Yeah, doesn’t really have a ring to it does it? But hey I’ll persevere.
I moved into a new flat at the beginning of this month and since then, bar a Vodafone USB modem I haven’t been able to use the internet. During this enforced “internet sabbatical” it occurred to me how many of my gadgets are near enough useless without a broadband connection.
Putting new music onto iTunes took an age as I had to manually enter the song and album information and I’ve only now been able to go and download the artwork (Yes I’m incredibly anal about having the artwork, coverflow just looks rubbish without it)
My PS3 worked, but only for gaming. I realise that sounds ridiculous considering its primary job is to you know, play games but I couldn’t use BBC iPlayer, download software updates or new games but the biggest tragedy? No Modern Warfare 2 deathmatches. I had to actually go to a friends house to play multiplayer. It was like being in 2004.
I could edit videos. In a way I was quite fortunate in that being broadband-less freed up some time to do this, but sharing said videos proved to be a bit trickier.
Even my consumption of music dropped. I stream it straight from my iMac to my speakers in the living room, but without broadband this left me with the option of either putting on headphones and listening to my iPhone or sitting in my bedroom with the door locked and using the iMac speakers. Not the most social of things to do.
I made by far and away the biggest fuss about having no internet over the last three weeks but I think thats squared by me being by far and away the biggest (only?) geek who lives here. For the two normal people I live with it wasn’t as much of a problem. I wouldn’t take this blog post as an indictment of how reliant the world is on broadband, instead an indictment of how reliant I am.
But then you should have seen one of my flatmates reactions when she found out LivingTV was included in the package.
Originally I was going to try and do a list of my top five albums of 2009. This was scuppered by a few things; I bought loads of albums last year and trying to narrow them down to a top five would be impossible. Secondly, I thought doing a top five gigs of 2009 would be much more interesting.
An album at the end of the day is an album. The same every time you listen to it. A gig is different every time you go and even if two people attend the same show, chances are that they’ll have totally different experiences and memories of it.
One last caveat. I’m not counting festivals as one gig as there are good parts (the bands) and bad parts (carrying your camping gear which always seems heavier than last year/needing a poo)
5. The Blackout - Reading Festival 2009
This was actually the hardest choice to make on the list. Steel Panther at Download was the other contender and yes they were amazing and a complete surprise but that couldn’t overcome the sheer fun I had during the Blackout’s set at Reading.
It’s hard to describe why I enjoyed them so much. When I’d seen them on the main stage at Download a few months beforehand they had been good but in the confines of the Festival Republic stage they were simply incredible. If anything it was because of the smaller stage. At Download they seemed to have been swallowed up by the sheer size of the place. Their fans were dispersed everywhere, whereas at Reading the whole crowd was there to see them, concentrated in one place. Clearly it made all the difference.
4. You Me At Six - Reading Festival 2009
Again on this one the crowd made the difference. At Download (admittedly not the best place for a pop-punk band to play) the crowd was pretty sparse and those who were there seemed to be out of curiosity. At Reading they had the whole second stage packed out with people who knew every word of every song. Same set at both venues, completely different results.
What made it so great for me was the company. I watched You Me At Six with pretty much my whole camp, some of whom went to school with the band. You could see the pride in their faces at watching them doing so well and their enjoyment of the moment was amazingly infectious.
And lastly, any band that can come on after Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones and play a set like they did deserves to be in the list.
3. Motley Crue - Download 2009
I was actually a bit worried before seeing The Crue. On a holiday the previous October I’d read their autobiography “The Dirt” and although I’d heard their stuff (and of their reputation) I’d never owned an album. In the intervening months I really got into the band but in the run up to Download a lot of the reviews I read of their gigs weren’t hugely complimentary.
Safe to say that this show was one of the good ones.
Motley Crue are one of those bands where you forget how many classic songs they’ve had. There I was watching Vince Neil singing Kickstart My Heart, Mick Mars playing guitar better than I ever will despite his poor health. Actual legends playing these massively famous songs right infront of me. Highlight of the show? Tommy Lee coming to the front of the stage and passing two bottles of Jack into the crowd and telling everyone to take a swig and pass it back.
Yes it was gimmicky but at the end of the day, it was Motley Fucking Crue.
2. Prodigy - Reading Festival 2009
I don’t really remember much of this if I’m honest. Glowsticks, UV facepaint, lots of beer and some close mates.
This isn't me. Sam's Gene Simmons facepaint was much cooler than mine.
For the whole hour set I think I saw the stage twice. Normally I hate being at a gig where you can’t see the stage, with Prodigy I was too busy dancing to care.
1. Limp Bizkit - Kentish Town Forum
Along with my friends Nick, Sam and Unass, Limp Bizkit were one of the first bands I got properly into back in 2001. By 2002 Wes Bordland had left. For seven years between then and this year I’d resigned myself to the fact that if I ever saw them live it wouldn’t be with the original lineup.
