txt msg review: “…Earth to the Dandy Warhols…”

“new dandy’s rocks save for the last track (possibly the worst song ever)”

(Courtesy of my friend Bruce)

1 comment August 28th, 2008

Need Your Needs

Well, last October, Georgie James– the band– cancelled their show at the Holocene. I was bummed that I didn’t get the chance to catch the show, given how much I liked some of the stuff I’d heard on their only full-length, Places.

And now they’ve gone and broken up entirely, so we shall never know how good of a show that might have been. Il ne me plaît pas.

Add comment August 11th, 2008

“I know kung-fu.”

Internet Explorer is ever the fussy browser.

Sometimes you don’t have control over a whole page but you don’t want to endlessly define repetitive inline styles, so you create a <STYLE> section and away you go! It works just fine in any other modern browser, but IE, at least as of IE7, will refuse to see it.  The solution?  Import the CSS file with JavaScript, and append it to the header yourself.  A bit counterintuitive, but it works.

The second thing that I needed to do was to show and hide a form element, which is pretty straightforward– just use JavaScript to set the style.display property of the given object, and away you go, right?  Well, sort of.  If I set foo.style.display = “none” in IE, it works as expected and hides the element.  But, the moment that I try to set that style to anything else to show the element again– “table-row”, for instance– the whole thing goes crazy and breaks.  The answer?  $(”foo”).style.display = “”.  The empty string makes it all happy.

Add comment August 7th, 2008

Lights In The Sky

Nine Inch Nails kicked off their Lights In The Sky tour in Seattle on Saturday, named presumably both for the track off of The Slip as well as for the absurdly amazing light show that they brought with them (but more on that anon).  As a birthday present to myself, we headed up there on what was a mostly uneventful drive except for the always-horrible traffic just north of Tacoma and the guy who nearly succeeded in sideswiping my car at 70mph due to an inability to look before plowing into the fast lane.  But I digress.

After stomping around the park for a few hours, seeing the half-hearted “25% off” Sonics merch at the Key Arena, marvelling at the preparations for the Sea Fair parade, and having dinner with a couple of friends, we headed in to the show.  It actually started on time, and by the time we were done standing in line for a drink, Crystal Castles had finished their set and Trent Reznor’s motley musicians had already begun, so we shoved some liquid down our gullets and went to find our nosebleed seats (which, at the Key Arena, still aren’t too bad).

So we missed the first song (which was “1,000,000″, as I later guessed), but the remaining set was wide, wild, career-spanning, and mind-blowing, as over the next two hours we were treated to an setlist spanning from Pretty Hate Machine; Broken; The Downward Spiral; With Teeth; various tracks off of Ghosts, The Slip, and probably The Fragile; and a smattering of great tracks off of Year Zero. (Mouse over the album title for the songs I could readily identify.)

It wasn’t enough to simply deliver on the goods, though, even with all of the raw energy and intensity that NIN brought to the stage (and woe betide anyone getting in the way of stray flying microphone stands).  There were also the aforementioned Lights in the Sky– a scintillating array of lights sat on either side of the stage, along with three “curtains” of light, placed as a backdrop, midstage, and just a few feet shy of the proscenium, each capable of displaying an amazing array of color, or to go nearly translucent when required, allowing for by far the coolest light effects I have ever seen at a show.

For instance, the middle light sheet could be a desert landscape of an alien planet while the front showered down a heavy rain through which the musicians played; or the front sheet could become the only backdrop, creating a small and intimate stage while each instrument had sound-related effects appearing behind the player/singer.  Or the massive arrays of lights at either end of the stage could throb with an intensity and brightness that bring you to the brink of an altered state of percepting with a near 3-D effect. The screens were, variously, security screens depicting the action onstage and off; a gigantic night-vision closeup of Trent Reznor whispering the words to “The Greater Good”; or bursts of static where the sounds of a microphone could punch a hole through, to reveal the singer behind.

My only regret?  That I didn’t spring for even-better seats.

Add comment July 28th, 2008

+2 Bears of Repeating

I don’t know where it all began, but at this site (consequenceofsound.net) I found this link which led to a new live Jicks song (faithfully and locally reposted here.mp3) (edit: for full accreditation, thanks to nyctaper for the hard work!).

Also wik, over at NIN.com you can not only nab the excellent The Slip, but also a tour sampler EP which has some interesting tracks on it (I was already partial to the “A Place To Bury Strangers” record, but “Does It Offend You, Yeah”, while being a difficult name to remember along the lines of “Clap Your Hands Say Yeah”, is catchy, yeah?).

2 comments July 25th, 2008

You Spin Me Right Round, Baby

There’s something in my car on the passenger side that’s making an odd, annoying scraping noise every time I make a turn. Now I just need to find a roundabout and a seaworthy passenger that’s not prone to motion sickness. We’ll get this all straightened out.

1 comment July 19th, 2008

The far come close took by the littl come big

• For the first time, a significant evolution has been caught in the act in a lab setting: an E. Coli bacteria acquired the ability to metabolise citrate, something it normall can’t do.
• The New Journal of Physics reports a new “meta-material made up of array of small cylinders” can create a substance that is essentially impervious to sound, with lots of potential applications. Noiseless courdoroy!
• Great news from the upcoming iPhone/iTouch app store: a new version of iTunes and free software will allow remote control of iTunes from anywhere in the house (presumably anywhere on the network). This is a feature I’m definitely going to use a lot.
• Hall & Oates reunited for a show in L.A.
• The last period on earth with so few sunspots resulted in a little ice age in the late 17th century, and some geophysicists think that within 500 years the Earth’s magnetic field may be gone entirely– or at least enough to severely screw things up– but don’t panic! It may be that our universe was just a “bubble pinched off from a previously existing universe.”

2 comments June 27th, 2008

Basically Driving Me Mad

Usually prefacing an involved explanation of something very technical, I would conservatively estimate that I hear the word “basically” used in a sentence a couple of hundred times a week. I also hear it used in the middle of any particular sentence, presumably to describe a simplification of what’s being said. In reality, I think it’s become just a bridging word, but its use has become overwhelming.

It wasn’t driving me quite so insane, of course, until Amy noticed, and we started pointing it out to one another. Now that the secret is out, I can’t help but suppress a slight cringe.  At first, I would smile to myself, but now I can’t even use it — or even replace it with its cousin, “essentially”– and I find my spoken sentence structure has a more tightened, perhaps even erudite, quality to it, due to the lack of vague transition phrases.

A quick Googling of the word shows that it’s a popular word in all sorts of business names, particularly ones that begin with the letter “B”: Basically Babysitting, Basically Beds, Basically Bushwalking Club, Basically Brazil…

Add comment June 26th, 2008

Dishonest Abe

Just a picture I threw together while I was on the endless train ride home. I guess I’ve always liked the idea of a cyborg Lincoln, perhaps it’s the iconicity of the guy.

Add comment June 19th, 2008

About me:; drop tables

I mostly use MySpace as a place where old friends and enemies alike can hunt me down with surprising ease, but once in a while– generally on the order of a few times a week– I get MySpace spam too, scantily clad “real girls” advertising some online hookup service or another.

Usually they’re pretty dull, but sometimes you come across something that just makes you smile. To wit:

Obviously, we’re soul mates.

2 comments March 25th, 2008