Season 5 of The Wire is about debut on TV in the UK, so there is a mini-deluge of articles about hl’s fav, including this one on the role of architecture in the show.

It’s been a crazy few days for anyone with a passing interest in the iphone. Indeed with one million sold over the weekend (and 10 million apps) it seems like the revolution which started last year has broken into the mainstream.

There is a fair amount of general apple cynicism in various quarters, not least the amongst certain sections of the PC brigade who can’t see what all the fuss is with Apple and are quick to see ‘Apple-hype’ and generally ‘Mac cult-ishness’ at the root of the massive amount of media attention garnered on these sort of occasions. What amazes me is the lack of Apple generated hype behind last weekend’s launch, and the fact that it’s actually primarily customer generated. Think about that for a second. Apple had a $200 million (?) opening weekend and I’ve hardly seen a poster or an ad.

It’s obvious that price and/or 3G was the deal breaker for some, but it’s really the Apps that are the important thing to watch here. How many times have you ever said ‘check this out’ and showed someone something amazing on your phone ? I’d say before the iphone perhaps 3 or 4 times-now it’s an almost dailyoccurrence-and that’s before we’ve really got into apps.

It’s been perhaps 3 months since the majority of programmers got their hands on the SDK, so it’s very early days and already incredible programs like intua’s SICK looking Beatmaker are starting to appear. The video above is Moocowmusic’s stand alone Drummer, Art Gillespie (the guy behind Idrum)has a drum machine coming out next week (i-idrum?) and we’ve yet to hear from any of the traditional big boys of music software (iphone reason or iphone ableton anyone?). Beat making on the tube has just gone mainstream!! Imagine how many people I’m going bugging with iphone related ‘wow’ moments now. I’m going to become a walking apple viral campaign (as are 10 million other people). A friend who works for a very forward looking marketing company told me recently that his company’s philosophy now is to tell clients to spend their massive marketing budgets on making better products. Chat rooms and forums, blogs and amazon product ratings arejust way too effective at cutting through PR bullshit-it’s just wasted money.

It’s been said before, people underestimate Apple’s brand dominance within the 15-35 demographic (been to an Apple store recently?) this is going to have an exponential affect within that market. As deejay, I’m waiting for the Technics Ideck or the Serato IScratch to become the new default deejay tool -and there are million niche professions that the right bit of software could just completely open up. It has the hardware and now it has the software, (the Core Location side of which is still to be even vaguely explored) and as the political world knows only too well, more than anything else ‘It’s all about the Mo’. Apple has that momentum now and as long as they don’t go out of their way to screw it up-the world is theirs for the taking. Nintendo seem to be the main competitors in this field, depending on what they decide to do with the DS-Nokia/RIM/Google must be absolutely terrified that this is a race they have already lost.

***Update*** CDM has an interview with Intua, the makers of Beatmaker and a demo here- I downloaded it last night and I’m impressed. It’s very much like an MPC for the iphone-can’t wait to load it up with my own sounds and see where this goes. Go take a look!

Can’t wait to see this.

Olt Aicher’s complete set of posters for the Munich Olympics from the flickr set of design shop blanka.

via coudal

It hit me recently how much I’m missing the Wire.

It’s the lack of something comparable that really smarts.

Hopefully this will help

But chances are, I’m gonna be losing my mind and signing Season 6 online petitions in six months.

So the reviews are in and it’s all good.

At the time of writing GTA IV has a 99 on metacritic which is pretty unheard of.

To be able to consistently meet and surpass expectations of this kind is really quite extraordinary. Got mine on pre-order and will be zoning into Liberty City for a good few hours over the bank holiday weekend. My own expectations hinge on whether it is able to evoke the kind of emotional connection that tv and film can so easily provoke and video games have long promised.

All the graphical sophistication, all the realistic physics models, all the uncanny ai in the world doesn’t matter a damn if you don’t care about the characters.

Give me Liberty….

LCD Soundsystem-Get Innocuous (Soulwax Remix)

Photo via coops amazing toy collection

We’ve been pretty excited about cloverfield ever since the trailer first leaked onto the internet. It’s probably enough to say that the film lives up to those seemingly impossible expectations and delivers a masterclass in how to make an intelligent, original popcorn movie.

It’s not perfect, the opening sections feels long (we’re just sitting around waiting for the monster to turn up and destroy everything!) and sometimes the reportage style conceit feels a little forced-but ultimately they are minor quibbles. Once it all kicks off (and btw you need to see this movie on the big screen!!) you get an incredibly visceral and affecting rollercoaster ride that manages to find it’s way past the patronizing cliches that plague many a mainstream movie.

