Paul Brady – Arthur McBride

Sheet music available here.

Lyrics:

Oh me and me cousin one Arthur McBride
As we went a-walkin’ down by the seaside
Now mark what followed and what did betide
For it bein’ on Christmas mornin’.
Out for recreation we went on a tramp
And we met Sergeant Napper and Corporal Vamp
And a little wee drummer intending to camp
For the day bein’ pleasant and charmin’.

“Good mornin’, good mornin’,” the Sergeant did cry
“And the same to you gentlemen,” we did reply
Intendin’ no harm but meant to pass by
For it bein’ on Christmas mornin’.
“But,” says he, “my fine fellows, if you will enlist
It’s ten guineas in gold I will slip in your fist
And a crown in the bargain for to kick up the dust
And drink the King’s health in the mornin’.”

“For a soldier he leads a very fine life
And he always is blessed with a charming young wife
And he pays all his debts without sorrow or strife
And always lives pleasant and charmin’.
And a soldier he always is decent and clean
In the finest of clothin’ he’s constantly seen
While other poor fellows go dirty and mean
And sup on thin gruel in the mornin’.”

“Well,” says Arthur, “I wouldn’t be proud of your clothes
For you’ve only the lend of them as I suppose
And you dare not change them one night for you know
If you do you’ll be flogged in the mornin’.
And although that we are single and free
We take great delight in our own company
And we have no desire strange faces to see
Although that your offers are charmin’.”

“And we have no desire to take your advance
All hazards and dangers we barter on chance
For you would have no scruples for to send us to France
Where we would get shot without warnin’.”

“Oh no,” says the Sergeant, “I’ll have no such chat
And I neither will take it from spalpeen or brat
For if you insult me with one other word
I’ll cut off your heads in the mornin’.”
And then Arthur and I we soon drew our hods
And we scarce gave them time for to draw their own blades
When a trusty shillelagh came over their heads
And bade them take that as fair warning.

And their trusty of rapiers that hung by their side
We flung them as far as we could in the tide
“Now take them out devils,” cried Arthur McBride
“And temper their edge in the mornin’.”
And the little wee drummer we flattened his pow
And we made a football of his rowdy-dow-dow
Threw it in the tide for to rock and to row
And bade it a tedious returning.

And we havin’ no money paid them off in cracks
And we paid no respect to their two bloody backs
For we lathered them there like a pair of wet sacks
And left them for dead in the mornin’.
And so to conclude and to finish disputes
We obligingly asked if they wanted recruits
For we were the lads who would give them hard clouts
And bid them look sharp in the mornin’.

Oh me and me cousin one Arthur McBride
As we went a-walkin’ down by the seaside
Now mark what followed and what did betide
For it bein’ on Christmas mornin’.

Please Say Something is a 10 minute short concerning a troubled relationship between a Cat and Mouse set in the distant Future. The final film was completed in January 2009 and contains 23 episodes of exactly 25 seconds each.

The film won the Golden Bear for best short at the 2009 Berlinale, the Cartoon D’or and several other awards. In 2010 it was given a distinction of cultural significance by the German ratings agency FBW (Prädikat Besonderes Wertvoll).

Please Say Something – Full Length from David O’Reilly.

Plenty of photos here.

Work at the station has recently uncovered these amazing advertising posters in non-public areas and that date from c1956 – 1959 when the station’s lifts were removed and replaced by escalators. These are in an old lift passageway and will be safe.

Check out more photos, along with scans of mid 20th Century design.

The concept of Hauntology was then brought to my attention by a knowledgeable member of the electronic music community. From Wikipedia:

The idea suggests that the present exists only with respect to the past, and that society after the end of history will begin to orient itself towards ideas and aesthetics that are thought of as rustic, bizarre or “old-timey”; that is, towards the “ghost” of the past. In this, it is has some similarity with the cyberpunk literary movement. Derrida holds that because of this intellectual realignment, the end of history will be unsatisfactory and untenable.

The name and concept fundamentally come from Marx‘s assertion that a “spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism.” Derrida holds that the spirit of Karl Marx is even more relevant after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the demise of communism, that the West’s separation from the ignorance of the suffering still present in the world will “haunt” it and provide the impetus for a fresh interest in communism.

Fascinating!

This first installation in the series will focus on more “traditional” music in comparison to the music that will be featured in the following parts. In other words: plenty of singing; plenty of guitars and drums.

Any artists or record labels who take issue with me sharing these songs need just contact me in order to have the material removed.

