This is my ear-worm of late. OK, I know that my ravings about Porcupine Tree on here have probably become boring already, but I urge anyone that reads this post to have a look at this video, whether they like, hate or are indifferent to the band.
It’s a song filled with such beat, such dark energy and detached maliciousness… It’s almost scary. It draws you in the same way an “Incident” would draw you, making you cheat a look at the victims before they are carried away…
Listen to the song and take a look at the eerie and very fitting video right here.
Yes, another Porcupine Tree related post. The craze continues, excuse me while I kiss the quills. Ouch. Nevermind that.
The ‘Tree played in Thessaloniki last night. The setlist was the same as in Athens.
Except instead of The Circle of Manias and The Seance, they played the 15-minute version of Even Less, The Start of Something Beautiful and The Sound of Muzak. AND because they were playing with no Anathema, the ticket cost just a mere €20! ARGH!
OK I’ll just go listen to Buying New Soul to calm down a bit! I’ve got studying to do and only 1 hour or something to do it in!
I’ve been listening to Porcupine Tree since 2004. I wasn’t even 16 years old then. My first contact with them was by listening to The Sky Moves Sideways… It was just right for me then: I was a developing Floyd fan and I could really relate with their sound as it was when they (him? Porcupine Tree was little more than Steven Wilson’s pet band that early) did it, their prog rock side shining through… It didn’t take long for me to listen to In Absentia in all its glory as well, and a few months later their newest album, Deadwing, was released. And then I started actively following them.
It was July 2005 when they played in Lycabettus Theater together with Blackfield and Van Der Graaf Generator, under a full moon. Back then, they had played 9 songs; some of them I didn’t know. I was there with my friend George. Porcupine Tree hadn’t grown enough on me for me to truly have a great time but I liked it nonetheless. I was a fledgling rocker anyhow (I consider myself a fledgling rocker even today).
It took Porcupine Tree another 5 years to re-visit Greece and Athens. Within those years, there’s been great change inside of me. I was 16 back then, I’m 21 today, that’s obvious enough… But I feel that whatever I like about Porcupine Tree grew up with me as well, it matured. The years passed and I loved them more and more. Their music accompanied me through times happy, sad, hard and carefree. It inspired me, mystified me. Fear of a Blank Planet and The Incident came out within those years and I was there to celebrate. These guys’ music even served as my initial common ground with Maaike and anything that relationship, quotes or no, ever symbolised or tought me. To summarise: Within 6 short years, Porcupine Tree developed into my favourite band.
So of course it was a special moment when I learned that they would be coming this year and what a surprise: they’d be playing in Technopolis, one of the coolest places in central Athens. So the months passed and the night came! I left the day before yesterday from Mytilini to be here in Athens on time for the concert and I’m leaving again for my beloved little island town tonight. ~24 hours worth of hanging around ship interiors, studying and reading The Drawing of The Three. I could honestly take twice as much for what I experienced yesterday. And on my own was great. Neni, of course, in one of her usual bouts of derangement decided not to take the opportunity to even come to the concert on her own, let alone with me. Not that I cared in the end: I was able to take it all in with no distractions in my head. What can I say? Her loss. That’s the least I can say.
The ‘Tree gave a fantastic performance. I wish I could be at the railing but I was just half a meter behind! I would have managed to be at the railing if not for a few friends that I met and gave the extra ticket to, but I didn’t mind at the end, we had a good time after the concert! 😉
So! What did they play?
The Setlist:
Occam’s Razor
The Blind House
Great Expectations
Kneel and Disconnect
Drawing the Line
Open Car
Lazarus
Russia on Ice (part 1)
Anesthetize (part 2)
Time Flies
Degree Zero of Liberty
The Séance
Circle of Manias
Normal
Way Out of Here
Sleep Together
Encore:
Stars Die
Blackest Eyes
Trains
Highlights:
Right when they came out and started playing Occam’s Razor, at one of the pauses it seemed as if there was something wrong with Steven’s guitar, which might actually have been the case. But he just made it look as if it was just dramatic idling.It was suspenseful! And then of course came The Blind House.
Open Car in last night’s show had a brand new breakdown! We were all ecstatic, looking at eachother in crazy disbelief. Check it out in this video that, strangely, has not been taken down. 2:10 marks the spot.
Russia on Ice together with Anesthetize? What an inspiration! Steven did a trick where he played his chords by just kind of slapping the strings there. It was impressive!