Download Festival changed that. There I was watching LB with the original lineup playing Break Stuff. Amazing.
However it was their gig at the Forum a few months later that really blew me away. At Download I was somewhere in the crowd, Nick was somewhere else, Unass was running late and Sam was at home with his girlfriend. Knitting probably.
What made my gig of 2009 was the thing that’s made most of my top five shows so good. The company I was sharing the moment with.
Nick, Sam, Unass and myself watching the original lineup of Limp Bizkit playing the songs we’d fallen in love with eight years ago in a gig none of us thought we’d ever see.
So at work today one of the guys sprung a question on me that I really should have put more thought into by now. Especially considering that a few months ago I was debating the film of the decade. He asked what my top five films of 2009 were.
Off the top of my head I came out with them but in no particular order - a few hours later I think I’ve got a vague idea. Here goes:
5. District 9
Any other year this film would have been a lot higher. I loved the way it combined the documentary style footage with conventional sequences and Wikus has to be one of the best realised original characters of the year. Funny, caring and when dealing with the Prawns, a bit of a dick. A human essentially, not just a one dimensional “good guy” or “bad guy”. When I found out that Sharlto Copley’s performance throughout the film was completely improvised it blew me away.
Aside from the obvious parallels with apartheid which have been dissected by people a lot smarter than me, the action sequences were great and the way it sets up a sequel is perfect. My one criticism is that if an alien ship really appeared over South Africa there would be no way in hell that the Americans wouldn’t be all over it. Regardless of national sovereignty.
4. Watchmen
I’ll freely admit that I knew very little of Watchmen prior to Empire magazine running a feature in the lead up to the films release. I read it and it looked kinda interesting. My buddy Dan had just been given the comic as a birthday present and since finishing he couldn’t stop saying how great it was. It was these two events that led me to seeing it at the newly installed IMAX screen at the Wimbledon Odeon.
What Zac Snyder did so well was make the film reasonably accessible for people like me who hadn’t read the comic while putting in a fair few nods to the source material for the people who had. After reading Watchmen myself I noticed that the opening sequence manages to get a hell of a lot of backstory into the film without adding to the already massive 3 hour runtime.
That isn’t to say that if you saw the film with no knowledge of the backstory it would make complete sense, just ask my brother who having sat through the dvd then had to read the whole comic to know what was going on.
Yes fanboys complained that the ending had been changed, but if I’m honest the film ending made a lot more sense than the comic ending. So kudos to Snyder for having the balls to change it. The casting was spot on, I couldn’t think of anyone better to play any of the quite unique characters and any film that gets me to watch a lecture on the Watchmen comic at a music festival easily deserves to be in the top five.
3. Star Trek
I was expecting this to be amazing. I’ve adored literally everything that JJ Abrams has touched and as with Watchmen the casting of Star Trek was spot on. Simon Pegg as Scotty and Zachary Quinto as Spock were particularly inspired choices.
The best decision Abrams made was the (SPOILER) alternate timeline plot. It completely freed him to do whatever he wanted without pissing off the hardcore canon worshipping Trekkers (myself included) while making a film that would actually interest the general public. Perfect example would be my friend Nick, he’d refused to watch anything with “Star” in the title before this film came out but having seeing it his exact words were “That wasn’t too bad actually!”
Here’s hoping for a sequel!
2. Zombieland
On paper all three films lower down on this list should be above Zombieland. A revolutionary sci-fi film, a perfect adaptation of the best graphic novel ever written and the best Star Trek since “Wraith of Khan” and yet somehow I enjoyed a zombie film more.
I love zombies, a good third of my dvd collection has the word “Dead” somewhere in the title but this film is more entertaining than any of them bar Shaun Of The Dead. As I wrote in my original post about Zombieland it came out of nowhere and I think this is why I enjoyed it so much. I went into every other film this year with the expectation that it would be pretty good - and they were. However I went into this one expecting some generic tough guy partnered up with a generic wuss guy shooting generic zombies. But hey, I love zombies so I was willing to endure it.
What I got however was a hilariously well written and acted buddy movie with the best cameo of the year. And zombies.
There wasn’t a point during the entire film that I stopped grinning like an idiot.
1. Avatar
Obviously.
In all fairness I was debating whether to put this at number two instead of Zombieland but in the end I couldn’t do it. This film was hyped beyond belief and once I’d left the cinema I was almost disappointed that it had “just” lived up to my expectations, whereas Zombieland had gone way beyond them. But as I said earlier I wasn’t expecting anything from Zombieland whereas I was expecting everything from Avatar.
And because Avatar simply lived up to the expectations placed upon it I’m giving it my film of the year award.
