Less than useful

The 4-Hour Body is a new book by Tim Ferriss, or at least it was new when I first started writing this post at the end of last year

I bought it because I liked the excerpts I read on Gizmodo. I’m extremely pleased with it and endorse it wholeheartedly, though there is some weird stuff that is probably safe to ignore. Word of warning though: it’s a massive tome. You only need to read small sections at a time (concentrate on one goal at a time), but it’s a little impractical to carry around because of how unwieldy it is in hardcover. I wish I’d bought an e-book version, but originally thought this might be something I’d want to share with people. I frankly want to keep it all to myself, hah.

Back in December, I’d barely started with the recommended diet, but switching to only eating legumes for carbs had made an immediate difference in my wakefulness and alertness. The difference was night and day. I was often still sleeping like crap, but I was vastly more productive during the days. I also lost a significant amount of weight pretty quickly.

Since though, I started falling into bad habits again. While most of my meals are still of the protein+legumes+vegetables variety, I’d started eating junk food again as well.

So it’s time to get back on the wagon. Since willpower didn’t work, I’m trying one of the weirder ideas in the book: take a picture of food before you eat it, and better yet, post it somewhere to keep yourself honest. We all carry cameras around with us on our phones nowadays so it’s simple. The idea works in embarrassment and potential shame ha. Do you really want to take a picture of a hamburger? And it helps to have people keep you honest.

So that said, my food log can be found at:

http://www.markosaar.net/category/food-log/

I’ve set up WordPress to not post those to the main page. For some reason the photos don’t show up until you actually open each entry. I’ll figure that out.

Only a month late on this.

Less than a week after James, I got to see the greatest complete line-up I’d ever seen: Locals Fjord Rowboat, and my all-time favourite electronica wizard, Ulrich Schnauss, opened for classic shoegazers, Chapterhouse.

A friend I was going with knew Fjord Rowboat personally, and he gave me their albums a couple weeks in advance so I would know what I was in for.  Their albums were outstanding.  They could easily qualify as a major-label act.  I got a mid-career Catherine Wheel vibe out of them.  A particular stand-out track was Paragon (Click to listen).  The only thing is maybe they were a little too similar sounding to those early 90s shoegazer bands (of which Chapterhouse qualifies as too), but it was great to hear here and now.

Regardless, it was the first time in ages I actually wanted to see an opening act.  They played as if they’d been doing this for years.  Everything sounded and looked great.  Nice equipment too, which they were actually lending to Chapterhouse.

Ulrich Schnauss is someone I discovered a couple years ago courtesy of my brother, and Kim at Penguin Music, and just became completely infatuated with his music.  Chapterhouse was an influence to his sound, and Schnauss has often tried to bring the indie aesthetic to electronic music.  (Check out Goodbye: I think he succeeds incredibly well there.  Previous albums are more pure electronics and more ambient.)  Reviews of the event (see bottom) have alluded or mentioned that Schnauss was actually largely responsible for this reunion tour.

Unfortunately, his set did not seem to go over particularly well with the crowd.  They were there for guitars, and he just sat at his computer mixing in Ableton Live, occasionally throwing in a live keyboard accompaniment.  He played a long time and people seemed to start getting bored.  I heard several remarks about how he could have just hit ‘play’ and left the stage.  He had visuals of European cities and vistas shot from a moving vehicle, but the screen was too large for the Lee’s stage and sat off-kilter behind drums and other equipment.  The effect was much better when I saw him perform at The Rivoli three years ago.  He should tour with a vocalist.

I knew all his albums backwards and forwards yet the only track I recognised was Never Be The Same, the introduction to Goodbye.  I managed to catch a clip:

Before publishing under his own name, he’s been known as ‘View To The Future’ and ‘Ethereal 77′ and probably several other names I’m not aware of.  I recorded the following because I absolutely loved the sound of it, but I have no idea what it is.   I don’t know if it’s coming to a forthcoming album, or if he was just mixing some of his older music:

And then came Chapterhouse.  To be honest, as slick and amazing as their albums were, I didn’t know what to expect from a reunion tour 20 years later.  I walked in completely blind.  (YouTube footage had actually scared me off from going to go see The Happy Mondays, but they are a special case…)

I was completely blown away.  The years had been entirely kind to them, though it certainly helped that the band were only in their very early 20s when Whirlpool first came out.  They still looked reasonably youthful, but more importantly sounded amazing; their voices still sounded syrupy and young.

