he, he, he….

Hat tip to the encyclopedic memory of Jon Cooper

Brigid bought me a brand new 17” MacBook Pro, top of the line job. I do love her. After a week or three of living with it I’m thinking (aloud):

Pros:

1. First off and most importantly to some, it’s very pretty. Well, of course Mac acolytes will tell you it’s much more than that, that it’s a design classic and then bore you for an hour worshiping at the Church of Jonathan Ives. And of course it is all that but to restate the obvious over and over again…well it’s as dull as the design of your average Acer. Shut up.

2. It’s so magnificently easy to multi-task and I’m told that OSX 10.5 is a huge leap forwards here. I love the idea and application of Spaces and use the mouse in top right corner to take me to desktop repeatedly. And the wee bar along the top is very very smart, and user friendly.

3. The dock is so much friendlier than the Windows task bar, although I find the way it hides multiple instances of an app, say Word, on the same icon, a royal pain in the butt when one is flicking, as I often do between documents.

4. Installation. Universal is just so damn easy. I hate the Windows installation process which has only got worse with all the permissions and registry fiddling that’s required to install even the simplest program on Windows

5. Start up…it’s fast. Shit…50 seconds and you’re typing or doing silly things with the effects menus in the much easier to navigate, clearly optimized for Mac, Adobe CS programs. Which brings me to:

6. Floating windows….why does an application have to use all the screen real estate including any dead space…answer: it doesn’t. Photoshop and Dreamweaver are a dream on a Mac. This simple thing has made my life so much easier and productive. I put things where they need to go, not where Microsoft tells me it ought to go.

7. Battery life..so far, fingers crossed.

8. USB recognition. In a PC it takes an age and gets confused. I’m sick of crawling around the registry trying to fix a printer that Vista used to recognize but now won’t. Or a camera, or a scanner, or a card reader….

9. The DVD drive..no more groans and waiting, followed by the not so slight chance that one day Windows will fuck up the drivers so that it tells me it no longer has a drive.

10. Neworks and wi-fi. Turn on..they work.

The Cons:

1. The Office programs are a shadow of their Windows counterparts, with half the functionality, and the Mac equivalent is best not mentioned. Still, you can blame Microsoft for at least a part of that.

2. I miss two buttons on the keyboard….the backspace, which in conjunction with the pc delete button is both easier, and more sensibly user friendly than the Mac setup which is very early eighties..and the mighty Windows key which can be used to do a thousand things from navigation to searches to, well, just about anything, including a lot of things that you need a third party add on to do with the Mac modifier keys.

3. Which brings me to navigation. Maybe it’s because I’m a newbie, but the PC and the Windows environment kills the Mac when it comes to getting around. Windows Explorer has a depth of ease and functionality that Finder doesn’t come close to and many of the very simple things I took for granted as long ago as Windows 95 still require third party add ons, like keystrokes to launch programs or documents, or being able to highlight a file and hit delete to, ahh, delete it.

4. Where is the card reader? You pay several thousand dollars for a wonderful piece of hardware and they leave off the $20 cardreader as an economy move?

5. Can someone point me in the direction of a blog editor…a decent WYSIWYG editor that comes within a light year of Windows Livewriter. I’ve tried a bunch of the more highly recommended Mac apps and they all suck badly.

6. Nothing to with Apple but the Windows apps that either don’t exist for Mac or have punitive Mac upgrade paths (MYOB I’m looking at you…$199 for a Windows upgrade, $500 for a Mac upgrade). Or for that matter web sites that refuse to work under anything but IE Explorer in Windows. I have to run BootCamp just for these.

7. And last, and far and away the most irritating: The Mac acolytes that haunt the forums and magazines. I’ve taken to buying Mac mags and wandering around a forum of two and the verbiage is nausea inducing. Take for example something in last months MacWorld:

If you use a Mac you are automatically hip.

Really, so If I use my Mac to plan a terror attack or draw puerile pictures of naked girls to giggle at in class, I’m still hip?

