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"She asked me if we could be friends..."

So, I recorded Sign o' the Times on our TiVo this past weekend, and ever since I've been trying to figure out how to get it off of the TiVo. As in, off of the TiVo, and onto a DVD or my (Mac) laptop.

But so BTW, before I delve into the tech stuff, a brief aside that's worthy of the main post, as opposed to a footnote: Sign o' the Times is so fucking awesome. And it's not really easily available on DVD, which is just totally lame.

Favorite things about Sign o' the Times:

• When, during "Hot Thing," Prince slides across the stage under Cat Glover's legs, and rips off her skirt with his teeth. (Or, I guess, almost—he actually appears to grab it with his hand, then transfer it to between his teeth. Yes, I've now watched this part too many times in the writing of this post.) But still: how awesome is Prince!


• This movie is just so brilliantly directed. The cuts & closeups are as good as a music video, which is pretty incredible with what appears to be concert footage. [1]


• This is a really great mini-review of the movie. Of course, it would be, as the author wrote a book on the subject.
  


• "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man". Best. Song. EVAR.

So, all of that said: We only have Macs around the house (around 6 of them now that we've amassed, but quantity doesn't help, in this case), so we can't use TiVoToGo. And really, what I most want is just to be able to burn this to a DVD, so I can watch it over & over again. It seems so simple: it's a file, made of bits, on a hard drive on (what is basically) a Linux box, that is on our fucking network. Why can't I just mount the box and copy the file to my laptop, then play it? [2]

So finally, from a comment on this post, I figured out part of the answer:

Open up a web browser and go to https://(the ip address of your tivo)/nowplaying/index.html and login as tivo with a password of your media access code (from the Tivo view settings screen) It will let you access a website where you can download the *.tivo files of your shows.

Yay! Now I have the .tivo file, though I can't actually do anything with it without a PC with TiVo ToGo.

And yet somehow, just the idea of having this file on my own hard drive makes me feel so much more secure!

Prince: you're safe now.

[1] Of course, it's not actually concert footage, which is the reason it looks so good. It turns out it's a lot easier when you reshoot the entire movie at your own studio!

[2] This is a rhetorical question.

"And I love what you've done with your hair... oh yeah!"

I love it when music makes me happy! & tonight, it's been doing just that.

I heard The Ark's "Echo Chamber" when it was posted on Fluxblog a year and a half ago, totally loved it, & I've been looking for We Are the Ark at record stores ever since (unsuccessfully) [1].

So anyway, I was thrilled to read tonight on The Tofu Hut that The Ark have a new album, "State of the Ark" [2], which is streamable on The Ark's official website.

And also, & on a related note, I picked up the new Darkness album yesterday, and it's just brilliant—they're embracing their inner Queen even more than before. [3] This post does a better job than I could of describing how awesomely rawk the Darkness are (& also raves quite a bit about The Ark).

[1] I could've just bought it off of Amazon, but I hate paying import prices for music that should rightly have been released in the US. It just doesn't seem fair!

[2] Which has been out in Europe for awhile, and which may (?) be released in the US in 2006.

[3] I had only heard snippets of "One Way Ticket," the first single, before buying the album—and I seriously thought I'd accidentally bought the wrong CD when it started with a fucking panflute. But it's all part of the fun!

Looks like the real thing.

Quite randomly, yesterday the TiVo decided to tape an episode of Beavis & Butt-head from 1995.

I feel like I have somewhat of a history with Beavis & Butt-head, in that I actually saw Beavis & Butt-head Do America in the theater [1]. I think that probably makes me fairly unique, given how poorly the movie did. I don't even remember the movie much, but I do remember always loving the television show. My favorite part was always the music videos, because that's when they'd get their best lines in—that's where you'd get pop-cultural references, and the cleverly roundabout slams on the artists in the videos.

So in the episode I saw today ("Whiplash"), they were watching the video for "Fake Plastic Trees", which is just such a self-pitying piece of shit [2] (both the song and the video, I think). And so anyway, the video begins, the acoustic guitar comes on, and there are all these fluorescent supermarket lights, etc.

And then, Thom Yorke comes on for the first time, looking all pathetic and pushing a shopping cart. And this is where the magic begins!

