Friday Random 10: Getting back to it edition

Because I am woefully behind in my posting, and because it is Friday, and because I am listening to music:

  1. Jeff Buckley, “Calling You” (Live at Sin-é)
  2. Low, “Silver Rider” (The Great Destroyer)
  3. David Byrne, “Don’t Fence Me In” (Red Hot + Blue)
  4. U2, “Party Girl” (Under a Blood Red Sky)
  5. Sonny Rollins, “Blue 7” (Saxophone Colossus)
  6. Roy Orbison, “It’s Too Late” (Sun Recordings)
  7. Peaches ‘n‘ Cream, “112”
  8. Nirvana, “Serve the Servants” (In Utero)
  9. The Tallis Scholars, “Requiem 5. Sanctus – Benedictus” (Cardoso: Requiem)
  10. Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach, “I Still Have That Other Girl” (Painted from Memory)

End in sight to reboot hell?

I have been struggling with Windows Vista for a month or two. Regularly the system ran out of resources, regularly reboots were required to re-enable functionality. The symptoms were eerily reminiscent of classic GDI resource heap exhaustion: windows would refuse to open, pop-up menus stubbornly stayed closed, applications reported an inability to save to disk or access the registry.

I am now trying various patches to see if I can fix the problem. After a blue screen of death (yes, those still happen on Vista), it occurred to me that the problem must be in a device driver; after all, that code gets to play at a privileged OS level where it can do things like attempt to overwrite read-only memory. I suspected the video driver, and attempted to use an update from Intel’s web site to update the driver (for the record, it’s the Intel Mobile Chipset 945), but was told that the upgrade was not installable on my machine (an HP Compaq NC6320 laptop).

Now I am getting a message from the Windows problem reporting system that one of my issues may be fixed by a hotfix for KB 931671. We’ll see if this does fix the problem, or if I continue down the path of no return with this OS. Already not a good sign: I am being forwarded for the second time in a 20 minute call to another department because the reps I have been speaking to are not authorized to distribute the hotfix.

Manila minus one

A blogging great, Doc Searls, is off the Manila platform, on which this blog is based, and onto WordPress. I have been wanting to make a similar move for a long time, ever since I used WordPress for the Sony Boycott Blog.

One of my readers last year offered to migrate my Manila content to a WordPress blog, and I am definitely thinking that it’s time to take advantage of the offer. If only there were enough hours in the day.

Marissa Nadler

How much buzz must there be about an artist before she is an overnight sensation?

I’m not in the habit of raving about musicians after hearing one performance—there have been too many about whom I’ve obsessed for weeks or months only to have them disappear—but I cautiously think that Marissa Nadler might be the real thing. The Stereogum crowd appears to agree, as they invited her to participate in OKX (she covers “No Surprises”), but the real thing is in her songs and her voice. I was working down the podcasts on my iPod and decided to play her in-studio appearance on KEXP in my car on the way in this morning. Wow, what a sound. Just lifted the hair on the back of my neck. The vocal quality bridges Jeff Buckley and classic 60s folks like Joan Baez, and the songwriting recalls 80s psychedelic folk revival (in fact, there are moments listening to her when I hear strains of Mazzy Star loud and clear—if Hope Sandoval were a high soprano).

She’s kind of a local, too, having grown up in Needham; though, since she makes a reference to being from a “plastic place” in her KEXP interview, I’m guessing that she doesn’t harbor a lot of love for the Bay State. Looks like she’ll be at the Middle East on September 11; I might have to check it out.

Watching TV from miles away

Universal Hub: Now that’s a wide-screen TV. Looks like WGBH is going to get into the lit advertisement space with a VERY large (30’x45′) outdoor display. Visions of 25′ tall Ernies aside, it looks like you won’t actually be able to watch television on the display; it’ll show a different image each day.

That relieves me of having to make the obligatory hifi comment, but I’ll make it anyway: with every TV in the world moving to 16×9, why on earth would they deploy a 3×2 TV instead? I could almost understand 4×3, but 3×2 is just puzzling.

