Au revoir.

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I enjoyed most of BSG (apart from the interrupted final season) and I was intrigued to see the Caprica S1 part 1 boxed set on Amazon, though I confess to knowing little about it.

So I ordered it to give it a go. Of course the show is now cancelled, so its 18 episodes will stand alongside Firefly as one of the great TV what-might-have-beens.

Taking place 58 years before the events in BSG, Caprica tells the story of the events leading to the first Cylon war.

In the pilot episode, we see the development of the first cybernetic life- form and learn the origin of the artificial intelligence that inhabits the metal body. The DVD set includes a longer, racier, unaired version of the pilot (there are boobs), as well as the one shown on SyFy.

The series starts slowly. Unlike the BSG reboot, there are no space battles. The main characters are not terribly sympathetic and their motives remain unclear. But the show clearly knows where it wants to go. This is a character drama bit it’s also a proper piece of science fiction, unlike most of the stuff that passes for SF on TV.

It deals, for example, with a singularity: a technological development that creates a state of being you could call post-human. It deals with the idea of an uploaded personality in a virtual world. It also deals with the moral and social questions that arise from these developments.

Caprica is an Earth-like planet, one of 12 human-colonised worlds (not including Earth, which is lost). The level of technology is similar to ours, but slightly different. Most people believe in multiple gods, but a minority are monotheists (some of them terrorists, natch).

Networked, uploaded, artificial intelligences are frighteningly powerful – which explains why the level of technology in BSG was so oddly backward.

This show is interesting, especially if you’re familiar with common science fiction tropes. Shame most of the audience clearly were not. I’ll get hold of the second half at some point.

Related Articles

• Caprica: Season 1.0 (cinemablend.com)
• Musings On Caprica’s Cancellation (mutantreviewers.wordpress.com)

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As a confirmed smartphone bachelor, my marriage of convenience to the Jesus Phone has been a culture shock of sorts. Talk about a high maintenance relationship…

I’ve gone from less than a fiver a month on a pay-go Nokia with a greyscale screen to £25 a month, which buys me more minutes and texts than I’ve sent in my lifetime (not many, but it’s not many). My Nokia’s chief benefit was its diminutive size/weight and its battery life.

I find the jPhone heavy therefore and yet it sees so much use that I have to charge the battery every night.

Do I use anywhere near my 75 minutes? Er, no. But I do make about 1000% more phonecalls than before (about 10 in the last month), and I have sent three or four texts to different people.

I got the jPhone on the wi-fi network at work, but then the geezer who runs the IT system rebuilt the wireless and it stopped working. It took so long just to get my laptop back on again that I gave up hope of using the jPhone. I’ve been relying on 3G. My experience of this is that it’s so slow that it’s unusable, so I still don’t tweet during the day and I don’t use Path or the interwebs. I leave it on so email comes through, but 95% of that gets deleted.

I was shocked that the jPhone Mail app doesn’t have a spam filter. I still can’t believe it doesn’t.

As for other apps, there have been a number of misses and a very few hits. Hit #1 is the clincher , the Keynote Remote app. Because of wi-fi issues at work I have to set up a mini network from the MacBook, but once working it makes doing presentations a wondrous experience. Instead of needing line-of-sight I can stalk the classroom, and tailor what I’m saying and my questions to the upcoming slide.

Hit #2 is Attendance. Although we have an electronic register system in school, it belongs to the shit school information management system which doesn’t easily give up its treasures. Attendance allows me to see how many sessions a student has missed with one touch. I can’t wait to wave it in the face of parents at parents’ evenings.

Hit #3 is the free Waitrose app, but only because I do shop at Waitrose and I like the quick recipes and shopping list.

I’ve also enjoyed Instagram, 8mm, and Hipstamatic, but I’m aware these are gimmicks and not much point to the unsocial network I inhabit.

I’ve tried a few games (my daughter gets loads for her Touch) but only Angry Birds and Removem held my attention for long.

I’ve barely used it as an iPod, and have relegated the YouTube app to home screen 3. I use Twitter a lot, and follow links from there to read articles, but I don’t tend to use Safari on its own. I loaded a few free eBooks but didn’t get beyond a few page swipes.

When winter’s over and perhaps I’m outside more I might use the camera, but this mostly lies dormant. The novelty of most things wears off quite quickly.

Am I disappointed? A little, maybe, but – for all the things I do use it for – it’s better than a laptop. My 4-year-old (this July) MacBook is starting to seem unusable in comparison when it comes to web browsing and Twitter. Spinning beachball of death ahoy. I still use my MacBook for teaching, spreadsheets and stuff, but sitting at home in front of the telly has become a jPhone-only activity.

