Gutterblood with Bonnie Prince Bob, “Gardyloo”, which is a delightful term from Edinburgh via the French language. What relevance the word (which kind of translates to “watch yersels doon in the street, we’re putt’n’ oot the shite”) has to the British monarchy is something I have absolutely no idea about. Not the slightest clue. Also, “Hanoverian” and “Luciferian” is one of the best rhymes I’ve ever heard.
Category: [Videos]
Small mercies?
Ed Sheeran Threatens to Quit Music if Found Guilty in Copyright Infringement Case
Ed Sheeran is in the midst of trial for a lawsuit that claims his song “Thinking Out Loud” rips off the Marvin Gaye classic “Let’s Get It On.” His attorneys have spent the past few months unsuccessfully trying to get the case dismissed, but now, he’s raising the stakes by threatening to quit music entirely if he’s found guilty of copyright infringement.
Per New York Post, when Sheeran’s attorney asked what he’d do if the plaintiffs won the case, he responded: “If that happens, I’m done. I’m stopping… I find it really insulting to work my whole life as a singer-songwriter and diminish it.”
Sheeran has vehemently insisted that any similarities between his 2014 hit and Gaye’s 1973 song are purely coincidental, and that those similarities were too common to constitute copyright infringement. To drive his point home, he reportedly “belted out various mashups of Van Morrison songs for the courtroom on Monday” during his testimony, which probably did not help him as much as he thought it might.
I haven’t paid any attention to this case, which has been dragging on for some years now, largely because, you know, it’s Ed Sheeran; he seems to be a perfectly delightful person but his music holds no real interest for me… but when I saw him issuing this threat to quit, I thought I should perhaps see what the fuss is about. Consequently, I turned to Rick Beato:
And oh dear. Once Rick transposes the Gaye song down a half-step so that both songs are now the same key, you find it’s basically the same chord progression, same tempo and overall groove, and when he alternates the two songs one bar at a time… yikes. Not looking good for Ed, except that the latter goes to different places when it leaves that first part of the verse and melodically the two songs are completely different. I suppose the question then becomes can you prove it was deliberate (which I don’t think it was) and is it enough to merit this absurd $100m that the company managing Gaye’s co-writer’s assets (cos it’s not even Marvin’s estate this time) are asking for (which it surely isn’t)… I don’t know. Like I said, it doesn’t look great, but at the same time it’s also not the whole song; Ed’s potential problem is that this isn’t his first go-round with the copyright infringement thing, and though he did win the second one he settled on the first one, and that always looks like an admission of guilt (whether or not you are in fact guilty). Be interesting to see if he lives up to that threat if the case goes against him…
Parenthetically, something similar happened with my band, the Inflatable Voodoo Dolls… we had a song which I’d made, though calling it a “song” is dignifying it unnecessarily; it was called “I Believe Robert Smith is My Saviour” and it was basically a string of samples against a beat I’d come up with and the only melodic aspect of it was actually the cymbals which I’d pitched… anyway, it took years for us to solve the problem of actually putting a proper melody to it, until Joe (partner in crime, now housemate and spider wrangler) had the brilliant idea of just starting the fucking thing from scratch. The result was great but the little pattern of notes he’d come up with as the basis of the new track was almost the same as that of The Presets’ “Are You the One”… not that I expected legal issues or anything, but I suggested pitching it down and changing it slightly. Weird how I wasn’t worried about the battery of uncleared samples we had all over the album otherwise… but I don’t think there was ever much danger of us even being noticed, let alone sued over anything, anyway, given we’ve probably sold literally about a millionth of what Ed Sheeran has. There’s no money for Bob Larson to make from us…
EDIT: And he won. Looks like the Cradle of Filth collaboration will be happening after all!
Physician, heal thyself
Fascinating viewing from the Holy Koolaid channel. I don’t think I’d heard of Jack Coe until now, and certainly didn’t know anything about him and his somewhat short life story, and, well, I’m sure I’ve said before that I don’t like celebrating people’s deaths, but Coe deserved something bad to happen to him. And what happened was not only bad, it had multiple elements of irony to it; it was the sort of death that, if I were inclined to believe in that sort of thing, I’d have considered it a sign that God was kind of pissed at me for the sort of life I’d lived. And frankly, I’m ten years older than he was when he died, and with all my issues I look a lot better at 48 than he did in his mid/late 30s…
The Nicholas Brothers: GODFUCKINGDAMN
FUCKING LOOK AT THIS. Someone posted a colourised version of this clip on Mastodon, which was ho-hum enough that I went in search of the scene in proper b&w and duly found it. Not everything needs to be run through a wobbly AI to make it look “new”, especially when it’s not even convincing at doing that. But… just… LOOK at it. Seriously. Fred Astaire apparently claimed this was the best film dance scene he’d ever seen, and I’m not going to disagree with him on that point.