I didn’t expect to like the 2nd part of The Incident, that is, the songs after Time Flies, but the band managed to give them some kind of energy that was absent on the recording. I liked that…
After they finished their standard setlist with Way Out of Here and SleepTogether, they left the stage. I always find encores funny, how the artists just leave the stage like that. It’s as if they’re saying “Klain” to everyone! 😀 Anyway, they came back of course and Steven said: “We have some of the older songs for you tonight…” He had already mentioned it at the beginning, but it was really happening! And we were all like: “what might they have in store for us tonight?”, you could smell the anticipation in the air. We hoped their guilt for leaving us with no Porcupine Tree for 5 years would be enough for them to do something special, at least they sounded guilty when Steven said “we hope you haven’t forgot us” or something to that extent… And it begun with Stars Die.
And here’s your proof, the best quality I did find… The song took me back to when I had first listened to PT. It was one of the first songs of theirs that I had come to love. And I remember Giorgos, an old friend of mine, telling me he’d told a girl he was hitting on, drunk of course: “Stars die, stars die…” I dedicate this memory to him. 🙂 Incidentally (pun unintended), he was the one that introduced me to Porcupine Tree. Cheers mate. We need to talk more.
And then came Blackest Eyes and Trains (Fanis would have gone wild with this one). I’ll leave the following do the talking. By the way, you can listen to me cheering and making happy noises and remarks at least at 2:07 and 4:14, that ETSI REEEE!! must be me… I’m not sure! I was somewhere around there. Also notice, at the end of the concert, how Gavin does his magic trick (hard to see on the video) and Richard produces a suitable sound effect and Colin took out his video camera and recorded the whole scene, including the wild crowd (that’s us)! Yeah! I can’t imagine the guys just sitting in a couch, watching crowd videos from the tour and making funny comments. I would actually pay money for such a deep behind-the-scenes.
EDIT!: THEY DELETED IT! THESE ASSHOLES! I CAN’T BELIEVE IT… :'( YOU’RE NOT EARNING ANY RESPECT OR FANS FOR THIS, YOU KNOW…
I sung every song at the top of my voice. I headbanged and rocked with my whole body. I got lost in memories and created even better ones at this concert. I had the chance to see them live again and it was awesome. Gavin is the best drummer alive, Richard is a master of atmosphere, I’d like to have Colin’s coolness and bass guitar skills, and Steven is a bare-foot musical genius with incredible live energy and style. John Wesley, their guest guitarist and backing vocalist for the tour, melted girls’ hearts yesterday in addition to playing superbly… Thanks for a great show, at a great place, with great music.
Have a look at their older setlists in Athens, however, and tell me how awesome it must have been to see them play stuff off Lightbulb Sun, for example…
Oh, Anathema also played… Meh… These are the songs they played, they really weren’t anything special in my opinion. Don’t know their old songs, of course, nor did I catch them at their hayday.
EDIT:
Maybe not all that much has changed after all… has it?
I don’t know whether it’s because I like Porcupine Tree so much that I find their songs so close to my emotions or whether the reverse is happening. Maybe it’s a cyclical thing.
I hope this doesn’t get taken down (like all the otheeers…)
Stumbled upon (literally, not via StumbeUpon!) it while looking for a place to develop a b/w film in Athens…
1826
The picture below is reputed to be the world’s first photograph. It was taken in 1826 and was developed by French photographer Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. He called this process “heliography” or sun drawing and the entire process took eight hours.
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1869
Before the Autochrome process was perfected in France, this photograph of a landscape in Southern France was taken. No, it is not hand-tinted. This is a color-photograph. (Note: It was published in a Time/Life Book entitled “Color” in 1972, “courtesey of George Eastman House, Paulus Lesser.”) You are looking at the birth of color photography seven years after the American Civil War. 130 years ago this view of Angouleme, France, was created by a “subtractive” method. This is the basis for all color photography, even today. It was taken by Louis Ducos du Hauron who proposed the method in 1869. It was not until the 1930’s that this method was perfected for commercial use.
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1838
This is one of the, if not the, oldest known photograph of a human being in existence. It depends on how one defines photograph, but this was taken by Louis Jacques-Mande Daguerre in 1838. (The fellow the daguerreotype was named after.) This is a photo of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris. This is a busy street and there was tons of traffic, but since the exposure was so long, about 15-20 minutes, none of the moving figures can be seen. The only people visible are a guy getting his boots polished and the bootblack. Who was this nameless gentleman or the bootblack? No one knows. I’m sure they never imagined that they had been immortalized, albeit anonymously, by a clever scientist testing his newly discovered method of preserving moments in time.