Oh, and I tried the Guardian app out of professional interest. Waste of money. Not just because the Guardian mobile site is perfectly useable, but because the Guardian mobile site is actually better.

Related Articles

• The iTrip Home (BLOG) (maximumbob.wordpress.com)

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It seems abundantly clear that there are more DVD and/or Blu-Ray boxed sets in our futures. Radio Times has a big article this week about the launch of Sky Atlantic, the Murdochs’ attempt to do with quality drama what they previously did with sport and movies.

Having signed up all the chavs and all the film geeks, they are now after those of us who have little or no interest in sport and have realised long, long ago that television is better than the movies.

For me, this realisation came back in the early 90s. Radio Times writes the article as if it’s something new, but it has been a fact for around 20 years that if you wanted story, character, and ideas, you weren’t going to find them in the multiplex. Martin Scorsese is now a television enthusiast. Hilarious. His Boardwalk Empire is one of the hotly anticipated new shows, but Scorsese is the Microsoft of directing. He suffers from a fundamental lack of taste; I’m not that interested therefore.

Maybe some were fooled for a while by the robustly interesting independent film movement, supported as it was by the Sundance and other film festivals. But now all the major studios have pretend “indie” imprints (Fox Searchlight and their ilk), and the economics of Hollywood have descended into economic bubble madness.

Hollywood doesn’t make much that’s original – sequels, adaptations, and remakes are their stock-in-trade – and it has been left to international cinema to come up with the interesting stuff. Without Japan and Korea, without Spain and Mexico, there wouldn’t have been much worth watching in the cinema over the past 10 years.

But that was okay, because I had The X Files, NYPD Blue, Homicide,  ER, House, Battlestar, Supernatural, CSI, The Closer, Alias, and many others. Guardian readers had The Sopranos, Mad Men, and The Wire. Recently, I’ve enjoyed lightweight fluff like The Mentalist, and NCIS, and too-cool-to-be-true stuff like Life and Justified.

For my first sight-unseen boxed set, I tried Fringe, broadcast on Sky in the UK, and loved it.

My objections to Sky have more to do than my hatred of News Corp. Avoiding Murdoch product is like trying to live without the very air that you breathe. The fact is being too powerful means that people can’t avoid you, like it or not. While I don’t subscribe to Sky I can hardly avoid the output of Fox Studios.

But I’m careful with money (don’t have much of it) and refuse to pay £30 a month for what is mostly a load of old shit with adverts thrown in. Sky Atlantic may snaffle all the shows I want to watch, but there is a pleasure in waiting. I won’t download these shows, and I managed – somehow, quite easily – to avoid Lost spoilers for five years.

Buying House on Blu-Ray was a great move. Fringe was wonderful. And since Channel 4 stopped broadcasting Lost at the end of Season Two, I’ve been waiting. And waiting.

I know a lot of people give up on these shows. Call them hokum. Get fed up of the plot twists and the unanswered questions. Rabid fans download episodes in advance, which is such a stupid thing to do you don’t know where to start with them. When network viewing figures drop because you’ve been skanking your favourite shows for free online, why is there an outcry when they’re cancelled. Waiting is both a pleasure and a virtue. Wait a week, wait a month, but watch the show on the network that made it for fuck’s sake, or they’ll cancel it.

There’s a been a lot of that going on. Lost was supposed to be seven seasons and ended up as six. Between 15 and 20 million people tuned in for the final episode. In the UK, the figure was much lower: just over half a million. Ten million households have Sky, but they’re mostly football fans. A major undertaking like Lost deserves a bigger audience than 600,000.

So if you stopped watching at the end of Season Two like me, should you get the boxed set?

I paid just over £50 for it. Works out at 40-something pence per episode, or 60-something pence per hour. I received the boxed set around the 6th of January, and finished the last episode last night, 28th January. So in three weeks I watched 80 hours of Lost. Everything else took a back seat. Nothing else seemed worth bothering with. I recorded and didn’t watch (yet) all the usual stuff. We’d start watching at around 5 pm and switch off some time after 10 after four or five episodes. The whole family was hooked.

Cliffhanger after cliffhanger, twist after twist, surprise after surprise, we loved every minute of it. Ideas pour from the screen. Some of them aren’t followed through, some are red herrings. Some complain that the whole finale is a swizz, but if you didn’t see that coming then you weren’t paying attention. I love the Lost. I’ll watch it all again sometime, but maybe not in three weeks.

Meanwhile, if it’s on Sky, I’ll wait for the boxed set.

Cover of Roll

Who is your favourite female lead guitarist? I think more people should be aware of Ms McCue, a California-based Australian singer-songwriter who has the chops and the pedal board to impress any guitar aficionado. She’s the Mike Campbell of women.

