I see no value whatsoever in the Oscars, but, as an exercise, here are some brief thoughts on those (feature-length) nominated films that I have seen.

The Artist (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Writing (Original Screenplay), Best Original Score, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing)

What’s perhaps most surprising about The Artist is that it works at all. Full props for making a successful silent film in the 21^st century. Considering this it’s not surprising at all that it’s garnered so many awards and nominations which are probably not actually entirely related to its worth. Even so, it’s certainly enjoyable.

A Better Life (Best Actor)

From the director of Twilight: New Moon, no less, would you believe it. Well, actually, yes. It’s not a great film, but neither is it terrible. It’s noteworthy for its Hispanic focus and acting but little else.

Bridesmaids (Best Supporting Actress, Best Writing (Original Screenplay))

So, I watched Bridesmaids, did I? And I’m admitting it? Yes, actually, to both. And I’m not saying I actually laughed, but still, at least 1.34 times better than the average Hollywood comedy. And that, from me, is high praise indeed.

A Cat in Paris (Best Animated Feature)

Not actually that good, I think people’ve been fooled by the fact that it’s in French and that people drew it. Much of the voice-acting is wooden, the timing stilted, and it’s highly derivative. While the pictures may have looked good in a picture book, they don’t work in motion. I guess people did draw it though, that’s got to be worth something, right? Ultimately it’s a little too derivative, and the timing misses its beats a little too often to make it truly immersive but (mostly) its aesthetically pleasing and possibly I’m being too hard on it, taken as a kids film it’s pretty good.

Chico & Rita (Best Animated Feature)

Technically a bit of a shambles, but even so, good fun, particularly musically.

The Descendants (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Bet Writing (Adapted Screenplay), Best Film Editing)

Boring. When Hollywood makes a film in which someone takes two hours to die we’re supposed to think it’s amazing and touching and wonderful, but it isn’t, it’s just generic and boring. Even the writers seem to have realised this, throwing in an ecological sub-plot, which just serves to remind us how generic and boring the whole thing is.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (Best Art Direction, Best Makeup, Best Visual Effects)

Well, I loved it, but honestly that has nothing to do with its worth as a film (minimal). I felt the last two Potter films did a particularly good job of coping with the books, although I’m aware many disagree. Even so, there were, I think, some obvious beats missed, and this one missed some golden opportunities for emotional cinematic moments, largely because of the pursuit of spectacle. It is, I think, like most-all of the Potter films, a bit of a mess. I still cried though.

Kung Fu Panda 2 (Best Animated Feature)

While it gets pretty high marks for its character animation there’s not much else going for it, I guess maybe if you haven’t learned to walk yet.

Midnight in Paris (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Writing (Original Screenplay), Best Art Direction)

Awful, truly, abominably awful. But then I am incapable of seeing even a modicum of worth in anything Woody Allen does, so I’m probably not the best source for an opinion on this.

Pina (Best Feature-length Documentary)

Awesome, amazing, best film I saw in 2011. Glorious, sublime, poetry. Love. Etc. Also, only film I’ve seen worth watching in 3D.

Puss in Boots (Animated Feature Film)

This is basically an appalling film. I struggle to find anything good to say about it. The animation is shoddy, the writing is lame, the music is diabolical. I could go on, but why bother.

Rango (Best Animated Feature)

Johnny Depp in snooze mode, story boring, moral painfully driven in to the centre of the forehead with Thor’s oh so subtle hammer (not a reference to the film Thor, which doesn’t appear on this list, and I haven’t seen). On the other hand, some jokes half-good and much better character design than any other CG animation on this list.

