Five Minutes

My love of being fashionably late has apparently extended to buying music on-line. Well, not that so much, since I’ve ordered quite a few CDs on-line, but more buying actual music files. Really, it’s just that iTunes doesn’t run on Linux and that I’ve never been comfortable with AllOfMp3; besides which, I’m not interested in buying DRM-infested files when I can go and get a CD. Plus, I just kinda like the packaging and having something to hold.

Anyhoo, Martian Music (not affiliated with them, et cetera) has finally broken down that barrier by selling plain old MP3s. (OK, they’re not FLAC or even Vorbis files, but it’s still a hell of a lot better than anything encrypted and DRMed.) So, tonight I burned a little more of that bank card and bought some virtual music for the first time. If I’d known it could be that painless, I’d have done it ages ago.

For the record, I bought Roaring Trade by Razorlily (thank God for Unearthed helping me to find music, given my distaste for much of Triple J’s current on-air staff), Like Drawing Blood by Gotye (probably should have won the J award — sorry, Hilltop Hoods fans) and a CD that’s been on my I should get around to buying that some time list for at least seven or eight years, Eternal Nightcap by The Whitlams.

All quality music.

I used to love late night TV. Sadly, what was once the domain of weird and bad television (LA Heat, Largo Winch, Lexx, take a bow) is now dominated by tacky, cheap to produce game shows which feature a disturbing number of reality TV contestants.

Thankfully, every now and then it still manages to throw up a real winner, and Power Rangers: Time Force is certainly right down there. (The mere fact that Power Rangers apparently has spinoffs amuses me, actually.) I happened across this gem of a show in the wee hours of this morning, and let me tell you that I thought it was great.

By “great”, I mean “failed on every level”, of course. For one thing, I can’t see who it’s actually aimed at — even the kids I know would think it was tacky, shoddily produced and banal. Personally, I couldn’t stop laughing. It’s as though the production company found half a dozen crack addicted hobos, put them in a writers’ room, and didn’t let them out until they came up with a TV show. Saying it’s clichéd is an understatement.

As the piece de resistance, I give you the villain from the episode I watched:

You can blame Youtube for the poor quality of the image, but the blame for the poor quality of the villain on the people responsible for the show. Still, it’s entertaining as hell — just not in any way its makers intended, I suspect.

Another entry from university. Ho hum. Nuclear war still hasn’t broken out with North Korea, which is probably a good thing for our temporarily-Pyongyang-resident hero, Dirk, but there’s plenty of other things to be depressed about.

Alcohol, for example. No, not the price of it, although that is something to be depressed about, but rather the film Drinking for England, which was just screened in my documentary theory class. It’s rarely a good sign when the screening of a film about the perils of alcohol is concluded with a comment from the audience, So, who’s for the tavern?.

Drinking for England is a funny sort of film. It’s a musical documentary about drinking culture, and while it’s obviously intended to be a cautionary tale, it really comes off as some poetic, participatory documentaries do: simply fake. It’s hard to take a film seriously as a non-fiction work when one person in the middle of rehab breaks into song (complete with cheesy fades to half-full glasses and the like) about the evils of sherry. Or the old guy who produces a series of outlandish statements about why he doesn’t have a problem and can handle alcohol far better than the average Badger.

I guess the problem I have with it is the poetry and music. While the interviews ring true, the wrapping is just so cheesy and fake that the film can’t be taken seriously, even when it wants to be.

Well, that’s five minutes, and I’m now nicely primed for the tutorial in six minutes. Excellent. Go nuclear war!