chidade.net

Quick rant:

How awesome is Wednesday night TV? I usually hate teevee. It’s generally so boring or requires shit-for-brains (especially when watching that glorified karaoke contest known as Idol - or worse - Big Brother).

But!

6pm: The Simpsons
6.30pm: SBS News because they’re more intelligent than any of the others and I refuse to watch Neighbours
7pm: Futurama!
7.30pm: Thank God You’re Here (perhaps the best Aussie comedy show in the last decade)
8.30pm: Spicks and Specks (bonus points for having Frank Woodley on tonight)
9pm: The IT Crowd (Yay! I can finally watch it legally!)
9.30pm: The Glass House
10pm: At the Movies
10.30pm: Lateline
11.15pm: Battlestar Galactica

The IT Crowd is awesome. It’s Black Books-funny and there’s so many geek in-jokes. First episode contained an RTFM t-shirt, “MP3 Is Not A Crime”, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Stewie from Family Guy and heaps of cool little toys that I want!

Teeheeheee!

Okay, back to geek teevee goodness.

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I wonder if I’m the only one that can tell people in detail why such-and-such an instrument is lovely/a bitch/egotistical. Every musical instrument has a personality. This will have a lot to do with the person playing it, of course, but I think there are also generalities of instrumental personalities. Say that 10 times quickly.

I dislike violins. I think they’re bitchy and elitist. This does have a lot to do with knowing the people who play violins, or at least, people who were forced by Mummy to practice since the age of four but still can’t play well, or if they can play adequately, haven’t really got an inch of talent. It’s one of the two instruments (the piano being the other) that parents will consider when they sign their kids up for music classes, because you need to send your kids to music classes, don’cherknow. The darlings need the extra-curricular activities on their school reports and the school is offering classes at a most reasonable price!

(…in case you haven’t guessed, I was a scholarship girl at an elite private all-girls school. I have little respect for the girls and families that could afford to pay the full fees of that school, especially when I see the housewives in their SUVs after-school. Everytime I mention my old school, I feel like a class traitor…)

There’s also the almost…demand of sympathy that violins make. You’ve heard that joke about violins playing when someone demands sympathy? Yup, violins. Bitchy, elitist, and utterly selfish.

Violas are more acceptable. Mainly because anyone who decided to play viola had the intelligence to realise that there were more stringed instruments out there.

Saxophones (particularly alto sax) I have a love/hate relationship with. They can make me bop along but then they can suddenly turn around and get all 80’s-rock-ballad on me. The 80’s was a musical decade that we could have lived without. Well, except Crowded House. And the Hunters. Oh, and the Hoodoo Gurus. Paul Kelly. Look, everything besides the Australian rock scene we could have lived without. Saxophones are best when they’re swinging and jazzing away. But even then, they demand plenty of attention, so are somewhat egotistical. It’s very easy for a sax to take over the song. This happened a few times in the Cowboy Bebop OST. Yoko Kanno loves her saxomophones. The Sax Quartet track is made of pure win, though. Evidence of when sax is the sex.

As an aside, I went to see Peaking Duck last week. A guy called Dave Addes was playing sax and I was worried it would take centre stage and drown out the other three (particularly the drummer whom I’ve become a big fan of - <3 James Hauptmann) but he quite often moved off-stage to let the other three thrash out. I appreciated that. His sax was mad but it was all the better for not playing all the time >.< Ollie's piano demands plenty of attention, hehe.

Guitar is harder to identify because of all the different styles you can play it. If Chris Cheney's guitar was a real man I would be his groupie. The pillows' melodical guitars never fail to change my mood. Paul Kelly when he's acoustic can break your heart utterly. On the other hand, death metal is something I would gladly see dropped into the black, swirling, sucking seas they melodramatically wail about so they can finally drown and be put out of their misery.

Disclaimer: I used to play guitar. I probably was best at the folk stuff. "I guess a robot would have to be crazy to wanna be a folk singer..."