A Separation (Best Writing (Original Screenplay), Best Foreign Language Film)

A superbly acted and paced drama and absolutely revealing, both about Iran and as an examination of the complexities of relationships. It’s gained a load of awards and nominations and topped a bunch of best-of-2011 lists, and rightly so. Whether it’s quite the classic we’re being led to believe I’m not entirely sure, but for sure it’s an insightful and revealing film and it’s pretty astonishing that it got made at all.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Best Actor, Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay), Best Original Score)

I wrote quite an extensive review of this in my little black notebook immediately after seeing it, but it didn’t seem worth posting. I don’t have anything clever to say here really. I enjoyed it. A great exercise in adaptation of a complex story from page to screen, and a textbook creation of period milieu, although, frankly, it was a little forced at times – In every shot the camera seems to subtly pan past some expertly placed piece of authentic set dressing. Also fell afoul of the current preoccupation with absurdly shallow depth of field. Nevertheless, good writing, good acting, it’s a lot more than you get from the majority.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Visual Effects)

Bilge. Why did I even bother to watch it? You say. Well, only because I was in Chicago when they shot bits of it, and I wanted to match reality to celluloid. It wasn’t worth the time wasted.

The Tree of Life (Best Picture, Cinematography, Best Director)

Well, as most have commented, The Tree of Life is nothing if not ambitious. And reviews seem to fall into two camps: Is the ambition well placed, or is it childish pretension? The consensus seems to fall in the former camp. I can’t be bothered to weigh in on this debate and will simply say, it’s great to see Douglas Trumbull working again and creating what is essentially, if you ignore the boring bits with people in, far more of a sequel to 2001 than 2010 ever was.

Here’s a curiosity.

Who wants to hear me sing? If you said no, you’re very sensible, if you said otherwise, then have a second thought before clicking on play below.

As I have mentioned to some people I am theoretically in a band. I say theoretically because since ceasing to live together we haven’t played almost at all. Possibly more pertinent to the band being theoretical is that, while I have zero musical ability (I do noise, but that’s different); don’t play any instruments; and can’t sing, I am nevertheless lead singer, drummer, and keyboardist. Even so, we still attempt from time to time to put something together. The above video is from a few weeks ago. The drums are coming from a fairly dodgy web app running on an even dodgier laptop and were programmed by myself. Everything else is improvised on top.
Obviously it’s not any good, but for the curious, and if I’d heard that I was pretending to sing in a band then I would be curious, it’s something.

(PS. The title shouldn’t be taken as too literal a reference to the novel, it’s just that the song’s got a lighthouse in)

What’s being going on in noiseland then? Well, quite a lot really. I built a simple sampler:

Which I connected to an old step sequencer I built a long time ago

I recorded this as a test:

Imagination by Treebait Consortium

I also set it up with much more traditional sounds in order to make a drum machine which I plan on working on further.

Then I got bored and built a circular step-sequencer. I recorded something with that too but I’m keen to get my flatmate to add bass to it, and for that we have to wait a bit.

Finally, I decided to rebuild my old sequencer from scratch to make it a lot more user friendly, and came up with this:

It’s a lot better, mainly because it allows patterns and settings to be saved to disk and then loaded at a later date, but also because allows the length of patterns to be changed, can hold up to four patterns at a time and optionally play all or some of them in sequence automatically, allowing them to be anything between 2 and 64 beats long. Again, I recorded something I really like with it, but have grander plans, so, again, we have to wait.

We are in France, my family and I, eating in a restaurant garden. My father is making slightly xenophobic comments and warns us that, in France, you should never hitch up your trousers on the way to the bathroom. Despite the dire warnings as to the consequences of improper restaurant etiquette, we finish our meal and leave with relative ease.

We are at the railway station, waiting for a train. The station is tiny, hardly worthy of the name, there aren’t even any platforms. Despite this, there are a significant number of people waiting on our side of the tracks. While we are waiting, several trains pass going in the opposite direction. Only one stops. Two people clamber down from the front of the train with difficulty as there isn’t any platform. Somebody says this is a request stop. As the train draws away I notice a glitch, like compression artifacts, obscuring it slightly. That’s strange I think. I begin to note a few more glitches, as if I were dreaming inside a heavily compressed .avi file.