Butt-head: "Hey, that looks like that dude. He was on TV, and then they made a cartoon out of him."

Beavis: "Oh yeah, yeah. He's got that shirt, and then his hair's all like a point on the top of his head."

"..."

"Yeah, yeah, what's his name?"

"Uh... Yeah, what is his name?"

"Oh... damnit... what's it, he's um..."

"..."

"Oh yeah yeah, he's like always going, 'I must say'..."

"Uh, yeah... And then he's like, always saying he's going to be on Wheel of Fortune, and he's like, all into Pat Sajak."

"..."

"Uh, Wiggly... Smeggly..."

"No, that's not it. Damnit! Damnit! This guy looks just like him! Damnit! I'm forgetting everything! I can't remember anything anymore!"

And then Beavis starts getting all frustrated, and asks Butt-head to hit him, and then he finally remembers Ed Grimley's name.

It's just so fantastic! I cried.

BTW, I really wish I could find a clip of this episode online, but I can't find it anywhere. I still have it on our TiVo. Can I get it onto my computer somehow?

[1] amazingly, considering that I hardly ever go to movies anymore. But I used to go see pretty much anything in the theater, because I was so bored in college. I even saw The Waterboy.

[2] One of my favorite things I've ever heard about "Fake Plastic Trees" was in Clueless, where Cher calls it "the maudlin music of the university station... waah, waah, waah." So funny! [3]

[3] And which is also sort of weird, because right after this line, Cher and Josh sit down to watch TV, and Beavis & Butt-head are on. Full circle!

Todo list for Friday, 11/18/2005: complete!

You know, I hate to just write follow-up posts, but seriously: watch Trapped in the Closet. Now.

Photo via Krissy.

It was the most amazing scene at Foo Bar on Friday. We gathered around the couches, pulled out a laptop, and started playing the DVD.

And David described it best: one by one, people would walk up and initially start laughing at the idea of someone watching an R. Kelly production. And then, magically, all of a sudden they'd get really quiet, as they were sucked in to the story.

And that was how we amassed 15 or so people watching Trapped in the Closet.

Oh shit! It's a recursive footnote explosion.

You know what I hate about Spanglish? [1]

Everything, except for [2].

[1] There's only one thing that I like about Spanglish. [2]

[2] Paz Vega, c.f. [1].

You broke my heart.

SPOILER ALERT. Or something. It's in bullet number one, if you actually care about Top Model.

• Wow, Lisa [1]. I'm actually surprised, but not so much, because she was really starting to bug me lots in recent weeks. And frankly, I considered myself a pretty big supporter of Lisa. But then it just stopped mattering, because she was so annoying.


• I've been listening a lot to the Dios (Malos) album, which is unexpectedly one of my favorite albums of this year. Going in, I didn't have any reference points or comparisons for it [3], which lack of baggage may be part of the reason why I'm enjoying it so much. But it's this great fun pop music, sort of sad, sort of relaxing in a druggy way, but at the same time—maybe even inexplicably—happiness-creating.


• I am, admittedly, a little bit obsessed with The Godfather: Part II. It's a fucking long movie, and usually, even a 90-minute movie is too much of a commitment for me. And not only that, but it's a really, really depressing movie. I mean, you know this, I'm sure, having watched it (right?), but it's really depressing! That look on Michael's face at the end? It kills me, every time, but I just can't stop watching it.

[1] Who, I think, I liked better with dark hair. But that's just me.

[2] This is a total exaggeration.

[3] Except for the really obvious ones, which don't really affect me that much, because I'm not a big fan of either the Beach Boys or Neil Young.

"And then things get a little more interesting..."

Since this blog is basically a chronicle of the (presumably) embarrassing thoughts that go through my head, here's the latest:

R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet (Chapters 1-12) is the best album [1] of 2005.

I remember, a couple of months ago, watching R. Kelly perform one of the tracks in a one-man show on the VMAs, and just being completely mesmerized, watching him act out all of the parts on stage. It was incredible. That's the feeling that the music induces in you—it's really hypnotic, and yet at the same time it's really, really fucking funny. "Rufus!" "Kathy!" etc. And it's so smooth.