More info about the Jumbotron LED mural can be found on WGBH.com’s design pages for their new building.

New mix: a young escape to find you

New mix up at Art of the Mix: a young escape to find you. Been working on this one for a while, finally got it put together tonight. Copies out soon to the usual suspects.

Two or three superb cuts on this—the return of Black Francis on “Threshold Apprehension,” Sonic Youth’s “Do You Believe in Rapture?,” Gillian Welch’s take on Radiohead’s “Black Star,” and three tunes that have been waiting their turn on one of my mixes since high school, “Fixing a Hole,” ”Yer So Bad,” and “Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires.”

DVD Review: Foyle’s War, Series 4

foyle's war series 4

Sixty years after its conclusion, World War II continues to provide an inexhaustible flow of stories. While many follow traditional narratives of Good vs. Evil on the world stage, a set of quiet television dramas from England have told a different story:
what does the Last Just War look like from the home front?
Foyle’s War explores crime stories in a small village against the backdrop of the war. And Series 4, now available on DVD from Acorn Media, begins at a particular point in the war:
what happens when your allies come to stay and fight the war from your soil?

The first episode, “Invasion,” is a case in point. The story opens with a young boy playing in the street, whose eyes widen at the sound of motors coming up the lane. As Jeeps roll by, he runs back to the house shouting, “The Jerries are here!” The boy’s mistake sets the stage for the next 90 minutes, during which a murder mystery plays out against a background of mutual Anglo-American distrust.

This is, in fact, the sort of video that can be challenging to watch without bringing context from current events. One uncomfortable resonance point includes the angry speech from the farmer whose land is requisitioned by the war department, asking whether the Americans have come to help or to stay. Another, the scene of Foyle providing background on British behavior and customs to a schoolroom full of American GIs, only to be confronted by an isolationist private angry at having been dragged from the US to save the British, is an uncomfortable metaphor for American foreign policy.

What the series does best, though, and what episodes 3 and 4 in the set deliver in spades, is show warfare from the perspective of those left behind at the home front: spouses, retirees, war profiteers, and the police themselves. One critique of the series is that the producers spend so much time on getting the historical atmosphere right and exploring these characters that they can lose the thread of the main plot; with each episode featuring some level of murder mystery or other police case, that can be a little frustrating. But overall the show is one of those rare viewing experiences that is quietly compelling. I’ve tried, and failed, to do other things while the program was on (like for instance writing this review), and for an inveterate multitasker like myself to confess that is high praise indeed.

Harry Potter: all over but the movies

I started, and finished, Deathly Hallows last night. Don’t worry: no spoilers from me. Just a note to mark the end of that particular journey.

But one thought: how the hell are they going to make that a movie? Jo hardly managed to fit it all into just one book.

Living in the wiki

Just to show you that you never know when you’ll follow a reference down the rabbit hole: I was struck by a greeting that one of my German coworkers gave another. Looking it up, I was quickly sucked into a maze of Frisian and Jutish dialects and German comic book characters.

The greeting used is moin, which (Wikipedia says) comes from the Frisian and is commonly used in the eastern Netherlands and Schleswig-Holstein. As with all central European languages, there are cognate greetings in closely related languages, including Old Saxon and Jutish.

The rabbit hole part is the way the greeting likely spread to my coworkers, through the German comic book character Werner, who consistently uses the greeting (apparently when not consuming large amounts of beer). And yes, it all comes back to beer as well: the official website for Werner feature promotes a special sixpack of Werner’s favorite beer, Bölkstoff, including judicial actions by the Guild Brewery of Hanover and corporate takeovers by Inbev.