Finally our train comes, and we board it. The train takes us to a terminal where we have to make a change, but first my father must buy the tickets. The terminal is a gargantuan, byzantine labyrinth, again with no platforms, or rather, with some platforms that our ludicrously high and others that are non-existent, there are also a number of places where one must cross the tracks. My family manages this with aplomb, I am a little more tentative. I have to cross from a side where there is no platform to the other side where the platform is above my head. I make a dash for it. I get across the first line and then a train comes hurtling by inches in front of my nose. I jerk to a halt. Another train comes in the opposite direction. I am trapped with these two seemingly infinitely long goods trains, both carrying lumber in open cars, clattering past with barely enough space for me between them. The cars are ancient and irregularly constructed so that I continually have to dodge out of the way as bits of them come rushing towards different parts of my body. There is a small boy also between the tracks, dressed like a Victorian chimney sweep, doing the same spastic dance as I am, although with a lot more finesse. He turns and doffs his cap at me, laughing, as though this were riotous fun.

Finally the trains pass and my family, still waiting on the far platform, shout at me to hurry up, we need to get the tickets. I’m still daunted by the ridiculously high platform ahead, and am certain that another train is on its way. I grit my teeth and make a dash for it, struggling to mantle over the obstacle in front of me. No one offers assistance. At last I make it up, just as another train comes arrives behind me. “Come on!” shouts my father, and we head to get tickets.

As we’re waiting in line on an enormous mostly-empty concourse my attention is drawn by a peculiar vista to one side. One vast wall of the station is open and looking down (we are quite a few storeys up) I see an intriguingly shaped building across the street. It is made out of a series of sweeping concrete curves layered one on top of another like a massive multi-storey car park in the form of a pile of whipped cream. The building glitches. In front of the building is a row of what might be uninspired corporate sculptures but which I realise instinctively are the product made by the company inside. They are complexes of large diameter grey metal tubes twisted into curvaceous forms something like swimming pool flumes. I realise that these are pneumatic tubes for transporting people, like in The Jetsons, and while these ones outside are clearly not connected to any transport system I wonder if there are functioning ones inside the building.

My father has the tickets now and my family follows me down a long curving ramp that leads into the building across the street. Inside is cavernous and open-plan and strongly reminiscent of a Jacques Tati film. I leave my family waiting as I venture over to find out if I can try out the tubes. I find two, both marked with an arrow pointing down. One clearly goes down to the next floor and the other goes down to any floor below this one. I observe a few people using the tubes and their operation is simple. You stand over an irised trapdoor and press a button at waist height set into a pillar in front of you. The door apertures open and you are sucked down. I’ll give it a go. I chose the one that goes down to any floor you chose. I stand on the door, press the button and am whisked away. Before I have time to think I am at the next floor down. There is a instant’s pause, time enough to see that I have come to a brief halt and there is another button in front of me before I am whisked down again. It takes me several floors down before I work out what I have to do to get off, and to time the pressing of the button correctly to stop.

I exit into another large open-plan space, all concrete and brushed aluminium. I’m not certain how many floors down I’ve come. There is a wide light-well in the centre of the building and I can look up to see my family waving at me from several floors above. Now I have to go up again. On the way down I had realised that the large shoulder bag I have on rather gets in the way, so I find the up tubes and leave the bag by one of them. As soon as I press the button I am sucked up and am hurled wildly this way and that exactly like a flume but in reverse. Finally I am spat out. Now where am I? How do I get to my family, and how do I get my bag back?

Eventually, after quite a few journeys up and down and round and round inside the tubes, I find them again. My bag is goodness knows where, but never mind. We head back to the station. I wake up.

