pootling

dear all,

i hope that you have had / are going to have / are having a lovely christmas. mine’s been rather nice and quiet. if i don’t blog again, all the best for the new year as well.

love
minifig

for all five of you out there that read my blog, my apologies for not doing much with it. mostly i’ve been spending my time playing with lego, flickr or del.icio.us. at some point, i will stop doing as much of these things and actually start writing more here. this is unlikely to happen this side of christmas. in the meantime, my flickr is likely to be a little more interesting.

to tide you over for a little while, here’s a picture of one of the opening scenes of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (flickr version).

a little while back, the fall website (i’m reliably informed) linked to my mark e smith picture, and a couple of thousand people have turned up since then which is rather nice.

i’ve had an order of lego in today, so i’ve added a few new lego pictures to my flickr. here you can see U2, but you can also see britney spears, santa, nirvana and well, santa again. any comments either here or on flickr welcome.

ok, so now it seems that we’re wandering back into the time in the mid-to-late 90s when the music industry decided that people who want to download chords and tabs of songs are villified as evil, stealing pirates. the mpa (music publishers association) also don’t think that fines are good enough, but that if the authorities can “throw in some jail time” they will “be a little more effective”. you can read the bbc story here.

what the music industry don’t seem to be able to get into their thick little heads is the fact that the people you want to throw into jail are the people buying your sheet music. i own a fair number of guitar tab books, since i play the guitar. however, i also use the net to get some chords or tabs if i don’t want to buy a huge overpriced book with 15 songs in it, but just want to know how to play one bit of a song. there’s no way in the world that, if i couldn’t do this, i would buy any more music at all, i would just play my guitar less. this would lead to me, in the long run, buying far less of the tab books, since i won’t have got a taster of what i’d like to have the full sheet music for.

also, what is the benefit to society of jailing these people? will the world be a safer place because a guitar-player who’s set up a website is kept away from the public? i think not. also, the costs of sending a few people to prison each year is probably going to be considerably more than the companies will make from selling a few tab books.

so, why are they doing this? i think that the idea is that they are losing revenue because these websites are competing directly with their product. this is, however, crap. i am not, and will not be, able to fork out £20 a pop every time there’s a song that i fancy learning to play. in fact, because i will no longer be able to get an idea of what i do want to learn in detail, and what i don’t, i’ll probably stop buying the books altogether.

of course, this is a close mirroring of the problems surrounding file-sharing. people who download music from the net wouldn’t otherwise have spent all of their money buying CDs that do dubious things to their computers - they just wouldn’t have listened to the music at all, wouldn’t have gone to see the bands live off the back of it, and wouldn’t have gone around recommending it to other people. the music industry needs to realise, and fast, that all of the things that they are fighting so vehemently and idiotically at the moment are best described as free advertising. i think probably the best example of this in the uk are the arctic monkeys. instead of militantly “protecting” their music, they released a huge amount of it for free over the net. what happened? did they bankrupt themselves? did they make all of their music obsolete overnight? no, they sold out the astoria in london, despite not having released anything at all, then proceeded to go in straight to number one in the uk with their debut single. i can guarantee that when they release their album, that too will go into number one.

they advertised, basically for free and it paid off. how could they do this? because the music that they made was good. the only musicians that have anything to worry about when it comes to piracy are those making crap that no-one realises they didn’t want until they get it home. and, frankly, that is great news.

to sum up, the music industry are:

1. attempting to jail their best customers
2. attacking and attempting to destroy the huge array of advertising they are getting for free

whilst at the same time…

3. making the products that they are selling to law-abiding customers worse, by making it them work in various machines, or attack your computer, or allow virus onto it.

as business plans go, i’ve seen better.

i think the best take on it i’ve seen are these articles from the onion, which seem to get to the core of the issue:

riaa sues radio station for giving away free music

and

riaa bans telling friends about songs

the rant endeth here.

ever since i heard hope there’s someone on zane lowe’s show on radio 1 a few months ago, i’ve been intrigued by this antony fellow. in fact, it took me a little bit of prompting from the starfish to remember that, in fact, we’d seen the guy live a couple of years ago as a singer in lou reed’s band.

i’ve been telling all my friends about him and his band for a little while now, so i was really looking forward to what he could produce live.

he seemed a little shy on stage, but was wonderfully charming. his voice is so unusual and sounds even more intense live than it does on record. his band (one of whom supported - and was great) are an extremely talented bunch of musicians and reflect the tones of antony’s voice beautifully.

it was a fantastic gig, one of the best of the year. i can’t wait to see them again.

i like this comprehensive god faq
there’s great collection of pictures here
a list of films ordered by the use of the word “fuck” from wikipedia
a collection of personality tests to freak you out if you can’t get hold of a copy of cosmo
apparently various countries’ favourite jokes - i like belgium’s
i’ve started playing “guess the google” again - i’m doomed
life-sized works in driftwood - rather beautiful
google moon

the starfish bought this book when we went to naples, partly because it comes highly recommended, having won the orange prize for fiction and being described on its back cover by the new statesman as “Desperate Housewives as written by Euripides” but also because i think she’s toying with the idea of writing about school-shooting fiction for her forthcoming MA. anyway, buy it she did, started it, didn’t like it, and so moved on to something else. so i started reading it and today i’ve finished and having just got up from the sofa with a dazed expression on my face and tears on my cheeks, i can tell you it well and truly lives up to the hype.

the book is written in the first person of the mother of a boy that has murdered 7 children in his school. it is in the form of letters to her estranged husband, about the childhood and character of her son kevin. it paints a believable but terrible portrait of a child that may appear normal to her husband, but does not to her.

i’m being careful here not to give too much away, because the book twists and turns superbly, gradually revealing various facts about kevin and his crime and the ending is, suffice to say, terrifying.

this is a truly amazing book, one of the best i’ve read in years. it can be funny (believe it or not), but also a fascinating insight into the notion of evil. to return, rather lazily, to the back cover of the book, i can’t help but agree with the bookseller when they say:

“Few novels leave you gasping at the final paragraph as if the breath had been knocked from your body. Such is the impact of We Need to Talk About Kevin.”

Buy. Read.