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An occasional blog about populist politics and popular music, not necessarily at the same time. LinksLocal Links My Other Websites Music Politics Others Networking Music DatabaseArtist Search: Website SearchGoogle: Recent Reading
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Monday, July 16, 2018 Music Week
Music: current count 29979 [29939] rated (+40), 340 [342] unrated (-2). Easiest way for me to scrounge for new music is to bring up the "featured" lists on Napster, descending into my dozen or so "favorite" genre lists. (Not most useful, but sometimes easy trumps.) One surprise record on their jazz list was 5 x Monk 5 x Lacy, a Penguin Guide 4-star album that had eluded me, so I jumped on it. It had been released on the Swedish Silkheart label back in 1997, and it turns out that a whole passel of old Silkheart releases have just appeared on Napster (and probably other streaming services, as well as Bandcamp -- unfortunately only limited cuts on the latter, so they're useless for me to review). I scanned through my database and came up with a list of 24 Silkheart records I had noted but hadn't heard, and listened to 18 of them last week. Before this bonanza appeared, I had several Silkheart albums at A-:
I'll probably hit some more of them up in the coming week(s). Another album I picked out of the Napster featured lists is the Millie Jackson remix. It raised my hopes that label Ace's compilations would also be available, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Tempted me to go and take a dive through her back catalog, but I held back. Very likely my database picks will stand: the 1974 concept album Caught Up, the 1979 Live and Uncensored, and to mop up the rest, Rhino's 2-CD compilation Totally Unrestricted. The remix album frames her in disco strings with occasional but weak horns. Pretty useless, although not even Levine can suffocate "Never Change Lovers in the Middle of the Night." Some hip-hop too. Robert Christgau did an Expert Witness on a batch of six recent EPs, including four of Kanye West's 7-cut productions. I listened to four of them in previous weeks: Pusha T: Daytona [***], Kids See Ghosts [*], Gift of Gab: Rejoice! [A-], Kanye West: Ye [*]. I should revisit the first two; good chance both could be nudged up a notch. (Ye is more likely to drop one.) I did bump my initial Tierra Whack grade up after seeing her video: Welcome to Whack World: A Visual and Auditory Project by Tierra Whack. I still have reservations about musical flow, but it doesn't feel too short or incomplete when you keep your eyes glued to the screen. I've never been a fan of EPs. Always thought one needs more time to develop a statement or even a feel, but the recent vogue for mini-albums looks to be unstoppable. Probably ties to shorter attention spans and a huge explosion of digital product. On the other hand, Christgau has always been a big fan of EPs. Probably relates back to his early preference for singles over albums, and his complaints when CDs were introduced about them being too long. Last Friday we announced a new feature on Christgau's website, Xgau Sez, where Christgau will answer readers' questions. Here's a form for submitting questions. The idea came from Greil Marcus's Ask Greil posts. The timing has something to do with promoting Christgau's new (October 2018) essay collection, Is It Still Good to Ya?: Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017. The initial plan is to answer questions in batches of a half-dozen or so, every other week. I've counted 73 submissions to date (not counting 2 spam). I imagine he'll pick and choose the questions that pique his interest, and adjust the quantity and frequency accordingly, depending on how much other work he has (quite a bit at the moment) and his other commitments. Meanwhile, I need to do a fair amount of work to support this new feature, and also to promote the new book. In particular, the book contract requires that most of the essays and reviews in the book be removed from the website for an extended period (if memory serves, five years), so I have to identify and flag all of those. Also write up a new book page. I hope to get most of this work done by the end of the week, but I'm still hampered by the crash and its attendant conversion issues. I'm only about half way through rewriting the PHP files that access the database. (The database interface library was rewritten between PHP 5 and PHP 7 with new function names.) Until that work is done, I won't be able to do a comprehensive update of the server, so I'll have to poke selected files. Complicating this is the longer-term need to convert the website character set from ISO-8859-1 (which handled Western European languages) to UTF-8 (which handles all languages), and to upgrade the HTML markup from 4.1 (Transitional) to 5.0. The former is simple in principle -- just run the program iconv on everything -- but has to be done all at once, upsetting the whole apple cart. The latter is complex, but may be done somewhat incrementally -- I don't have a real good handle on it. It would also be a good time to do some re-design, especially to make the website easier to use from smart phones. I'm far behind the learning curve there. Would appreciate any suggestions on this sort of thing. One big problem from last week appears to have been solved. I was experiencing sudden garbage screen updates, where pieces of previously rendered windows would pop up suddenly on top of things I was working on. I suspected the problem was the video card. Those things have much more memory than is needed for a simple screen buffer, so the computer can offload window manager display lists and buffers. Anyhow, problem has vanished since I installed a new video card (an ASUS R7240-2GD3-L 2GB, cost $75). One more (important) news item: Mike Hull has released a short video on Sacred Space, a collaborative art project that my sister, Kathy Hull, took a leading role in conceiving and executing back in 2002. It consists of eight portals: doorways from around the world, each opening to landscapes featuring endangered wildlife, viewed through the prism of the world's major religions. The portals are 7-8 feet high, 5-6 feet wide. The exhibition includes a labyrinth in the middle of the room, and origami cranes hanging from the ceiling. It is currently exhibited at Wichita State University, and will be up until August 31, 2018. However, the longer-term future of the exhibit is up for grabs. We are looking for a future home for the artwork. Anyone interested should get in touch with Mike (contact details in video). Special thanks to Joanna Pinkerton, who designed three of the portals, and appears in the video. Kathy was very excited about this showing before her death in March this year. PS: One thing that must mark me as an old-fashioned UNIX hand is a fondness for obsolete tools like the classic spell program. (Newbies seem to prefer the interactive ispell, which steps you interactively through a file, giving you alternative choices to toggle in; spell just lists possible misspelled words one per line, leaving it to you to figure out what to do about them.) I had to explicitly download spell to even get it. But when I run it on HTML files, it routinely flags lots of markup, especially URLs, as possible errors. Some while back I had written a shell script to sift the HTML tags out before piping a file through spell, but that got lost in the crash. Finally took a few moments to rewrite the script, and came up with this:
First line throws out some meta-markup I use in my faux blog files. Second is a perhaps over-simplistic way of deleting HTML tags (without deleting HTML comments or PHP markup, which often span multiple lines, but rarely occur in things I need to spellcheck). I could add code to strip HTML entities, but again they very rarely show up. A more useful enhancement would be to add a post-filter to weed out complaints about non-dictionary words that are commonly used (e.g., Silkheart, ECM, Interscope, remix). One way to do this would be to figure out how to add books to ispell's dictionary. Another would be to pipe the output through fgrep -vw and the "good word" list. PPS: Played Daytona three more times, and it didn't budge, but Kids See Ghosts picked up a notch. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
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