Re: eli's post of 9 ~hrs ago.
What about "I am Jim's Ak-47"?
"I was bought to bring peace to this country; yesterday, I laid waste to an entire village."
/sorry, been reading too much Frederick Forsyth lately
//I want my copy of Day of The Jackal back before you move, Eli!
cool site that has a list of the samples used in hit songs, with audio files to match:
http://jruaux.free.fr/samples.htm
I'll do a little research and get back to you about your keyboard question, billy.
PG article about PACKAGE RAGE referenced on the colbert report:
To: The Amazing Rolo
CC: Yann Seznec
Jon Brodsky
I'm thinking really hard about buying a keyboard. The musical kind. I've wanted/needed one of my own for a while now, and my parents have offered to help pay for it as a combo graduation/birthday gift.
I'm interested in something that is sort of in-between Yann's concert piano model (was that an Alesis?), and Jonbro's synth-sequencer-style Roland. I'd like something lighter & more maneuverable than Yann's, because I'm a little guy. "Weighted keys" are a must, but I'm of the opinion that maximizing the hammer-action doesn't successfully simulate a real piano feel. Or at least, those super-heavy-springy ones feel unnatural to me. So I guess I want something that feels more like an honest electromechanical piano would feel like. In terms of sound, I only need the basics, but I want them to sound quite good. Acoustic grand, maybe an upright, definitely a wurly and a rhodes, and organ would be great too. But I don't need brass & strings patches and all that stuff.
After scouting around in a couple of stores and on the net, the brand that catches my eye the most is this Clavia Nord thing. They have a decent reputation on forums I've perused, and their website seems to have frequent sound patch updates. The 2 criticisms I've seen are that their basic acoustic piano isn't great (but this could be ameliorated by the new updates), and the keyboard isn't top of the line. Their Stage88 looks appealing, and so does the Electro 2, which I actually tried out in a store last week. I liked the straightforward knob interface, and the lack of a pricey and unimpressive touchscreen. Plus, their red keyboards are snazzy looking!
I've also heard that the GEM Promega 3 is comparable to the Stage88, and that the PRP700 and PRP800 may be good choices if I'm not interested in the Promega 3's pricey motorized faders.
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/May03/articles/gempromega3.asp
http://www.harmony-central.com/Synth/Data/Gem/pRP800-1.html
Yann & Jon, I would appreciate any thoughts you have on the matter. Thanks!!
'Jafaican' is wiping out inner-city English accents
by LAURA CLARK, Daily Mail09:56am 11th April 2006
If you struggle to understand Cockney, Brummie, Geordie and Scouse, then stand by for an even bigger challenge.
It's called Jafaican and, slowly but surely, it is infiltrating the English language.
The multicultural hybrid, based on Jamaican but with undertones of West African and Indian, is not a totally new concept, of course. Ali G has been delivering his comic routines in his own colourful variant of it for some years.
But linguistic experts say it is becoming so common in the inner cities that it is beginning to eclipse traditional accents.
In some London boroughs, for instance, it has taken over from Cockney, the prevailing accent for generations, as inner-city white youths pick up the speech patterns of their black and Asian classmates. More than four out of ten London residents are now from ethnic minority backgrounds.
The Jafaican name, conveying the idea of 'fake Jamaican', was coined on the streets rather than in the research rooms. The academics prefer 'multicultural English'. But the message is constant.
"People are beginning to sound the same regardless of their colour or ethnic background," said Sue Fox, of London University's Queen Mary College, who is studying the phenomenon.
She ruled out suggestions that the language is simply the result of white youngsters trying to be cool.
"It's not about that at all," she said.
"It seems more likely that young people have been growing up in London exposed to a mixture of second-language English and local London English and that this new variety has emerged from that mix.
I might be up for the concert, I'll let you know later, Josh...
In sad news, the really cute teller at the 5th/Craig PNC Bank is leaving the job, today's her last day :-(
Boo hoo.
anyone interested in seeing the dirty projectors tonight? they are playing at garfield artworks at 8. i think the show is $7.
here is a review of their concert:
http://www.popmatters.com/music/concerts/d/dirty-projectors-050121.shtml
and a link to one of their videos (NSFW):
http://www.vsanna.com/ww_LO.html
there will also be live video projection and some animations will be screened.
also, we can get pho beforehand because that food is (to paraphase jonbro) the up and over.
Another alternative is to make the central character totally inert. sort of an "I am Jim's pancreas" type thing. The perception of time and space is there, but the narrative doesn't come from an active participant.
...How would a toaster bear witness to a murder?
Those are some really good examples of non-character-driven fiction, Eli. (Zach, I also really enjoyed your evaluation of the James Bond character.) The other night, I was having trouble thinking of literary precedents because I thought Eli was describing fiction that was completely devoid of characters. I can't think of a way you could successfully relate a series of fictional events, i.e. a coherent plot, without ever relating it to an individual human being... I mean, who's carrying out the actions in that scenario? Who's perceiving the passage of time?
If those examples were more what you were trying to describe, Eli, then I think that you could make your story work using that flat/iconic character model that Zach outlined. Maybe limiting the narration to limited-omniscient. Then there would be somebody's eyes perceiving all the events, giving the reader a lightweight framework for following the story.
On second thought, maybe there is a precedent for fiction completely devoid of characters -- the speculative political essays of past centuries. "A Modest Proposal" and the like. Or Thomas More's "Utopia": a coherent, engaging description of a fictional society that never actually invents an individual "person". It just talks about titles/roles that individuals and groups of people would fill. For example, he talks about how "parents" and "children" behave in the general sense.
Eli-
you bring up an interesting point re: James Bond. while certianly there isn't much subtext to the Bond character, Ian Fleming was so precise regarding Bond's eating habits, choices of clothing, specific kinds of cigarettes, cars, etc... that it didn't take much(in the late 50's - 60's) for the reader to suspend their disbelief and imagine that Bond could have been a real person. There was no history to the character, but his current life was so comprehensively described by Fleming that it almost didn't matter where he came from.
I think the tangent I'm shooting for here is an "everyman" character defined by external forces, be they products (what's Bond without the suit and Aston-Martin?) or even Cold War Europe (and the Carribean, and Asia, and Africa...) as a whole.