It was a vastly better experience than seeing shoegazer legends, My Bloody Valentine was.  I guess it was my fault for not doing my research before, but I had been unaware that MBV had a reputation for holding some of the world’s loudest ever concerts.  It was so insanely loud that people were passing out and vomiting in the crowd.  I was worried this was a shoegazer thing, but Chapterhouse didn’t depend on the volume gimmick, just textured swirly psychedelic, even danceable, guitars.

Schnauss came back out to perform Pearl and Love Forever with the band, and once again for Inside of Me at the end of the encore.

The show was phenomenal and certainly made me re-evaluate (and raise) Chapterhouse on the scale of legends-of-shoegazer.

The rest of my photos can be found here.  Before the show I contacted the venue and asked on the Facebook and Last.FM pages if anyone knew what the camera policy was.  Andy Sherriff of Chapterhouse was kind enough to contact me and let me know the band wouldn’t mind.

Some other reviews of the event:

• Lithium Magazine
• Panic Manual
• Chromewaves.net
• GTA Music Scene

Something nifty that came out of this: the gentleman that runs gtamusicscene.com noticed these photos and asked if I’d mind contributing to his blog in exchange for concert tickets. The first show I did for him was Bruce Peninsula.

I got to see James for the second time at the end of September.   Unable to find any regulations about cameras, I brought mine in:

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I was done shooting anyway, but unfortunately security accosted me and made me put the camera away because it had “removable lenses.”  Apparently having a sub-SLR isn’t enough any longer.  The rest of the pictures I took are here.

It was unfortunate because a bunch of friends happened to get invited to dance on the stage during Laid (not my video):

The show was outstanding.  It started out with a simple, stripped down version of Sit Down (official, but non-album version video), with Tim Booth walking down the centre aisle from the back to the stage.  When I last saw them at The Phoenix two years ago, they just started with a double-speed version of Born of Frustration (nonsensical fan video), which was unfortunate because it’s my favourite track by them.  Still, at least I got to hear it once as it was the only time I got to see it live: they skipped it this time around.

Despite that minor setback, the show was phenomenal. They played a few new tracks, but lots of favourites such as Ring The Bells, Seven, Getting Away With It, Tomorrow, Stutter, Say Something, Sound, Out To Get You and Sometimes. Their newer tracks, Dust Motes, Crazy, It’s Hot, Porcupine and Tell Her I Said So went over just fine considering how quiet they were to begin with.

The only shame was that the crowd went nuts after their encore, but that was it. It almost seemed as if the band would come back with the lights dimming again, but disappointingly the venue’s piped music came on and the crew started disassembling the band’s gear.  On their blog they commented:

The show in Toronto was amazing.  The audience clapped forever, calling for endless encores.  Too bad there was a curfew…

Mr. Booth commented on Twitter:

The manager at the toronto venue said he hadn’t seen any audience make such a noise in 10 years of owning clubs.

Maybe next time they’ll choose a better venue.  The Queen Elizabeth Theatre wasn’t the worst place I’ve seen a show, but it inhibited the band.  Considering it was seated, no one I knew there complained about their view of the band, and the sound, no pun intended.  That said, the assigned seating really impeded the energy.  People really just want to be able to dance and/or make fools of themselves.

Other takes, as I discover them:

BlogTO (great photos)

ChartAttack

awmusic

Lithium Magazine

LiveInLimbo.com (also great photos)

Procrastinating a bit from some contract work I need to get done tonight.

I’d seen Amazon Kindles in person a few times, and was absolutely blown away by the quality and legibility of the text on the screen.  I didn’t get to spend that much time with them though to really get a feel for the features.  I didn’t like how a lot of the device’s real-estate was used up by a keyboard though.

Today I spent a while with the Sony eReaders, and was surprised to find that they don’t look or feel nearly as nice as the Kindle.  They looked great in their press-shots and sounded vastly superior to me, but they felt quite cheap comparatively.  When these things are supposed to recreate the “experience of reading a book,” which detractors keep bringing up, it’s apparently a really big deal.

Speaking of e-book readers in general, the ability to change text-size I think is a killer feature.  However one thing I noticed on the Sony readers, and really disliked, was that they wouldn’t justify or typeset the text particularly well.  It’s especially obvious at larger font sizes. I don’t know whether the Kindle does this either, but it seems like it’d be a great feature to further enhance legibility.  Maybe most people don’t notice this sort of thing though.

It does make me think though that I really don’t want to be an early adopter in this instance, and it’s steeled my resolve to get through all the physical books I’ve acquired over the years before I invest in something that will be obsolete in a few months…

I’d been meaning to write about Avatar for some time since I’d seen it, as none of the reviews/articles/criticisms I’d seen on it quite captured my thoughts.  Now this Macleans article, by Brian D. Johnson, captures them far more succinctly than I could manage: Why Haven’t You Seen Avatar Yet?

