adamyntium

Category: arts and entertainment

  • Katamari Damacy – Why is the music so hard to find?!

    Updated Mar 2024 to note that album is now on streaming services!

    Well, hell hath frozen over! More than 15 years after writing my lament here, the Katamari Fortissimo Damacy is now available online; enjoy!

    This morning at work I was chatting with a colleague about my morning commute, and I don’t know what got into me… but for some odd reason I confided that I wished to be a big katamari ball, rolling my way to work and grabbing everything in my path.

    Then, adding to the strangeness and freaking out my poor katamari-less colleague, I started singing “Na NAAAAAAAAA na na na NA na na na, na Na na na-na naaaaaaaaaaa!”

    *  *  *

    What… you aren’t familiar with Katamari Damacy, the psychedelically funky and happy video game in which you, Little Prince, must help out your hungover King of the Cosmos dad by rolling up everything on Earth to make stars that your daddy accidentally splatted during his previous nights’ bender?  If you have a PS2, *go out and get this game now!*  You won’t be sorry, except perhaps for the temporary loss of productivity and your embarrassment from singing jazzy goofy charming jazz/j-pop tunes to all your friends.

    And, indeed, the musical score is that great.  Listening to it is just bound to cheer anyone up.

    Unfortunately, trying to actually buy the soundtrack is not nearly so pleasant.  Amazon?  Nope (they’ve only got a misleadingly-labeled CD that’s inspired by the Katamari tunes… it doesn’t actually contain the songs!).  iTunes?  Nope.  Yahoo Music? Sorry.  Rhapsody?  Sadly, no.

    So far, I’ve only seen it via Play Asia… >$30 for the CD + shipping :-(.  I’m actually willing to pay that much, but not very pleased about the idea.

    Anyone know:
    1) Other places to get this CD for less money?
    2) WHY such a charming, beloved score is not available via an American label?
    3) Why Amazon.com and other American retailers would carry the game, but not the soundtrack?

    UPDATE on May 24, 2008

    I ended up buying the CD from PlayAsia (for, indeed, $30… ouch!)… but now you can all enjoy the music, too! 😀

  • [Music] Instrumental Jazz Soloists – If you can’t sing it, don’t play it

    I’m guessing most of you probably just think of me as an Internet geek, but I used to be a classical pianist geek, choir geek, and jazz pianist geek.  I have performed over 200 times, won a bunch of Bach festivals, and studied under jazz greats Ashley Alexander, Frank Mantooth, and others.  This does not inherently make me a wonderful person, but it does (IMNSHO) give me a right to talk smack about some fellow musicians and a nasty trend which I’ll detail below.

    Sadly, though, there’s little proof of my musical history, or at least little proof that I can share; for instance, I recently called the music department of my alma mater (Northwestern University) to get copies of my jazz performances in ‘90-92, and alas, they no longer have the recordings.  Ack! 🙁  So you’ll just have to trust ol’ Grumpy Gramps today.

    So what’s my cranky rant for today?  Well, I’m sick and tired of jazz musicians ignoring their audience… more than that, downright ignoring the beauty of musicality.  More and more often, I hear jazz performers—young students and adults alike—musically belching through way-overlong solos that—despite oft-impressive technical wizardry (wow, he can play 743 notes a minute!)—bore everyone to tears… perhaps even the solo’ist himself.  And I think back to one of my fabulous jazz teachers at Northwestern who gave me a delightfully straightforward and valuable piece of advice:

    “Play less.  Say more.”

    And so I did… slowly but surely learning to integrate recognizable and fun bits of TV show themes, adding short and sweet call-and-response phrases, and so on.  My solos began to sing—not just shout “look at me!”—and as part of this, I connected more with my fellow musicians (who could hook on and really play with me) and audience members who’d come up to me afterwards and chuckle, “Hey, I caught that bit of the Muppets in your solo!” or even the more basic, “Your solos are FUN!”

    Furthermore, I began to understand why so many of the world’s greatest jazz musicians (particularly in the swing/big-band era) were and for many remain so loved.  Their solos were a conversation, a song in and of themselves with the audience.  Not too much talking, nothing too fancy except for maybe a tiny flash here and there.  When you hear these solos today, you inevitably smile… often because you can sing with them, you know where they’re going, it’s not just a bunch of notes, it’s part of a melody, part of a melody you understand and can relate to and know it was made for you, not for the solo’ist.

