The Killing (Forbrydelsen)

We finally got around to watching the original Danish version of The Killing thanks to Malkovich Malkovich. We were gripped for all twenty episodes, but given all the little bits I'd read about it (not too much because I didn't want to accidentally read a spoiler) I'd been expecting some truly original TV, as in The Wire original.

Instead it was surprisingly full of clichés and not just a few but almost every one the detective/thriller/cop drama can throw up, barring the old cop two days from retirement getting killed. Even the story is fairly straight-forward, with what amounts to an episode of Inspector Morse taking 10 times as long. But then Inspector Morse was good telly too. This also means much of the story ends up, much like 24, being about red herrings and dead ends, with whole episodes ending up not furthering the plot at all and someone's bare-faced lies being revealed every episode.

This sounds like it should be bad but the acting is excellent and the script seemed really good, excepting a few dodgy lines. I suppose one can't necessarily judge a script that's read compared to one that's written - I've read plenty of books where character dialogue would have sounded ridiculous if someone had actually said it out loud - so maybe I should just say that it read well. Certainly we didn't have the normal scenery eating acting or those ridiculous 'emoting 101' moments where someone SMASHES THE STUFF OFF THEIR DESK to make a point about how angry they are.

I think I could only have wished it had more of a continuous plot running through it with each episode building things up. The only show I remember really using that device well recently was Damages, which is similarly laced with clichés and good acting but is only 13 episodes long, so doesn't have to stretch its story quite so much. It also leaves me a little baffled as to why the US market felt the need to remake something that was really just apeing quality US dramas in the first place. Oh well, one day I'll probably see an episode of it and it'll start with 'Previously, on The Killing' and somewhere in the episode someone will get massively emo and upend a table and scream and yell.

2011 Albums as of 11-05-2011

Had a quick aggregation on Last.Fm sorting by albums across devices:


180 Let England Shake PJ Harvey
147 The King of Limbs Radiohead
142 Ravedeath, 1972 Tim Hecker
118 Rolling Blackouts The Go! Team
112 Kiss Each Other Clean Iron & Wine
103 Content Gang of Four
69 Red Barked Tree Wire
37 The Big Roar The Joy Formidable
33 GOB DELS
31 Tao of the Dead ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead
28 Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will Mogwai
27 Peanut Butter Blues and Melancholy Jam Ghostpoet
21 The King Is Dead The Decemberists

The numbers represent the number of tracks played on each album, incidentally. There are a few other 2011 albums but I just did the first few pages of the last 6 months and deleted all non-2011 albums. Ghostpoet, DELS and Bill Callahan have been played just since yesterday but my phone hasn't yet sent some listening stats on GhostPoet and Callahan so they're just bubbling under that list too. Expect them to rise.

The Renewal Website

I've been working on the Renewal website for a while now. Partly this is my fault because I work on these things in my spare time and partly it's because the journal is also the result of other people's spare time and theirs is even more precious than mine.

So, some 12 months after I first started working on it, Renewal.Org.UK is now working and has some content on it. More is to come but it's a good start.

The site allows for users to login to view certain articles - there's no charge but you have to submit your email to the site. Other articles are only available in the issues of the journal itself. The colour scheme on each journal is a very striking affair of black, red and a single other colour that changes each year, and the website reflects this depending on the volume you are viewing.

Pocus Whiteface Website

I've been working on three new websites recently, though one is in hiatus until it's signed off. In the mean time I took what I learned from designing that site and applied it to the band website, which had been in a 'rough' form for far too long.

The new design is modular and uses PHP 5 and in creating it I already so a load of things I could reapply to the other website to improve on the initial form. Anyway, the Pocus site has been designed to be a very basic, no frills design but with a high level of information.

As such, it has some very obvious key screens: About, News, Gigs, Photos, Videos, Releases, Songs, all of which follow the same basic pattern of a logo at the top and post after post coming along beneath with the information. The font is Courier New right now but I think I'll change it to Garamond in a few minutes; the picking of Courier New was a deliberate attempt to make it look basic and concentrate on the content.

Behind the scenes the structure is clever: songs are added to releases (with notes on the version if necessary) and then reordered so that under each release you can see the songs that are on it in track order and each song is a link back to that song's info. Likewise under each song is a list of all the releases it is on and the videos.

There's some other stuff coming including images of the lyrics in handwritten form and set lists and stuff. It's going to be looking pretty sweet when it's all done.

http://www.pocuswhiteface.com

London Progressive Journal

LPJ has been going for over a year now. You can find it here LondonProgressiveJournal.com

Once it was a one page per issue thing but I recently upgraded the site heavily and it's got a page for each story in an issue. The code is a mess, though, because I don't yet fully understand Rails. I'm going to get back to it at some point soon but first I need to create a new Pocus Whiteface website.

It's been WELL OVER a year since I last posted.

This is quite an amazing thing. Why? I'm rubbish, that's why. What scares me more is the knowledge of how long ago I started this and how quickly 2008 slipped through my fingers. Bugger.

Friends of the Bride's New Video

Bobby just punted this one my way. Being the geeky sort I am I immediately noticed the 2.35:1 aspect ratio and the the HD logo. This is swish stuff. It's a good song too and also a great little video. I think if you play this embedded version you don't get HD but I'm presuming the link will be in there somewhere to go to the proper version? Oh yeah, there it is. :D



Friends of the Bride - So... You Think You Can Dance? from Scott Jaeger on Vimeo.