The amazing thing about this is that there’s just so many points where something could’ve gone horrifically wrong and everything would’ve been absolutely fucked. I presume the whole thing was shot with multiple cameras cos it looks like one take (albeit edited from multiple positions—and albeit from some reasonably long shots, too, this is not super-edited), and really, anything could’ve gone wrong. It finally gets to the end on the large flight of stairs and they’re kind of piggybacking each other on the way back down while doing the splits and I just shouted “JESUS CHRIST!” at that point (I actually couldn’t watch it on my second viewing). I mean, nothing does go wrong but if you’re like me you’ll watch this wondering when something will… and then you’ll wonder how nothing did. Phenomenal.
Jordan B. Poetry
On the occasion of World Poetry Day, I think it’s time I finally talked about something I’ve been meaning to talk about for a while now.
Jordan B. Peterson’s poetry.
And I don’t mean that hideous “children’s book”, I mean something he actually posted on his website presumably quite some time ago, though I will briefly mention that… or at any rate I’ll point you to a couple of Youtube videos:
Firstly, one from José which was how I discovered this book was a thing in the first place (he notes that Peterson himself seems to be doing oddly little to promote it, having apparently deleted his own video about it and I can’t see it mentioned on his website either, which is certainly… interesting) and discovered Jurr Durr had written a terrible Edward Gorey knock-off…
…and here’s Rachel Oates, who knows poetry, writes it, performs it, understands it, and is able to explain just why it’s a terrible Edward Gorey knock-off. Enough about that, what I want to talk about instead is… this. I’m going to take the liberty of quoting the thing entire in case the good doctor remembers its existence and decides to delete the evidence that he actually wasn’t bad at poetry once…
And I still find it so hard
“Blue Monday” by New Order turned 40 the other day, and I am just old enough to remember it being new, and if there’s anything I really need it’s something to make me feel old… Anyway, the Graun has a piece by Alexis Petridis looking at some of the tunes that inspired it and that it in turn inspired, and I was intrigued by a reference to something called Gerry and the Holograms, which I dimly recalled having heard of somewhere but I couldn’t place where; I now gather it is widely considered by those who’ve heard it to have been a primary source for “Blue Monday”. Anyway, I duly went in search of them and found this:
Now, Bernard Sumner has denied having heard this and claimed “Mighty Real” by Sylvester was actually what New Order really ripped off, but GODDAMN. If Sumner’s telling the truth, then we have a truly odd case of parallelism at work here… I know there’s not exactly an infinite number of ways in which you can combine notes so you’re perfectly likely to innocently come up with a note sequence someone else has already come up with, but even so. But Petridis reckons the band have been otherwise honest about where they nicked bits of “Blue Monday” from, and Sumner said he would’ve admitted it if he had borrowed from “Gerry”. So.
Anyway, Gerry and the Holograms were a duo of fellow Mancs who had variously played with the Albertos and John Cooper Clarke and released two singles in 1979, one of which was designed to be unplayable cos the record was sealed inside the sleeve with glue, rendering it impossible to play the disc even if you could get it out of the sleeve. Much more of an absurdist art project than a band (their label was in fact called Absurd Records), hilariously the “music” on the unplayable record was actually two minutes of silence. Frank Zappa was a fan. Found their complete works on Bandcamp, too.
Lions in your lap, horseshit in your hand
Found this interesting video the other day about why 3D movies don’t “immerse” you in them, and it’s not just because you have to wear those fucking polarised glasses (which is always an additional problem if you’re already a speccy git like me); it’s also down to things like focus and the darkness of the image. Consequently, 3D movies fail to immerse the viewer, the technology gets in the way of viewer involvement. They don’t really draw us in.