I snore peacefully, a little loudly, I also talk in my sleep
Massage
Incompleteness
You snip a little off the end
Games and charades
Spellbound
LAN party
Wear those tights, the orange ones
A skipping rope
Jump ship
You move, peacefully
Itinerant salesperson
Beg for just another go round
Catch me a mythical beast
That time the fuses blew
Haberdasher
Your squalid period
Needle and thread
Sales-pitch
Glaucoma
Your ringtone
The most expensive dish on the menu
Having the run of the mill
Eight lives left
Spinnaker
The friends you made on the ferry over
A collapsing star
Like all the time I lost in between all the cups of tea
A visit to the ventriloquist
Fretting
Collarbone

The reasons that I love you

I just had one of the most violent dreams I can recall having in my life. In it I was living with an ex-flatmate and her (dream-invented) little sister. The younger of the two was angry at the other for eating her mini-cheesecake that she’d been saving in the fridge. She also had a rice maze with which she woke me up by it filling with rice. There was a very large bee, more like a hornet, trapped in the maze. As it got agitated by the falling rice it escaped through a small hole in the back into a large metre cubed transparent perspex box in which there was also a dead bat. The violent finale to the dream happened as a cat got into the box as well and started to fight with the bee, causing an incredible raging cacophony as bee, bat, and cat thundered around the box, all screaming incoherently with fear, pain, and anger. And then I woke up, worried that the little sister was about to leave home with only a bag of cat food to her name, and there was no way she could survive on the street by herself.

Smooth it out
Shook your head
Mementos of Africa
A rucksack twice your size and twice your weight
The level crossing
Jam on a crumpet
Baggy pyjamas
Taking an underground train for the first time
Jóga
Venn diagrams
It’s like the first thin ice on the pond in winter
A human pyramid
Not what you’d have asked for
Code and cypher
Day-Glo orange
Burnt umber
Bench-pressing
Technocratic government
Your centre parting
I got fired today
Two lies for every truth
My principal failing
A feeling of indescribable panic
Stomach rumbling
Alternative ways to spell fish
Oh, all the notes in the universe
Bucharest, Lima, Tel Aviv
Tongue-tied
Breakfast in bed
Appellations
Laying down the law

The reasons that I love you

Every time you run for president
All the holidays I’ve been on in my life
A happiness so profound
Answers on a postcard
Perfume
The bicycle I received for my seventh birthday
A bird nest in the hand
Olive oil and gin
The worst moment came two hours into the flight
Your recurring dream
The lucky penny in your pocket
A deep sigh
The morning after
Drinks after work
The sound of the children tiptoeing downstairs
Memorial Day
Catch 22
The moment you woke from a deep sleep
Rough and tumble
Tranquillity
A shopping list on the fridge door
Sunday football
The photo beside the bed
My umpteenth coffee of the day
I took my time and did it well
Practising a French accent
When you gave my your email address
Odd socks
Humbling
Terrapins and ocelots
Grumpiness

The reasons that I love you

Over the past few days I’ve been working on a little noise machine.

Here was my first version:

It looks pretty complicated, but actually, sonically, it’s very simple. The ‘metro’ object at the top sends out pulses, like the clicks from a metronome, every 58 milliseconds, below it are six (nearly) identical groups of objects which are focused around an oscillator which produces a simple sine wave. The frequency (or pitch) of this wave is controlled by a very simple sequencer, essentially just a text file consisting of a list of numbers (in this case 3,6,12,7,14,28) which is read by the ‘qlist’ object. Every time the metro pulses it increments a counter by one and once every n times the counter goes up the sequencer moves to the next number in the sequence. For example, the first block of objects clicks through the sequence once for every 3 pulses, or once every 174 milliseconds. Of course the numbers in the sequence are far too low to represent audible frequencies of sound, and so they are multiplied by an arbitrary number (in the case of the first block, a number between 22 and 52). This number is also incremented by the metronome, at a rate proportional to the playback of the sequence (in the case of the first block once every 696 milliseconds). Each block increments at different rates and multiplies the sequence by a different number which also increments at a different rate. The result is this:

3,6,12,7,14,28 by Treebait Consortium

After achieving this and being fairly pleased with the result, I thought I’d finesse the design and so built the following related patch:

It looks more complicated but is actually very similar to the first one with some additions, namely: The original oscillator is modulated by a second one running at sub-audio frequencies, this results not in a single tone at a single frequency but rather a kind of wobbly note; The tones are not continuous but rather consist of discrete notes, like a piano key being hit although a little simpler – they consist of three attributes: attack, length and release – the attack is the amount of time that the note takes to increase from 0 volume to maximum volume, the length of the note is self-evident, and the release is the amount of time it takes to go from maximum volume back down to 0. These five attributes (modulation frequency, modulation amount, attack, length, and release) are all incremented across time in the same way as the pitch of the main oscillator is, all at rates that are multiples of the original rate of progress through the sequencer. The result of this patch is this:

3,6,12,7,14,28 version 2 by Treebait Consortium

Finally, after realising how hideously incomprehensible my patch was, I thought I’d work on a third cleaner version. Seeing as how there is so much repetition of objects it was a prime candidate for the different components to be organised into duplicated groups of objects. This is what I came up with:

Now, this looks a lot more organised, which it is, and also, maybe, more complicated, which it also is. Each of those identical blocks, which represents a track, internally looks like this:

And each of these contains nine of these:

However, it’s still the same idea, just better organised and with some extra features. This time I added the ability to switch all the previously mentioned functions between automatic and manual control and I added in a delay (like an echo), a fuzz generator (actually pink noise – like white noise but better), the ability for each track to produce either discrete notes or continuous tones, and the ability to manually modify all the default values. The result was this:

My Baby’s Heart Inside Me Beats by Treebait Consortium

I can’t imagine anyone would, but just in case it occurs to you to fiddle with what I made, you can download the patches as a zip file here:

You will need pure data-extended to run it, which is open source software available here.

Now, I’m well aware that I don’t know anyone who appreciates this kind of noise/music, and it’s not even the kind of thing I listen to most of the time, but it makes me happy to be able to create things like this, so shucks.

As an addendum, the title of the final track came from my mother, who, when I played her a little of version 2, commented that she thought that it sounded like the heartbeat of an unborn baby, this in turn reminded me of the sound of doppler readings of blood flow and I had a theme.

Some time ago now I made a carrot cake. But not just any carrot cake, this is The Queen’s Carrot Cake – a painstakingly and lovingly researched and elaborated new culinary work made especially for The Queen. Here’s the recipe.

Ingredients:

• For the cake:
• 175g dark muscovado sugar
• 2 medium eggs
• 150ml sunflower oil
• 200g wholemeal self-raising flour
• 1tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1.5  tsp cinnamon
• zest from one orange
• zest from one lemon
• 200g coarsely grated carrot
• 4 chopped, crushed and drained pineapple rings
• 50g chopped walnuts
• For the drizzle:
• Juice from 1 large orange
• Juice from half a lemon
• 75g dark muscovado sugar
• For the icing:
• 320g marscapone
• 200g fromage frais
• 20g icing sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla essence

Intructions

1. Preheat the oven to 200ºC. Line two 20cm cake tins.
2. In a large bowl whisk the sugar, eggs and oil together for a couple of minutes until all the sugar is dissolved.
3. Sift in the flour, bicarb and cinnamon, making sure that you add back the bran from the flour that was left in the sieve. Stir in gently.
4. Add in the rest of the ingredients and stir in again.
5. Divide the mixture between your two tins.
6. Bake in the centre of the oven for 20 minutes (however, your mileage may vary, I find my oven does things pretty quickly)
7. Meanwhile make the drizzle and the icing.
8. For the drizzle: put all the ingredients together in a bowl and whisk. Set aside.
9. For the icing: put all the ingredients together in a bowl, whisk until combined, cover with clingfilm and place in the fridge for at least one hour.
10. When the cakes are baked leave them in their tins and poke holes all over them with a fork, pour over the drizzle and set aside to cool.
11. When completely cool, remove the cakes from their tins, spread icing on top of one and sandwich them together. Use the rest of the icing to coat the top, and, if you’re feeling adventurous, the sides as well, there’ll be enough.
12. Share and enjoy.

