Did I Say That?

random thoughts and other junk

Saturday, December 31, 2005

The List To End All Lists, edition 2005

So, with less then twelve hours left, I present my final list of the year.

  • The List of Albums of the Year:
    1. Dream Theater - Octavarium
    2. Opeth - Ghost Reveries
    3. Stream Of Passion - Embrace The Storm
  • The List of Songs I've Encountered for the First Time This Year and Like More than Quite a Bit™:
    1. Iron Prostate - Bring Me The Head Of Jerry Garcia (demo)
    2. Kelly Clarkson - Since U Been Gone
    3. Acda en De Munnik - Jaren Ver Van Hier
    4. Rob Evan - What Part Of My Body Hurts The Most (live bootleg)
    5. Keane - She Has No Time
  • The List of Songs I Wouldn't Mind Not Hearing Ever Again of the Year:
    1. De Jeugd Van Tegenwoordig - Watskebeurt?
    2. Katie Melua - Nine Million Bicycles
    3. Black Eyed Peas - My Humps
    4. The White Stripes - My Doorbell
    5. Green Day - Boulevard of Broken Dreams
  • The List of the Best Songs in the History of the World… Ever—of the Year:
    1. Meat Loaf - For Crying Out Loud
    2. Bruce Springsteen - Jungleland
    3. Steve Barton - Die Unstillbare Gier
  • The List of Live Releases of the Year:
    1. Bruce Springsteen & The E–Street Band - Hammersmith Odeon, London, November 18, 1975
    2. Bløf - Tussen Schemer En Avond (Live met het Metropole Orkest)
      (even though seeing yourself several times severely reduces the visual enjoyment)
    3. Over The Top, The Songs of Jim Steinman live at the Mohegan Sun (bootleg)
  • The List of Reissues of the Year:
    1. Bruce Springsteen - Born To Run 30th Anniversary Edition
    2. Ayreon - The Final Experiment 10th Anniversary Edition
  • The List of Music That, Although Not Released This Year, I Couldn't Stop Listening To of the Year:
    • Dusty Springfield
    • Keane - Hopes And Fears
    • Wende - Quand Tu Dors
  • The List of the Best Live Performances I Attended of the Year:
    1. 2005-10-03 - Jon Oliva's Pain, 013, Tilburg
    2. 2005-05-20 - Lisa Loeb, Patronaat, Haarlem
    3. 2005-10-10 - Dream Theater, Heineken Music Hall, Amsterdam
  • The List of the Most Disappointing Concerts I Attended of the Year:
    1. 2005-06-11 - Dream Theater, Arrow Rock Festival, De Schans, Lichtenvoorde
      (Highly anticipated, but I sadly missed most of it.)
    2. 2005-06-11 - Meat Loaf, Arrow Rock Festival, De Schans, Lichtenvoorde
      (Although technically and vocally one of best shows I've seen him do, the entertainment factor was way, way, way below zero.)
    3. 2005-08-14 - Therion, Tivoli, Utrecht
      (The singer was unbelievable, but as a whole, it never rose above a mediocre performance.)
  • The List of the Best Non-Headlining Performances I Attended of the Year:
    1. 2005-05-13 - Krezip, Feesttent, Mijdrecht
  • The List of the Most Memorable Musical Moments of the Year:
    1. Seeing Survivor play "Eye of the Tiger"
    2. Holding the Holy Grail in my hands
    3. Seeing Black Sabbath play "Paranoid"
  • The List of Books I've Read This Year (in reversed chronological order):
    1. Sue Townsend – The Adrian Mole Diaries
    2. Jonathan Stroud – Ptolemy's Gate (The Bartimaeus Trilogy Book III)
    3. Lynne Truss – Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
    4. Stephen King – The Colorado Kid
    5. Christopher Paolini – Eldest (Inheritance Book Two)
    6. Katherine Neville – The Eight
    7. Stephen King – The Green Mile (A Novel In Six Parts)
    8. Stephen King – From A Buick 8
    9. JK Rowling – Harry Potter And The Half–Blood Prince
    10. Christopher Paolini – Eragon (Inheritance Book One)
    11. Stephen King – Dance Macabre
    12. Legends (edited by Robert Silverberg)
    13. Umberto Eco – De Slinger Van Foucault
  • The List of the Best Books I've Read This Year:
    1. Stephen King – The Green Mile (A Novel In Six Parts)
    2. Jonathan Stroud – Ptolemy's Gate (The Bartimaeus Trilogy Book III)
    3. JK Rowling – Harry Potter And The Half–Blood Prince
  • The List of Books That I Would Never Read Again, Even If My Life Depended On It, of the Year:
    1. Umberto Eco – De Slinger Van Foucault
  • The List of Things I Really Want To See, Hear or Do in 2006:
    1. Take a break longer than a week. Preferably to a place I haven't been before, and although not exactly necessary, not going alone would be a plus.
    2. What the hell: Meat Loaf's "Bat Out Of Hell III" being better than I can imagine at the moment.
    3. Less stupid songs about insignificant things, like the number of bicycles in various capitals around the world.
  • The List of Things I Really Saw of My "Things I Really Want To See In 2005" List:
    1. Meat Loaf's "first annual final world tour" in The Netherlands (well, close enough)
  • The List of Other Highlights of the Year:
    1. London. Great city, never a dull moment. Seen some things I hadn't seen the previous times I've been there, and then there's still some stuff I'd like to see.
    2. Being in Belgium at a moderate −2°C., when the weather in The Netherlands reach an historical low for the first week of March.
  • The List of Things I've Discovered In 2005:
    • That despite all my talk of things that gotta change, things I wanna do, other worlds and truths that may be out there, it's still little more than just talk.
    • That talk is cheap, so maybe I should just shut up, and dance. Or do something that I'd call dancing, but that in truth has nothing whatsoever to do with dancing (*waves*).
    • That I'm still able to say exactly nothing at the moment I really should say something, and vice versa. It's a gift, I know…
    • But seriously, it wasn't really a remarkable year. It was better than some others, but nothing really stood out over the rest.