    *  *  *

    A few weeks ago, I was at a benefit concert which featured an award-winning youth jazz band.  It was, even according to my friends who invited me, a cringe-inducing evening.  I looked around while these young men—obviously talented but horribly misdirected—were solo’ing and solo’ing and saying nothing worth listening to.  “Artubation,” I ruefully called it, and one of my friends chuckled and sighed.  I looked around at the large audience:  few were actually looking at the musicians.  People were reading their programs, looking around, looking generally bored and uncomfortable.  For crying out loud, I thought, I can understand that these 16-year-old musicians might not know better, but where the $&#$! is their adult director, and why is he so horrendously clueless?!

    Yes, I blame their director 100%.  In his quest to mold musicianship, he’s failed to impress upon his students the necessity and beauty of musicality.  Of connecting with your audience, not to mention your fellow musicians.  Yes, even those kids looked bored up there.  Okay, it’s time for the trumpeter’s solo.  blah blah blah blah… okay, soon it will be my turn.  Quick, think, what am I gonna play this time?…

    Unconscionable.  True, I’m not-so-subtlely betraying my contempt for much of modern jazz and indeed, even many famous “jazz musicians” today, but so be it.  But I’m hoping the pendulum swings back (no pun intended)… so musicians are no longer making music for just themselves, showing off, squeezing in as many notes as they can… but rather delighting dancers, listeners, fellow musicians as well as tone-deaf music-appreciators.

    So, in closing, I simply wish and urge this…

    Soloists:  If you can’t sing it, don’t play it.

  • Fair use, mashups, and profits – why hasn’t anyone figured this out yet?

    Lots of us love music and we love to share it; I think that’s even more powerful than simply “grab lots of music for free”—it’s the sharing that excites us, motivates us.  Music is a shared experience!

    Why, then, hasn’t anyone made it easy to share music snippets legally from a simple iframe, a simple widget that someone can cut and paste or even drag and drop into their blog?

    Let me give an example of how painful it is to share (within, IMHO, fair use) a music snippet:
    1) Identify song you want to share with others.  Determine that it’s DRM’d.  Ack!
    2) Remove DRM (yes, I know this may technically be illegal, but frankly I don’t give a damn.  Call it civil disobedience)
    3) Use software to grab a relevant thirty second snippet and save it as an mp3.  Make sure tags are still embedded.
    4) Upload to server.
    5) Before all of this, download and install a good flash player so others can listen to your snippet whether on a Mac or PC.
    6) Embed the appropriate code into your blog entry.

    Check out this entry on the emotional wallop of strings for an example of the result. 

    I think it took me at least 20 minutes just to prepare, upload, and post this one clip.  Does that sound very conducive to sharing to you?!

    So you know what massively puzzles me?  Why on earth hasn’t any major player (Amazon, Rhapsody, Napster, Apple, etc.) made this process easier… not only facilitating the discovery and sharing of music by the increasingly powerful blogosphere, but increasing subscriptions and download sales?!  Let me explain how I envision this working…

    What the blogger / music lover does:
    1) Blogger goes to associates.amazon.com or embed.rhapsody.com or whatever and looks up an album or specific track.
    2) They then selects an embed method (php include, javascript, iframe, etc.) and optionally set other customizable widget options.
    3) If not already logged in, they enter in their subscription ID or affiliate ID so they can get credit from referred subscriptions and purchases.
    4) They copy the specified HTML and paste it into their blog, along with (hopefully) personal comments.

    What the person visiting the blog sees:
    A simple mini-player widget that contains a play button and a short description of the clip (title, artist, album), along with links to:
    – “Learn more about this artist, album, or song”
    – “Purchase this song” (on iTunes, Rhapsody, etc.)
    – “Subscribe to service for unlimited listening to 3 million songs” (again, on Rhapsody, Napster, etc.)

    * * *

    Of course, even cooler would be all the online music folks coming together to make a common standard of some sort, so this widget could actually have a small pulldown menu enabling listeners to buy the tune on or subscribe to their preferred online music service.

    So why hasn’t any of this happened? Some guesses:
    – Music services are shortsighted and want to more tightly (and obnoxiously) control the listening experiences.
    – Music services are scared crapless of lawsuits; despite the fact that any sane person would envision 30 seconds being pretty much fair use, the RIAA would probably sue anyway.
    – Fears over brand tarnishing (putting the names of artists and music services on splog sites featuring child porn, for instance)

    I’m skeptical about the third issue, though. After all, Amazon seemingly lets pretty much anyone embed jpegs of book covers or album covers on raunchy or spammy sites.