The characters in the film are bystanders to the action, not the usual cookie cutter action heroes. It’s a film about the smallness of man, next to the enormity of their fate and the utter destruction
all around. Perhaps understandably the clear references to 9/11 have proven controversial- (I found the subway sections eerily reminiscent of the 7/7 phone tube footage) but the film never feels exploitative. Rather by defining the characters so early as powerless participants in the much larger drama happening all around, we arrive at a greater truth. That the best response to senseless violence is to draw closer to the ones we love, and so remain undefeated.

Wild Rumpus-Musical Blaze Up (Rub-n-Tug)*

*re-up styles

Via somekind of rare astral alignment, the subject of today’s post and the track I’m most into are perfectly suited for each other. Usually, either we write something then search for the appropriate soundtrack or we are so excited by a track that the text is just an expression of love for that particular bit of music. Today, therefore, is like some one-in-a-million meta-post, words and music in perfect harmony.

It’s also the day after ‘the keynote’, our seasonal excuse to appreciate all infinite loop has to offer.As stephen fry has so sagely noted, apple seems to have the uncanny ability to engineer products of such functional and aesthetic beauty that they provoke an almost emotional response. It’s this reaction that is the cause of such extreme opinions of mac products.

There is a whole beige world out there that can’t understand why people act the way they do about mac and the arguments almost always boil down to the irrationality of it all. Why someone would pay extra for something that is even slightly intangible, can’t be benchmarked and serves a seemingly ‘higher’ set of needs.

I read today at the bottom of a huge argument over why the macbook air was doomed fail/ guaranteed to succeed, one woman write that she wanted to buy one because she knew that everyday she would open it up and smile at owning something so beautiful.

It’s hard thing to put a price on.

Not for me, I still cling to my reason to save me from heartfelt overspending, but a powerful thing to argue against.

Oh and that track-just one letter from absolutely nailing it.

Kenny Dope-Air Mac(k)s

(pic via)

No Country for Old men is one of those films for which it’s very easy to start bandying around superlatives. It’s a contender for my film of the year (I saw it at the very end of 2007) but would still be in the running if I had seen it on January 1st. It is a film made by incredibly talented people at the very height of their abilities, from a book by one of America’s finest authors.

On the surface, it’s an old fashioned morality tale, good vs evil, set in the Texan/Mexico border familiar to readers of Cormac McCarthy’s wonderfully rich body of work. It’s a spare and brutal film, set in a world of random encounters of enormous coincidence and characters tossed around and buffeted by events way, way beyond their control. In short it’s a world which feels very much like reality.

Toning down their usual predilection for the surreal and absurd, the Coen brothers stay unerring true to the spirit of the work to deliver a taught, intensely focussed narrative which draws heavily on the expansive moral questions which underpin McCarthy’s work. Why good men fail and the wicked prosper, where justice seems absent, what hope remains ?

They are questions as old as questions themselves and fittingly, as McCarthy is oft compared to an old testament prophet, it feels like a contemporary retelling of the story of Job (but without the special fx heavy ending).

The answers to such questions, when they come, point to overarching truths hidden and divine, beyond our mortal understanding and out of view in our waking state but revealed to us partly in dreams and visions.

To quote Tommy Lee Jones’ character;

“It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin’. Never said nothin’ goin’ by. He just rode on past… and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin’ fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. ‘Bout the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.”

Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Tortoise- (Some Say) I Got Devil

One episode down and I’m unsure if I’m going to be able to enjoy the fifth, and final season, of The Wire. It’s not that the quality is down, (although I worry about how they can possibly find a way to give it a fitting finale) it’s just I have way too much invested in the characters and those wonderfully crafted, slowly to earth story arcs, that my enjoyment of the show is massively tempered by the growing realisation that this is it.

The clock is ticking.

Ten(?) hours and no more B-more.

Shheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!!!

I guess come spring I’m gonna need some serious, serious  grief counseling. Till then, there is much to enjoy and plenty of time to plan way to ease the pain.

Three choices spring to mind.

Buy the Homicide box set (122 episodes of balitmore police-that’s 2008 booked then!)

Sit tight and wait till Generation Kill -(David Simon/Ed Burns latest project)

Try and get my quality US TV fix somewhere else-Mad Men or Kill Point are the most likely candidates at the moment.

More likely, I’m just going to have to ‘be an adult’ about all this.

Accepting the unavoidably finite nature of life and that the things we love will one day end is one of those healthily, difficult lessons that to pass is a baby step closer to what some people would call maturity.

There is an amazing (and humbling) what is the wire all about? discussion you should really read here (and make sure you read the comments !!!)

Fittingly for the swansong it’s Steve Earle doing the theme this time.

I thought you might like to listen.

Steve Earle-Way Down In The Hole