Released on her 2003 album Roll, “Stupid” starts with a lovely 12-string riff and offers namechecks for both John Lennon and Bob Dylan. It says on Wikipedia that this song was included in a Time Life collection called Four Decades of Folk Rock. Folk Rock is about right for this, and not alt.country as she is sometimes styled. (As a country fan, I seem to spend half my life explaining why stuff I like isn’t country. Odd.)

Folk Rock ingredients: 12-string guitar, hammond organ, words that are supposed to mean something.

And I’m gonna write a Bob Dylan song
I’ll sing all day but it wont take long
Well I never worked in a factory
But I suffered your shit and shovelled your debris

Stupid, on a lonely afternoon
I almost gave up on my life too soon…

She has a sweet voice, a slightly bleak outlook, and knows how to write a good tune. I love the guitar on this. On some other songs she does some extensive solos, which some might find self-indulgent. I think I read the other day someone opining that he would like to edit all music to remove drum and guitar solos. But some of us love guitar (even if we have recently fallen right out of love with guitarists as a general breed).

She played a gig in my home town of Buckingham once, a nice intimate venue at the back of a pub. She had a bit of a nightmare. It was an opening night with a couple of pickup musicians. She was impressive enough, and I was enjoying myself, but two gits standing behind me not only wouldn’t stop talking throughout but also commented loudly about every single mistake. For example, McCue was distracted at one point and forgot the opening line to a song. We’ve all been there. But the two know-it-alls behind me made it seem like she’d done a Whitney. So I finished the evening feeling bitter and angry not because of the performance but because of the audience. I wanted somehow to apologise to the artist for the rudeness, but what did she care?

Suffice it to say, I wouldn’t want to sell anything to Anne McCue on eBay, but her records are good. I tend to find the albums a bit dull all in one sitting, but there’s always a couple of songs you can live with over a long period of time. When “Stupid” comes on the iPod, one does not skip.

Here’s a link to the song on iTunes. Her new album is called Broken Promise Land.

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I’ve never been keen on eBay.

About 100 years ago, when the internet was shiny new, I gave this eBay thing a try. I bought a fondly remembered out-of-issue CD for five dorrar. What I didn’t know at the time – and I didn’t know anyone who would have told me about this – was that you had to have a PayPal account and that these could not be set up instantly. You had to wait several days for that little transaction to test the system, and you had to confirm the number of the transaction. It was horribly complicated.

Meanwhile, the immature, petulant CHILD I’d bought the CD from threw a fit about the delay in the payment of the five dorrar, and gave me negative feedback.

This was my introduction to the blackmail ratings system of eBay, which can sully your reputation as a buyer or seller and make it difficult for you to operate, even though you are not by inclination a time waster, a tyre kicker, or a liar.

So I do most of my second-hand buying a selling on Amazon, where I have never had an issue, and where I can just use my credit card to buy and get moneys transferred directly to my bank account when I sell. Furthermore, the people who buy and sell through Amazon are generally quite professional and don’t throw their toys out of the pram at the slightest problem.

I bought a watch the other day for my daughter, but a seller sent the wrong one. I contacted them and we arranged a return. They sent the correct item and I got a refund of the postage. This is the ONLY PROBLEM I have ever had on Amazon, and it happened in the past two weeks. And it wasn’t, actually, a problem.

My next eBay experience came when I decided to sell some guitars a few years ago. Because I had no reputation on eBay and have never knowingly used PayPal since that first time, I used my wife’s account. I was immediately contacted by a scam artist who wanted to “overpay” for a guitar by bank transfer and receive a refund. Or some such unlikely story. In the end, the sales went okay, but strike two for eBay, which attracts these types all the time, and has a long list of rules and etiquette as a result.

This time, I sold a few guitar bits and a very nice guitar amplifier. It would have been a mostly painless experience apart from the bit where the amp seems to have developed a fault for the new owner after several years problem-free service in my studio. Hmmm.

You might suspect (new) user error, and you might want to dig your heels in and tell someone to take a hike, but you’re always facing the ultimate sanction of negative feedback blackmail, so you bend over backwards to keep someone happy, because that’s what you have to do on eBay.

Another buyer took several days to pay, meaning that I’ve got to take a special trip to the post office just for him, but I’m a normal person and not a petulant twat, so I won’t give negative feedback for that. And I won’t complain about the guy who bought a guitar, said he wanted to pick it up (to get the free case I offered) but didn’t seem to remember the transaction two days later.

I blame the drugs. It always seems that the people who buy stuff off you are a bit odd.

Or maybe it’s the guitar thing. One of the things I don’t miss is the rampant twattishness that seems to go along with guitars and guitarists in general.

