Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

The other day I went together with a few friends to the WhiteSnake rock band concert in Nicosia.  It was the same venue and more or less the same setup as for the concert of the legendary Deep Purple back in 2005.  Except that:

• the sound was really crap this time
• WhiteSnake is not Deep Purple by any means – much more commercial, less passionate
• both video and photo cameras were not allowed, so no pictures
• there was much more advertising for the event, and the place was crowded
• there was a warm-up band, which actually performed better than WhiteSnake at certain times

A few things that I was thinking about during the concert:

• we need more beers
• “F*ck this” and “F*ck that” in between the songs doesn’t suit the romantic mood of many songs.  Like, “Is this love?”
• we need more beers
• like we have SEO – Search Engine Optimization on the web, some over-commercialized bands probably have CCO – Concert Crowd Optimization.  Pointing fingers to random people in the crowd, waving, shouting “Let’s make some f*cking noise!”, and other attempst to engage the audience strongly suggest that.  Plus a few other things.
• we need more beers
• “Ozzy!  Bring back Ozzy!  Ozzy rocks!”
• “Smoooooke on the water!  Fire in the sky!”
• we need more beers

Overall, I did have a good time with all the noise, beers, and fooling around.  But I won’t be going to the next WhiteSnake event.  One is just enough.

P.S.: If you want to see pictures, Flickr can help you out – thanks to small size of modern cameras and huge disregard to rules by rockers all over the world.

I have a rather large MP3 collection.  The directories and files are named correctly more or less, but ID3 tags used to be a mess until very recently.  Two applications helped me to bring some order in that mess.

EasyTag, a GUI application, that helped me to fix lots of broken and add lots of missing comments to my MP3 files.  The smart thing about this program is that it can figure out a lot of data from the names of the files and directories, and that it can grab and replicate partial data from within the albums.

The second program that I wanted to mention, I just found out about today (thanks to Michael Stepanov’s delicious bookmarks).  It’s called tag2utf.  It’s a little Python script that converts the encoding of ID3 tags from koi8 or cp1251 (two most widely used Russian encodings) to utf8.  It’s very easy to install (the only requirement my system needed was python-eye3d library, which exists in Fedora repository) and use.  Just run it from the command line with no parameters and it will recursively look in the current directory for any files that have ID3 tags in non-utf8 encoding.  It will then give you a choice of two encodings to select from (koi8 or cp1251), a “skip” option, and a “manual” option.  All you will have to do is take a quick look at the files, and chose to either convert them from one of the two options, skip them or convert manually one by one.  You will have to make this choice for every directory with non-utf8 files.  Optionally, you can specify on the command line which directories to scan.  In case you need to convert from some other non-Russian encoding to utf8, the script is trivial to modify.

Both tools are excellent pieces of software.  It took me practically no time at all to fix my mp3 collection.  Now I can search it better, and all files display nicely in any mp3 player.  Brilliant stuff!

I just watched a really powerful movie – “Black Snake Moan“.  High quality, and I’m not talking about the DVD copy.

I liked this film from the first seconds.  Before it even started, it positioned itself as a blues movie.  And I love blues.  Gladly, the blues vibe, the atmosphere, and the soundtrack lasted through the whole film.  Some great stuff there, with the “Black Snake Moan” song scene being one of the best music scenes I’ve seen in the movies.

I liked the story and the way it was told.  It was very worked through.  Sometimes predictable, sometimes unexpected, but really followed through.  Probably the fact that the director Craig Brewer was also the one who wrote the script has something to do with it.

Also, there was really good acting.  Samuel Jackson played a character who was (or at least looked) much older than he is.  He did a really good job at that.  Christina Ricci, that little girl from the “Adams Family” … well, she’s not little anymore.  And she’s steaming hot. But not only that, she is a good actress too.  Her character in this movie was rather complicated, but she managed it just fine. Justin Timberlake pleasantly surprised too.  I just recently watched a film with him, and he is so different here that I didn’t even recognize him until the closing titles.  This guy too can act. And he seems to be picking up quite a lot of practice recently.  Also, there were quite a few good supporting actors in the film, so that the whole thing felt like real, like they are indeed inhabitants of a small rural town.

