Blues
I’m really kicking myself because I’ve missed most of the series of documentary films organised by Martin Scorsese called The Blues. Each feature-length film is directed by a different person, and the one I saw last nightâThe Soul of a Manâwas by Wim Wenders. He focused on three blues artists: Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James and J. B. Lenoir. It was fascinating learning about their lives, and a real treat to hear the old recordings made in the 1920s and 30s of Blind Willie Johnson and Skip James, and see the amateur film taken of J. B. Lenoir in the 1960s.
As with many blues artists, none of them really managed to break out of poverty, despite cutting commercially successful records. Skip James was offered a choice between a cash settlement and a percentage for his work, and went away with only $40 in his pocket, despite the fact that his work wasâand still isâvery successful. Those early blues artists got really exploited. It’s so tragic that neither they nor their families ever benefited from their talent. I think my favourite artist of the three is Skip James. I love his high, sweet, voiceâslurring, blurring and smoothing the words into his soft and dreamy guitar playing, and concealing the harsh themes of the songs. They featured him singing ‘Hard Time Killing Floor Blues’, which is one of my favourite blues songs. It’s like running your fingers over the flat of a razor blade; it’s cool and smooth, but if you move your hand a little, it will draw blood.
It’s a fascinating series (which is available on DVD already it seems), with archival footage alongside modern interpretations of some of the songs by famous artists like Lou Reed, Beck and Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds.
At the otherâ’totally obstructing you at every turn’âend of the spectrum, I tried out the new version of Microsoft Office 2004 today. I approached it with a little hope, but no expectation that my hopes might be fulfilled. In the immortal words of Bernard Black, “It was all I expected and less”. Things didn’t get off to a great start when the download link on Microsoft’s page turned out to be broken. I went to MacUpdate’s listing instead and had more success. The only really positive thing I can say is that the track changes and commenting systems have been improved a lot. I’ve used the latest version of Word on XP, and was envious of the ‘bubble’ presentation of revisions and comments, and the drop-down menu that lets you flick between different modes of display of the revisions. I work on a lot of collaborative documents, and the old system made me grind my teeth. Unfortunately, nothing else seems significantly better. The new Notebook view is a total rip-off of NoteBook and NoteTaker, and I would much prefer to use either of those than Microsoft’s poor attempt. There is also a new Project Center to organise your work, but if you don’t use Entourage for your email, contacts and calendar, it is needless bloat. Word still insists on consuming about 20% of my CPU even when in the background and inactive, which just isn’t acceptable. The suite is huge, overbearing and the way it looms over me in a monolithic, lumpen way depresses the heck out of me.
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Damn, WordPress is impressive!
Y'see, I've always hated the "live preview" of comments on WordPressâuntil just a few minutes ago. First off, I am like so totally stoked that I can add an em-dash to a comment! No more of that sicko, twisted "double dash" that I did out of habit on those Movable Type 'blogs!
Secondly, I was consideringâonly for a momentâadding a set of abbreviation tags around CSS, but then thought to myself, "Nope, that's a tad bit over the top. Everyone here should know what it means, it's way too geeky and I just want to do it because I thought it was cool that the 'live preview' was able to handle the tags."
Well, lo and behold, I submit my postâsans abbreviation tags, of courseâand what does WordPress do? Damn thing adds 'em for me anyways! I've got nothing to say to that but, "Way to go, Bsag! Damned nice touch there."
Okay, sorry for the two long posts here. Just needed to get that off my chest.
by Nathan Ladd @ 20/05/2004 4:05 am • Permalink •
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Will need to take a look at Ulysses for work I think - thanks for that.
As for Office 2004, as ever the new features ARE an improvement, particularly in Outlook but you are right the sheer size and resources required to run the programs.. Oy!
Modular Office apps is what they should offer, but I think that's been done already. Mind you I've never checked out the open source alternatives to Office - Star Office, OpenOffice et al.----- I tried Ulysses awhile back but didn't much care for the interface then. About that time, I came up with my own "dream list" of featuresâa list remarkably similar to both yours and Adam's.
