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Believe the Hype | Dec 19, 2008 11:32

I like reading lists as much as the next guy: I just don't like making them as much as your average geek. But it's Friday and I feel moved towards some account of my favourite music for 2008. Even to me, it splits up quite oddly.

On the one hand, there are the cool-and-knowing-but-rootsy female singer-songwriters. Jenny Lewis's Acid Tongue doesn't hang together quite as well as Rabbit Fur Coat, but the title track is a wonderful work of ambiguity in a bell-like voice. Here she is performing it llive this month in LA, with her band on backing vocals:

In Jenny Lewis-related business, who couldn't love the Watson Twins' brilliant cover of The Cure's 'Just Like Heaven' on Fire Songs?

I'm also currently in love with 'Little Rock Star', from Lucinda Williams' recent album Little Honey (you can listen to it here on Last FM) and especially the way this image:

Your lovely eyes
That close like petals
Your sweet surprise
Could win you medals

Gives way to the bawdy 'Honey Bee', where the words run like this:

Oh my little honey bee
I'm so glad you stung me
Now I got your honey
All over my tummy

Ooo-err!

On the other hand, I've spent a lot of time listening to nerds with synthesisers: MGMT (and yes, the album did get old eventually), Hot Chip, The L.E.D.s' Still, SJD's Dayglo Spectres and Deastro's dense, amazing eMusic-only collection Keeper's have all been much in my head this year.

Retro: there was only one choice: the out-of-nowhere Velvet Underground bootleg Live at the Gymnasium: the only known live recording of the band from 1967 and the last to feature John Cale. It is some small miracle that it not only has matchless fanboy interest but sounds absolutely stonking.

And then there's Hype Machine. I love what it reflects about pop music; I love that it's okay to have a favourite tune today and be onto something else next week; that there are a million remixes of MGMT's 'Kids', from the Pet Shop Boys to that Soulwax monster; that you can find the housiest house remixes of Kanye West's 'Love Lockdown' and a surprisingly good mash-up with ZZ Top.

The zeitgeist this week seems to be with covers of Britney Spears' 'Womanizer'. Mark Ronson leaked a version he'd just recorded with Lilly Allen on his radio show (get it here before it disappears) and Ladyhawke has done one for a BBC session:

YouTube will provide you with many other versions, not all of them good, but all part of pop's rich, responsive tapestry. Did I say I like pop music?

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I once told Paul Holmes that while I might on occasion disagree mightily with his words or actions, I had never doubted his authenticity. In a world where so many empty vessels make noise, he is what he is; sometimes maddening but rich and real. On the day of his final breakfast radio broadcast, I wish him all the best.

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The speaker lineup for next year's Webstock has been finalised and it's pretty amazing. Author, journalist and EFF co-founder Bruce Sterling and poster-boy for the "new new journalism Adrian Holovaty of chicacocrime.org fame are of particular interest to me, but it's a very strong lineup all round.

I think we're lucky to have access to an event of this quality. I'm in what now appears to be my traditional slot: kicking off the Friday morning with a content-roundup keynote. And yes, it is intimidating being on the same bill as those other people.

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The really nice people at Felt have a really nice prize pack for one lucky Public Address reader. Pop over to the site to check it out, and then, to enter, send your name, address and phone number to renee@nzmusic.org.nz with "Felt like Christmas" as the subject line.

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And don't forget to vote for the Public Address Word of the Year 2008. One lucky voter will receive a case of Vavasour sauvignon blanc (another case will be awarded the discretion of the judge, who is me). Voting closes Sunday night. Get in there.

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Need to Know | Dec 19, 2008 08:50

I had planned to be done with politics for the year, but one thing needs saying before the party starts: the police commissioner's assurances about domestic surveillance don't wash any more, and there must be an inquiry into the spying activities of Rob Gilchrist on the police's behalf.

I have no doubt it is a tricky situation for the incoming police minister, Judith Collins, but we cannot afford to be as incurious as she is. She says she has been assured that "the special investigation group is not actually targeting groups but individuals who may be involved in criminal activities."

Yet there is good evidence that police, in the words of No Right Turn, "seem to have been running a general dragnet, collecting political intelligence on left-wing groups engaging in perfectly ordinary and legal protest activities."

The best-case scenario is that this troubling over-reach has been driven more by Gilchrist's curious personality -- he seems to have acted with an enthusiasm fuelled by something more than the $600 a week police were paying him -- than carried out as part of policy. But we need to know.

PS: NBR editor Nevil Gibson makes a complete arse of himself discussing this issue with Oliver Driver on Sunrise. With what appears to be a straight face, he conflates environmental protest with "jihad". Memo to Nevil: get a fucking grip.