This film, although entertaining, is not purely entertainment.  It feels like it was done, because the filmmaker had something to say, something to show. There are a few things to think about during and after the movie…

Overall, a really nice film.  Strongly recommended for any fans of good acting, drama, and or blues music. 8 out of 10.

Matthew Sidney Long brings up an interesting point with a challange:

Please name me a band over the past 10 years who has come close to Nirvana in sheer impact and talent since Kurt put shotgun to mouth above garage in 1994? (and, I’m not talking about some indie band that hardly anyone listens to or some ring-tone fueled, Top-40 creation who no one will remember in 6 months. I’m talking IMPACT here, people. Combining art AND commerce. Both big AND authentic. Dig?).

My pick would be Rammstein, of course.  That’s the band that made an impact.  I don’t know if it was as strong as Nirvana’s or not, but I think it was pretty close.  As always, I very biased and subjective.

While I was trying to come up with the band, I had a thought about the strength of an impact.  And, as much as I love Nirvana, I have to admit that it was nowhere near the scale of Elvis and Beatles.  There were a few others in between that were larger than Nirvana too.

If Rammstein isn’t as big of an impact as Nirvana, maybe it has to something to do with my theory of sources.  Back in the days of Elvis and Beatles, there were much less sourcse of music available to an average listener, than it was in the days of Nirvana.  Think number of albums, songs, bands, radio stations, television, top-X lists and hit parades, music awards, DJs, Internet, peer-to-peer, mp3s, music shops, etc.  So, each band had a chance of producing a bigger impact back then.  In the last 14 years, since Nirvana, the number of sources only grew.  So, each band these days has even less of a chance to impact the world.

Either that, or the music industry is broken.  Or both.

While reading this post at Techdirt about a starting decline in DVD sales, I was thinking about quality and quantity…

We get more and more music and movies released these days than ever.  But most of them suck.  Most of them suck so badly, that nobody cares about them.  If I’m bored and I have plenty of time on my hands, I’ll watch a movie.  It’ll help me kill a couple of hours.  If that movie sucked or if it didn’t left anything for me to reflect on, I’ll grab the next film from the top of the pile and I’ll watch it.  And then the next.  And then the next.  A couple of years ago I had a period of time when I was watching 4-5 movies a day.  (I had a lot of time on my hands, and I had a friendly DVD rental right next to my apartment).

If in my crusade to burn free time I stumbled upon a good movie, my behavior changed totally.  After watching a good movie, I’d need some time alone to “sink” it into my brain.  To think about it.  Then, I’d go on the web to read more about the movie and people involved.  That can range anywhere from actors biographies and filmographies (most IMDB pages) to movie mitakes and trivia. I’d often feel the need to discuss the movie with other people, read other people’s reviews, blog about it, and, eventually watch the same movie a few more times.  I’d have no problem buying a DVD (bonus materials anyone?).  I’d be more inclined towards investigating and watching films with the same actors, of the same director, producer, screenwriter, etc.  I’ll even go to the movies.

Something similar happens with music.  I’d get an mp3 from the web.  If I didn’t like it particularly, I’d get another one.  If I liked it though, I’d get an album. If the album was any good, I’ll get the discography.  I’ll try to get my hands on live performances.  Videos are very welcome too.  And posters.  And interviews.  And I’ll listen to the music several more times.  Then I’ll learn the lyrics.  Then I’ll listen some more.  If I get a chance to go to the concert, I won’t miss the opportunity.  I’ll blog about it.  I’ll talk about it with people I know…

Now, back to the quantity vs. quality.  Producing a good piece of entertainment, be that music, movie, or anything else, is hard.  Everybody knows that, and I’m not an exception.  It takes time, money, dedication, and talent.  Mass producing crap seems simpler.  However, when applied over huge numbers (think globalization), is it still so?  Is it really easier to keep up with the demand for entertainment by  producing, distributing, and advertising crap?  I don’t know for sure, but I have my doubts.  Why?

