| Saturday, April 30, 2005 |
 | All right, you swine. You wore me down. I can't take it any more. You win, do you hear me? You win.
Oh God, it's gorgeous.
So, what do I do next, apart from stroke it erotically? Specifically, what do I need to:
a) Replicate OpenOffice. NeoOffice?
b) Scan for viruses and spyware. Yes, I know, but I don't believe you. More people start using Macs, virus writers start writing code for it. That's the way it works.
c) Create MP3s without DRM.
d) Record audio from an analogue source - like music from a hi-fi.
e) Record video from an analogue source.
f) Sync my Pocket PC (yes, I know, but if you're going to wank on about how easy it is to run WinMac networks you need to make this sort of dirty miscegenation work, Jobs)
g) Plan writing - so, databasey, note-takey stuff.
h) Stop spending money.
This could be a new and virulent strain in my accessorising. I must grit my teeth and remind myself that I did need a laptop, and that I did get over a hundred pounds off it. Yes. Oh. Crikey.
Are my ears bleeding?
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| Wednesday, April 27, 2005 |
| In media player res
Last time I had a purchasing dilemma, lo, you spoke and I listened, and am now resolved to buy a 12-inch iBook the moment Tiger comes out. I asked for Linux recommendtions, and - hallelujah! - my spare PC is now ticking over like an open source beast. Come to me, my darlings, and help me once again to make an informed decision.
My needs are twofold. The first is that I think I probably need some form of capacious media player. This is as yet undetermined, but sitting on the plane back from Florence I realised that the 192MB of storage provided by my solid-state was a bit of a limiting factor, as was the incredibly irritating process of swapping tracks in and out of player and Compact Flash card, not to mention the limited run time provided by a single AA battery. Everything used to run on alkaline batteries, you know. None of this lithium nonsense. This may become less pressing when aforementioned iBook arrives, as my PDA can handle short hops (my standard model) - obviously, battery life being the main concern there.
Annnyway. That's issue the first. Issue the second is that I have a large, some would say silly large, collection of analogue media - magnetic tape and VCRs, primarily. It's occurred to me lately that, in order to hedge about actually getting rid of the books that actually take up most of the space in my flat, it might make sense to digitise these and dispose of/put in storage the originals. Now, the tapes can be digitised using my PC and Audacity or something to that effect, and get an analogue-to-digital video converter of the sort produced by dazzle for the videos. However, there are also media players out there, specifically the Archos AV series and the MSI Megaview 566, which can encode analogue input on the fly. Other than that, I don't think I'd have much use for a media player - books being the ultimate portable visual entertainment system for bus or train. I think I just like the idea of them - they seem so of the future.
So, would it make sense to amalgamate these functions in a media player, digitising straight from source using the player's software and then dumping it on my PC? Or to move the PC into the living room (which will have the added bonus of making Half-Life 2 impossible and make it my digital encoding girlfriend? Either way, what do you suggest I lay out for? Or is there a genius third option (beyond growing a pair and just throwing out or giving away products I have not listened to or watched for years), possibly involving Apple, as all good things apparently do?
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| Tuesday, April 19, 2005 |
| I was told about splats and spivaks a few years ago, but only t'other day did I rouse myself to find out more about this sparticular interface of gender identity and online gaming, two great tastes that taste great together. I don't know if it was the first usage, but the only extant one, unless I am spelling "Spivak" wrong, is this one.
It struck me as interesting that there didn't seem to be an exact delineation between "neuter" and "spivak" - spivak seems to be a non-gendered gender, whereas neuter does not partake of gender. Maybe, however, the answer to the question "what's the difference between neuter and spivak?" is "one is it and one is e" - the pronominal usage either avoids or subverts the "he/she" parallel. So, hmmm.
The splat, despite silly name, also does something quite interesting. One of the potential uses or importances of the epicene (itself a complicated adjective) that has become relevant in the last decade or so is the proliferation of situations in which one might not have immediate access to the cues whereby you might normally conclude a gender usage, either through intention or simple unfamiliarity.