Bass guitar....I tried playing that at the same time I was taught guitar and could never get the hang of positioning. So while it's fine for some, it ain't for me. Upright bass instantly wins though. Especially if they twirl it :D Electric bass players win points for their funny stance (bwaaahahaha, no elbows!) and because they're good with their fingers! Bass players do it with rhythm, don'cherknow?

Piano needs plenty of time to be assessed before any judgment is passed. Is the pianist just another kid that was forced at knife-point to attend classes by Mummy? Did they exceed because they were expected to, much like how they were expected to become doctors or lawyers? Or do they bloody well have fun when they play it? Do they like trying out what sounds they can create? Do they, when you get right down to it, improvise on occasion?

I think Ben Folds restored a lot of the piano's image for my generation. He wasn't the only great pianist, but he was the one that made people sit up and notice. Ollie McGill is a madman on the keys and it's hella fun watching him. He has a bit of the David Helfgott or even Stevie Wonder about him when he gets completely into it. Left unchecked, Ollie could jam for hours without pause. Sheer awesomeness.

Mind you, people don't need to go skitz on a piano to make it awesome. Yoko Kanno, Tori Amos, Nobuo Uematsu, Ray Charles, heh...Billy Joel and Elton John and then go waaaaay back to Beethoven and Mozart...I love the piano. I just have to be wary of the people who play it for the wrong reasons.

Disclaimer #2: Yes, I used to play piano, too. I was better at guitar though.

The drums....ah, the drums....If a drumkit was a person it would be my best friend. I love the sound of brushes on a snare. It always makes me smile. Man, I miss Paul Hester. He started my love for brushes/snare/cymbal combo. I'm always in awe of drummers because they need such coordination to play...I couldn't hope to get it. I could just barely manage a drum roll. The rest is beyond me.

Favourite drummers: Paul Hester, RINGO, Rick Allen (for the inspiration factor), Jimmy Marinos and Mark Maher for their ability to drum and sing lead vocals at the same time, Gene Krupa, Will Hull-Brown, Tim Donahue and now James Hauptmann.

Tuba makes me giggle. Childish, I know. But they're comical! The awkward fat kid in the classroom. It'll always be associated with an image of a plump, red-faced German in leiderhosen and a feathered green cap. Last Saturday, I saw Martin Martini and the Bone Palace Orchestra live (with The Conglomerate - finally saw them live, yay!) and noticed how their tuba player was basically the bass player. It was interesting and overall the gig was very good. The also have a violinist but she passes because she plays her violin like it's a fiddle and that brings out the folk singer in me.

The band is great. The music is awesome and Martin Martini has a fantastic voice. The lyrics annoyed me sometimes because of how blatantly political they were. Sure, the music is borne of anger and frustration that the man has against "the system" (he sounds a bit university student union-y) but is the name dropping really necessary? It just seems to cheapen a song somehow for me. At any rate, it will make his songs out-of-date when the next government gets elected. November 2008 and the songs about President Bush won't hit home as hard anymore. Yes, he's an arsehole but why not just say "The President"?

It's not the case in all their songs though, so Martin Martini et al are still worth the CD purchase. They also have one secret weapon, which is my last instrumental rant:

Clarinet. Instant win. I can't think of a song where a clarinet goes wrong. Does anyone remember the Gadflys? Good News Week house band? I bought their music just for the clarinet. Benny Goodman, zomg. Jimmy Dorsey, too. Oh, and Glenn Miller, thank you for getting those clarinets out in the front of the big bands where they belong.

Disclaimer #3: Yes, I had a Bb Yamaha clarinet. It was lovely. It’s probably the most heartbreaking of the three instruments I no longer play. I always wanted to play Rhapsody in Blue.

Maybe one day I can start again with the trumpet? Harry J. Angus is a damn good inspiration. N told me the other week that she only began learning violin four years ago, at 22. I could start trumpet at 23.

One day, one day.