Vista: Very, very hungry

I run Windows Vista at the office. Generally I get along with it just fine, and our company’s software plays pretty happily with it. But every now and then in my daily work I hit some kind of wall. Sometimes it manifests as a problem with Microsoft Outlook: when I try to launch Word to read an attachment, it starts up the Office Installer instead, then complains that it is suffering from “Windows Installer error 1450” and can’t proceed. Cancelling or clicking OK brings me to the same place: a copy of Word that complains that it hasn’t been installed for the current Windows user.

Other times, the problem manifests as a refusal to open other software applications, even Notepad, or to open new explorer windows. When I hit this point, even clicking on the funky little restart menu to try to get to the restart menu option won’t open the submenu. I have to hold the power key down to force the power to cycle.

It feels for all the world like the bad old days of Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 when one of the system resource heaps would be exhausted. But that shouldn’t be happening in Vista, or any post-NT OS, for that matter.

What’s weird is that applications that are already open, e.g. Firefox, appear to run just fine as long as you keep them running.

I can’t find anything on Microsoft.com or on the web at large about the issue, so I’m posting something to jog my own memory the next time I run into the problem.

From a psychic landscape

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I uploaded a bunch of photos last night to Flickr, including some from our vacation in North Carolina: some purely family photos and one large set of a visit to the place I will always remember as Grandmother Jarrett’s house.

As you can see in the photos, it’s not really a house so much as a farm, with as many as seven or eight buildings on the property (counting various barns and one chicken shack). The property was built up over the years starting with my great-grandfather, Zeb Jarrett, who built the house. In one photo you can actually see the evolution of the house: the section with the porch on the right was the original house built by Zeb and Laura, while the middle section was added on a few years later and the part on the left was added by my grandfather. The house was well kept up over the years, and my aunt has put it in exceptionally good shape after my grandmother passed away a few years ago. But without my grandmother there, it feels like a stage set waiting for someone to walk on.

In fact, walking past the barns I felt the truth of Laurie Anderson’s lyric: When my father died we put him in the ground. When my father died, it was like an entire library burned down. In this case, everything still stands but the spirit of the place is gone.

Harry Potter and the Cantabrigians

After a long week, Lisa and I headed down to Harvard Square tonight to take in the Pottermania. We’re both a little too old, now, and have too many other responsibilities to stand in line until midnight to get a copy of The Deathly Hallows, so ours will arrive from Amazon sometime tomorrow. (And I will get to read it by the end of next week, if I’m lucky—Lisa has dibs.)

But we enjoyed watching the chaos. Coming into the Square past the Coop, the crowds of college students waiting for the doors to reopen at midnight were substantial; fortunately for my eyes, few wore costumes, though there were more than a few Gryffindor scarves in evidence. Walking from Eliot Street to the Harvard Bookstore along the back roads, we saw a little more cosplay, most perfectly safe (though the college age girls in school uniforms and plaid short skirts were a little much).

Bjizzle

While on vacation, I borrowed Björk’s Homogenic from my sister Esta. Listening to it reminds me of nothing so much as the conversation between Björk and Diddy, as imagined by Milkfat.com. “Sometimes… I climb into a laundry basket and tickle my ears!”

Then of course there’s the sequel, featuring the conversation between Diddy and Snoop: “Yo yo, you know that Japanese lookin’ white girl from Europe?” “Bjizzle?”

OK, I’m easily amused, but it does stick in the head. Even after it was posted, like, a lifetime ago.

Back. And so is “None of the above”

Having spent a good 17 hours or so spread across two trips in the few days since I posted last, I have still not recovered from my vacation. I think it will take a few days for the soreness to go away from the drive.

My soreness, however, must pale in comparison to the feelings of the average GOP presidential candidate when he learns that his entire field is trailing “None of the Above” for the 2008 nomination. While I would hate to have to run away from W’s war record as a GOP candidate, surely there must be someone in the party who will go out on a limb and do that. If not, the 2008 election will shape up as a referendum on whether we should be in Iraq, rather than what it should be: a contest of ideas on how to get out of the mess we are in, since our need to get out is for all rational people a foregone conclusion. (Via the slickly-redesigned Talking Points Memo.)