at the moment i’m listening to metallica. they are playing a concert in the olympic stadium here, the venue is about 1,5km walk from my place and i can hear the concert perfectly. “nothing else matters” just finished.
mtv’s “this is our music” this week came from stockholm. well, it was last week, but i saw a repeat. one of the bands on it is called “sagor and swing” and is a drum and organ duo. some really nice songs. and videos. free. website. check it out.
summer, fall, winter and spring.
genius! (samurai jack, episode 49)
jóse gonzález played his second helsinki concert last saturday night in semifinal club. the venue is about a tenth the size of the main venue in the place (tavastia) where he played last time, so everyone was packed in. even though im pretty tall and was only a few rows from the front i couldnt see him for about half the gig. we got there at around 21 and it wasnt till around 2300 that the support band come on stage, an pretty bad three piece light metal band who sounded like placebo. eugh. anyway it was midnight when josé came on stage and he did about an hour, pretty much the same set as last time and it was fantastic. he finised up with the track “remain” from his veneer album. he played it for his second or third encore and just before he started he said that its been a while since he played it. a really cool concert.
on monday evening was the lawrence lessig talk. he talked about the copyright wars. he spoke a bit about the creative commons movement (which i think he helped to found) and how it helps to redress the imbalance in copyright laws back to the people and away from the lawyers. i need to read up more about creative commons, they just launched version two of their licence and there is rumours that the bbc is gonna open up a large part of their archives with this type of licence. hurray.
in far more important news i cleaned up a lot today, got turned down for a job and had a pretty unsettling dream. i applied for the evening version of the course i want (its 1630-2030, four days a week, for two years). i’ll find out about that next week. fingers crossed. i also ate an ice cream and thought of a cool thing to do when i get my digicam next month. i also learned how to do that aligned image thing in the previous post, in the past i would have the image and the text underneath it, but now i can have the text beside it!. welcome to the 1990s darren.
nothing! the everchanging rain snow sleet sun warm cold damp dry green drinching wet maelstrom that is irish weather has been taken care of. just in time for summer. enjoy!
päivi is gone off to iceland and london for 16days. i am here on my own for all that time. so the next few days should be fine, before i descend into primordial behaviour - i’ll start to make a fort in the bedroom out of socks and old tshirts. then i’ll somehow form my own rudamentary religion based around the worship of the union of bread and cheese in heated toasting machine furnace.
thankfully thomas is here sometime next week for a month, then alice the week after for a week, then sara for a weekend (and our first annual wine and cheese party) then my cousin fionnuala is here for five days.
here is a cd i made for päivi to enjoy. she rang me a little while ago and said that she nearly fell asleep cos of it on her way to tampere airport. good or bad sign?. dunno.
01. badly drawn boy - once around the block (3:44)
02. cyann & ben - selected ambient work (2:30)
03. cyann & ben - siren song (6:23)
04. sigur rós - hvalir í útrýmingarhættu (3:00)
05. giant robot - 09 - jenny (4:36)
06. josé gonzález - heartbeats (2:40)
07. ladytron - seventeen (4:37)
08. stina nordenstam - fireworks (5:46)
09. …and you will know us by the trail of dead - mistakes & regrets (3:46)
10. bob hund - dansa efter min pipa (3:19)
11. håkan hellström - kom igen lena (3:54)
12. nancy sinatra - bang bang (2:39)
13. low - just like christmas (3:08)
14. suede - shipbuilding (3:16)
15. ampop - made for market (5:03)
16. frakkur - untitled [live in reykjavík] (11:00)
17. josé gonzalez - love will tear us apart (3:04)
18. kings of convenience - parr-á-pluie (2:49)
defined by the new yorker as “the most important thinker on intellectual property in the internet era”, creative commons founder, stanford law professor larry lessig is visiting helsinki, and kindly agreed with super-short notice to give a talk on the topic “the future of copyright, culture and creativity” to aula members and anyone interested. the talk will be this coming monday, 24 may at korjaamo (details here, for directions see map). the event will be held in english and is free and open to the public, so please spread the word! also, check out larry’s new book free culture, available for free download here and published by penguin press.
im off to this in an hour or two.
i love randomly finding shows on television late at night. bbc2 after newsnight was great for it, but there doesnt seem to be as many interesting programmes (for english speakers) here. last night i found a programme on swedish television (broadcast in english with swedish subtitles) in whicc a (i think) danish documentary film maker (jørgen leth) and dan holmberg made a movie about america. random scenes of arizona, california, new york city (amongst others). i missed the first half of it, so im gonna get it when its repeated tomorrow
jørgen leth, den berömde danske dokumentärfilmaren och hans fotograf dan holmberg har gjort en personlig och poetisk film om amerika. filmen är inspelad under september 2001 i new york, texas, new mexico, colorado, arizona och kalifornien
elections in finland are different to those in ireland. i cant vote here for parliamentary elections as i am not a citizen, so i didnt take too much time to look into the mechanics of the elections last time around (march 2003). however, the general atmosphere surrounding them was very much different from those in ireland.
in ireland, almost every single telephone pole in the country has posters on it for months before the election. most have smiley happy politicians promising the world, sometimes for referendums they can get a little ugly (previous referendums on abortion and divorce being classic examples). two laws were passed that changed irish elections slightly and subtly. the first one was that no canvassing could occur within a certain distance from the polling station, so no more party faithful harassing you just outside the door of the building. the second one was the introduction of laws governing the erection of posters. before the law, any poster could be put up, and usually it would stay for a few months after the election (funnily enough the winners would tend to leave them longer than the shamed losers). the new law said something along the lines that the posters had the have a notice on them stating who funded them and contact details, also the posters had to be taken down within a certain time frame after the elections. but still the greater part of the madness remains. posters everywhere.
another great thing about elections in ireland, is that the pr system is used: proportional representation. this means that the vote counting is incredibly complex and full of twists and turns. every constituency has a between three and five seats, as opposed to the (for example) english system where its 1 seat only. anyway, the last election in ireland i had my vote taken away from me because i never changed my address on the registration list, and i didnt get a letter asking to confirm my details, so my name was struck off (even though i had voted on previous elections no problem), so the last election i sat it out. however, the day after the election i was at home in limerick and i got lots of food, a comfy place on the sofa and i watched the counting process on television for hours.
this counting day is the only day that irish politicians are even remotely honest. the difference between what the say that day with what they had said the previous day (polling day) and the following days (when the government forming tussles begin) is amazing. they are honest and pretty humble. it can be nine or ten counts before all the seats are given. all the political parties have their own people on the ground (tallymen i think is the name) whose job it is is to lean over the barrier and count the votes as they are being counted and to give word back before each count is announced (which is around ten times per constituency). i’ll miss them days.
finnish elections are a lot more ordered in comparison. i didnt remember seeing any posters last year for the election. trams and buses had a lot of advertising, but it was strange. each party would have several people you could vote for (similar to the irish system), but they had a more varied choice. you could vote for more senior people, slightly less experienced people ……… all the way down to the early twenties person standing for election the first time. some of these people had dreadlocks and were being put forward by the main parties, something that would never happen in ireland. the only young people who went up for election in ireland tended to be the children of dead dáil (parliament) members. these advertisements were there just to show the faces and names. in public spaces then around the city they had boardings erected where each of the parties would affix a small little manifesto or outline of their policies and a list of their candidates. no need for the widespread postering like was evident in ireland.
anyway, whats the point to all this you may ask, well here it is: european elections are coming up on june 13th, and i being a european union citizen can vote!. hurray. so if i get the camera i want, expect some silly pics of me voting.
update: i posted this, then took it down again, i went on a bit of a posting spree during the week, so i decided to hold off on this one for a while. anyway, i was just watching a bbc news report about posters in the irish elections and they interviewed someone from dublin city council who said that there is a limit of two posters per lampost and some streets should be kept poster free (the most famous of which is dublins main shopping street, grafton street). although the reporter on that bbc report did say that he counted 60 posters on one street (it looked like the street outside the irish parliment building).
another poster story here: ireland.com story