If I don't see you again this year, watch your fingers, and finish it off in style.

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

So this was Christmas… and what have you done?

Me? Well, I did nothing much really. Read a good deal in my book, so that one should be finished by the end of the year. Other than that, I ate a bit, went to my sister's for her birthday, ate some more and came back home. That's about it. So tell me… what have you done?

Comments

  1. slept until the next morning

Friday, December 23, 2005

Bring me to his dealer!

So I was standing in the back of the venue, near the bar, and in between songs I was conversing with previously my neighbour. Then this balding, graying, beergutting man in his late forties turns around, reaches up to grab me by my neck, and says to me in a stern and disapproving matter, I drove two hundred-fifty kilometers to get here, and I didn't come here to hear your talking. If you have to keep talking, why don't you do that in the hallway or so? Something along these lines, and in Dutch.
If I were talking during the songs, he might've had something of a point. But since I didn't, he didn't either. He didn't have any point whatsoever, and he's lucky that I'm such a nice, well-behaved fellow, or otherwise I might have told him that:

  1. He has to keep his fuckin paws fuckin off of me for fuck's sake. Touching me doesn't only make you lose whatever argument you were thinking of having, it also makes the little baby Jesus cry like the crybaby he is;
  2. He might as well make a scene with the people who were standing next to me, and kept talking all the way through the concert;
  3. He really shouldn't be talking to his wife (I suppose) then either, and that that bitch doesn't have to like that when I sssh'd them to silence either;
  4. When you go to a gig to listen to the music without being distracted by people talking, you should not be standing in the back near the bar;
  5. I didn't travel an hour and a half by train (and more on the way home), just to see him smootch all over the missus. If he has to keep doing that, why doesn't he do it in the hallway, or even better, get a room, the inconsistent asshole of a hypocrite! Fuck him, and fuck the fuckin horse he fuckin rode in on. Bitch.

But since that I'm such a nice, well-behaved human being, I didn't say that of course. I want to know who his dealer is, 'cause I need to get the same crack he's on.

Comments

  1. you have such a nice dealer!

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

List the Sixth

Seems like it's time for one of those again. The best bits are at the end, so sit tight. Ready? Let's go then!

  • For starters, camera tossing is a very intriguing art-form.
  • Speaking of intrigue: you must have seen Sony's advert with all those bouncy balls. See a longer version, the making of and more at their official website.
  • French Super Monks. In French, but you should be able to decipher where to find le film.
  • π — to 1.000.000 places behind the comma.
  • I've linked to Non Sequitur before, but the comic I linked to then is unavailable now. Thanks to this LJ Community, I can link to it again!
  • A bit old, but Apple should announce their new gadget any day now…
  • Fuck Christmas is a rant. I link rants. Especially if I agree with it on most counts.
  • Almost there, prepare for the big bang, while I skip a song, and point to another insightful article (well, for some people at least). I might just check out that guy's book.
  • And now, finally, isn't this the cutest thing you've ever seen?

Comments

  1. DANK JE WEL VOOR JE KAARTJE! :-) See you in heaven slijmbal!

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Of facts and fiction

Just like in my last post, I am going to rant a little bit. You're free to do whatever the hell you like with the outcome.