My own first encounter with 3D actually came in comic form; Eagle did a bit of an experiment with it in, I think, 1983, and around the same time I remember one of the TV stations (7?) making a fuss about showing an old William Castle 3D production called Fort Ti in actual 3D. And, of course, there was the 3D revival happening in cinemas at the same time, I remember seeing Treasure of the Four Crowns and Metalstorm on the big screen when they hit Australia. (Even as a not especially critical child, though, I felt both of them were shit.) Oh, and Starchaser (which I wasn’t a big fan of either) nearer the end of the 80s boom, and Captain EO (seen at Disneyland in 1987, I recall liking it more than any of the above-mentioned), but I don’t know how much that’s a “real” film as such.
Anyway, the problem I have with the thesis that 3D isn’t immersive is that, as far as I can tell, the whole point in the first place was that 3D came to you rather than trying to draw you in:
The 1950s 3D boom began by threatening the viewer with “a lion in your lap”. 3D was about things coming off the screen. It was about the lion in your lap, the tree branch hanging over your head, the arrow being fired at you, the hand reaching out, the paddle ball being hit at you… Years ago I watched a flat print of Douglas Sirk’s only 3D film, Taza Son of Cochise, in which I could still tell what the 3D gimmick shots were meant to be even though I was watching it flat. Cos that was what 3D did, as far as I was concerned, it jumped out at you. The Bwana Devil poster made that clear 70 years ago. Protrusion was the point. It was there in the very title of the 1981 film Comin’ At Ya!. It was technology overtly showing off.
I don’t know what post-Avatar 3D films are like, admittedly, because cinemagoing is not something I do any more for various reasons. So I haven’t seen any of the newer 3D films, I only saw Avatar itself flat on DVD, and I don’t know if they approach 3D in the same way as the old ones did. I remember thinking once I’d be more interested in 3D if it were, in fact, about drawing you in, if it weren’t so much about the foreground looming out of the screen at you as it were about extending into the background, taking you into the depth of the image… but as someone notes in the comments on that video, cinema already has plenty of ways of depicting that depth. Hugo Munsterberg noticed this way back in 1916, that the paradox of the cinematic image is that it’s flat but nonetheless we perceive things in the image as three-dimensional anyway (and camera movement produces a further impression of this flat image containing three-dimensional space). It’s not really necessary, in other words.
But either way I don’t care as long as those fucking glasses are involved, cos I think they’re still the ultimate reason why 3D doesn’t immerse you (particularly the red/green ones; possibly my eyes just work strangely, but even when I read the 3D strip in Eagle the effect never quite worked for me cos the two lenses didn’t quite cancel out their respective colours properly). They’re an additional imposition on the viewer, even if you’re not a speccy git like I said I am (and if you are they’re even worse). The last 3D film I saw was a Mu-Meson Archives screening in the oughts of The Bubble from 1966, which mostly served to remind me how fucking irritating the glasses are (particularly because of the red/green issue I mentioned); they took me out of the movie for the entire time. And if the point of cinema is, as the video suggests (and I think that point is itself kind of arguable), about drawing the viewer in and involving them in what’s happening on the screen, then it seems to me the glasses will always get in the way of that more than focusing issues and image darkness will.
Yedolf!
Aamon’s got a new video out, and, well, I’ve seen him use the word “eldritch” himself in the title of a couple of his other videos and I can’t think of a better word for this one either. What we have here is Alex Jones’ encounter with Kanye West late last year during the latter’s Nazi meltdown, and in which Jones was comprehensively outmonstered by him… I’ve seen a couple of commenters observe that Alex’s hideous form here becomes more human as he starts talking about his grandfather, and that’s interesting to observe; if it weren’t Alex Jones, I’d almost feel sorry for him being in that position.
Lena
This was fascinating viewing. I think I may have been dimly aware that “the Lena image” was a thing, I have somewhat vague memories of reading somewhere that an image from Playboy had played some sort of key role in the development of digital image processing, but I knew nothing else apart from that… so this was really educational, and I have a lot better understanding of why Lena was and is important, and what she means for the industry and the culture at large.
Take it away. PLEASE.
Saw this posted on Facebook a few days ago, don’t recall seeing the video before (probably saw it on Countdown at some point and I’ve just forgotten) and had almost completely forgotten the song… indeed, this may actually have been the first time I’d heard it since it came out. Hasn’t left my head since then. Which is a bit of a problem cos… I don’t like it. Chorus and verses sound like they’re from different songs that have been beaten together into one, and the Beatles pulled that trick off successfully a few times, but oh it doesn’t really work here. And like I said, I can’t get the fucking thing out of my head now. Help.
You must be logged in to post a comment.