It was a different world then. The only motorized transportation was the railroad, and even it was in its infancy. Horses and sailing ships were still the primary means of getting around, the typical person probably never travelled more than 50 miles from where they were born. The first Atlantic steamship service started this year though, so the future was on the way. The telegraph had been invented, but the first commercial telegraph operations were a year away. There were commercial semaphore telegraphs operating, so it was possible to send a message over some distance for a price.
The first accurate measurement of the distance to a nearby star was calculated in 1838, the intellectuals were beginning to grasp just how big the universe really was. Though the discovery that there were other galaxies besides our own was still decades away. The first mass produced clocks were flooding markets in England and America, for the first time commoners could have a clock in their homes. Though it would be some decades before time zone was invented, clocks were set to local noon. They were the PCs of their day no doubt. What we would call a modern bicycle was still a year away, the bicycles of the era were propelled by pushing the ground with one’s feet. Gads.
Napoleon was still on everyone’s minds no doubt, the way Hitler is now the demon du jour, having been defeated less than three decades before. Slavery had been abolished in most of the civilized world, with the exception of the USA. In England Queen Victoria’s reign began the year before. I’m sure no one guessed she would reign until 1901, 63 years, the longest reign of any British Monarch. I doubt she or anyone guessed at the changes that would take place in her lifetime. And neither Germany nor Italy existed yet yet, both were a dozen or more smaller independent nations.
Here is a map of Europe in 1815. It would have looked the same in 1838 if I am not mistaken. America was a lot smaller then too, and Texas was an independent nation. In any event, nothing particularly profound about this post. I am just trying to share my love of history in general and old photographs in particular. (I’ve linked to this before, but here again is a lovely site about the history of photography.) Every age thinks it is at the end of history, and at the time, they were.
Puts some perspective into digital photography… Do you think people in 2180 will find anything interesting that exists today in my flickr profile? I wonder if and how today’s technology will be compatible with the mediums of the future…
Big thank you to my sources (in order) and to (CTRL+C)+(CTRL+V):
An important period of my life begun with this song… Now it appears to end with his song as well. To some cultures, time is cyclical, not linear. Events repeat themselves, since time does not “go on”, more like, “goes round”.
You move in waves
You never retrace
Your newest craze
Straight out of the face by the bed unread
I’m left behind
Like all the others
Some fall for you
It doesn’t make much difference if they do
She changes every time you look
By summer it was all gone – now she’s moved on
She called you every other day
So savour it it’s all gone – now she’s moved on
So for a while
Everything seemed new
Did we connect?
Or was it all just biding time for you?
Είναι μια αρκετά ευαίσθητη περίοδος για μένα… Κάθομαι κάθε μέρα σπίτι εδώ στην Νέα Σμύρνη, διαβάζοντας Scott Pilgrim, Y: The Last Man και The Gunslinger, γράφοντας στην Νένη (η οποία ήταν στην Καπαδοκία τις προηγούμενες μέρες — καταπληκτικό), συλλογιζόμενος το χτες και το προχτές… Είναι πολύ δύσκολα θέματα τα οποία έχω αποφασίσει να αντιμετωπίσω μέσα στο καλοκαίρι. Δεν νομίζω ότι μπορώ να γράψω για αυτά εδώ, τουλάχιστον, όχι ακόμα. Όλοι οι προηγούμενοι μήνες ήταν δύσκολοι (προσέξτε μόνο την έλλειψη ποστ), με πολλά ταξίδια για τα οποία ποτέ δεν έγραψα, πολύ άγχος το οποίο ποτέ δεν κατέκτησα, πολλές στιγμές με την παρέα τις οποίες δεν ένιωσα, πολλές προσωπικές στιγμές τις οποίες ποτέ δεν ανάλυσα… ούτε εδώ, αλλά και ούτε μέσα μου. Ο χρόνος τρέχει και νιώθω ότι με έχει προσπεράσει εδώ και καιρό. It’s time [pun… unintended (?)] to do some catching up…