At the moment, Katie Melua's song "Nine Million Bicycles" gets a lot of airtime in The Netherlands. The song pretty much sucks, but with all those ethnic flutes (insert the mocking, semi-ironic "air quotes" yourself if you like) it being a ballad and all, it goes perfectly well with the season. Whatever. I'm used to hearing horrible songs on the radio.
But the woman is a crazy-ass mofo. In Dutch I would have called her a vreselijke doos, but since the English equivalent escapes me, crazy-ass mofo it is. I mean, she's whacked over the head. The woman is a nutjob, out of whack with reality, loco, whatever you'd like to call it. See for yourself:

There are nine million bicycles in Beijing
That's a fact—it's a thing we can't deny

No, it's not. Something is not a fact, just because some tourguide says it. It's not a fact, just because some guy who found some chick to sing his wussy "jazz and blues [songs] in an interesting way" found it a potential song title. No sheer force of will or a billion pesky, forgettable songs will make the estimation that there are nine million bicycles in freakin' Beijing a fact. Evidence does.
Which brings me to the second verse:

We are 12 billion light-years from the edge.
That's a guess—no-one can ever say it's true

According to miss Melua, we're 12 billion light-years from the edge of the observable universe. But that's a guess. No one's counted all the bicycles in Beijing, but that's a fact. Hordes of scientists have done their very best to come to a good estimate with well-defined error bars of 13.7 billion light-years, but still… a guess. I wouldn't be surprised if a scientist would take offence to this nonsense. And at least one did. British author and scientist Simon Singh wrote in The Guardian:

In short, Katie Melua has no right to call the age of the universe "a guess" or quote it as 12 billion years when we now know it to be 13.7 billion years old.

You might think that I am being rather uptight, but the role of the scientist is slowly being undermined with a growing belief that scientific results are merely subjective guesses that go in and out of fashion. In fact, scientific results are a careful attempt to objectively measure reality, and although they may be refined over time, they are always our best hope of getting at the truth.

And now for the part that ties this post to the previous one: just as I don't care for endless rumours, crackpot ideas and other fiction being passed as truth, I'm not much impressed by bad science or awful songs about loads of bicycles either.

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Bat III; or, I'll see you when you get there

As I might have told some of my readers, Meat Loaf is working on "Bat Out Of Hell III". I am, since earlier tonight, not holding my breath.

Tonight, it became clear that apart from writing the songs, Jim Steinman most likely will not be involved with the album. So while you still got the original concept of Meat Loaf singing Steinman's songs and fantasy art of the cover, you're not going to get the special X-factor. Both times Mr. Loaf and Mr. Steinman worked together on an album, it was something special. Both "Bat" and "Bat II" are high on my list of favorite albums.
However, this isn't the first time that Mr. Loaf works on Jim's songs without Jim's (direct) involvement. 1981's "Dead Ringer" is all Steinman, and both "Bad Attitude" (1984) and "Welcome To The Neighborhood" contain two songs by Steinman. And on 1998's "The Very Best Of", you have "Is Nothing Sacred?". All are made without Steinman's finger in the porridge, as we would say in The Netherlands. And guess what, they are nowhere near as good as they could (should?) have been. Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of them, but I then you have a few I couldn't care much about one way or the other. That special ingredient, that thing "X", is missing. Quite hard to explain, but you'll get my drift.

A lot of speculation has been going on about the who, where, when and how of "Bat III". First, Michael Beinhorn (Ozzy, RHCP, Manson, Korn) would produce it. That was, say, three month ago. All of a sudden, Meat's guitarist Paul Crook says that Desmond Child would be producing. And this week Kasim Sulton, the bass player, confirmed that. I mostly knew Child for his songwriting credits with Bon Jovi, Alice Cooper, Cher, etc. But apparently, he's also a producer now. The closest he's been to producing rock music is Alice Cooper's "Thrash" (with the hit "Poison"), and Bon Jovi ("Bounce", which isn't their best, and "Have A Nice Day", which I still haven't bothered picking up). The closest he's been to producing like something Steinman would do, is Bonnie Tyler's "Hide Your Heart" album. What I've heard from that wasn't bad, but it's nothing special either. For the rest, he's been doing Ricky Martin, Kelly Clarkson, American Idol, stuff like that. I'm all like, m'kay, m'kay?.

Anyway, I've further consolidated my stance on "Bat III": I'll see it when it's done. Until then, don't bore me with rumors and speculation. (I've got a hundred euros here that say I'll love the album anyway—who's taking that bet?)

So today, Steven Rinkoff (Steinman's sidekick/engineer/co-producer since 1986) announced he and Jim are working on various Steinprojects, involving live shows, recordings, the work. Little else is known, and, guess what, a lot of speculation is going on — so that also goes in the "I'll see that when it's done" file. 2006 has a lot of potention of being a great Steinyear. Steinman's projects, Bat III, "Tanz der Vampire" going to Japan and Hungary ... Well, I'll just wait and see.

Until then, I'll be playing some fairly obscure, recently received, 1972 Steinmusic from Jim's long lost "Rhinegold" musical.

Comments

  1. hoe kom je in godsnaam aan die informatie? en een nog betere vraag is; wat moeten wij hier godsnaam mee? wil je dat ik voor je ga zingen?
  2. De informatie komt van www.welkomophetinternet.nl, en wat je ermee moet? Geen idee. Zie maar. En of jij moet zingen? Dacht niet :P