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‘I hadn’t seen The Cat Empire live in over 18 months. I hadn’t seen any of the side projects (Jackson Jackson, The Genie, The Conglomerate, Peaking Duck, etc etc) AT ALL. That second point was a sticker for me, since I’d been listening to the side project music more than the Cat’s music for a while now. I wanted to see them live, dammit!

So, yesterday, after by chance reading on the .info forums that both The Genie and The Conglomerate had gigs coming up, I dragged S along (complete in Scouts uniform!) to Transit in Federation Square to see an acousticised Genie.

Ryan and I had exchanged a few comments over MySpace about Japan so when I noticed that Transit had Asahi on tap, I ordered a round for the band with a message: “Hope you enjoyed Japan -Chidade”. I wondered how good Ryan’s memory was, would he remember it was me from MySpace?

The tracks I had heard on The Genie’s MySpace had about a million of Ollie’s keyboards featured. I didn’t read the bulletin post too carefully, so I was expecting more of the same but instead, they had a very acoustic, jazzy, swinging sound. Will had brushes on the skins for half the night, Ollie was on a baby grand, Ryan alternated between his upright bass and the standard electric one.

The songs were fun too. I think a lot of them were covers of TV show or movie themes. The only two I definitely recognised were Dr. Who in the second set and Indiana Jones (bloody awesome) in the third. In the first set there was this track that S and I agreed sounded like the theme song to some corny 70s TV show, not unlike The Wonder Years, but we couldn’t pick it. There were plenty of melodies that we knew we recognised, but couldn’t place a name to.

I think they played a little bit of Me Babe Dubbin’ Out but because Ollie didn’t have his dozens of electric keyboards with him, the sound was very different and moved on quite quickly.

The night consisted of wine and snacks (mmmm…olives), bitching about men and discussing music. S and I had a good night. We hadn’t really done anything together since I came home from Japan. I promised myself that I’d get out more often when I arrived back home in Melbourne. Last night I finally started keeping the promise, heh. Only two months late.

Music finished up, boys started packing up. Approched Ryan to ask him about whether there was a CD to buy yet.

“Were you the one that bought us the drinks?”
“Ahh, yeah, that was me”
“Oh thanks! Good to see someone from MySpace here”
“Heh, well, yeah, but I don’t like admitting I have a MySpace in public”

So, I have become an official MySpace stalker. Oh, gods.

My MySpace bashing seems to have gone over his head, though. I told my sister this. She says that everyone thinks that MySpace is the shit. Except us, that is. So, I think I should explain why MySpace is teh suck:

Firstly, as an amateur web designer, I can tell you that it is horribly designed. It isn’t intuitive at all, it can take several clicks to get to where you want to go. Clicking on “Blog” will take you to your friends’ blogs when in fact you wanted your own blog, for example.

The URLs are ugly and open for hacking. Plus, MySpace doesn’t even stick to the URLs it assigns to people. When I right-click on Jackson Jackson in my friends list and choose ‘Copy Link Location’, I expect to get www.myspace.com/jacksonjacksongs when I paste again. That what MySpace says is their URL, after all.

Lies. Copying the link location and then pasting gets: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=58996280

They don’t need this information in the URL. At least, it doesn’t have to be visible! LiveJournal manages to do without! And it can still tell whether I’m logged in and a friend of the person. Bad design. And not very good security protection either.

It gets worse. I’ve decided to crosspost my blog entries at chidade.net there. An automatic syndication isn’t possible, despite Wordpress plugin developers’ best efforts. So it’ll be a manual syndicate update everytime I make a post on my homepage. Livejournal can do it automatically with a Pro account.

Anyway, this means uploading my old blog entries with a backdated entry. For some reason, MySpace doesn’t want to let me backdate any earlier than January 1st, 2006. Why? Who knows. They do deem it necessary to let people post with dates in the future though! I can date my post as far as ahead as December 31st, 2010! Why?! Who knows! I could understand if they didn’t want me to backdate any earlier than my signup date with MySpace, which was May 2006. But no, they chose these arbitrary dates within which my blog entries can be dated. I don’t know what this will mean for my 2005 entries. They either won’t get cross-posted at MySpace or all given a January 1st date with a header proclaiming the real date and how MySpace sucks.

