Paradise City by Guns’N’Roses is a great song. Take me home.

I saw the Paris Combo at the Somerville Theater last night with an assortment of friends. It had been a long time since I saw a show there. It’s a lovely venue, not too big and good visibility. The combo were very good, very French — a little combo of Serge Gainsbourg and Django Reinhardt influences, but very tight playing and singing. If you like Gypsy swing music (like Reinhardt), French cafe chansons, or bands like Pink Martini, Paris Combo are worth checking out. It would be really fantastic to have them play in a small club, where we had a seat at a table with a bottle of Beaujolais. We were up in the balcony in the back, where the seats are so small and the rows so narrow that even I had issues fitting into the seat. Luckily I escaped the horrible knee pain that afflicted Erin and other members of our party. Afterwards we went to cozy Croatian restaurant near Teale square, where I had ouzo and olives. It’s a combination that’s growing on me, slowly.

Perfect Fifth

To Shorten Winter’s Sadness

Perfect Fifth, a ten-voice ensemble from the University of California, Berkeley, will present a concert of early music featuring sacred pieces by Isaac, Senfl, Victoria, and Guerrero, madrigals by Weelkes, Othmayr, and de Monte, and old carols from the 14th-16th centuries. The concert will be held in the beautiful acoustic of the Hearst Memorial Mining Building Lobby.

Hearst Memorial Mining Building Lobby
Saturday, December 4
7 PM
$5 for UCB Students / $8 general

Tickets will be available 1 hour before the concert at the door or can be purchased via phone at (510) 642-3880 or on the web

For more information, including a map, please see our website.

Non! Rien de rien …
Non ! Je ne regrette rien
Ni le bien qu’on m’a fait
Ni le mal tout ça m’est bien égal !

Non ! Rien de rien …
Non ! Je ne regrette rien…
C’est payé, balayé, oublié
Je me fous du passé!

Avec mes souvenirs
J’ai allumé le feu
Mes chagrins, mes plaisirs
Je n’ai plus besoin d’eux !

Balayés les amours
Et tous leurs trémolos
Balayés pour toujours
Je repars à zéro …

Non ! Rien de rien …
Non ! Je ne regrette nen …
Ni le bien, qu’on m’a fait
Ni le mal, tout ça m’est bien égal !

Non ! Rien de rien …
Non ! Je ne regrette rien …
Car ma vie, car mes joies
Aujourd’hui, ça commence avec toi !

Propellorheads and Roni Size remain, after all these years, the best tooling music I have in my posession. Especially for MATLAB coding.

Two albums I really need to buy soon. Tom Waits’ Real Gone and Björk’s Medulla. I’m listening to the latter now, courtesy of Rhapsody ($2 a month for Berkeley students!), and it’s pretty awesome. She overdubs herself over voices — even the percussive effects are done by voices. Tom Waits does the same thing with his album. He recorded himself beatboxing (!) and lays the music over that. From a review:

You don’t own a run-down turntable with a rusted stylus? No worry, Real Gone has been recorded and mixed to make you believe that you do. Percussion clanks and scrapes like a ruckus in a submarine’s bowels, guitars and turntables (yes, turntables) squeal like midnight transmissions from pirate radio, chairs squeak and banjos hypothesize.

I’m very excited.

On a side note, I constantly type LaTeX commands to get special characters in HTML, and it never works. I need one of those “auto spellchecker” things.

Charles Mingus was a true genius. He managed to take the blues and make it sound like something I’ve never heard before but still fits like a pair of old broken-in jeans. Jeans that get you riled up, jeans that make you want to go punch Governor Faubus in the face. You want to sing praises to the skies, you want to dance, you want to run around screaming at the top of your lungs on a beautiful Indian summer day in the hopes that it will prove some goddamn inequalities about random walks.

For whatever reason, I again have the Gummi Bears TV theme stuck in my head. Here it is in Polish too.

Check out Dave Freeman’s (known to me as “morose Dave”) Classical CD Guide. It’s a good way to get oneself educated about classical music in general. Since I’ve lost myself in the corners of choral music and avant-garde electronic noodlings, a primer on basic orchestral and chamber repertoire is a good thing to have around…