Music

Wear sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it.
The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists,
whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my
own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.

In late May 1997, Chicago Tribune metro columnist (and "Brenda Starr" writer) Mary Schmich was walking to work along Lake Shore Drive, wondering what she was going to write about that day. It occurred to her that it was near graduation time and she thought she would write a column that read like a commencement address. As she wondered what advice she might offer, she saw a woman sunbathing on the shore of Lake Michigan.

"I hope she's wearing sunscreen," thought Schmich, 45, "because I didn't at that age."

And that's how newspaper columns are born.

A couple of months later, the column became an Internet hoax when a prankster never identified except as "Culprit Zero" copied it, labeled it as "Kurt Vonnegut's commencement address at MIT," and began e-mailing it to his or her friends. The pyramid began. Schmich's quirky, smart style seemed believable as Vonnegut's. It carried the implied authenticity of the printed word. And, on the Internet, the concept of "validity" is often less important than "bandwidth" and "really cool graphics." The spread of the thing was amazing. It eventually reached Buz Luhrmann, who bought the rights of the text, and so the Sunscreen song was born.

What circulates on the Net faster than anything else, it's clear, is jokes.

TW Classic 2005 is over, and I can't say it was very good. Duran Duran was headliner, together with the Belgian rock god Arno and Lenny Kravitz. But Duran Duran just, eh, sucked. Sure, they have one or two good songs on their new album, but the rest isn't "Wild Boys" either. Even when they started on their old repertoire, they could sparc the public. Weird. Luckily Lenny Kravitz knew how to entertain the public, and that made our evening good.

There was heavy rainfall predicted, so I didn't bring my mobile phone with me. That means no pictures of the concert. Pity again.

Like 10 million other Belgian people, it seemed, I tried to get me some tickets for the upcoming concert of U2 in Brussels, next June. All I got in return from the goformusic.be site, where the tickets could be ordered, was a HTTP 503 error (temporary overloading of the server). I would suspect they would have taken measures so that the foreseen avalanche of requests could be handled, but apparently, this is too much asked from any IT department in Belgium, where server infrastructure is held together by strings and duct tape. What's the friggin' point of offering a online ticketing 'service' when it even can't handle the load of the work it's supposed to do. Shame.

From purplemoon.be :

The Invitation 2005 has been cancelled!

Several ongoing arguements with other organisations in Belgium have made it more and more unpleasant for us to continue doing this sort of work. Recent collisions with people from some of these organisations forced us to make this decision. We're no longer interested in organising an event like The Invitation 2005 in such circumstances. Also, the past has shown us that we don't have to expect much co-operation from Belgian magazines and media and that the audience simply doesn't care. These recent collisions were the last straw. In short, we have had enough.

Yesterday we visited the Live gig at the Brabanthal in Leuven. Good concert, with a nice intro gig by Jasper Sterverlinck, but shame about the horrible PA system.

A glass of spirits made of ethereal salt, hermetically sealed up
Kept continually in quicksilver, of so volatile a nature
That it will scarcely endure the light
And therefore only shown in winter
Or by the light of a carbuncle, or a firefly
-- Batwings, by Coil (from the album 'Musick to play in the Dark II')

Johnn Balance passed away on Saturday. Balance was composer and co-founder of Coil, as well as a one-time member of such hugely influential acts as Current 93 and Psychic TV . The official memorial site can be found here.

On October 15th, it will be 25 years ago that Radio Scorpio started broadcasting. From September 13th, Scorpio will look back on its turbulent history, with flash-backs, interviews and different events, celebrating its 25th birthday.

HUMO magazine has a regular column in which they interview someone for the 10 records which changed their lives. This got me on the idea of compiling a list with my 12 favourite songs of the last year. So far, I compiled this list of the past months. For every song, there's a story and a moodswing, but that's for later :

• January [Sadness] : Wall of Sound, by Covenant
• February [Hope] : Technoman, by And One
• March [Party] : Merging Oceans, by Rotersand
• April [Pain] : Care for You, by Wolfsheim
• May [Recovery] : ?
• June [Love] : Could It Be, by Hungry Lucy
• July [Busy] : Love Parasite, by Fad Gadget

I'll place these songs on the Radio Blog entry when I find some time to convert these to Flash audio.

TWClassic is not really my cup of music, but with a few friends and someone very special, it turned out to be quite enjoyable. Alicia Keys and the Corrs were quite good, and Phill Collins was good for some youth sentiment. We had only one rain shower for some 15 minutes, but in comparison with the previous days, the weather was really great.

Ishkur has compiled a great 'family tree' of electronic music, containing many of my favourite bands. The overview has lots of sound samples, so check it out.
(via Kapinga)