andcurve.weblog - The weblog of Kevin Teljeur. Somewhere within all the noise, there is a note you need to hear.

Hm. I said it was dead, didn’t I? The Kaoss Pad Mod story. In fact, I went so far as to say something like: “www.make-phil-and-his-fucking-contraption-history.com”. Well, I was wrong to do that, partly because it was a negative and abusive thing to say (Particularly of someone who hides from society, seeking solace in vandalising his musical equipment; the guy needs a therapist. Or a slap.), but mostly because not long after posting that story, I found that someone close to where I live is using the Kaoss Pad Mod in a very interesting and creative way.

One Jack Freeney, Painter and Decorator, has installed the Kaoss Pad on the front gate of his house over on Roselawn Road, whch I pass every day to and from the train station. And what a gate it is too. Granted, even mobility-impaired dwarves (And there are more than ever now, since the EU started handing out grants for them.) could hop over it, and it’s probably there to discourage people from getting to close to the house and being disorientated by all the tasteless ‘decoration’ on and in the house, but it has a set of controls just outside of it that would put a Boeing 747 cockpit to shame. I can only assume that he’s an extremely busy man or has attention deficit disorder or perhaps even is just remarkably thick, and that is why it takes so much hardware to get him to temporarily stop transforming his house into a grotesque, gold-veneered plasterwork nightmare and come out to open the door. Including having installed the Kaoss Pad beside everything else; presumably if he’s being particularly intransigent, or perhaps working on an entirely turgid and completely unoriginal home decoration concept, then you can lure him out by playing tunes on the keypad and use the Kaoss Pad to fuck with his sense of reality. Or maybe, as a light relief from his efforts, he comes out some evenings as the light is fading and gently plays a few tunes which he thought up that afternoon, poetic ruminations of the nature of silicone sealant, gently touching the keys and stroking with the lightest of passes, the Kaoss Pad. In reality I have no idea what goes on in the mind of Jack Freeney, Painter and Decorator.

I got as far as playing two thirds of the guitar noodling sequence from ‘I am The Resurrection’ on it the other night before he came out to shout at me for using the wrong chords. I was disappointed, but also secretly pleased in a way. He’s my hero.

The old coot.

This is great. “Hi, my name’s Phil…” - etc, etc. What an opening line to a demonstration video of some guitar japery in ‘Phil’s Epiphone Les Paul Kaoss Pad Mod’. There’s a lot more where that came from, along with a number of fascinating yelps, squeals and strange noises for which there are, in all likelyhood, no names yet assigned. If this guy was to really try to extend his vocubary of noises, then I doubt even a hardened team, hand-picked by Garret himself, could keep up.

I got this link from this article on Ars Technica, which is a great site, full of pearls of wisdom and often some good writing too by fellow geeks.

Incidentally, this link is dedicated to David and to Sean, who are both great fans of making peculiar and frequently loud noises with guitars and other implements (and, damn their talented hides, quite good at it too.) which I enjoy listening to. I’d like to learn how to play guitar myself one day. I have no talent for music, but these things don’t always stop me (even when it would be in the Greater Good for me not to try).

If either of you guys have an opinion on this link or additional information, please comment below!

This business of just linking to stuff is going to get old very soon, but stick with me and enjoy the wild ride into… The World of Interweb Kevin and his 802.11g connection to the world!

Me, striding manfully up the beach at Wexford a week ago. I should have been on Baywatch, or Celebrity Love Handles. Click image to view larger version…

The last chunk of new music I got my hands on was an album by ‘Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’ by none other than ‘Clap Your Hands Say Yeah‘, a band who made their name by self-publishing and getting rather famous by being good and getting talked about on the Interweb (as opposed to shagging a music executive and having huge amounts of money poured into advertising their album). Kenny had been going on about them for a while, and then my brother Conor got me the cd, which was good. Very good.

Now, I was biased because I hadn’t listened to anything new in a while, and I tend to get blown away by any music that I haven’t listen to over and over and over on my iPod, several times a day for the last four years. This is actually slightly peculiar since I have something like three thousand tracks available to me, at least a thousand of which are not stupid sound tracks or incredibly crap, so I should be able to go and explore some of these. More over, a lot of those are actually sets from full albums (Don’t worry IRMA, I own them and paid far too much for them, as you well know, you cunts.) and I haven’t even ‘ripped’ a lot of my other albums onto my iPod either. Sometimes I even take out my portable record player to listen to my cds; it’s great, having these big plastic disks which you have to swap when you want to hear a song by a different artist. Anyway, I don’t do these things, for whatever reason, and my mind is starved of new music, which is why I get very excited by hearing something new and good, and then I get obsessed with it for about two to three weeks before I go back to listening to the hundred or so songs that I feel comfortable with (You can take that as being too lazy to set up a new playlist. Yes, apathy, my friends!).

A good manifestation of this effect was after I went to the Castle Palooza festical and came across ‘8 Ball‘, an up and coming band with a good sound; I located the website, downloaded the samples, and then listen to the samples over and over and over like some sort of crazed, obsessive loon. I am, possibly, a crazed obsessive loon; that’s not the point. It’s just not healthy and it was clear that new music was required. Also, their album is apparently not available, or out of print, or banned or whatever, one of these things you have to do leg-work for and then be bitterly disappointed.

Before I get to the explanation of where all this is going and the subsequent linkage, there’s something I need to point out (and I do so love a good pointing) which is that I have a habit of endorsing enthusiastically whatever I’m into, or doing at the moment. Five a Side Football, learning Romanian, contracting, premature baldness, masturbation, whatever it is, if I’m doing it then I’m convinced that everyone else should be doing it too because you’ll all enjoy it at least as much as I have. But you knew that, because if you’re reading this then you know me, right? Yeah, I have a post for you on that subject shortly. The net effect is that if I find something I like then I have to tell everyone to get onto that too. If this blog ever started getting read by more than five or so people (make that a tentative six, since we may now reliably have Aideen onboard; time will tell.) then I could make a living out of doing things and then endorsing them. Somehow.

So I needed some new music, and at the same time I have difficulty with going out to a music store, because of all the hassle involved in trying to find a cd, comparing prices, all that. The iTunes online music store is not bad, but it’s a swindle because they’re charging the same as I’d pay for a cd in a shop, but without all the bells and whistles. Some cds, notably a few from Sony, have copy protection, whereby if you put the cd into your Windows PC it installs some software which opens your PC to virus attacks (I’m simplifying here) and then prevents you from copying the music onto your PC, and then onto your mp3 player. So you still need your portable record player, thanks to those stupid cunts. Buy a Mac instead, which allows you to carry on as usual and looks nicer. I want my bells and whistles if I’m paying for them. Or I can go to Amazon or somewhere like that and again, try and get it cheaper by searching around a bit, and then wait a few weeks while they figure out how to get it to me and An Post (our beautifully hopeless local postal service) loses the delivery.

Or I can go here:

AllOfmp3.com
Cheap music to download from Russia!
http://www.allofmp3.com/
Yes, I finally decided to take the plunge and try this site. It sells music (Not quite everything, but a damn good selection.) in almost any format you can think of, and it’s legal. In Russia. So, I went to Russia on the Internet, bought credit, selected the music I wanted, it sent me an email when the site had processed my request and put the files up for me, and I downloaded them! I organised them and put them on my iPod! It was cheap and easy! Ok, almost too cheap, Russia isn’t known for being the most secure place to do business with a credit card (Possibly less safe than Finglas West.) and I was a little disconcerted when the credit card company rang up a few hours later to check if I really intended buying the fissile uranium from Uzbekistan, to which of I course I said maybe, depending on the quality. The site is easy to use, well-designed and clearly secure (You only get one shot at every download, but it hangs on to them until it knows you were successful and only charges when you complete the download) and I’m totally comfortable with using it. This is the way this should work.

I’ll say it again, because I love repetition and over-emphasis: This is the way this should work.

It was cheap, the cost is basically calculated by file-size which is dictated by the quality and format of the files, so an album might work out to between two to five euro, and the processing (they generate the files on demand, depending on if you request a popular format) is fast. The site is something that so many other similar businesses could learn from; it looks great and still delivers the goods. It even has decent preview samples!

I would actually pay even more per album, and with that I’d like a PDF file of the cover and sleeve notes, but the basic principle is great, and this is the way it should work. Everyone could make money off the deal, especially the recording artist, and the losers would be the people who are currently making money by having a big office and a sharp suit; yes, these are also the people who are opposed to a better way of doing business and who will sooner or later find themselves having to adapt to having to work for a living. I mean, it’s a model that works for the guys at the top of the pile, but there will over time be more bands who will move into the new model which makes use of the Interweb and new technologies.

The next discussion would be, how about myspace.com getting into selling music for unsigned bands? That is the begginging of the new model, and they have the money to push it. Bring it on.

Oh, and the music itself.

• New Order
  Yes, the obsession continues, and my therapist says that listening to some actual albums light help. They don’t need any further introduction.
  • Waiting For The Siren’s Call
    Bloody excellent. Krafty is particulary good, and is why I wanted this album. It’s very good indeed.
  • Power, Corruption & Lies
    Not bad, although a lot of it sounds like variations on ‘Blue Monday’, so I guess that was the sound of the day, or maybe the sample was broken or there was a sort of concept there or something.
  • Substance
    Great stuff in there. Yes please. All the collected singles up to 1987.
• Goldfrapp
  Didn’t hear too much of their stuff, but apparently they are where it’s at and I decided to taste a bit. They generally seemed to get good reviews, and they have a very reclusive, shy lead singer after whom the band is named.
  • Black Cherry
    Great stuff. Touch of the Gary Numans about it, but he was always top notch, if a bit of a whinger. She really has an excellent voice and it’s great stuff. Harsh electronic sounds with a good beat. It’s definitely ‘different’.
  • Supernature
    The opening track, ‘Ooh la la’ is what sold me on this, and the rest of the album is as good. Fantastic stuff. The sound can be a bit repetitive at times, and it seems intentionally a bit retro. Some great dance tracks, which I like.
• Snow Patrol
  Oh dear! Material for another post! This is because I went to see Snow Patrol a couple of weeks ago with the Jennifer (I got her tickets some time ago, to cheer her up; she’s a big fan. A very big fan.) and heard the music for the first time. Not bad, and a great live act, which always does it for me.
  • Final Straw
    Good music, but miserable stuff. It’s an album of misery, although the music itself is chirpy enough; I decided to actually listen to the lyrics because Jen talks about it a lot and it seems to have made a big impression on her. Man, I’m going to think long and hard before I buy her an album again, it gets me into all sorts of trouble.
• Blondie
  Again, if Blondie needs an introduction then you need to get out from under your rock more. Seriously now.
  • The Platinum Collection
    A collection of all the singles, the hits… Forty-seven tracks. It’s probably every piece of music, every squeak, every burp and every fart they ever made. Dear God, what was I thinking. Some great stuff in there though.

Now I’ll have to listen to it all, compile some new playlists, and worst of all clean out the crap. There is a lot of it in there, believe you me.

As Bernard Sumner of New Order might say; “Ooooooh ooooh, I like you, you run away, there’s a wall between us, the sun comes up, people everywhere, Oh, you’ve got hairy legs, you’ve got hairy legs, you’ve got hairyyyyy legs, and I’m too short, oooooh, oooooh, oh! Oh!”, and I think we all know what he meant by that. I’ve been listening far too much to the same 5 songs by New Order recently, but you’d probably guessed that already. It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here and in fact the biggest contributors have been you, the people reading this site. Happily commenting away. You could sign up, and even write posts yourself! Why didn’t you do that? You could have added something meaningful, post some photos, maybe start a small community, or some pod-growing scheme to revitalise the economy of Longford, perhaps. But you didn’t. You waited.

You could have read back over some of the old posts, because I suspect you missed some of the more controversial statements altogether, buried within layers of articulate but verbose ruminations on this idea, that activity, the other place. And you can still go back and check, if you like. Why didn’t you do that? There were some great photos. Comment below, if you can find the controversial statements.

I have a set of notes on what I was going to write about, but… I don’t know where they are. I’ll have to find them. In the meantime, you might enjoy these:
Michael, Liam, Caroline and John just after we arrived at the church for Michelle and George’s wedding. Hellraising joyride against the clock to get there. But we survived. Click image to view larger version
Michelle and George exchange vows and agree to dedicate themselves to each other. This was after a fantastic stand-up routine by the priest, where he told the most inappropriate jokes possible. Comic genius. Click image to view larger version
Michelle and George signing the register, for what must have been the fifth time, for the cameras. That chap does a great wedding, I’ll have to remember him for mine. The priest was good too. Click image to view larger version
John, Caroline, Liam and Michael just after the main show, waiting for something to happen. There were in fact no major dramatics, which was good and yet slightly disappointing. Nicole! Click image to view larger version
Michelle and George, the happy couple, outside and telling everyone how happy they are. They even got the sun, which was an unexpected bonus. Click image to view larger version
The Conway entourage (Michelle’s family) after the main group photo. I have no idea where they were headed to. Click image to view larger version
Michelle and George cutting cake. It took them long enough, with all the theatrics and photography. Click image to view larger version
Michelle and Caroline, with Geesa in the background. Wedding dress aside, it’s just like good old days. Click image to view larger version
James, George and Michelle, wittily entertaining each other after dinner. Click image to view larger version
Me giving the camera-man the finger. I don’t know who the camera-man was, but shortly afterwards the tiredness got me and I went home, via some interesting shenanigans involving taxis. Click image to view larger version

Yes, my friend Michelle finally married George (it was his idea apparently, but I’m not so sure) and it was a great day, not least for them and we were all very, very happy for both of them. No-one hit anyone else, no-one tried to ‘nicole’ the proceedings, and even the weather which was predicted to be brutal, behaved itself when it was required to do so. A good day had by all, and we wish them all the best for the future.

Now, I had a look for my notes while you were marvelling at the wonderfully turgid wedding photos (I’m a turgid photographer, by and large), but I’ve lost them along with my driving licence so not only do you not get to read the great things which I had sketched out laboriously one morning while feeling particularly bitter about the way my life is going at the moment (in a nutshell, professionally things are great; I’m at the top of my game there. But personally it’s starting to become a bit of a shambles, and I’m considering pharmacutical assistance to get that extra eighth day out of the week), I also can’t drive in the car I don’t own. The purchase of a car is planned, because now I have enough money to buy anything I damn well want, but if the licence really is gone then I’m sort of fucked on that front too. Since I’m working up to ten or twelve hours a day I’m not really thinking about anything else these days.

It’s not looking good. Other people keep it together under far tougher circumstances, and I’m really just being weak and self-indulgent here; take a look at what’s happening in Lebanon for example. One day you’re minding your own business, the next day the shitheads next door come over and try to wipe you off the face of the Earth. If you’re passing an Isreali embassy any time soon, throw stones at it. You’d have been right to do it to German embassies in the 1940’s and Isreal is cut from the same cloth (it’s not even ironic). One of these days that state will get what’s coming to it, and I will shed no tears for it’s supporters.

So I’ll keep looking for those notes, and then I’ll get the 60 or so turgid photos I have here on my hard drive up as a post. If I have time. I don’t have much of that any more. I’m going to get back on the cross now, and get back down later when there’s more to say.

(Edit 3rd August ‘06: You’re in trouble now, whoever you are. I have the bitter notes. And the turgid photos. The all-whinging, all-moaning spectacular is in production right now. Corrected some bad grammar too.)

Right, a quick little post about some h0t chixx0rs! That’s right, hot women, and from abroad at that. Now, I know loads and loads of hot women, I’ve dated and had relationships with some of them, and I tell myself this a lot in order to stave off the relentless waves of insecurity and self-loathing. Anyway, as many of you are aware, I was in Romania in Summer of 2003, in Timisoara, and it was one of the more interesting episodes of the last couple of years. I made a few friends there and on Monday night I managed at some point to chat to all of them.

The main square in Timisoara. It’s somewhat Italian, with a hint of Dun Laoghaire

I got there enroute to Serbia (at that stage I still harboured some vague notions of hitting Albania, and maybe looting a few shops or starting a pyramid scheme or something) but I was determined to see where my friends Vlad and Diana were from. Let’s be honest here; in Ireland, until recently, Romania was seen as a very distant country, a grim, nuclear wasteland inhabited by ‘Big Issue’-wielding Gypsies and ruled by Communists. You weren’t likely to meet any ‘Romanians’ in Ireland other than those Gypsies. And then, one day, this guy starts working in the company. He’s dark, latin and somewhat brooding, in a conflicted way. He looks a little bit like Keanu Reeves after a hard night on the town and could do with a shave. He doesn’t say much. And then we find out he is Romanian! A real, live Romanian, who isn’t looking for small change for his poor baby, and in fact doesn’t look as if he’ll start stealing anything! He’s called - get this - Vlad! You know? Vlad the Impaler! From Transylvannia! Dracula! So, that was impressive, and instantly put paid to a lot of stereotypes caused by years of selling a lousy magazine by Roma Gypsies (whose roots are in India, originally). I didn’t know that Romanian was a latin language, or that the country is a very young one, while being a very old nation with it’s roots directly traceable to Roman times… It was every bit as eye-opening as when I first got to know Petr and then Pavel, and learnt about Czech history, lanuage and culture.

Vlad and Diana, Romanians at play. They play a lot, and then discuss it

So, I got there on the train from Budapest in Hungary, and immediately you could see that these were a different race of people altogether to the reserved and subdued Hungarians. They were like Italians, relaxed, animated at times… Latin. Now, I had a series of adventures there right from the outset but that’s not what I’m getting at here; it’s the connections between people. I had a set of numbers for contacts to call, a certain Ilca (I later discovered by trial and error that his first name is Marius and Ilca is his second name. That is Vlad for you.) and Roxana, a friend of Diana’s. Also, there was Horea, who knows both of them, more or less. Marius was off on holiday by the Black Sea, but organised a friend of his to go and meet me - a girl by the name of Oana - something which Horea, once I’d met him and explained the situation, found intriguing and mystifying (which made me wonder if she was a nutcase or something). Actually, I’d say that Marius was hedging his bets; on the off-chance I found Horea hard work, then I was very unlikely to find Oana hard work. I doubt anyone would. As it happened, Oana also brought her friend Michelle and I brought gaggle of Americans I’d met in the hotel I stayed in earlier that day. We all hit it off and I even got my head around Horea’s sharp sense of humour, and they all spoke fantastic Engleza. Something I noticed, in fact, was that by and large almost all younger people there spoke very good English; I don’t neccessarily see it as a good thing, or a cultural advantage, but it was very helpful. Romanians are generally good at language, possibly because Romanian has a Latin base but also has smatterings of Slavic, Germanic and Hungarian in it.

So, that is how I met Oana, who I was chatting to several nights this week. It seems she switched on Yahoo! Messenger for one reason or another last Monday, and lo and behold! I’m on all the time, myself, thanks to the miracle of broadband. We hadn’t talked in quite a while, but we’ll probably chat a lot more now, since we can waffle away online.
Oana (on the left) and Adina eating famous Tiramisu. They were the Popular Girls, and that was quite a night.

Anyway, I stayed in Horea’s (tiny) apartment that night, and caused all sorts of mayhem thanks to a devastating mix of alcohol and dehydration. He headed off on his holidays the next day, leaving me to fend for myself… I also had to catch up with Roxana who was just back from a Hungarian pop/rock festival, and Oana was going to put me in touch with someone who had a place to stay. Also, her friend was having a party that night, which I’d have to go to.

I met up with Roxana, and we hit it off and hung out, after I tried a MacDonalds. Athough I generally boycott the Mac, Vlad had assured me that they’re wayyyyy better in Timisoara. They’re not. They’re just as crap there as here, even though the service is marginally snappier. We went out on the town, rounded up Roxana’s friend Sorin, and went to Oana’s friend’s party…

Roxana at a recent concert, doing her thing. She does that a lot. Concerts, I mean.

As it turned out, Oana knew Sorin too! Whoa. Small world. She’d never met Roxana before though. Great night was had there, it was a lot of fun, Sorin jumped into the pool, some people drank a lot of tequila, and there was a lot of crazy dancing and great music. I used to chat to Roxana a lot online, since we were both at work at more or less the same time, and both somewhat bored. However, I have removed such things from my PC now, and Roxana roams Romania doing French-Romanian interpreting for some people studying factories or something.

Like I said, Oana put me in touch with a guy who had a place to stay. I really didn’t want to stay in the hotel again because although it wasn’t too expensive for me, it’s not what I wanted to experience as part of the travel, and Timisoara’s only hostel had been closed for the summer for some reason. That guy was Faust, who Oana knew somehow (I heard more about that from Faust later, but I’ll keep that to myself for now). Faust talked in a Chicago accent; I initially figured that he’d learnt his English and indeed his manner from watching too much MTV, but as I got to know him better, I realised that he was actually over for a holiday from Chicago, where he was hanging out with the locals. I’d go so far as to say that he was a black guy in a white body… He rented me his grandparent’s apartment for €10 a night (which didn’t go down very well with anyone else, but he needed the money for his holiday in the Black Sea so he could bang some chick his girlfriend didn’t know about) which was fine for me.

Anyway, after variously hanging out with Roxana or Oana, I went for drinks with Faust one afternoon, and while we were sitting in the cafe (Papillon, for anyone who’s been there) some girls were trying to get Faust’s attention. Fabulous, beautiful girls… Faust ignored them. Then, after about 20 minutes of us talking, Faust decided we’d go and sit with them for a bit, which is how I met Ramona.

Ramona, demonstrating the art of Romanian glamour. She has a small cat, too.

After a few minutes (where Ramona’s friend flirted with me; I have beautiful eyes!) Ramona decided I needed a tour of Timisoara, and to explain some of the local history and culture. This is, of course, how I got to know Ramona. We didn’t have too much contact until earlier this year, when she finished college (the same course that Vlad did, I believe) and got broadband at home, so we’ve been chatting a lot since then.

It goes to show the whole ‘6 degrees of separation’ principle, and how close people are to each other without realising it… Neither Oana nor Ramona know Vlad or Diana, and Ramona’s connection to them is through Oana via Faust, even though Ramona doesn’t know Oana. So, when all three of them were online within an hour, well, it was a strange but good feeling which inspired me to relate the story about Kevin in Timisoara, and was a fantastic excuse to post photos of stunning h0t chixx0rs.

And thanks again to Oana, Roxana and Ramona for helping me out, showing me around and generally making sure I had a good time (and thanks also to Horea, Marius, Faust and last but definitely not least, Vlad and Diana). This is the short, five minute version, but it’ll do

(footnote: added 16.12.05)
Romania: in case I wasn’t clear about it, Romania is a fantastic place. Yes, it is poor, it needs work but it’s also changing rapidly. It’s like Ireland was only a few decades ago, but people really seem to be trying to move things forward. I know I wasn’t there long but it left a good impression on me.
Engleza: Yes, I’m labouring the point. But I haven’t gotten my head around that fact that Roxana (for example) speaks English better than I do. Oana looks like coming a close second, my jaw was flapping loosely at some of her constructions the other day. And Diana, well, you can tell that she’s not a native speaker because her English is far too good, it’s technically flawless, which always a give-away. Vlad and Ramona are good too, but Vlad is more interested in body language and words for peculiar and probably illegal sex acts; I’d say his collection of words is pretty good now. He speaks buna engleza when he needs to.
h0t chixx0rs: I came across this phrase while looking some article on the web. It’s cool. I made the Romanian adventure before I lost my cherry, so I wasn’t actively trying to chase women, I just (as I explained above) met lots of them. What a waste you may think, but I made good friends and that’s what matters at the end of the day.

Help yourself to questions and if anyone wants to add or correct any part of that, please do…