Ha, keep in mind that you can search for entries on my blog homepage from January 1st, 2000. Such bad design. It could be easily fixed if they took time out to debug the damn site instead of rolling around in their mountains of cash, Ducktales-style.

Even if you have no clues about web design and you don’t care if the website is standards complaint (it isn’t), the website still effects the average web user’s experience. There are dodgy cookies throughout, heaps of advertising (some of it the insidious adware/malware variety) and even having an automatic popup blocker, AdBlock and FlashBlock plugins on a Firefox browser doesn’t save you from being bombarded with advertising. After spending a few hours on MySpace, I always feel dirty, like I need to wash out my web cache.

Then there’s the people spam, on top of the advertising spam. People I don’t know message me to ask for a cyber or to sell me something. Or chain letters. Gods! Changing the settings to “paranoid” still allows some people to message me. It’s tolerable at this level. Mainly it’s just bands that ask me to listen to their stuff. It also happens rarely. But it’s still unsolicited advertising.

One more thing about settings: they could be better. I get an email (most of the time) notifying me of a new blog post by someone on my friends list. A notification system for Bulletins or page updates (particularly when there’s new songs or concert dates, for bands) would be more useful. As it was, I could have missed last night’s gig if it wasn’t for someone on the .info forums - MySpace needs to be checked thoroughly everyday it seems, to make sure I don’t miss anything important. And I don’t want to waste time on that. It needs a better and more customisable notification system.

The system in general could do with some tweaks! Well, the server anyway. 20% of the time, loading bands pages causes their music player to have a “Loading Error”. 40% of the time, clicking any link gets “Sorry! An unexpected error has occurred!”. If the link does choose to work, then it takes a long time to process! And why can’t MySpace actually remember that I’m logged in everytime that I check the checkbox to remember that I’m logged in?!

Character encoding is just useless. Copying and pasting from my webpage to my MySpace blog has somehow magically removed punctuation. It only reinforces the belief that MySpace users are uneducated teenagers that think “you” is spelt with one vowel.

There’s many more reasons that I dislike MySpace, but the last one I’ll mention is how it encourages people to be idiots. As Ryan himself says, people feel the need to make “myspace layouts that are so clever that they’re entirely illegible”. LiveJournal has the preset layouts to help curb this. If you really want complete control over your LiveJournal layout, you pay for the pro account. Presumably you’re a bit better with web technology then than the average 14 year old emo kid that wants to get attention with suicide notes or animated backgrounds of sparkly stars.

ANIMATED GIFS SHOULD NEVER BE THE BACKGROUND IMAGE, PEOPLE!

There are some things that I like about MySpace though, despite the several paragraphs above. It’s the only community website I know of that has a musician focus. Bands and artists can set up their own webpage (but then again, imitators can set up pages too, and not just for musos) and network with their friends/collegues/inspirations. They can put up a gig calandar that I can add to my own calendar (though I’m notoriously bad for not using calendars). Because of the networking culture of the site, I found out about Jackson Jackson, sodomy county and Martin Martini and the Bone Orchestra (I will definitely be at that gig with The Conglomerate!), as well as several Japanese indie bands.

The same seems to apply for comedians and general friend networking (although meeting people from MySpace frightens the bejeezus out of me), which is useful. But with a bit of extra work, the same can be done at other networking blog sites like LiveJournal. You wouldn’t need to be restricted to 4 songs or videos or whatever either.

MySpace has its uses, but its design, layout and spam/idiocy culture makes me cringe everytime I visit it. So, Ryan, I love your stuff, but I can’t forgive you for obliging me to sign up for this piece of tripe! MySpace needs a huge makeover! From the ground up! I spent so many hours wandering through this site getting frustrated and I want them back! Damn you! *shakes fist*

Oh what the hey, I can’t stay angry at that mop of hair.

Just buy me the drink next time and we’ll call it even.

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