Category: Uncategorised

It’s taken a long while, but I’m now, finally, a convert to the church of gaga. It’s all Alejandro’s fault, and more particularly in the video. It’s another epic 8-minute piece, which means there’s plenty of time to develop a good many themes. She’s doing what I like best: not making a syllogism with her music, but layering loosely-connected themes so that, if you clap your hands and try to believe, you’ll be able to weave your own meaning out of it.

It’s somehow very European, but drawn from disparate sources within that; Gaga surely deserves some EU subsidy for semiotic integration. The setting is mystical and unspecific, but in a cold and German fashion. Gaga appears as Dream or an Ice Queen, or maybe as Narnia’s White Witch. But this isn’t Narnia, with children and a christ-like lion. It’s Weimar, a collapsing world where introspectively melodramatic romance must take the place of morality. It’s intense and fearful, slightly frigid, physicality replaced by power. Even the male dance troupe are desexualised; after entering with a haka-like swagger, they retreat into stylised weirdness.

So far, we’re in a familiar aesthetic, one which runs from Rammstein to Bauhaus through the entire spectrum of goth. The equivocation between sex and violence is likewise familiar, though rebel chic rarely gets as far as a semi-automatic bra. It’s the hispanic eurodisco elements that take us away. Our tragic ice queen seems about to start singing ‘numa numa ey’. Teutonic tragic Romance meets the Romance culture — in accent, if not in much else.

More on Alejandro:

– Bad Romance may have been similarly intricate

– The dreamscape reminds me strongly of Gaiman, although that probably means no more than that Gaiman’s been on my mind lately

– Everybody seems to have seen the religious elements as a homaget to Madonna, with “like a prayer”. Fair enough, but it surely also has some connection to Derek Jarman’s video for the pet shop boys’

It’s a Sin

s

Neat trick from stackoverflow: the

re.DEBUG

flag for python regexes:

> re.compile('a(b+)a', re.DEBUG)
literal 97
subpattern 1
  max_repeat 1 65535
    literal 98
literal 97

Spent a chunk of the weekend with a clique of Australian travellers and party animals — who turned out to have a sweet and counter-intuitive affection for watching documentaries. Also, chess. On the documentaries, they turned me onto this giant list of of documentaries to watch online.

Going to start hijacking this blog, to record/link to patches I submit to various open-source projects. As with everything else on here, it’s mainly to ensure I can find these little snippets a few months later.

So, to start, something intended for this blog itself. A patch to the google commandline tools enabling the “google blogger post” command to post content read from stdin (adding to the current options of supplying a string or a filename). Usage is the traditional ‘-‘ in place of a filename.

This enables two pieces of functionality I’d find very useful:

A) filter content through other programs. e.g. using markdown to HTMLify my content:

$ markdown post.txt | google blogger post –

B) make a blogpost from within vim, by selecting my post content and piping it to googlecl

AP, via Wired:

“This year, the Pentagon will employ 27,000 people just for recruitment, advertising and public relations — almost as many as the total 30,000-person work force in the

State Department.”

Comix is my favourite no-bloat viewer for collections of images: not just for comics, but also for paging through a directory full of graphs or photographs. But needing to slip to the arrow keys for navigation is an irritation: hence this quick little patch to enable h,j,k,l scrolling. [I later realise that the h conflicts with another keyboard shortcut. So it goes]. This is in lieu of a large patch, which I’ll probably never write, allowing shortcut keys to be set from a config file.

Here on github — the first time I’ve used github in this way, and an impressively painless experience. I’m now itching to hack on other code that’s hosted there. [also, there’s probably a way of getting automatic github updates posted here, or to facebook, or something]

:The LSE seem to have had an unusually interesting speakers lately. Not sure if it’s an end-of-term twist away from serious economics towards the more accessible stuff. Žižek, Clay Shirky and Andrew Ross Sorkin, all in the space of a day; what a treat!

While loving both _The Parallax View_ and _All the President’s Men_, I’d somehow never realised that they had a forgotten sibling. Klute is the first member of what came to be known as director Alan Pakula’s _political paranoia trilogy_. One to watch.