The only thing I’d really like to add is to chastise people who are reading so deeply into what is really such a superficial movie.  The plot is so thin, the characters are so shallow, you’re just seeing what you want to see, or ‘jumping at shadows’ so to speak.  Despite the lack of depth, the movie still manages to be an awe-inspiring experience.  It’s really okay to just watch it with an open … or possibly empty mind.

It’s awesome.

The general online sentiment however is that this device is a pile-of-crap, that you’re “a motherfucking idiot if you buy that piece of shit,” etc.

I really don’t get it.  One caveat: I upgraded from a PSP-1001.  Things like physical dimensions, and the extra memory cache present in the 2000 & 3000 series devices I have no familiarity with.  I love the tiny dimensions, the quality of the games available to it, and how freaking light it is.  It doesn’t feel cheap.

PSP-1001, PSPgo, 1st gen iPod Touch

Most of the arguments against it seem to stem from a perceived high launch price and the lack of a UMD transfer option.

The price argument is stupid.  It’s the price of admission for being an early adopter.  This isn’t any different from any other new technology.  Can’t afford it?  Don’t think it’s worth it?  No one is forcing you to buy it.  But people love feeling entitled and bitching.

The lack of UMD transfer was hardly a surprise.  Yeah it would have been nice, but how could the company possibly ensure that there wouldn’t be thousands of software copies made from a single physical disc?

It wasn’t a deal-breaker for me.  I actually just went and traded in every single one of my UMDs because I figured I had enough games anyway, and I was never going to get around to beating those particular titles if I hadn’t already.  I’d owned them for years.  Something to be said for the PSP platform in general, the A-list titles typically have a good 50 hours of gameplay each, at least.

Having access to those A-list titles in such a tiny pocketable form though is of immense value to me.  Admittedly the novelty hasn’t worn off, but the Go goes everywhere I do, no pun intended.  The old PSP-1001 was a real brick to carry around; it wasn’t remotely pocket-sized, nevermind with that plexiglass Logitech Playgear case which was popular at the beginning.

With my PSP-1001 I was already ripping all my UMD games to the MemoryStick with hacked firmware and homebrew available to it.  I hated carrying around extra media, and they loaded many times faster from flash.  As it is, I’ve been declaring war on most physical media.  I was glad to trade in my UMDs.  I’m looking to dump my CD collection and have whole-heartedly embraced iTunes.  I’ve been buying PC games from Steam for years whenever possible.  So the Go really fits my mindset.

I did enjoy access to homebrew (NES/SNES emulators, an ebook reader, some indie games) on the old PSP, but I realised I wasn’t using any of it anyway.  The PSP-1001 d-pad was terrible for NES games with its lack of diagonals.  I’ve been reading books on my iPod Touch instead with Stanza.  The indie games were novel, but nothing I couldn’t live without.

The only nitpick I have with the device is that it’s silly that, while you can leave the screen on and watch video with the device closed, there are no real play controls outside.  There’s volume … but then screen brightness and mute/equaliser (really helpful).  At least you can pause with the ‘PS’ button.  This really makes it almost useless as an MP3 player as well, something that with the slightest bit of effort it could have been at least competent with.  (Technically, you could make playlists in advance…)

The only major issue I have with it is that you’re tied solely to the whims of the Playstation Network store.  You can buy digital titles from Amazon.com as well, but their prices are all worse-to-substantially-worse when you consider conversion from USD to CAD at the low end, and arbitrarily inflated prices at the high-end (Killzone: Liberation is $13 CAD on the PSN store or $40 USD on the Amazon.com store).

So far though, Sony seems to have been pretty good with sales, which is how Steam suckered me in.  I already owned Patapon 2 & Jeanne D’Arc digitally from my original PSP, but picked up the well-priced Killzone.  The sale this week had me picking up a Mercury bundle for $10 (Marble Madness-like games) since I felt I was lacking a good puzzle game.  That’s already a something-stupid 250 hours of gameplay or so…

Another post, another blog category.  Totally inconsequential too, but hey, it’s a hobby.

IGN has reviewed the new portable Gran Turismo game, and assuming the reviewer didn’t miss something painfully obvious, gave it a fair, relatively low 6.8/10 score.  The main complaint is that the game lacks a “career mode,” instead making all 800 cars available to be purchased, and all 35 tracks open from the start,  rather than making/allowing you to work through events in a steady progression.  ¹

It seems to me that the design philosophy behind this is to just turn it into a portable ‘pick-up-and-play’ game, while if you want the real experience you need to buy a Playstation 3 and the full version of Gran Turismo 5 whenever it too is finally released.  A problem with this is that the huge selling point of major-release PSP games is that they offer  full-console-game-like experiences, and are all packed with anywhere between 25-50 hours of gameplay.  Even Locoroco, a game about rolling a big blob around has surprising amounts of depth and things to do.

