Some time ago I began questing for a movie-playing device. I may have found one, but unfortunately not one which I necessarily should be buying.
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I recently came across a couple of delightful expletive expressions in other languages. Parental Advisory Warning: this post contains swearwords. Wouldn’t be much point otherwise, would it?
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The fantastic game Osmos has finally come to Android. In celebration of which, here are a couple of tips for playing it well. They are based on some similar remarks by Mat Jarvis.
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During our Christmas holiday trip to visit my family in New Zealand we put on a small workshop teaching rebetiko, the style of Greek music that we play. Olga has put some footage online, which I’ll link to in a moment (I want you to read the caveats and disclaimers first).
Said caveats and disclaimers being:
- At no point was this a professional undertaking. We don’t know what we’re doing, although we’re having fun finding out.
- The folks attending the workshop had to pick up two entirely unfamiliar scales and one quite unfamiliar rhythmic structure over the course of about five hours, during which they also learned four songs.
- These folks were playing from sheet music notated for an unfamiliar tonal system, which they had to translate on-the-fly to what they are used to.
- We cocked up: we didn’t play them the originals. So they know the songs from our renditions, and (mainly) from the sheet music.
Given all of which, I’m proud of what they (and we) accomplished. Here it is.
Some thoughts about what worked, didn’t work, etc:
- Four pieces in two modes worked pretty well for a one-day workshop. I think we got through two pieces in the morning and two more in the afternoon; we also attempted a fifth piece late in the day, but that didn’t go as well as the first four. If we tried again to fit five into a single day, the fifth should be carefully picked to revive flagging energy and definitely shouldn’t introduce new complexities (rhythms, modes, etc).
- I was amazed at how easily people picked up the melodies, playing from sheet music. We are used to playing by ear, which usually makes learning a song a slower process because you have to remember it entirely. Sheet music parts (and people who can play to them) rock!
- The book we used, Smirneika and Pireotika Rembetika by Evgenios Voulgaris & Vasilis Vantarakis, also rocks. But…
- … it is notated for makam theory (a Turkish-based tonality involving four kinds of accidentals, none of which is quite the Western sharp/flat); I think it would have been helpful to write out the parts in simple sharps/flats, although people coped very well.
- Another disadvantage to this book for a workshop is that the transcriptions are extremely faithful to the original recordings; they include all the fills, ornaments, etc that the performer put around the melody. A simple transcription of the main melody, with ornaments and fills indicated separately or left out entirely, would have been better I think.
- Final disadvantage of Voulgaris/Vantarakis: no guitar chords. We didn’t actually think to plan for guitarists at the workshop, and the pieces were chosen for their melodies; that, combined with my indifferent guitar skills, left poor Jim making it up as he went along (very competently I must say), and playing an awful lot of Cm chords.
- We made one colossal error: we didn’t play them the original recordings. Between that and the sheet music (and the fact that of course nobody in New Zealand could sing the lyrics), some of the parts end up sounding a bit wooden because there’s not enough phrasing: they don’t know what’s melody and what’s not, and they don’t really have any model to work from to find out.
- Listening to the recordings makes it horribly clear how much I, in particular, speed up when playing. While not a workshop problem per se, this is definitely something I need to work on.
- To finish with something positive: as well as making it possible for people to pick up the pieces, the photocopied sheet music we gave out let them take something away from the workshop, which I think was appreciated. All in all, a decided victory for paper-and-ink.
If we ever do this again (and I hope we do!) I think we’ll start with rewritten versions of the Voulgaris/Vantarakis transcriptions; perhaps one with only the main melody and one with ornaments, or perhaps with the ornaments written in smaller. We’ll choose pieces with some guitar potential, and I’ll figure out, and perhaps notate, some guitar parts with more interest than “5 1/2 bars Cm, 1/2 a bar G, back to Cm, repeat” — the older recordings often have quite startling choices of chord and beautiful bass parts. We’ll also make a point of playing the original recordings as we introduce each piece.
Still I reckon we did a pretty good job for first-timers. And again, huge thanks to my mother for suggesting the idea and organising it, to the folks who showed up and shared the music, to Graeme and Zoë who made recordings, and to Jessica who gave us a beautiful venue for our New Years Eve concert.
Here is a service I would sign up for in a heartbeat: I tell you the authors and musicians I follow, and you notify me when they release something new.
You don’t have to do fancy algorithmic guessing at my interests: there are plenty of artists I enjoy but who I don’t follow obsessively. This is for the few that I want to preorder; for the achingly slow release of new books in a series; for beloved books coming back into print; for the band that doesn’t exist any more but that occasionally gets back together to produce a live album with some old offcuts thrown in.