Sparklehorse – It’s A Wonderful Life

Sparklehorse – Eyepennies

Beautiful tune from Mark Linkaus, with PJ Harvey as guest vocalist. Unfortunately Mark killed himself a few months ago, so we’ll have no more incredible releases like “It’s A Wonderful Life”, “Good Morning Spider” or his Fennesz collaboration…

Grouper – Cover The Windows And The Walls

A few months ago I would’ve pointed to Grouper’s “Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill” as her best work, but I’ve since realised that CTWATW is much more of a grower and absolutely consistent… Certainly the “new music find of 2009″ I’m most happy about, easily the most difficult choice in selecting a single track from the album for this blog post, definitely the best music in this blog-post. Genius.

Minimum Chips – Lady Grey

Australian indie band, shamefully under-acknowledged. Perfect album from start to finish.

Cortney Tidwell – Boys

“Oh, Suicide”, a very slow reprise of this song justifies buying this CD alone. I chose instead to put the more upbeat version here to lift the mood a little.

Tape – Luminarium

Killer keyboard part for this tune. Gorgeous stuff.

Jack Rose – Jack Rose

Interesting guy, considering his main project was as a guitarist in a Doom Metal band. Only now do I learn he died suddenly last December of a heart attack. Tragic.

The Gentleman Losers – The Gentleman Losers

The Gentleman Losers – Laureline

Mirah – C’mon Miracle

Inextricably linked to memories of wrestling with Wikimedia’s parser in the early hours of the morning, working on my final year project.

The Album Leaf – Into The Blue Again

The Album Leaf – Always For You

This too. Pretty drab and dreary, cheesy lyrics and arrangements: the very essence of “folktronica”. I enjoyed it at the time, though, for some reason, so it deserves a place here.

It Hugs Back – Inside Your Guitar

Absolutely stunning album, perfect from beginning to end. Support them by buying it!

Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions – At The Doorway Again

Heather Woods Broderick – From The Ground

Sister of Peter Broderick and impressive songwriter and musician in her own right, it was difficult choosing a song from this one too.

Beach House – Beach House

A nice one to end on, no?

The next installation in this series will most likely focus on ambient noise and will appear in a week or two.

One of my favorite hacks at last weekend’s Music Hack Day is Tristan’s Swinger.  The Swinger is a bit of python code that takes any song and makes it swing.  It does this be taking each beat and time-stretching the first half of each beat while time-shrinking the second half.  It has quite a magical effect.  Some examples:
Every Breath You Take (swing version) by TeeJay

Sweet Child O’ Mine (Swing Version) by plamere

You can find more examples in the original blog post. The results really are truly impressive. I’m looking forward to playing with Tristan Jehan‘s code, and also having a look at his PhD thesis:

Machines have the power and potential to make expressive music on their own. This thesis aims to computationally model the process of creating music using experience from listening to examples. Our unbiased signal-based solution models the life cycle of listening, composing, and performing, turning the machine into an active musician, instead of simply an instrument. We accomplish this through an analysis-synthesis technique by combined perceptual and structural modeling of the musical surface, which leads to a minimal data representation.

Fascinating stuff!

The script makes use of pyexiv2 – the 0.2 branch – for metadata editing, mechanize for grabbing pages and submitting error reports, the very handy unaccented_map() class (included) for unicode trickery and of course the wonderful XML parser, BeautifulSoup.

Naturally, it’s available from the Big Picture Cataloguer’s page in the Code section of this site.

Given how much The Big Picture galleries’ HTML format has subtly changed over time, and the fact I wrote this in a rush, it’s quite messy, but it does the job.

Today’s update is of version 0.3, which has an optional “quiet mode” to enable users to schedule the program to run frequently. Enjoy!

Now, I’m happy that the application is stable enough to release to the world in the Code section of my website.

Since I don’t want people to be hammering The Boston Globe’s servers, I’ve made the script wait a fraction of a second between each request, and since I don’t want people to be able to disable this functionality, unfortunately only binaries will be available for the time being. Windows binaries are available already, OS X and Linux binaries to come in a few days.

Indeed, if those at The Boston Globe have a problem with how the program operates, they need simply contact me and we can come to an agreement, but I’ve worked hard to make sure that the program contacts their servers as little as possible.

Bug reports will be automatically submitted through this website too, but if you have any unforeseen problems (e.g. a crash or a hang), email me with as much information as possible (text describing the “Traceback” printed before the crash, what album/photo the program was working on, etc).

What can you do once you’ve got the entire 2GB collection of photos downloaded? Well, you can simply look through them at your own pace and comfort, or indeed choose to create a montage screensaver from them (although be warned – a screensaver that fades from a beautiful Antarctic landscape to a bloody photo of a victim of the war in Afghanistan might not be exactly what you had in mind.)

But in any event, hopefully it’ll be of some use. Enjoy!