However. The splat usage is a chosen, programmed attribute. That is, it doesn't mean "I don't know enough about your gender to call you he or she with a certainty of correctness, so I will use this form as a temporary or permanent solution", but rather "I want to conceal or defer how I stand in terms of binary gender, and am using a technological system to do so". Which is interesting... the closest example I can think of, in a way, is the Miss/Mrs/Ms. thing, which came up in the shouty thread linked above also. That is, Ms. was an innovation that allowed one to emply the structures of title (as a "splat" is able to use pronouns) without revealing whether or not one was married. Except the use of the wild card asterisk makes it even harder to translate into speech.
So, how many genders do you think you need, for personal use and to describe the world around you? Are splats and spivaks, or anything of that ilk, meaningful to you?
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| Saturday, April 16, 2005 |
| Lobster fights sea hare. Squishy.
So, Hecuba on Wednesday. It's come in for some piebald reviews, and I can see why. Redgrave's performance seems quiet, inward. The small size of the Albery, even compared to the Swan, gives her some space to do this, but the heavy, deadening grief that fills her performance plays oddly with the vigorous, fully-sung interludes of the full chorus, which have the natural impact of a dozen singers with extensive breath training in a smallish theatre. The music was simple, and did feel a little obvious - the costumes also walked a line between evocation and orientalising. Generally, they did very well, until Polymestor appeared as a sort of Bollywood cowboy - pink shirt, slicked-back hair and chaps. Unless a set of very specific conditions are fulfilled, one of which would require the presence of the late John Ford, you can forget about being convincingly tragic in leather chaps. It just doesn't happen.
The actors, and in particular the chorus, were also up against Tony Harrison's translation. I remember shortly before Iraq 1 a very stark, very minimal recreation of the debates around the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, as recorded in Thucydides, was screened. Without the gratuitous creation of parallels, it successfully evoked and referenced the apparently inevitable spiral into war. Given the geographical correspondences - the opposition of East and West, of Asia and Europe - and the cultural discomforts - the Greeks insisting that their civilisation is superior even as they spurn suppliance and sacrifice children - there are all sorts of allusive references and readings available.
Tony Harrison is clearly having none of that allusion bollocks. The Greeks are "the coalition", Hecuba is called a terrorist. Odysseus, slick and Blairite, offers to "spin through" the account of the decision to sacrifice Polyxena - a rather liberal interpretation of "all'homos phraso" (but I will declare it anyway). You're waiting near the crest of every line for the Chorus to leap in with a cry of "how eerily this situation mirrors the plight of the women of Baghdad, or other victims of oppression!". Which is a shame, because it really doesn't need it, and also because nothing clearly emerges from Hecuba, except maybe that being a slave sucks. It's a complex and somewhat bewildering play, where everybody claims to be the injured party and everybody, as far as they have the power, inflicts the very same injuries by disdaining the ties of suppliance and guest-friendship, and as such does not lend itself well to simple allegory.
The other problem with the translation is that at times it is just really not much cop. The rhymes in the stychomythia between Odysseus and Hecuba at times sound more like Inigo and Fezzik than the Queen of Troy and an Achaean king, and the tripartite alliteration that at times trip up the choral pieces sound plain dumb in speech - some sort of tribute to . I'm not saying he's lost it, but can anyone think of anything Harrison has done since Prometheus.. oh, hang on. I am, aren't I?
Ah well. It was an interesting collection of parts, and worth seeing, but didn't quite gel - what did not go too far seemed not to go far enough. Strong, measured performances (Hecuba, although seeing Redgrave muff the odd line was surprising, Agamemnon, Polyxena, Talthybius) were up against an all-singing chorus and an all-bellowing Odysseus and Polymestor. It felt a little as if translator and director were looking for a clearer modern relevance and, denied by the complexities of the three-sided cultural exchange (Greek, Trojan, Thracian), they decided to mess with the equaliser a bit.
Speaking of three-sided exchanges, I, like all who love the arts, experienced a quickening of the pulse at the news that Stan Collymore is to appear in Basic Instinct 2. High art.
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