On a related note: The biggest problem with recommendation systems like Amazon’s and eMusic’s is that they only see what Amazon or eMusic have sold you. They work better the more you centralise your purchasing, which fits Amazon’s interests perfectly but is not something I’m very comfortable with. LibraryThing, on the other hand, has recommendations based on what I own (regardless of where it came from); they’re generally spot-on, which means they don’t generally tell me anything I didn’t know. Unfortunately, this kind of data-mining (based on comparisons with what other people own) can’t anticipate that you will enjoy a new release by a favourite author: it has to wait for other people to start owning it to see whether people with similar tastes have it more often than people with dissimilar tastes.
(LibraryThing also has the UnSuggester, which uses similar statistics but looks for books that occur less frequently than expected in similar libraries. Looking at titles it seems to be pretty good: Shopaholic Ties the Knot (a sequel to Confessions of a Shopaholic) sounds rather ghastly, as does The Purpose-Driven Church: Growth without compromising your message & mission. On the other hand I am part of a presumably rather small potential market for Herman Cappelen’s Insensitive Semantics, and Systematic Theology sounds like the kind of theology I would be reading if I were reading theology. Given the amount of sf and fantasy I read, it’s plain amusing to see Eragon in that list.)
Catching up on blog posts from my holiday I saw the cover for a book named Northworld: Vengeance on Good Show Sir (a blog devoted to “only the worst sci-fi/fantasy book covers” — and indeed, this one is awful). “Northworld,” I thought to myself, “what kind of nonsense is that?” According to one commentator the world was discovered by “a guy named North”, which doesn’t improve matters much. But then I remembered about living in glass houses and casting first stones: I am hardly in a position to criticise others on the originality of their placenames.
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We had a lovely time Down Under, now we’re back to the short days and looooong nights (which jetlag is letting us really appreciate) of Europe. If you were thinking about robbing our apartment: missed your chance.
As I said, we had a lovely time. We caught up with friends with babies (thanks Tim & Sharon and Ian & Katie for letting us get clucky with your wee ones); we caught up with family (hordes of Pembertons, my sister and her new husband back from Mongolia); we ran a rembetiko workshop, played at the Takaka market and gave a house concert (huge thanks to Hennie, Pat, and Joachim for the music and the encouragement and for letting us in on the market gig, to the workshop folks for your enthusiasm, and to Jessica for the opportunity and the marvelous venue for our wee concert); Olga made flax weavings and I made a mess of some gorse with the scrubcutter; we met Paul and Jenny’s pet pukeko and I helped put a roof on Paul’s chookshed-to-be; I got a scenic flight over Golden Bay and bits of Kahurangi National Park and even took control of the plane for what felt a very long five minutes (thanks Ian!).
There is documentary evidence of lots of this, which will probably trickle online at some point (Olga has an album up already). Especially we have promises to keep regarding the rembetiko: original recordings to send to people and videos of the workshop and concert to tidy up and put somewhere visible. Luckily, we’re waking up at between 2 and 4 every morning, so we have lots of extra hours in the day to do it. Yay?
The last payment on my student loan has gone to the IRD.
Time to buy a house.
Sunday, December 25, 2011
We’re experimenting with recording some of our favourite rembetiko numbers. Here is our rendition of Τα λευτά σου δεν τα θέλω (“I don’t want your money”), with Olga’s vocals and bouzouki and me on guitar. It’s by Toundas, our favourite rebetis; the original was sung by Rosa Eskanazy.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Every time I visit Germany by train, something goes wrong.
Once I spent most of the day waiting on platforms, after some perfect-storm-like sequence of feedback effects interrupted not just the service I had a ticket for but also the fallback service we were advised to take instead, and then even the unscheduled service arranged specifically for the victims of the outage.
Another time, more pleasantly, I had an unscheduled wait of a couple of hours in Cologne: just long enough for an old friend to take the subway into town and have a beer with me.
Recently I visited the same friend for a weekend; predictably, something went wrong on the way home. This time it was only a communications breakdown, but one I found particularly amusing: the various automated systems announcing the timetables completely failed to cope with a planned change to the schedule.
The ticket I paid for was Cologne to Amsterdam, but my seat reservation was only valid to Utrecht; the reservation system, at any rate, knew that on the day I was travelling the international service to Amsterdam would end instead at Utrecht, and the last half-hour of the trip would have to be made on local trains.
In Cologne, an automated voice helpfully announced in three languages: “The ICE service to Utrecht leaving platform 5 at 17:32 will not stop in Utrecht.” (We’ll carry on until we fall off the edge of the world?) The board on platform 5 announced an ICE service to Amsterdam, and warned that it would not be stopping in Utrecht. (Not to the edge of the world then. I wonder what my seat reservation to Utrecht is worth if we don’t stop there?) On the train, around the time I would have expected to arrive in Utrecht (or not to arrive there, under the circumstances) the wee lighted displays said we were approaching Arnhem. (I wondered how far from Arnhem to Amsterdam and what time I would be getting home.) Then we pulled in to Utrecht: right on time, as predicted on my ticket, but somewhat befuddled.