Bruce Springsteen and I; An unaknowledged love affair

I haven’t been listening to new music lately. Apart from browsing the rather slim IDM vaults of 15megsoffame.com, I’ve been dedicating myself to Terry Pratchett most of the time. That, or recorded lectures (the teaching company is a favourite) on topics I can’t even recall at the moment, although I’m sure I’ve become a better and more confused person as a result.

As it turns out, my hampstering has lead me to have more music on my computer & iPod than I’ve had time to listen to, cause I found thunder road by Tortoise, sung by Will Oldham (aka bonnie ‘prince’ billy), and I really liked it. like, I am almost certain that there was a hint of a tear poking it’s head out of one of my eyes at some point. And that’s quite a lot.

Today I looked for the lyrics to the song, and was only slightly pertubed when it turns out that the song was originally written by Bruce Springsteen of all people. (Wikipedia article on the song here, and the lyrics to it are on this here fan-page.) I’ve always branded myself as someone who doesn’t like Bruce Springsteen, but this sounds false when compared to another statement I tend to do, which is that it’s content, not form that’s important. Since the song was written thirty years ago, I must’ve heard it somewhere before. The only reason I don’t recall it must be cause it sucked.

Then will oldham sings it, and it makes perfect sense. Form over content, indeed.

[audio:Thunder_Road.mp3]

Another brilliant track from the same album is another cover: Love is love by Lungfish. That’s about it from the album though – just get those two. The rest is rather bleak, if not outright crappy (the album is The Brave and the Bold, btw)

The hazards of being a download hampster

One of my more endearing character traits is that I’m always trying to download the internets. If you’d like to learn how to program in Pascal for paper-mill machinery, I probably have the documents and compilers lying around somewhere.

Before I had a computer with a connection I would go to the library once a week and walk among the shelves and pick out whatever books caught my fancy; When it comes to dedication to books I’m quite the polybookamist – I’d end up having twenty books on different topics at any given time. The only Dewey decimals I wasn’t into were the ones between 796 & 798. (sports)

Now, every time I get my hands on a connection I end up downloading everything that either 1) interests me, or 2) I don’t know what it is but it sounds interesting.

This has of course some drawbacks. For example, I should have looked up what ephebophilia meant before downloading a 200 mb zip-file named epheb with the description “ephebophilia junk“. I end up with a couple of hundred images of some post-pubescent girl looking slightly amused. What the fuck. Although there wasn’t any porn involved (well, I only looked at five or so of the images, so I can’t tell) the sheer volume of images taken from someone who’s obviously taller than the girl is kinda twisted my head a bit; I can see this being sort of gateway-erotica to more overt kiddie porn.

Can’t fucking believe I’ve tainted my hard drive downloading it, and since it was over Bittorrent, I’ve actually helped others downloading it as well. Next time, I’m either looking up any words I don’t understand, or reading the info-page before downloading anything.

The torrent’s info-page is here: http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3457951, and actually describes what he torrent contains. For fucks sake; I honestly thought they were body-modification files. Like, gross piercings and subdermal implants.

Wiszdomteetzh

My jaw was clicketyclicking and then I dislocated the shit out of it – can’t close my mouth properly and I’m chewing (OK, not really chewing, actually just slightly mauling the food, mashing it up.) with my right side.

I feel like a whale, just siphoning the food through my teeth. And I drool a bit when I talk. Especially when I’m drunk. Which makes me look even more drunk.

Trollhättan and back. With pictures!

It’s like this: A friend of mine organised this rather big festival indoors that started at three in the afternoon and kept on going until 01:00. (now, actually)

They had lotsa bands playing, some stalls, a mini ramp for skateboards. And a big warehouse they didn’t really manage to fill, (it would’ve taken a thousand people to get a crowd going, and there were 2-300 perhaps?) and it was really, really cold. Really cold. Very very cold. This being a aforementioned “big big warehouse.”

Lot of very nicely geared up teenagers, and of course I feel out of place. My friend is running around climbing stuff and doing all those things that need to get done when you pull something of this magnitude together, which leaves me fending for myself with whatever pitiful social skills that I have: Usually they consist of me lending my lighter to people who are standing outside of the locale, smoking with fingers so frostbitten that the glow from cigarettes is the only thing that’s keeping them from falling apart (á la terminator 2). It’s very cold.

I did rediscover that some of the people from the (brilliant) band bob hund had reformed as Sci-fi skane. And that was good. Apart from that, I was supposed to take some pictures. Since I wasn’t paid, I left it to my mood to dictate what I’d shoot, so it was few pictures, mostly taken from a distance, showing concrete walls, cigarette butts and the occasional first-aid person.

Another video online

I’ve added another video to the guiltyguiltyguilty.org page: Mark Melvin.

Since last week I haven’t really touched the page, just sort of leaning back and occasionally watching the traffic stats (not all that high yet), but I’ll prolly get around changing some of the texts – as it stands it’s focusing a bit too much on music- & film-piracy, instead of the more general question of “intellectual property – is it a useful concept?” sorta thing.

But for now – feed my ego and go and watch the new video.

2009 Update: The above mentioned site is now defunct. Go to monocultured.com for a mirror of the project.