Because of two points:

1. Anybody can produce crap.  Seriously, how hard can that be?  Even I can do it.  I know, because I did. (and still do sometimes)
2. The lower goes the quality, the harder it is to see the difference.  How much one crappy movie was worser than another crappy movie?  Nobody cares?  Both of them weren’t worth the time and money the spectator spent on them.  That’s as bad as it can go.

Content is getting easier and cheaper to produce.  Mobile phones had built-in photo cameras for years.  Most of them can record video now too.   And sound.  Semi-professional equipment is getting cheaper too (think camcorders, DSLRs, etc).  Software and hardware is getting more and more powerful, closing up the gap between a personal computer and a rendering cluster.  More and more people are getting connected to the Web.  More and more content sharing web sites are coming up (YouTube, Google Video, Flickr, PBase, etc).

I think the competition in crap producing is getting tougher and tougher because everyone and their brother can do it now.  The quality stuff, on the other hand, is something completely different…

After hacking WordPress for a full week straight, it was nice to see other people hacking other things… These music videos were quite entertaining:

• Stringfever – History of music
• Stringfever – Bolero
• Fragment of the Russian television game KVN – similar to the Bolero.

All three found in this post and comments.

I try to stay as further away from hardware jobs as I can. But sometimes there is no way around…

I’ve been promising some fixes to Olga for about six month now. No music played in our living room during this time. And Maxim was continiously getting closer to power cables and outlets.

So, today I fixed everything. Appologies for a little downtime, by the way. I had to rearrange my harddisks and move about 80 GBytes of mp3s and oggs. I also had to disconnect power cables in order to properly move all cabling behind the table, so that Maxim won’t reach it. Or at least where he won’t see the cables so often.

Now everything is done and back to normal. I even got a bit of free disk space that I can use to refresh my music collection…

Listening to Raven’n'Blues show from BFBS I learned about Pandora.

Pandora is a result of Music Genome Project. Basically, what they do is analyze a lot of music for rythms, instruments, vocals, and a whole lot of other criterias and then help you find the music that you like.

Excellent science project with perfect end user appliance. You get a single box to fill in – write the band or album that you like and you’ll get a whole bunch of music that matches your taste. I’ve been playing around it for half a day only and I have to say that it works out great. Maybe my taste is too simple though. But anyway, I’ve heard many songs that I’ve heard before as well as a lot of new stuff.

You don’t even have to register to try it out for an hour or so. If you’ll listen for longer, it will ask you to create an account, which is as simple as giving your email address, adding a password, and specifying your birth year (you can lie, ma). They also aks for a ZIP code, which is USA specific, but you can always use the Beverly Hills’ 90210.

Enjoy! Let it be my Christmas present to all of you.

Update: You can also save your favourites to a list, share your stations, and do a lot of other cool stuff. My favourites page is here.

Luckily I managed to save a few pictures from KSP5. By the way, since KSP5 was held under the name “Nostalgy” this time, I decided to convert all pictures to black and white. Not that there were a lot of vivid colors anyway…

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-11-12_KSP5

It’s that time of the year again, when crowds of Russian people gather together in Kakomalis picnic place and do all sorts of cool stuff. Playing games, cooking barbeque, shooting lots of pictures, singing songs, dancing, and drinking lots of vodka.

While usually I rush to Kakomalis early after noon, today I only managed to get there by about 7:30pm. Still, I didn’t miss much. Most of the music part was still ahead.

This time was the 5th song festival. Each time it is different fromt he last and so it was today. First of all, the stage was at a different place. It was high up on the hill, so all the tables and people were reorganized quite a bit. Secondly, three core musicians (Albert, Doors, and Vladimir Kardash) had to leave early due to their own reasons, so the “pro” part of the concert was somewhat smaller. There was a new rising star though – Pasha. He was excellent. And multilingual too. And he didn’t limit himself to the usual Russsian and English. He went a few more, including the Turkish language. Truely, the music knows no borders.

Fewer people attended this time and most of them left earlier. I suspect mostly because it was rather cold – about +10C. Women and children are known to get frosty in such temperatures pretty quickly. Not to mention a few hours stay outside.

The party ended around midnight. Overall it was good, but I wanted more. That’s why I continued at one of my favourite kitchens down in Limassol.