    * * *

    So, what to do in the meantime?
    If I wanted to be lazy AND give the finger to non-Windows-users, I could just link to Amazon.com clips, for instance, like this clip of “Where Does the Wayward Footwear Go?” from The Bobs. But that’s pretty inelegant, and it also depends upon Amazon:
    – having the song I want to show off
    – including a decent snippet
    – not changing the URL or blocking folks from accessing it off the Amazon.com domain

    And, to be fair, it’s not a very attractive option for Amazon.com. I mean, what do they get out of it? No potential sales, no branding (except from my arbitrary mention), etc. And unless I manually create a link to the album (“Songs For Tomorrow Morning” ), it’s not even easy for the listener to learn more about the album or group, much less purchase the CD. In other words, it’s a lousy experience for everyone.

    Surely there’s got to be a better way?!

    — –

    Update at 12:58am the next day:
    Hmm… well, there’s Napsterlinks.

    But…
    – They require people to register with Napster before hearing any music (even a 30 second snippet)
    – Each registered user can hear a track only three times total (which is reasonable, IMHO)
    – The embedded widget doesn’t allow one to fast-forward in a song, nor can it contain multiple tracks (much less an album). Just one track per widget :(.
    – There seems to be a bug whereby any page with the widget on it never finishes loading. Weird.

    So, unsurprisingly, napsterlinks are seemingly quite unpopular (I had never actually seen them in the wild, and doing a blogsearch yielded just a tiny handful in existence). Such a lost opportunity!

    And Rhapsody? Sure, you can listen to free tracks with them, but…
    – You’re limited to 25 total plays per month (kinda stingy).
    – You have to download and install their plugin (not too time consuming, though)
    – The player window can’t be embedded :-(.
    – Any click to play a song opens BOTH the player window and a full-sized Rhapsody page. Boo!

    Obviously NOT a decent experience for bloggers :(.

    So, hey, music services… we’re still waiting. Yahoo? Apple?…

  • Blippet: [Video] Avenue Q + Fiddler on the Roof — oy vey, so gay!

    Love Avenue Q?  Appreciate Jewish humor?
    Watch what happens when the cast of Avenue Q mashes up with the cast of Fiddler on the Roof!

    P.S.—I’d like to hat-tip a fellow blogger, but I can’t remember exactly where I first saw this (I just re-found it via a YouTube search).  Much apologies.  Next time, I’ll be more careful about blogtribution.

  • Don’t Download This Song! (listen to another gem by Weird Al Yankovic)

    Unless you’re a fan of the RIAA or a bitter, clueless artist… I urge you to run, er, click, not walk to go hear Weird Al’s new ditty: “Don’t Download This Song.” [warning: music autoplays].

    I’m looking forward to the music video promised for this evening, but in the meantime, you can hear the song in its entirety (and, of course, download it!).

  • Brave Combo rocks in countless ways. Here’s why you will love them, too

    Brave Combo is 26-year-old (!) “hot jazz quintet, a rollicking rock’n’roll bar band, a Tex-Mex conjunto, a sizzling blues band, a saucy cocktail combo, a deadly serious novelty act, a Latin orchestra, and one of America’s dance bands par excellence.”  [see their bio page] But they kick ass for many other reasons, too.

    For those of you with short attention spans, fine… you can skip the rest of my brilliant commentary and go directly to Brave Combo’s music. 
    A variety “dozen sampler”(tm) I recommend:  Breslau, Canto a la salsa, Down at the Friendly Tavern, High Bounce Polka, Hokey Pokey, My Tears are Nothing, No Work Today, Spaghetti Twist and Twirl, Swing it Baby Swing, The Hustle, Three Ducks Ondo, Waltz in C Minor,

    Aside from the fact that this band is made up of great musicians that play a huge variety of contagiously fun music, it’s damn cool that they’ve made decent-quality one-minute segments of a ton of their songs available on the Web, no?  In fact, their Web site is informative, entertaining, and pretty comprehensive—a sad rarity for band sites, IMHO.

    Here are other things that highlight why Brave Combo is an amazingly kick-ass band:

    • They were featured on The Simpsons and have also won a Grammy.
    • They have made their full songs available online… from Yahoo Music Unlimited (172 songs!) to iTunes to emusic (live performance: 25 downloads free*!).
    • Their live performances are a hell of a lot of fun (and affordable: under $15!), but surprisingly their CDs manage to capture much of the energy and enthusiasm.
    • At the risk of being poo-poo’d by cynics, they honestly believe that spreading good music around can contribute to world peace.
    • They love dancers and they do a fine job encouraging people of all ages to get up and shake their booties.
    • They’re nice, unpretentious folks who clearly appreciate and respect their fans.