In fact, I remember a rather bold promise that I posted here about making a go of such a word processor on my own. Bah! I never could stick with a project long enough.
Well, based on this latest post of yours I'm going to give Ulysses another hack or two to see if it can do what I'd like for it to do. Just like you had said, I'd like software that can get out of my way when I write, but that I can later style to my heart's content. I don't want to have to think about the software when I use it. So far, only one thing has ever come close:
A combination of a whole lot of
vi, a nice dollop of Markdown and a splash of CSS to finish.by Nathan Ladd @ 20/05/2004 4:05 am • Permalink •
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[...] 4 BSAG on Office 2004 Filed under: General â JB @ 6:23 pm BSAGâscomments on the new version of Office didnât surprise me but I wa [...]
by Tech Notes » BSAG on Office 2004 @ 20/05/2004 3:05 pm • Permalink •
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Gordon: I have tried OpenOffice, and it's pretty much exactly like Microsoft Office, which is both a bad and a good thing. If you want a cheap replacement for Office, they work fine, but they aren't an improvement.
Nathan: Yes, I remember your promise, but I was being tactful, and decided not to mention it
. I've just found that the LaTeX exporting seems to be broken in the new version. The developers seem very responsive, so I wouldn't be surprised if it gets fixed quickly. Re the live previewâit was a surprise to me too! I just noticed it yesterday, when I was commenting myself. It has always worked for plain text, but didn't preview HTML. I haven't changed anything, so they must have changed the backend to run the text through the same filter that normal posting uses. Very cool 
The automatic acronym generation is another plugin which I've added since I wrote about hacking WordPress. It works very well, except when you put an acronym in the attribute of a tag (like title="buy this DVD at Amazon" in an anchor), when it breaks the tag. Marking up acronyms is very tedious, so it's a great automation.
by bsag @ 20/05/2004 5:06 pm • Permalink •
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but she's a girl.... they aren't supposed to like blues. Well you are the first I've met that does anyway. No idea why though.----- I really liked the one done by Clint Eastwood. Not a very good film, really, but a chance to see some amazing archive footage of great piano players, including a sequence of Art Tatum, who I've listened to for years but didn't know had ever been filmed in action.
by pete @ 22/05/2004 6:05 am • Permalink •
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ThoughtBadger: Well, I like a lot of things that I'm not supposed to
pete: I missed that one, but it sounds great. I think I'll have to see if I can borrow some of the DVDs from the library when they get them in.
by bsag @ 22/05/2004 4:06 pm • Permalink •
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Slightly off topic as of course Art Tatum is nothing to do with the Blues, but I love him too. Have you heard the album he made with Ben Webster? Although it would be hard to think of two players with more different styles of playing, they are quite sublime together. Just checked on Amazon, and sadly it seems to be unavailable at the moment, but you could try to er.. acquire "My One And Only Love" to get a taste. I am sure it must get reissued soon.
by ThoughtBadger @ 22/05/2004 6:06 pm • Permalink •
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Martin Scorcese also did a really nice 3-part series that was shown on FilmFour a while aho about Film Noir - wish I was able to get the rest of that from somewhere.
Incidentally, and completely unrelated - when did you change your RSS feed's location? I was wondering why I hadn't seen any posts for a while until I came looking. For one last level of tangentiality, this preview thing is swanky!
by Howard Jones @ 03/06/2004 12:06 am • Permalink •
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ThoughtBadger: No, I don't really know much about Art Tatum. The plan for when we've moved is to get a turntable and buy loads of cheap vinyl to allow us to broaden our listening a bit. There's a shop in Oxford that sells second-hand discs for about £3 a go, which makes buying music a lot more affordable.
Howard Jones: I didn't see that either, but then I don't get FilmFour. I changed the feed's location when I moved to WordPress, so several months ago now. I did try to put a message in the old feed about the move, but several people told me didn't work after a while. I'm glad you came back to check! Yes, the preview is rather spiffy, isn't it?
by bsag @ 03/06/2004 9:06 am • Permalink •
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