Gareth – Page 416 – The Designer Monologues

December 28, 2007April 19, 2010

Last Friday Music of 2007

We’ll start off this final entry for the year with an absolutely smoking Mash-up, combining the latest trainwreck by Ms. Spears with a Sisters of Mercy tune featuring the best opening line ever. Sing along, now: “25 Whores in the room next door…” Celebrity Murder Party – “Gimme Mercy”

Goddamn Microsoft. Why do they have to fill the commercials for their horrible crippleware music player (the Zune) with such catchy music? The two most recent commercials have completely brainwormed on me, so here are the songs in question:

The Shins – “Sleeping Lessons” (The commercial with the guy on the bus imagining going into a huge Mt. Rushmore-esque statue of his own head)

and

Rogue Wave – “Lake Michigan.” (The one with girl dancing with rabbits, swimming with giant jellyfish, etc.)

A nifty jazz-influenced electronica piece from a Strasbourg-based producer, Hervé Poudoulec, who records under the name Kira Neris (taking his name, I presume, from the Deep Space Nine character). Good stuff. Kira Neris – “Open Doors.”

For : That cover version that I told you about. One of my favorite versions of this song: Cake – “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps.”

The last big hit from the Jacksons, in 1979. After this, Michael went solo, and then slowly went batshit insane. The further back you go in his career, the more I like him. The Jacksons – “Shake Your Body (Down To the Ground) – 7″ single version.”

Lastly, I’m pretty sure I posted this before, but who cares. When Thomas Dolby released the single version of “Airwaves” in the UK, the B-side was intended as an extended intro, to blend right into the main song. Some enterprising soul on teh intartubes has ripped the tracks from vinyl, and melded them into a single mp3, so we can hear it as Dolby intended: Thomas Dolby – “The Wreck of the Fairchild/Airwaves (single mix)”

See you in 2008.

December 26, 2007

Doctor Who: Voyage of the Damned

More Davies nonsense.

Please give Steven Moffat the next Special, PLEEZKTHNX.

There were bits that were OK, bits that were pretty, but mostly it was overlong, and CheeseTastic, and DeusExMachinaRiffic.

Overall, it was a clunker — pretty much an amalgam of everything that Russel Davies does wrong, and far too often, in the new Who.

The new theme arrangement was interesting, though….and the scenes from the upcoming series were pretty damned nifty. Here’s hoping.

December 24, 2007

Christmas

I used to have a tradition of posting this every year. I didn’t last year, for whatever reason. In a completely unrelated sequence of events, 2007 ended up being one of the Worst Years EVER. So, just in case, I’m getting back in the habit of posting this again!

A few years ago, somebody asked me why Christmas was my favorite holiday, which struck him as odd for a pagan. I posted the following quote from Dickens, which sums up my feelings towards the season nicely….and I’ve posted it to my blog/journal every year since:

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew: “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round — apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that — as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

Sure, that’s the ideal, and sure, it seldom ever lives up to that. But still–that’s worth something, I think.

Gods, Goddesses, Household Dieties and Genii Loci Bless Us, Everyone.