So tonight, after listening to the album all day on repeat, I put it on at Foo Bar [2], and I've got to say, I received some pretty negative comments! Maybe I should've expected it: putting on 12 R. Kelly songs in a row might overwhelm a casual listener. Or maybe people at the office just don't like R. Kelly. And yeah, it's not like we have the ultimate sound system for playing music at Foo Bar, and so it all turned out rather bass-heavy.

But seriously, these are some awesomely good jams. And the story is just so ridiculous, and just keeps getting more ridiculous as it goes on, and you just want to laugh. But it gives me the chills, all the same, for some reason.

[1] Well, "album," since I guess it's actually a DVD. R. Kelly makes things so confusing!

[2] Our weekly office social, basically, where we sit around, talk, gossip, etc, and relax. It's fun.

OS X 10.4.3 Redraw Problems

I upgraded my laptop to OS X 10.4.3 the other day, and immediately upon reboot I started seeing massively annoying redraw problems. Windows would randomly get redrawn with part of another window on the screen, dock icons would be replaced by images found elsewhere on the screen. It was almost unusable.

I did some searches to find others afflicted by the same problem, and only found this post on a message board, which didn't have any answers or solutions.

So I started reading more about 10.4.3, and found out that it breaks support for Quartz 2D Extreme. Which is strange in and of itself, because I thought Quartz 2D Extreme was something new in Tiger—so why would they break it in a maintenance release for Tiger?

Anyway, everything I read suggested that Q2DE was disabled by default unless it was supported by the video card. There are hacks to turn it on even on machines that don't support it, but I'd never done that.

But I figured I'd check, so I opened up the CoreGraphics configuration file, and astonishingly, Q2DE was enabled! So I disabled it, rebooted, and the problem was solved.

If you're having the same problems with 10.4.3, here's what to do:

1. Open up the file /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/ Frameworks/CoreGraphics.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Configuration.plist in a text editor.
2. Look for the lines:

   
       <key>Quartz2DExtremeEnabled</key>
       <true/>
   
   

3. Change the "<true/>" to "<false/>".
4. Save the file, and reboot. That should fix the redraw problems.

"I want the truth so bad that I'll believe it all..."

The new Neil Diamond album is seriously fantastic.

Granted, that might not sound like the first sentence of a blog post you'd read in 2005. [1]

And I confess, I've never been a really big Neil Diamond fan, but his new album, "12 Songs," is just amazing stuff. It's very stripped down & acoustic—just a guitar, a piano, some light strings, and that simultaneously smooth & rough Neil Diamond voice—though not to the point of being reduced to a requisite "unplugged" record, happily. But just to the point where it sounds like it makes sense, as if these are, somehow, the ideal arrangements for these songs.

And so it's much less melodramatic than the version of Neil Diamond that I have in my head, and all the better for it (it's no "America," in other words). And the first song, "Oh Mary"? This is some seriously haunting stuff.

It's apparently streamable on MySpace, but the Flash thing won't load for me. It also happens to be available on file sharing networks, but don't let that stop you from buying it when it's released on Tuesday.

[1] Well, yes, maybe it would on this blog, where talk of Clay Aiken and Selena is the norm. So there, I preempted your planned putdown!

I've got Pavarottis following me, too!

This sample from K-Fed's upcoming album is so. Fucking. Funny. (transcription of the lyrics)

As is this:

Update: According to the Hollertronix boards, K-Fed actually is saying "Pavarotti": "I've been informed that's just K-Fed slang for papparazzi, he calls them Pavarottis in real life. that's his style..."

What I love most about this is imagining the first time K-Fed said "pavarotti" instead of "papparazzi". I'll bet his friends/entourage/hangers-on were like, "um, WTF's he mean?" And then they'd be all quietly embarrassed for him, but not want to say anything that might make him upset. So they didn't say anything, and then just kind of got stuck being quiet, and voting their implicit agreement on his "slang."

That's my version of the story, at least.

But anyway, the only bad thing about the sample is that it's so short (52 seconds), so I keep playing it over & over, and now it's basically the only thing listed under "Recent tracks" in my last.fm profile.

And that's a little embarrassing.