Και υπάρχουν και τα games. Για αυτά είναι πάντα πολύ εύκολο να γράψεις. Τολμώ να πω… βολικά εύκολο…
Αυτές τις μέρες θέλω να παίξω το Super Mario Galaxy 2, το οποίο είχε πάρει ο Μάριος εδώ και εβδομάδες, αλλά επειδή το Wii μου ήταν στην Αθήνα (α ναι, τον φιλοξενούσαμε με την Νένη καθόλη την διάρκεια της εξεταστικής! *hi-fives to neni and mario*) είχαμε απομείνει όλοι να κοιτάζουμε το κουτί. Αφού, ως γνωστόν, η παρέα μου απαρτίζεται από Nintendo-haters, δεν υπήρχε άλλο Wii στον χρήσιμο ορίζοντα. Και μετά ο Μάριος έφυγε, εγώ, η Νένη και ο Μουράτ (ένας κουλ τούρκος που γεννήθηκε στην Γερμανία, τον οποίο φιλοξενήσαμε στην Μυτιλήνη και μας συντρόφευσε στο ταξίδι μας μέχρι την Κωσταντινούπολη — ναι, πήγαμε κι εκεί :)) κι έτσι δεν είχα την ευκαιρία να το παίξω. Κι επειδή είμαι πολύ φτωχός, το Xbox μου χάλασε και θέλω να αγοράσω τα StarCraft II και Victoria II τα οποία έρχονται στο άμεσο μέλλον, δεν μπορώ να παίξω το Super Mario Galaxy 2… 🙁
Έτσι λοιπόν, αφού είμαι στην Αθήνα, μόνος, με μπόλικο ελεύθερο χρόνο, αποφάσισα να παίξω το πρώτο SMG. Το είχα αφήσει στα 116 αστέρια. Ε, σήμερα το τελείωσα, μετά από σχεδόν 3 χρόνια. Δεν ένιωσα τίποτα ιδιαίτερο, ίσα-ίσα, θέλω κι άλλο. Μου έκανε εντύπωση όμως ξανά η μουσική… ιδιαίτερα του Gusty Garden Galaxy, που ήταν και το πρώτο τρακ που είχα ακούσει από το παιχνίδι, πριν κυκλοφορήσει, και είχα δει ότι μεγάλο μέρος της μουσικής του παιχνιδιού θα ήταν ενορχηστρωμένη. Δείτε (ακούστε!) το original, τις 8-bit, live και metal παραλλαγές, και σκεφτείτε πόσο η ενορχήστρωση και οι συνθήκες μπορούν να αλλάξουν τι συναίσθημα θα βγάλει ένα κομμάτι. Απερίγραπτο.
Ηχογράφηση που εμφανίζεται στο παιχνίδι (Miyamoto’s getting it on! ^^,)
Live ορχηστρικό:
Metal:
8-bit:
Χτες είδα το Toy Story 3 μαζί με τον Κίρα και την Μυριάνθη. Ήταν εξαιρετικό… Ήμουν από μικρός φαν της σειράς (είχα το πρώτο σε VHS, το είχα πάρει από την Αυστραλία!), και ήταν ένα επάξιο τελευταίο κεφάλαιο στην ιστορία, αντιμετωπίζοντας πολύ ώριμα το θέμα το οποίο πραγματευόταν και έτσι με άγγιξε σε ένα σημείο που ήδη είναι πολύ ευαίσθητο αυτές τις μέρες: πώς ο χρόνος κυλά και ότι μας συντρόφευε πριν χρόνια δεν είναι πια το ίδιο, όμως ούτε κι εμείς είμαστε οι ίδιοι… Ότι ήταν δικό μας κάποτε μπορεί να μας εκπλήσει… Τελικα, όμως, τι είναι πιο αυθεντικό, και σύμφωνα με τι είναι σωστότερο να πορεύεται κανείς; Αυτό μπορεί να είναι το recurring theme του φετινού καλοκαίριου. Κι ακόμα δεν έχω δει τίποτα, είμαι σίγουρος…
[part 0 γιατί δεν ξέρω αν θα έχει συνέχεια… αν ναι, αυτός είναι ο πρόλογος…]
Found it through a post from Mordread’s facebook. What an incredible little piece of gaming culture! It’s a masterful piece of cultural representation in this game form on itself… How many can you find?
There has been relatively little talk about the BP oil spill. For such a big disaster, I’m surprised there haven’t been many people calling BP out on the matter. Especially here in Greece, the matter seems to be getting little attention. Hopelessly little when it’s the largest natural disaster to hit the US we’re talking about. One could say that Greece has its own problems at this time, but even like that, people just don’t seem to care unless it’s their home.
So, what if it was YOUR home?
This is what the people behind www.ifitwasmyhome.com must have thought… It’s a site trying to raise awareness about the BP oil spill. It has live streaming video of the spill (yes there’s a camera thousands of meters below the surface) but most importantly, they have a Google Map with a representation of the oil spill layered on it, at the location of the actual spill. This is a great way to comprehend the extent of the damage done, but for anyone who’s not from New Orleans or the southern coast of the US it means little. What’s best about the site is that you can move this layered spill anywhere you want in the world and see what it would look like over your home. I put in my post code in Nea Smyrni and this is what came up.
I am lost for words… There’s nothing that has not been said anymore. Things will only change if people unplug their ears and, most importantly, their minds…