    Unfortunately, they don’t seem to tour that extensively outside of Texas [see their itinerary]… but if you can possibly catch them live, do!

    Edited to add (a few minutes after posting this entry):
    emusic… great idea, noble quest (catering to independent bands and the smart folks who love ‘em)… but dudes, what’s with the “We won’t show you our catalog until you sign up.”  I understand your motivations, but that’s still just rude.—-
    One of my favorite Brave Combo songs is “The Mystery Spot Polka”… but alas, it’s not on their music clips page :-(.—-
    * Credit card / trial required.  Yours truly, a sincere but selfish bastard, get free downloads if you sign up 😛

  • Why Snakes on a Plane makes me sad

    I grew up with snakes.  A Burmese Python named, appropriately enough, “Julius Squeezer.”  Lots of harmless king snakes and gopher snakes and more.

    You see, my dad (a biology teacher) was friends with a herpetologist, and the two of them would often conduct hands-on educational seminars around the area to help people understand that snakes are our friends, not something to be feared nor chopped up with a garden shovel.  My dad and his friend also helped out the local sheriff by being part of what I called “The Snake Patrol”—comprised of environmentalist folks who’d go out to a house where some person—who had moments ago called 911 or whatever screaming incoherenantly about a deadly snake—was about ready to take drastic, lethal action against a harmless baby king snake or whatnot.  My dad would go out there, put the snake in a pillowcase, and release it into the wild. 

    One time, alas, it was too late.  The frantic woman, who had spotted what she KNEW was a deadly snake outside by her trash cans, could hold off no longer.  About ten minutes before my dad arrived, she had repeatedly bisected the critter.  The purely rubber critter I might add.  Methinks that snake wasn’t posing all that much of a threat, eh?

    As part of all these efforts, my dad would sometimes temporarily bring snakes to our home, where I got to hold them and learn that they weren’t slimy or (generally) deadly or even venemous.

    Plus snakes eat things like wild rats, which are generally NOT our friends when they’re carrying diseases into our homes.

    Anyway, this brings us to why movies like Snakes on a Plane and those films about deadly spiders or any other fearful-animal-de-jour make me sad.  They undoubtedly result in not only a rise of fear but also an increased level of senseless animal killings.  In a broader sense, they contribute to a dystopian view of nature as something to be feared, coralled, and conquered.

    You might think I’m overreacting, or you might argue that people are smart enough to know the difference between Hollywood and real life.  I, regrettably, beg to differ.  As a human race, we haven’t shown a very good ability to either assess comparative risks (say, the likelihood of a plane incident vs. the chances of dying in an auto accident) or live in harmony with nature.

    True, at the core, it’s pretty much just one of a zillion stupid movies that people flock to see.  And I suppose there’s something to be said for lame escapist entertainment.  I just wish it didn’t use nature as a scapegoat.

  • Trying out online database services (see my movie list!)

    Microsoft Access is for masochists.  It’s expensive, a pain to learn, and—frankly—quite overkill for nearly any home application.

    So, for too long, folks like myself have kept lists in Excel.  This works… sort of.  But it’s a pain to share, and it lacks a lot of the usefully-database’y features that make working with data multidimensionally both useful and fun.

    For instance, I’m trying to keep track of where I’ve traveled around the world, what sets of pictures I’ve taken, where those pictures reside (online, in photo albums, etc.), who I have yet to share them with, and so on.  I *could* do lots of messy filtering and sorting on Excel as I try to handle related action items, but a database (featuring multiple persistent views) would be so much easier!

    Well… dabbledb and Zoho Creator to the rescue!  Below I’ll talk about my initial experiences using both services, some advantages I perceive in each, and I’ll also demo my first “app”—a filterable/sortable list of movies I’ve seen and want to see (all 217 of them so far!)

    Clearly, there are lots of professional uses for databases.  But here are a few hobbyist uses I’ve thought of off the top of my head:
    – Managing and showing off stamp / comic book / music / other collections
    – Dealing with rosters (Little League, Church members, volunteer list, etc.)
    – Working with a personal or team todo list.

    *  *  *

    Zoho Creator (“ZC”) is, at least for now, free.  Dabbledb (“ddb”) offers a 30 day free trial, and various plans after that starting at $10/month.

