Worth Your Consideration #018 - A GF5 Linkdump
- RandomKitty.net provides a review of last week’s Nine Inch Nails show in Manchester, NH that is chock-full of YouTube links. If you’ve seen the band perform live on this tour and want to relive the magic, or if you haven’t seen them yet and you’re wondering what you’re missing, please do check out the YouTubeage. It’s not quite as good as being there, but it comes close.
- In her review, our good friend Beth provides a different perspective on the Manchester show, as well as some thoughts on the Worcester show that
precededfollowed it. (Thanks to Beth for the correction.) She writes, “Having seen it firsthand from three different angles, it seems to me to have been constructed with an eye for detail I’ve seen put into museum installations, with the view of it from every last vantage point taken into account.” Yeah, that pretty much sums up how I felt about it, and I only saw it from one angle. I’ll repeat this again: if you haven’t seen this show yet, and you’re at all interested in Nine Inch Nails, you need to get your ass in gear right fucking now.
Topics: Nine Inch Nails
NIN Oeuvre Blog: Leaving Hope
A 2005 Q&A with Rolling Stone establishes that Trent Reznor got off of drugs and alcohol in late 2001, just as the live album And All That Could Have Been and its companion disc, Still, were about to be released. AATCHB and Still are therefore our best windows into the world of Mr. Reznor as he transitions out of the chaotic milieu of the 1990s and into the creatively ripe era of the new millennium. And it’s my contention that the final song on Still, “Leaving Hope,” is a perfectly positioned bridge from one era to the next.
It was in the hopeful yet haunting soundscapes of “Leaving Hope” that I took refuge from the world of musical shit that the rest of humanity was wading through in the years between Nine Inch Nails releases. From January 2002, when Still first entered my consciousness, to April 2005, when With Teeth arrived, songs like “Leaving Hope” were what gave me, well, hope.
I think I always knew that the return of Nine Inch Nails would be more headbang-worthy than daydream-appropriate, but even the arrival of With Teeth and Year Zero, with their relative dearth of instrumentals, didn’t diminish my hope for another group of songs that, like Still, would encourage stillness in the maelstrom of my turbulent brain. “Leaving Hope” was like a final exam written for a course that had begun with assignments like “A Warm Place,” and it proved, to me at least, that the man behind this music was never going to abandon a musical form that he had worked so hard to get good at.
“Leaving Hope,” in my opinion, predicted the arrival of Ghosts I-IV, half a decade before its arrival. It is a remarkably narrative song, for an instrumental. Perhaps it is because I will always tie the music of Still to the videos that were released to the Internet to accompany it, but I can’t help but listen to “Leaving Hope” and see Trent sitting at a piano in New Orleans, candles flickering, curtains quivering in the breeze. When I listen to “Leaving Hope,” I hear the gentle sound of rain falling just outside the window, even though it isn’t there, and I hear a thunderclap at the end, like punctuation, telling me to move on. I feel suddenly at one with a man who seems to be making a decision, who seems to be finally making up his mind to stop hoping for better days and to start actively seeking them out.
That’s what “Leaving Hope” means to me. Whenever I hear it, I can’t help but feel compelled to get off of my ass, once the stillness is over, and to try and step out from underneath the rain cloud I’ve been palling around with for so long.
Geek Force Utterz #040 - Thriller
Veterans Day offers me a day off from my primary gig, but it does not absolve me from the paper-grading responsibilities I have for my secondary gig. So, I’m frustrated that I can’t just spend the day in bed, but I’m also aggravated with life in general. And that has me listening to some pretty weird stuff in iTunes. Listen in to today’s episode of Geek Force Utterz to see what I’m talking about. You can hear the call via the embed above, or by visiting Utterli.com.
The Cider Press #002 - Kevin Rose’s Laptop
The return of the column where we crush a hot Apple news story down to the sweet, sweet nectar of a single paragraph.
In a change that we are sure has not escaped the keen vision of his Diggnation audience, Kevin Rose has recently ditched his defaced Macbook (Pro?) for an updated model that is, thusfar, free from adornments. We here at Geek Force Five are happy to see that Mr. Rose has not yet decided to vandalize his new machine, that he has heretofore seen fit to leave untarnished the precision aluminum unibody enclosure that Apple Senior Vice President of Design Jony Ive poured his blood, sweat, and soul into. We hope that Mr. Rose will continue down this path of righteousness, for he must surely understand that applying a bumper sticker to an Apple product is like setting fire to Old Glory herself. Covering over the unfortunate Dell logo on a sad, Windows-powered laptop, as our esteemed leader Mr. Clark once did—that is one thing. But sullying the beautiful aluminum visage of an Apple machine is heresy. If you have any decency Mr. Rose, you will keep your new machine free and clear of the sins of your past. Have you any decency, sir?
Jocosely yours, the Geek Force Five
Geek Force Utterz #039 - Squarespace
I’ve been hearing a lot about Squarespace lately thanks to Diggnation and the Totally Rad Show, and my curiosity is about to get the best of me. It seems that I am always in the market for a content management system that does things faster and more elegantly than my current solution (Expression Engine), but which also does all of the things (or at least nearly all of the things) that my current CMS does. Listen to today’s call about Squarespace via the embed above or by visiting Utterli.com.
