Month: June 2008

Me versus the Deconstruction Podcast / Chamber Music project

I’ll have a post-Terrastock core dump here shortly but here’s a couple things in the meantime…

I programmed episode 15 of the Deconstruction Podcast and it was just posted over the weekend. The podcast is worth a listen… I tried to limit myself here to more recent pop stuff that’s been released within the past three years. As usual things take a left turn midway through and that 7% Solution track breaks the rule (it’s from 1996) but I like how it turned out.

Track listing is:

  1. The Morning After Girls – “Run For Our Lives”
  2. Asobi Seksu – “New Years”
  3. Airiel – “Thrown Idols”
  4. The Oohlas – “Gone”
  5. Persephone’s Bees – “Muzika Dlya Fil’ma”
  6. Hooverphonic – “Stranger”
  7. Goldenhorse – “The Last Train”
  8. The Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound – “The Morning Maiden”
  9. Mahogany – “Tesselation, Formerly Plateau One”
  10. Emily Loizeau – “L’autre Bout Du Monde”
  11. The Lovetones – “Everybody Hides Away”
  12. Telenovela – “Breakfast With Birds”
  13. The High Violets – “Xstacy”
  14. 7% Solution – “The Road And The Common”
  15. Ed Kuepper & The Kowalski Collective – “Miracles”

Episode 15 link. RSS feed for the podcast.

Years ago I helped briefly on Fire Records’ Chamber Music project and after a long gestation it’s finally about to be released. NPR interviews producer James Nichols and discusses the project.

Poyekhali!

Just before his first flight into space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin stopped on his busride out to the launch pad to, well, pee on the side of the bus. It’s a long flight and well, when you gotta go, you gotta go. Subsequent cosmonauts did the same before their flight because Gagarin did it and soon enough peeing on the side of the bus became as traditional to Soviet/Russian spaceflight as vodka, asking Gagarin’s ghost for permission to fly, and viewings of White Sun of the Desert.

Thanks to Russian GQ (and English Russia) this mysterious tradition comes to light:

cosmonaut_pee.jpg

ExDetectives June and July shows

exdetectives_goodhurt200806.jpg
ExDetectives played at the Good Hurt on Wednesday night and Everybodystalking posts a review and some photos. It was our first show in several months and it felt really terrific. We have two more shows on the way:

  • Thursday June 26 at Bad Hair Cut / Robertos (in Chinatown on Spring St.)
  • Thursday July 10 at The Derby (in Los Feliz)

We’re on schedule to have a new release out by the end of summer. (photo from Everybodystalking)

ExDetectives - June & July show flyer

AppleScript to rename files revisited

A couple years back I blogged a script that would take a file and append the name of the enclosing folder to the beginning of the file name. For example, a file called “Testfile.txt” inside a folder called “Folderstuff” would be renamed to “Folderstuff Testfile.txt.”

A reader recently stumbled across that script and asked:

That script is exactly what I’ve been looking for, with one exception:

When saved as an application I can’t drag and drop multiple files onto it. In fact, it doesn’t seem to be able to handle multiple files at all, I just get errors.

I’ve done a bunch of searching on how to deal with multiple files but I just cant seem to make it work.

Here are some updated versions of the original script. This first one is meant to be run directly out of Script Editor on whatever files you have selected in the Finder.


tell application "Finder"
set theFiles to selection
set theCount to number of items in theFiles
repeat with i from 1 to theCount
set theFile to (item i of theFiles as text)
set TheName to name of (theFile as alias)
set thePath to POSIX path of (theFile as alias)
set parentFolderPath to text 1 thru ((offset of TheName in thePath) - 2) of
thePath
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "/"
set parentFolder to (item -1 of text items of parentFolderPath) as string
set NewName to (parentFolder & " " & TheName)
set name of file theFile to NewName
end repeat
end tell

And this version is meant to be saved as an AppleScript applet. Drop some files (not a folder on it) and it’ll run with it.