I’m assuming that this post will very quickly be lost in the torrents of news articles/blog posts/lawsuits from the creators of The Smurfs that have come out since the release of Avatar, but I was so impressed by the film that I had to write something about it. Regardless of this post resembling a raindrop in Cockermouth in terms of importance or readership.
The film was incredible. I won’t go into individual performances and how good they were as I’d be here for hours complimenting literally everyone.
Now the plot is basically “Dances With Wolves” or “The Last Samurai” but this is missing the point entirely. The story is an excuse for James Cameron to take you to another fully realised world with its own ecosystem, culture and history. The guy created all of this from scratch. That in itself is amazing, but the fact that it’s been implemented so well and so believably is a testament to both his imagination and his skills as a director.
Leading up to the release of the film the internet was awash with comments saying how shitty the film looked, what was up with the Na’vi and so on. I never really understood why people were saying this. Were they thinking that somehow James Cameron would make a BAD Sci-Fi film? The guy who made Terminator 1 and 2? The Abyss? Aliens?
Right.
Does anyone remember Titanic? Cost overruns, rumours of cast and director not getting on? Predictions it would be a massive flop? Oh shit hang on, it went and made a billion dollars.
Good shout there internet commenter guys.
If you can, go and see it in IMAX. This will sound incredibly pretentious but after leaving the cinema it felt less like I’d just seen a film and more like I’d actually returned from Pandora.
...to a parking ticket yes. But even that failed to dampen the experience. See this film. I’m going again next week.
I was messing around on Gizmodo today when I stumbled across an article featuring a video made by The American Museum of Natural History that perfectly bookends a blog entry I wrote back in August about our place in the universe.
What’s compelled me to post it is the bizarre feeling of both pride and sadness I get when watching it. For example When zooming out you see the constellations of man made satellites orbiting Earth and at 3 mins 33 seconds the outer limits of what we know actually exists in our universe. The pride stems from the knowledge that we have the ability build those satellites and to see that far out into space (tying in neatly to the theories put forward by Michio Kaku in the earlier blog post of our universe being nothing more than a random bubble)
The sadness however, stems from me knowing that in my lifetime we won’t come anywhere close to exploring a billionth of that known universe.
Despite this blogs musically aligned title yet technology based content I’m yet to write a post that combines the two. Tonight, with the help of a few beers and a couple glasses of wine I’m here to rectify this.
On the way home from a gig in Kingston this evening my buddy Nick and I were reminiscing about how awesome the original Gran Turismo on PSone was. We chatted about the soundtrack, how blown away we were by the then amazing graphics and our old cars. The Mitsubishi GTO Twin Turbo being one of our classics.
Now actually using this car in a race was effectively considered cheating. Four wheel drive, great acceleration and when tuned properly it would put out 950BHP. Kind of like bringing the US Marines to a playground scuffle. Overkill, essentially.
As an aside, another similarity of this car to the US Marines is that neither of us had ever seen them doing their shit for real. Understandable really. It’s hardly something you’d see a local WAG drive to Waitrose or in the Marines case, clearing tangos from Esher Best Kebab & Burger.
During the journey back home I’d knocked together a rough playlist of the best original GT songs on my iPhone, Lose Control by Ash, Sweet 16 by Feeder and As Heaven Is Wide by Garbage. Rocking out was the order of the evening. The last thing we expected while turning into my suburban road was the sight of a mint condition GTO Twin Turbo parked at my neighbours house, yet there it was, almost inviting us to blow our minds.
Now my question is this - is this a coincidence? That two friends just happened to be chatting about an 11 year old videogame, listening to its soundtrack and being randomly confronted by THE ACTUAL FUCKING CAR they were talking about. Or was it an the most elaborate and customer targeted GT5 promo ever?
It occurred to me earlier today that over the last two or three years, bar the Download and Reading festivals I’ve only been to see a select few bands live. I checked my pile of gig tickets and all I keep finding are Funeral For a Friend, Iron Maiden, Feeder and Bowling For Soup ones.
Now thats not to say that I have a limited taste in music, in writing this post I’ve had iTunes on shuffle and heard Paramore, Biffy Clyro and Sabbath already but why am I only seeing the same bands over and over again? Is it because I know they always put on an awesome show and so won’t have wasted £35? Or is it because there aren’t any decent new bands around at the moment?
I’m inclined to go with it being 20% the former and 80% the latter. Yes Maiden and so on are always great live but I haven’t been properly blown away by a new band since 2005. I’ve enjoyed a lot of albums since then and seen some great performances at festivals but then I haven’t followed it up by going to see that band at their own show. This is probably where I’m going wrong.
So, as of now I’m gonna go back to what I did as a teenager. If I like an album then I’m booking gig tickets and seeing who wants to come along.