I can understand that kind of philosophy from a commercial standpoint, trying to make gamers double/triple-dip, but it seems horribly unfair to be charging nearly full-price for a seemingly crippled game that fans of the series and PSP owners have been waiting for for four years.  [4-4-4!]  Alternatives, the PSP game would be probably be outstanding value and make for an excellent game if it were priced just as a budget title.  The high expectations would vanish.

While this isn’t a deal-breaker for me, $40 isn’t even too much, this seems extremely unfair to fans of the series.  A PSP is affordable vs. a PS3 and the necessary HDTV to do it justice.  This portable release ought to be a complete title, building on the name and reputation of the series.  The Gran Turismo games has historically sold staggeringly huge numbers (GT3 & GT4 selling a combined 25 million copies on PS2), yet it appeals to a very different segment than the stereotypical gamer.   I personally didn’t give a crap about them until I tried the PS3 GT5: Prologue version, and now I’m obsessed.  It’ll have been five years when GT5 comes out, since GT4 was released.  I can see there being a huge segment of adult gamers now who keep a PSP around, but have otherwise aged-out and lost interest in doing the whole console thing.  I think I’m on the cusp of it myself, owning just a PS3 with a very small selection of games this generation.

In the late 90s I’d started getting extremely sick of the alternative  (“alternative to what?”) rock I’d been listening to through middle & high school.  My older brother had a friend working at a major record label who’d flip him extra promo copies periodically.  These would sometimes filter down to me, especially if my brother had no interest in it.  One of these albums was Praise the Fallen by VNV Nation, an electronic British band.

‘Electronica’ like The Prodigy or Chemical Brothers were popular, and I was casually into bands like Depeche Mode,  but VNV Nation were something different.  It was electronic, but probably owed more to the likes of Industrial giants such as Skinny Puppy or Front 242.

Leading from that album, I got into other bands like Covenant, Assemblage 23, Apoptygma Berzerk and Seabound.  It’s Seabound who really got me into the genre.  That said, one of the top albums in it was 2000′s Welcome to Earth by Apoptygma Berzerk.

The production was tight, the songs and album were cohesive and consistent throughout.  I loved the X-File-like theme of the album, about alien life visiting Earth and moving on.  The cover of Metallica’s Fade to Black was awesome.

They then had a live tour which produced a DVD and live album, APBL2000.  This was excellent.  That tour, and the subsequent recordings, were the best example and use of electronic music mixed with live guitar I’d seen and heard up to that point.  (Now I think that this live Trentemoller clip surpasses it…)  The live mix really seemed to be pushing the band and genre forward, and made such a great case for mixing guitars and electronics.

The next album however, 2002′s  Harmonizer, was back to being purely electronic.  It still sounded “good;” it was just boring.  It was intensely personal for the writer I suppose, but I couldn’t relate to it, and therefore it wasn’t particularly interesting.

2005′s You and Me Against the World was a total travesty and made me completely lose interest in the band.  It was a crappy lo-fi throwback to 80s rock I suppose.  Never mind the slick electronic production of Welcome to Earth and Harmonizer, this album sounded like a crappy cock-rock guitar band got drunk in the studio and WHOA DUDE happened to stumble upon a synthesiser.  They then decided to add some “ironic retro shit” to their album.  Don’t get me wrong, I love guitar bands too; just not Apop’s approximation of one.

Yet, it was apparently their most successful album.

This year’s Rocket Science is similar to You and Me Against the World in style, but even worse.  It even features a member of Good Charlotte on it.

So finally getting to the point:

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I went to see Apop live two nights ago, and they were fantastic.  Completely unexpected.

They almost played my favourites exclusively, only four newer tracks.  The newer ones were far better live than the album versions too, for the most part.  The only still-horrid track was the Good Charlotte one.

They played so much of their ‘old’ stuff it got me thinking.  Do they know that their new music sucks?

And if so, that begs the question, why do they make it?  Maybe they’re actually insidious geniuses,  crafting perfect tunes that are palatable to ‘mainstream’ pop audiences, suckering them in, with the express purpose of then exposing them to the ebm/electro/electronic/futurepop/goth/synthpop subcultures…

Yes.  Clearly that is why the last two albums are such horrid departures.