Or this month in MacLife:

Apple is more than just a company that makes computers, gadgets and software- it’s a game changing free-radical that manifests in multiple dimensions.

Piss off you dick…it’s a publicly listed company which exists to take your money like every other one on the board. It just does that very well.

So well in fact that despite my whinges and niggles I love my new MacBook Pro 17” with a gag speed processor and a bucket of ram, very, very much. As I do my generous wife.

One of the reasons I’m often less than nostalgic for the nest are things like this (via Steve Parkes):

The lead story in Campbell Live tonight was about the annoying, unpleasant, but essentially obvious and uninteresting fact that sometimes dodgy stuff gets in our food

Gosh, flies in the food…dear, oh, dear. That this would even come close to making a current affairs show is pretty funny, in a parochial way. Or at least I would’ve been if it wasn’t for the other events in the world that particular day.

This is what the other lot managed to pull together.

Joe Strummer, somewhere in the USA, talking to Michael Hutchence: Wow it must be strange to be a sex symbol

MH: Well, you’re Joe Strummer..

JS: No I was never a sex symbol. I was just a spokesman for a generation.

I’ve just finishing Chris Salewicz’s Joe Strummer biography, Redemption Song, which I found to be an engrossing and mighty read, trawling with some detail through the life, both high and low, of a man who quite clearly was one of the most important musicians, from any genre, of the past half century. He had a huge impact on me, and indeed, the deaths of only three musicians have bought a tear, the other two being Beatles.

The day Joe died I had a radio show to do and played Bankrobber on the show. It being a dance station I had a couple of texts wondering why I was noting the death of a rocker. I tried, in the most positive way I could, to explain that the dance revolution of the late 1980s was a direct outgrowth and result of the wee revolution led by Joe a decade earlier. It was Joe Strummer, the rest of The Clash, and the likes of John Lydon who made the rule that there were exactly no more rules, which snowballed into the indie revolution, garage electronica, the post punk scene and the club explosion.

You’re a DJ?…thank Joe Strummer.

After I finished the book I watched, with Brigid, the Julian Temple doco, The Future Is Unwritten. It was beautifully crafted and quite moving (although it tried a little too hard, as Temple does and I think I got quite a bit more of the man from the book) but we both agreed as the movie ended that there was much about Strummer that we would both have rather have not been reminded of. And that, despite the critical success of his post Clash band, The Mescaleros, you couldn’t help but feel that the singularly worst decision he took in his life was to fire Mick Jones in 1983. After that he seemed to spend the rest of his life trying, sometimes without direction, sometimes with, to grasp past and lost glory. It felt a bit empty, and the one time I saw him live in this phase, I felt the same. You couldn’t help but think that both of them were slightly workman without the other.

Why am I writing this now? Well aside from the book, which, as I say, I recommend above the DVD of the doco as having a little more flesh and substance, and having a little less of the mouth open idolatry, I’ve been thrashing the recent live Clash album, recorded at Shea Stadium, some 11 months before Jones got the boot.

The Shea concert, supporting The Who, is the stuff of legend. It was the moment that The Clash looked likely to take the USA and the world by storm and become the heirs to bands like The Who and The Rolling Stones. They didn’t of course, they imploded and, for our sins, we got U2 instead.

I’ve got a couple of other live Clash bootlegs, one from mid 1977, all snarl and punk, and one, although unlisted, from I think the (in)famous Bond’s season a year before this and both of those, for want of a better word (and there must be one, I just can’t think of it) rock.

Then there is the earlier live album From Here To Eternity, which largely fails because it tries to hard to be too many things (although the Ska version of White Man recorded in Boston around the same time as this album is a killer) and is a live compilation rather than a set..

But the Shea Stadium show works because it is a band on the edge, a band under silly pressure, and it captures the freneticism of the moment before it all goes pear shaped.

Starting with a very 1977 sounding London Calling, and then stomping into Eddie Grant’s Police on My Back, it roars ahead like a Ramones live set, with only 45 minutes to get through the song before The Who. It’s a band on a short fuse in more than one way and all the better for it.

And then, four songs in, it drops into the much written about Magnificent 7 / Armagideon Time / Magnificent Dub, premiered a few dates before this show, which takes you to the core of where this band had got to, five years after White Riot.

‘Now play it like a twelve inch’, says Strummer, and admits to the band stealing the rhythm one night from the Black New York grooves that Jones was so enamoured of, as it drops from the funk groove into a mighty Armagideon Time skank, much tougher and looser than the single version, before jumping back into the 12” dub mix of The Magnificent 7. It’s along way from even the pointer of Police & Thieves on the first album, and it’s one of these reasons why the band’s implosion was a such a sin, at least from a fan’s point of view.

After that little journey the album hiccups a little with a slightly plodding Rock The Casbah (which, lets face it, was one of their lesser tunes anyway), and set filling Train In Vain but then tears in into a scorching quartet of tunes, the magnificent Career Opportunities (also on the earlier live album, and also on a the CD as a video…only Joe Strummer could possibly have looked cool in a coonskin cap, although that may be subjective), a couple from from London Calling, and then English Civil War, as strident as it needs to be when one considers both the venue and the war in the band, which had already seen Topper Headon sacked.

But what pulls this album together, and makes it one of those very rare beasts, a live album that works without the visuals, is the sheer force of Strummer the very British showman. With the genius of Mick Jones’ melodies, and his own very raw almost stripped Staxish vocals, and lyrics, it’s Strummer the great rock poet of the post Lennon era who makes the record soar in a way that a thousand U2 albums could never approach. It was Strummer, the populist revolutionary punk poet who waved the flag, beat the drum and pulled it all together just for a brief few years before it disappeared forever, not just for us but for him.

Where’s the hair gel? We can’t start the revolution without hair gel!

Joe Strummer, 1982

So a huge pat on the back to Savage (South Auckland’s hip hop superstar if you didn’t know) who has gone on to sell 1.1 million copies of his track Swing as a download and a ringtone in the USA.

It’s a mighty feat, and I know more than most know how much hard work and sweat, let alone nights on the road and knocking on radio and media doors goes into this sort of thing. It doesn’t happen overnight and is also a mightily expensive exercise, so much so, that single sales of this sort are unlikely to have made much of a dent in the bill.

The NZ Herald, as I linked above, posted a story about it on Wednesday, which in itself is good as NZ should be making more fuss about this.

However, in it’s normal fact free way (remember, this is the same paper who said the Debbie Harry was a Brit Pop singer a few months back) the Herald now tells us that Savage has sold 1.1 million:

Now I don’t wanna be a sourpuss, but surely a quick check of the facts before posting this would’ve been in order. I have no idea what Don’t Dream It’s Over sold but I know exactly what Pauly Fuemana and Alan Jansson sold with How Bizarre.

The thing is, it’s impossible, in the US at least, for Swing to have outsold How Bizarre, or undersold it for that matter as it was never released in that territory as a single. Its number one status in the US came on airplay charts as the licensing label, Mercury, made a decision to only release the track as a one song on the album of the same name. That album reached number 39 in the US and to date has sold just over 1.5 million copies in the US, thus making it a platinum album. The single was exported extensively from Canada to the US but that was the only way it was ever available.

It was number one on the pop charts which are airplay based.

Globally, to date, How Bizarre has sold some 2 million singles and just over 2.2 million albums.

So, once again, this is in no way meant to take anything away from Savage but just a note to correct the Herald’s shonky reporting..again.

And over at Apple, home to the cult of all sorts of things, they seem to be having a customer service meltdown with older versions of iTunes spitting the dummy after taking money for tracks and JobsCorp saying, essentially, fuck you…

my favourite response from the good folks at iCentral comes from one Brooke:

From the church never forgets file:

The paper dismissed Lennon’s much-criticised remark that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ as a youthful joke.

Gosh…..I guess the past 28 years waiting outside the pearly gates are over.

Next they’ll be forgiving Martin Luther