on open theFiles
set theCount to number of items in theFiles
repeat with i from 1 to theCount
tell application "Finder"
set theFile to (item i of theFiles as text)
set TheName to name of (theFile as alias)
set thePath to POSIX path of (theFile as alias)
set parentFolderPath to text 1 thru ((offset of TheName in thePath) - 2)
of thePath
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "/"
set parentFolder to (item -1 of text items of parentFolderPath) as string
set NewName to (parentFolder & " " & TheName)
set name of file theFile to NewName
end tell
end repeat
end open

UPDATE 2008-06-13: Reader Andrew pointed out that the script only grabs the title of the front window and won’t work if you’re in list view and have a expansion triangle open. I’ve updated the scripts to account for that.

Tagged! Seven songs and seven blogs

Ned Raggett tags me with the following blog meme that’s been making the rounds:

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.”

So here we go…

1. Edith Nylon – “Edith Nylon”
1979 French new wave with all of the requisite elements for fantastic new wave: shouty vocals, insistent bass/drums, a synthesizer that does nothing else except announce it’s presence, a guitar line good enough to carry the whole song, vague title/band name reference to synthetic material (think Plastique Bertrand, Poly Styrene, The Age Of Plastic, etc.). Sometimes attitude is indeed good enough.

2. Swervedriver – “Duel”
I fished out Raise and Mezcal Head once word of the reunion tour leaked out and I revise my earlier estimate. “Duel” is now objectively 72% more awesome than I originally remember it being (originally I had this pegged at 62% more awesome when the Juggernaut Rides compilation was released two years back). And for me, Swerve is the kind of band that deserves to be measured in units of “awesome!” “Duel” is my favorite song of theirs by far – you think it’s going one way and then it shifts into another song and then back again. Bonus points for the chiming major-key guitar riff during the “I’m going down, down to the marketplace” chorus. (Video from last month’s show here in LA)

3. Motörhead – “We Are The Road Crew (instrumental)”
A couple months back I stumbled across the VH-1 Classic Albums episode on Ace Of Spades. No further word is necessary here, but there’s an extra from the DVD that made it onto YouTube – a semi-reunion (Clarke is in a different studio and effectively pasted in here) of the Lemmy, Clarke, and Taylor line-up who blast through “We Are The Road Crew” as an instrumental.

4. The Long Blondes – “Nostalgia”
Couples has a bucket full of “difficult second album” clichés, but when I saw them last week they are as furious live as Hanley/Scanlon-era Fall. Obvious pick would be the skittery Can-meets-P.I.L. “Round The Hairpin” but I’m going with “Nostalgia.” This is to 2008 what the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps” was to 2004. At least it should be.

5. Bo Diddley – “I Don’t Like You”
This 5:25 clip is as important to civilization as the discovery of fire, but the first thing I thought of was this track from the utterly insane The Black Gladiator album where Bo reconstitutes himself as a Sly Stone-style funk monster (Dave Alvin’s “The Night Bo Diddley Banned The Beat” is far more instructive rememberance than any of the other pieces last week). The Beat isn’t here, but Bo summons up a wailing howl worthy of Screaming Jay Hawkins before launching into a raunchy version of Booker T. & The MGs.

6. Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark – “Radio Waves”
Yes I did just pick up the new reissue of this. Uncomfortably sandwiched in between their New Wave singles and subsequent John Hughes pop, Dazzle Ships was the outsider album of 1983. “Radio Waves” is the best combination of collapsing circuity and flat out new wave, but you’re never really sure which part of the song is going to take the lead. Producer Rhett Davies should get a little credit for egging OMD on with this. He produced all those Brian Eno albums as well as The B-52’s Wild Planet and Dazzle Ships is the best possible amalgamation of that. Still my most favorite Peter Saville album cover too.

7. Holly & The Italians – “Rock Against Romance”
It’s a fantastically great song. Skip ahead to the 2:40 mark here and go nuts.

That’s it. I’m tagging these folks to carry on the meme.