    Getting started on either service is a snap.  You can easily import your existing data just by copying the cells from Excel and pasting one big block into a text box in either service.  Both of them handled this data quite smartly!

    Some other things both services have in common:
    – Very passionate developers who regularly participate in discussions online about their services.
    – The ability for users to put views and even forms on other Web sites.
    – Active user forums.
    – Helpful getting-started / overview videos

    Some advantages specific to ZC:
    – A unique and seemingly powerful scripting language
    – Custom error messages and validation
    – Multi-select-list fields.
    – The ability to put an “active” view into another Web page

    Some advantages specific to ddb:
    – It’s fast!
    – Handy grouping function
    – Superior ease of data entry
    – More choices of field types
    – Multidimensionality (a bit hard to explain… but you can define relationships between tables)

    I’ve included my movie database (in ZC) as a sample below.  Have fun searching, filtering, sorting… and don’t worry, it’s read-only, so you can’t hurt anything! 😀

  • Yet more awesome a cappella & an affordable music studio

    First, a quick note to those SEOs who are still reading my blog hoping for detailed Google search-related tidbits.  It’s still unlikely.  If I ever do post nuggets of search wisdom here, I’m sure you’ll hear about it :-D.  With that said, Google is moving ahead to improve communications, both internally and externally; I recently enjoyed visiting and discussing Search Quality issues with Googlers in Berlin and Dublin and also had a great time meeting with folks at the London Search Engine Strategies Conference.  Photos online soon, I hope!  And yes, we’re further extending the coolness of Sitemaps and related Webmaster tools, improving documentation, and much more.

    Okay, enough about that, though.

    I wanted to bring back the musicness of my blog and so today I’m featuring a catchy tune by my friend Tat Tong… a lousy Webmaster (sorry, Tat) but a fine musician and award-winning sound recording engineer.

    The short song below, Revocation, was composed, arranged, and sung entirely by Tat.
    NOTE: Broadband connection required.  Sorry, I’m not dealing with bandwidth detection and uploading multiple / inferior clips anymore.

    At Tat’s recording studio Web site, you can hear more of his recording work and learn about the awards he’s garnered.

    I’m highlighting Tat and his music for a few reasons:

    • He’s a friend.
    • I like his music and admire his recording skills.
    • I think the power and magnitude of what musicians can do today on modest budgets is amazing and worth showing off (so no, Tat does not have a multi-million dollar studio)
    • I’m happy to demonstrate (in case it wasn’t obvious already) that there’s yet another thing that Big Labels are unnecessary for.  Not to mention that artists can now gain exposure on MySpace or Google Video, sell CDs effectively (and without getting ripped off) via great sites like CD Baby, even sell electronic downloads (full quality, if they choose!) via kick-ass sites like Magnatune (and get a hell of a better cut than via iTunes!).  Admittedly, the day may not have come where artists can become megahit wonders without labels (due to the sheepiness of vast swaths of consumers, IMHO), but that day WILL come in my lifetime, I’m sure :-D.

    Well, enough pontificating.  Enjoy Tat’s music and hire him if you’d like some quality music work done!

    *  *  *

    UPDATE – July 2, 2006
    Tat updated his Web site and the music no longer autoplays.

  • Brief Da Vinci code review

    I got a free ticket to go see the movie Da Vinci Code and while it won’t say it was worth what I paid for it… well, it wasn’t worth a lot more than that, either.

    The movie in a word:  Joyless.

    I can count the number of times the characters smiled on one hand.
    I can count the number of times I smiled on probably one or two fingers.

    I haven’t read the book, but judging from my reactions to this movie and the 7th-grade-level writing abilities I slogged through in one of Dan Brown’s other books, I can’t say I’ll be clamoring to read the Da Vinci Code anytime soon.

    Things I *did* like about the movie:

    – Some of the beautiful scenery and cinematography.
    – Ian McKellen.  Not all the movies he’s in are good, but HE is always a pleasure to watch, IMHO.
    – Learning some interesting historical facts.

    Things I definitely *did not* like about the movie:
    – The ending.  What a fizzle!
    – The graphic depictions of the monk’s self-flaggelation.  Seeing the scars and (on the side) the whip would have conveyed the point just fine.
    – The overbearing seriousness of the entire film.  No, it didn’t need an Eddie Murphy sidekick donkey, but… hmm… on the other hand, that might have improved things.
    – The movie length.  Rarely does including every detail from the book make sense.

    Have you seen the movie yet?  What did you think?