For some completely incomprehensible reason I have no photographic evidence of this culinary delight :-( I must start documenting my baking. New year’s resolution, maybe?

The guy got back with his axe on his back and we didn’t know where he’d been. We’d been scuppered that day and trying to pull it back most of the hours of the day. Except for a bit where we slept.

So the guy got back and proposed we go out but it’s two o’ the morn oh it is. So we go to the OpenSiempre and it’s closed when we get there but we wait a bit and they buzz us in.

No one has hiccoughs at all.

And we buy a bottle of beer and go and sit on a couch in the street. A couch without cushions but the guy says it’s great, the most comfortable he’s ever seen. Let’s drag it back to the flat. I say no, you’re an idiot, every time you go out you find something on the sidewalk and say it’s de puta madre and it’s not. They’re all flippin’ uncomfortable and if you had nerves in your butt you should know it too so you should. So we’ll leave this one here and we’ll go back home and it’d be good if we found another, but life goes on whatever.

And the other guy, who never says nothing, is silent.

And we drink our one bottle of beer from the shop and we plop back off to home, to bed, to rum.

Time to catch up on some blogging. I have literally at least 3 draft posts kicking around unpublished simply because I haven’t gotten round to it. Let’s have a crack. Some of these date back months and months.

But first, a photo, in case you’d forgotten what I look like.

I am incapable of owning more than one cuff-link at a time. Which is a problem.
I wonder where you can buy cheap cuff-links in Madrid…
Hmmm… What’s the Spanish for cuff-links?
‘Gemelos’. That’s a weird word for cuff-links.
‘Gemelos’ is the Spanish word for identical twins, so it kind of makes sense.

I imagine going into a shop and asking if they have any cuff-links.
The proprietor narrows his eyes and fixes me in a penetrating stare.
“You’re not the filth are you?” he says. I am perplexed.
“Noooooo-ooo.” I say, perplexedly.
He continues to hold me in his gaze.
“Weeeelll,” he says, reaching under the counter to lift out a large battered cardboard box which seems to be rather heavy. Maybe I’m imagining things but I also think I detect movement within.
He plonks the box on the counter and opens it.
“As it happens, I do happen to have a couple just in.” Inside the box, on a mucky blanket, are two tiny identical eastern-european babies wearing only rather amateurishly fastened disposable nappies. “Fresh off the boat,” he says, winking, “If you want the pair I can give you a very reasonable price.”
I start to back away, stammering. I seem to have become mute. One of the babies starts wailing fitfully.
“EH!” he says, “you not interested then?” He’s reaching under the counter again.
I’m almost at the door when I bump into something solid. I whip round. Blocking my path is an enormous slab of a man, twice my height and three times my girth. Behind me I hear a weapon being cocked…

‘Gemelos’ is the word for identical twins, there’s another word, ‘mellizos’, for non-identical twins. I don’t have any actual factual evidence for this but there seem to be an exceptionally large number of non-identical twins in Madrid. One of my best friends is a melliza (female non-identical twin), as was one of my ex-flatmates, I have worked with a melliza, and I have taught inumerable mellizas, and one or two mellizos. I also don’t have any actual evidence for the fact that they almost all seem to be female. Does Madrid have an unusually high female non-identical twin count? I don’t know, but it seems possible.

I wonder, if you had two odd cuff-links, would they be called ‘mellizos’ instead of ‘gemelos’? Almost certainly not.

No bloggy, no bloggy, I know, I’m terrible… I’ll get around to it eventually. This evening I’m being distracted by making silly things like this: