4AD 1996

Listen to 4AD 1996 on Spotify.

Let’s focus on the positives: Dead Can Dance returned with Spiritchaser, and that’s a quite good album. Throwing Muses continued the streak begun with University and released another excellent album. His Name Is Alive went in a new direction: They discovered the Beach Boys. Heidi Berry released her final, and her most fabulous album, Miracle. And Lisa Germano released another really spiffy album.

So that’s all pretty good, right?

But the year is pretty much dominated by 4AD trying to make Lush the great new Britpop sensation, and I think they were successful? It did mean that they shed everything that was great about them, and I don’t think there’s anything from their six (!) EPs or the album they released this year that I enjoyed.

The other “big thing” 4AD tried to make happen was Icelanders Gus Gus, which wasn’t as successful commercially, I think. I kinda liked the music at the time, but I haven’t listened to any of afterwards. I seem to recall it being very mid-90s?

And then there’s the Paladins album, which I think a lot of people interpreted as a practical joke upon the listeners.

I’m still not sure that’s not correct, but I don’t want to hazard listening to the album again to make sure. You may feel a certain compulsion to start skipping when you get to that part of the playlist.

1996

	BAD CD6001 Lush — Single Girl Single Girl, Tinkerbell, Outside World, Cul de Sac
	BAD D CD6001 Lush — Single Girl Single Girl, Pudding, Demystification, Shut Up
	BAD CD6002 Lush — Ladykillers Ladykillers, Matador, Ex, Dear Me (Miki’s 8-track home demo)
	BAD D CD6002 Lush — Ladykillers Ladykillers, Heavenly, Carmen, Plums and Oranges (Neil Simons)
	BAD 6003 CD Scheer — Shéa Shéa, My World, Demon (acoustic), Nemesis
	CAD6004 Lush — Lovelife Ladykillers, Heavenly Nobodies, 500, I’ve Been Here Before, Single Girl, Ciao!, Tralala, Last Night (Steve Orborne), Runaway, The Childcatcher (rerecorded), Olympia
	AD6005 Scheer — Wish You Were Dead Wish You Were Dead, Hanging on the Telephone
	CAD6006 Scheer — Infliction Shéa, Howling Boy, Wish You Were Dead, In Your Head, Demon, Baby Sized, Sad Loved Girl, I Started Something, Screaming, Goodbye
	BAD CD6007 His Name Is Alive — Universal Frequencies Universal Frequencies, Up Your Legs Forever, Summer of E. S. P., Your Word Against Mine, Untitled
	BAD CD6016 Throwing Muses — Shark Shark, Tar Moochers (rerecorded), Serene Swing (rerecorded), Limbobo (rerecorded)
	DAD6008 Dead Can Dance — Spiritchaser Nierika, Song of the Stars, Indus, Song of the Disposessed, Dedicace Outo, The Snake and the Moon, Song of the Nile, Devorzhum
	BAD6009 Lush — 500 (Shake Baby Shake) 500 (Shake Baby Shake) (Mike Drake), I Have The Moon, Piledriver, Olympia (acoustic version)
	BAD D CD6009 Lush — 500 (Shake Baby Shake) 500 (Shake Baby Shake), I’d Like to Walk Around in Your Mind, Kiss Chase (acoustic version), Last Night (hexadeciman dub mix)
	CAD6010 His Name Is Alive — Stars On ESP Dub Love Letter, This World is not My Home, Bad Luck Girl, What Are You Wearing Tomorrow, The Bees, What Else Is New List, Wall of Speed, Universal Frequencies, The Sand That Holds the Lakes in Place, I Can’t Live in this World Anymore, Answer to Rainbow at Midnight, Famous Goodbye King, Across The Street, Movie, Last One
	CAD6011 Heidi Berry — Miracle The Mountain, Time, Holy Grail, Darkness Darkness, Miracle, The Californian, Queen, Only Human, Northern Country
	CAD6012 Lisa Germano — Excerpts from the Love Circus Baby on the Plane, a Beautiful Schizophrenic, “where’s Miamo-Tutti?” by Dorothy, Bruises, I Love a Snot, Forget it it’s a Mystery, Victoria’s Secret, “just a bad dream by Miamo-Tutti”, Small Heads, We Suck, Lovesick, Singing to the Birds, Messages from Sophia, “there’s more kitties in the world than just Miamo-Tutti” by Lisa and Dorothy, Big Big World
	BAD CD6013 Gus Gus — Polyesterday Polyester Day, Cold Breath ’79 (Crystalized), Polyesterday (Late), Polydistortion
	CAD6014 Throwing Muses — Limbo Buzz, Ruthie’s Knocking, Freeloader, The Field, Limbo, Tar Kissers, Tango, Serene, Mr. Bones, Night Driving, Cowbirds, Shark, White Bikini Sand
	CAD6015 The Paladins — Million Mile Club
	TAD6017 Throwing Muses — Ruthie’s Knocking
	BAD CD6018 Tanya Donelly — Sliding & Diving Bum, Restless, Human, Swoon
	BAD CD6019 Lisa Germano — Small Heads Small Heads, Fun Fun For Everyone (Acoustic), Tom, Dick And Harry, Messages From Sophia (Instrumental)

This post is part of the chronological look at all 4AD releases, year by year.

*) Missing from Spotify.

Useful Consumer Review

I’m always in the lookout for new smart remotes, so when I saw this Turn Touch wooden thing, I thought it might go better with my living room table:

Than the old remote I use to control the stereo (and the lights):

Eh? Eh? Slightly better, huh?

That Targus thing there has worked reliably for me for almost a decade now. I use the pointer thing to control the volume and the other buttons to skip and stuff, so I wondered whether this Turn Touch thing would be as flexible.

The Targus thing appears as a USB HID device in Linux, so it’s very easy to interface with. And it has a nice range: It doesn’t drop that many events. I’m almost always disappointed by the range and reliability of wireless things, but we’ll see…

But first of all, I wondered how the Turn Touch worked. There was no manual included, so I wondered how this thing is even charged and how you open it, because there are absolutely no screws.

But it’s all held together by magnets! How brilliant! Prying it apart was trivial, but it still feels nice and solid when it’s all put back together.

And it’s charged by a normal button battery that’s supposed to last about a year. That’s nicer than having to recharge it, I think.

Anyway! How do you interact with this thing?

Python to the rescue!

# pip3 install TurnTouch
# pip3 install typing

and then a script like this:

from turntouch import TurnTouch, DefaultActionHandler

class MyHandler(DefaultActionHandler):
    def action_north(self):
        print("Up button pressed.")
    def action_east_double_tap(self):
        print("Right button double-tapped.")
    def action_south_hold(self):
        print("Down button held.")

tt = TurnTouch('e5:b6:51:8e:f4:50')
tt.handler = MyHandler()
tt.listen_forever()

where that address can be detected by saying

# bluetoothctl
scan on

and waiting for a line mentioning “Turn Touch” to show up. Apparently you don’t have to pair things explicitly and stuff… These low-powered bluetooth things are a mystery to me…

However, as that this shows, the responsiveness is, what’s the technical term… Oh, yeah: “EEEK! THAT”S HORRIBLE!”

A second after you’ve hit the button, you get an event on the computer?

So, in the /usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/turntouch/turntouch.py file, there’s a line saying

MAX_DELAY = 0.75

that sounds suspiciously like the one-second delay I’m seeing, and reading through the code, I understand why it’s there: Each key is supposed to be able to give you three actions: Single tap, double tap and hold. You see this in mobile interfaces, too: If you want to support double tap (and mobile UX people thought that was going to be a thing), you have to wait a while to see whether the first tap was all there’s going to be, or whether another tap is to follow.

But I think that’s pretty horrible, and I can live with either single tap and very-quick double taps; I don’t need “hold”. Especially if the holds are going to fuck the UX up this much.

I changed MAX_DELAY to 0.1, and:

Now, that’s almost acceptable. It does mean that I get a tap event before I get a hold event, but I think that’s OK for my use case here… I think…

Hm… no, it’s janky and doesn’t really work properly.

And… I can’t really understand why it’s programmed this way at all. As far as I can tell, the device itself sends over events like “West” and “Off” and “West Double Tap”…

Oh, right! When you hold a button, you get “South”, “South hold” and then “Off”… But… when you tap a button, you get “South” and then “Off”. And on double taps you get “South” and then “South double tap”.

Uhm! No! OK, now I’ve added proper debugging, and I understand why the library is doing what it’s doing. If you double tap, these are the events you get:

North
Off
North
North double tap

So you can’t fire the “North” action on the “Off”, but have to wait and see whether you get a “North double tap”. And the built-in delay in the device is 0.75 (i.e., if you hit the button faster than that, you get a double tap event), so single taps can’t be executed faster than that if you want to have double taps.

The library almost has support for this: There’s a “debounce” parameter that’ll call the action immediately, but that’s also wrong: Then you can’t have a separate “tap” and “hold” action, either.

I think… I can live without double taps. A “hold” gives me these events:

East
East hold
Off

So I can have immediate for single taps (i.e., on the “Off”), and also support holds without introducing delays. So I’m going to fork and hack the TurnTouch library.

Man! Do I have to learn Python?!

*time passes*

Well, that was trivial enough. The TurnTouch library is written in a clean and nice fashion, so ripping out all the logic was easy.

My version is on Microsoft Github.

So after that slight detour… ahem… Is the Turn Touch any good?

Yes!

I’ve only been using it for a very short while, but the signal range seems pretty good: From the couch to the stereo (with a bluetooth dongle on the back of the computer; about three meters) it doesn’t lose any events. If I go to the next room, I’m able to send some events through the wall, but then it loses the connection.

But that’s a lot better than I expected.

And! It’s an open platform with good documentation, which is very nice indeed. And, with libraries like the one I forked here, you have pretty good access to the events and can construct your own workflows based on what’s important to you.

So, while I have no idea whether it works well over the long haul, I’m giving it all my thumbs up.

Decade Redux

After watching movies kinda aimlessly for a while, I wanted to focus on a specific era, so I chose the 40s: One movie from every month of that decade.

I chose the 40s more by process of elimination than anything else: All the other possible decades had bits that seemed less exciting here and there. I did consider doing, like, 1936 to 1945, but that’s… so… random.

Keeping the same three digits at the start is way less random, right?

Right.

Also, I thought it might be interesting to do the second world war and the aftermath just to see whether you could notice that there was a war going on in the movies or not.

And boy, could you. Before Pearl Harbour, the American movies were pretty circumspect: You wouldn’t want to be accused of spreading pro-British propaganda, donchaknow. (Well, I didn’t, but that was a thing politicians at the time accused Hollywood of doing.)

So most of the American war movies are set in Czechoslovakia during 1939. You could show how nasty the Nazis were without getting involved with the entire WWII thing.

And also a few historical war movies that kinda hint at, you know, invading other countries being a bad thing and stuff.

But then Pearl Harbour happened, and finally the producers can let loose and show American soldiers, now, fighting the good fight.

But it’s not like the majority of movies during the war was about the war. Several of the bigger war movies were not box office smash, and Hollywood pulled back a bit and did lighter fare. It makes sense, I guess: When half the people you know are overseas getting shot at, you may want some movies to take your mind off things.

So the period is more dominated by comedies than anything else, which was surprising to me.

But I was totally unprepared for what happened immediately after the Japanese and the Germans surrendered:

Film noir!

It’s like Hollywood had this bottled-up stash of scripts about criminals and low-life and were just waiting to spring them all on the public: Now, finally, they’re allowed to make people about people in the US being bad!

Sooo bad.

So that was interesting. Well, to me, at least.

But were movies in the 40s good?

Yes.

The Hollywood studio system was in full effect at the time, with directors and actors more or less employed by the studios and assigned to whatever project the producers wanted them to do. That sounds kinda soulless, and perhaps it was, but they were just really good craftsmen: They really knew what they were doing. While some of it’s Extruded Film Product, it’s well-made Extruded Film Product.

Largely.

I did discover at least one director (that I didn’t know about before) that I think is a genius, Preston Sturges. He had an interesting career as he chafed under the studio system and tried to strike it out on his own.

Which brings me to:

Smaller studios (and outright independents) mostly went bankrupt, and nobody bothered to buy up the rights to their movies, as far as I can tell.

So a huge swathe of these movies are in the public domain, meaning that anybody can release them these days. That’s something that I would have thought was a good thing. I mean, free movies! Nice, right?

Well, yes but no. When everybody can download these movies, sourced from an NTSC broadcast recorded to VHS and then uploaded to Youtube, that means that it’s difficult to make any money off of restoring them. So I’ve been suffering through more than my share of films where I can barely tell what’s going on.

In the UK, the British Film Institute finances restoration of significant movies, but there’s apparently no such system in the US.

And now that the market for DVDs and Blurays is fading, I wonder whether the window of opportunity for saving this part of our history is closing.

But perhaps Netflix will save us all!

So this is

But here’s a list of all the movies:

December 1949: Twelve O’Clock High

Awrite! The final movie in this blog series! December 1949! A decade of movies! It’s over!

I think I started in… September? So it’s taken me about six months to watch 120 movies? That’s two thirds of a movie per day.

OK, I’ll do a summing-up post later…

So what’s this movie about? A high school called Twelve O’Clock?

No! It’s a war extravaganza produced by Darryl Zanuck starring Gregory Peck! It’s long, it’s serious, it’s got a huge budget, and … it’s war!

This is the only movie in this blog series after the end of the war that’s about the war. I think during the 50s you got a wave of these, but in the years just after the war, people didn’t want war movies (or at least the studios didn’t think so).

Instead there were a bunch of film noir crime movies, but now we’re back to heroes again.

It’s not as simple as back in the days. We’ve got (allusions to) body parts and soldiers throwing up and PTSD and stuff.

The solution? Tough love! Responsibility! Pride!

But despite all odds, it’s a gripping movie. Lots of great performances and sentimental scenes. It’s a kind of perfect movie: It does everything it sets out to do.

Twelve O’Clock High. Henry King. 1949.

Popular movies in December 1949 according to IMDB:

Votes	Rating	Movie
10333	7.8	Twelve O’Clock High
12722	7.6	On the Town
7613	7.2	Sands of Iwo Jima
1782	7.1	Side Street
567	7.1	My Foolish Heart
1352	6.9	East Side, West Side
2472	6.9	The Inspector General
5017	6.8	Samson and Delilah
758	6.7	Malaya
525	6.6	The Threat

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

November 1949: Port of New York

Huh. This… looks like a B movie sourced from Youtube from VHS, but how did I buy this? It must be on a box set of some kind, but … which one? I sure can’t find it.

And it’s weird. It’s got a voiceover like an educational short. I’m guessing this is a public domain feature from a studio that’s now bankrupt?

This may be the weirdest movie ever. There are scenes of high stylised drama intercut with newsreel-like footage from the port. Of New York.

Is this a fixer-upper or was it meant to be like this?

And isn’t this weather supposed to be over by now?

A young Yul Brynner plays a totally gay super-evil villain, which is a plus, I guess?

Port of New York. Laslo Benedek. 1949.

Popular movies in November 1949 according to IMDB:

Votes	Rating	Movie
10239	7.6	All the King’s Men
16225	7.6	Adam’s Rib
5390	7.5	Battleground
766	7.5	The Rocking Horse Winner
3005	7.2	Holiday Affair
1605	7.2	Tension
1082	7.1	Prince of Foxes
363	6.8	A Run for Your Money
910	6.7	That Forsyte Woman
315	6.7	The Great Lover

This blog post is part of the Decade series.