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The Flashing Question Mark | Dec 18, 2008 00:53

You would expect you'd have to do something bad to unleash the Flashing Question Mark -- or least actually be in the house. So it was with surprise as well as disappointment that I briefly popped back home from recording some things for the radio show to find the dreaded glyph winking from the screen of my iMac.

I did the proper thing and restarted with the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard installation DVD, and ran Disk Utility. As far as Disk Utility was concerned, there was no internal hard drive to repair. System Profiler, likewise, could see nothing there. I restarted, and the Question Mark reappeared, endlessly, pathetically, winking.

It appeared to be a case of a dead disc. Had this happened to me 18 months ago, I might have been screwed. But because Steve commanded thus, I began taking advantage of Leopard's incremental backup utility, Time Machine.

I've been thinking of Time Machine as a PITA lately -- all that disk activity is noisy, and it sometimes slows down the rest of the system. But it was gonna come through for me this time. Probably. It's not like I'd actually used it: just occasionally clicked on it for the eye candy …

I decided I'd turn off the iMac off and disconnect the power lead while I was out at a meeting. Hey: it's worth a try. In the car, waiting to collect the people I was meeting, I called Ubertec and the service guy agreed that it was probably either a failed drive or one that had come unseated. Either way, I'd need to bring it in. I tried to put it out of my mind through two meetings.

When I got home, Leo hadn't got the memo. His brother hadn't told him the computer was off for a reason, and he'd plugged it back in, powered up, and tried to play World of Warcraft. It had frozen, and gone to Question Mark mode when he tried to restart. He was relieved to find he hadn't caused it -- and I was cheered to hear that it had started up at all.

And sure enough, Disk Utility saw the drive on restart. Booya! Disk Repair couldn't find a problem with the directories, but Repair Permissions -- so often the pointless voodoo of Mac maintenance -- came through. It fixed what looked to me like a disk permissions problem. I drew breath and restarted. My life came back up on screen, only snappier.

I thought about going hard and doing a system Archive and Install, but I really wasn't game for the small chance that bringing it up to the just-released 10.5.6 with the Combo installer might hose things all over again.

Meanwhile, no more Steve: Jobs will not give a keynote at this year's Macworld Expo in San Francisco, and Apple will not turn up at Macworld in 2010, or any time thereafter.

There's been a lot of fevered talk (in the Guardian, even) that this is all about Steve's health -- Apple stock closed down 4% on the day the announcement was made. But the big single-denominational trade show doesn't really pay off for Apple any more (or the vendors -- next month both Adobe and Belkin will be absent from Macworld). I suspect the withdrawal has been in the works for a long time.

I'm not saying it's not a shame: I was in the room at Macworld New York in 1999 when Steve unveiled the original clamshell iBook (more importantly, the "one more thing" was the first first mainstream implementation of what was later called Wi-Fi) and it was a memorable experience. I think Steve Jobs' triumphant return to Apple is one of the great business stories. But the company can't rely forever on two-hour stage shows from Steve Jobs . A man who has fought off pancreatic cancer deserves a rest, if nothing else.

Apple doesn't always get it right. Apple TV could have been the insanely great device that made it easy for people to watch any internet video on their TVs, but the company was (as its critics often contend) too far up it own ass to do that. OTOH, I like mobile phones a lot better since the iPhone. I played with a Google phone on Wednesday night. It was … Google-ish.

Anyway, my iMac seems stable again, although I'll probably reinstall the system and bring it back up to date when I have a spare hour and no deadlines looming. Roll on the Christmas break …

And meanwhile, I still don't know whether Time Machine really works …

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Some friends from Wellington (no, no one remotely involved in politics) generously invited us to dinner on Tuesday night, and asked me to choose a restaurant. I said that people had been raving about the revamped Kermadec (and such praise does not lightly flow from the keyboard of Graham Reid) and perhaps we should go there.

We did, and it was excellent. The food was classy and imaginative (sautéed scampi with cubes of pork belly, granny smith apple and mustard; roasted hapuka with a venison jus; modish alchemical desserts, their features set with liquid nitrogen) and Hans the waiter was on the money when he suggested I look at a pinot noir for my hapuka. It was a very, very good meal.

Only complaint? Too much space. Eight of us were placed a little distantly around the long table that had been set for us (the restaurant's large room was less than a quarter full on a Tuesday night). But there's always Prego if you want to sit intimately amid a hubbub. I personally will look forward to a special occasion back at Kermadec some time.

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The Creative Freedom Foundation website was launched today by a group of artists to advocate a more reasonable view of copyright -- and, in the first instance, to kick off a "Not in My Name" campaign against Section 92 of the copyright amendment bill. The whole site is published under a New Zealand Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike licence. Go look.

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