Anyway. eBay is where you sell larger items. It seems to be what we’re stuck with.

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A mournful harmonica, a slide guitar, and a guest vocal from Darius Rucker are the key ingredients of this track (iTunes link), from Trick Pony‘s 2005 third and final album R.I.D.E.

Formed in 1996, Trick Pony were the first in a wave of new-style country vocal groups, mixing male and female vocals with a commercial approach to the music. They’ve since been eclipsed by acts such as Sugarland, Lady Antebellum, and Little Big Town, but they were trailblazers in their way.

R.I.D.E. reached #4 on the US Country charts, but singer Heidi Newfield left the group in 2006 and her replacement didn’t work out. It’s a shame, because this is my favourite Trick Pony track, and Newfield is relegated to backing vocals on it, which indicates to me that – like Sugarland – they might have continued as a duo. I always found Newfield’s voice to be  a bit harsh.

It’s interesting too that this is probably the first inkling that Darius Rucker had a taste for country music – he recorded this three years before his first country album, Learn to Live, hit the shops.

Sad City is beautifully smooth, with great harmonies and Hammond organ. Two verses, a few repetitions of the chorus, and a nice guitar solo make it perfect. Why does anybody bother writing more than two verses? On the BBC4 classic albums programme about Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes, they said more or less the same thing. Unbelievably, “Sad City” wasn’t released as a single from the album, and remains a hidden gem (which is what Song of the Week entries are all about, of course).

It’s a sad city when the sun goes down.
Another heart’s breakin’ as the world goes round.
When that moon comes up, oh, these tears roll down.
It’s a sad city when the sun goes down.
It’s a sad city when the sun goes down.

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A long song title means an extra-long blog post title.

I almost selected a Dixie Chicks number this week, but decided to go instead for an artist who isn’t a multi-platinum phenomenon.

Austin, Tx-based Kelly Willis appears to have had two careers, first for MCA and then as a more independent artist, floating somewhere “out there” and getting little attention in the mainstream. I bought her MCA albums in the early 90s (there were three in as many years). They were okay, but there was something about the production that didn’t quite fit her voice. Willis herself was unhappy with the marketing around her. There was clearly an attempt to portray her as “sexy”.

The third album, Kelly Willis, seemed like an attempt at a relaunch (using the tactic of self-titling it, as if it were a debut) and had a better feel, but by then it was too late and MCA (as they do) dropped her.

After an abortive attempt to work with A&M, Willis decided to branch out on her own, which explains the five-year hiatus between Kelly Willis and What I Deserve, which was on Rykodisk (a label distributed by WEA, natch). What I Deserve was self-produced, with a more mellow feel and far better suited to her voice, which will pleasant enough can sound too nasal in the wrong hands.

What I Deserve reached #30 in the Country charts, which was better than she ever did with MCA.

Unfortunately, the path for independent artists is difficult. There is no album-a-year to keep you in the spotlight, you have to work hard to get airplay and rely on constant touring to build an audience (I note, for example, that Tift Merritt is coming over to Europe again in April, as support for Josh Ritter).

Willis did well to follow What I Deserve within three years with Easy, which is a superb record, one of those that always generates a double take when a track from it comes on in the car. It sounds so smooth and is so beautifully produced, that it was always the model I turn to when recording my own songs. It’s a mix of acoustic guitar with a tremolo electric, hammond organ, drums played with brushes, piano, etc., that really suits Willis’ voice.

We then had to wait four years for the third independent Willis album (I’m ignoring Christmas product), Translated from Love, which offered more fine recordings, perhaps with a slightly harder edge (an Iggy Pop cover, for example!). “Nobody Wants to Go to the Moon Anymore” is the opening track, a 2:53 tour de force of cool guitars,  great vocals and metaphor production. Here’s the iTunes link to the album.

I don’t know a soul that wants to visit the moon
That bruise in the sky, that busted balloon
A big rotten egg trashing up the sky
A red-faced drunk with a hundred black eyes
And nobody wants to go, nobody wants to go to the moon anymore

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The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Top posts of 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010. None of them were written in 2010, which just goes to show that I’m, as always, ahead of my time.

The Pleasantville Lesson Plan November 2006

What shirt to wear with an olive green suit? October 2006

Happy Families January 2009

The 10 Things I Hate About You Lesson Plan October 2006

The Breakfast at Tiffany’s Lesson Plan October 2006

I think Hipstamatic is my favourite app. It gives you some control over how your photos will look – you make choices in advance, just as you would with a traditional film camera. And then you’re more or less stuck with the results, which are square “prints” in the style of the kind of camera my dad used to use for his slides in the 60s.

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