dimanche 22 janvier 2012

no more tunes from Painter Babu

It was always nice to say hello to Wull, who spun discs for pimusic nights ("Free music for a better world") with a classic Glaswegian twinkle in his eye. I didn't even make the connection that this guy putting on the records in between the live acts was Painter Babu for quite a while. This was great, because I could have my fanboy moment with someone I already knew to talk to when I realised.
Anyway, now he is dead. Details are pretty hazy: I only found out when I went to check out the pimusic site in an idle moment back before Christmas, by which time the news was already months old. I knew Trevor has been a fan, and he confirmed the news. Lung cancer apparently. He was 48. He did not suffer long. It was a good excuse to get in touch with Paul again, who characteristically offered me a download of Wull's hard drive with all his Cubase files, should I wish to do a remix. I wouldn't presume to touch a note, so here are links to my two favourite tracks: Into Reality a vinyl mashup that includes samples of AJP Taylor reading from his history of the second world war, and It thought, it thought, which features Wull himself. It's sad there will be no more Painter Babu tracks. What a talent! He will be missed.

mardi 3 janvier 2012

Interesting typo in the New York Review of Books


Untitled
Originally uploaded by Julius Beezer
Like anyone who has edited articles for the press, I fancy myself good at spotting typos.
In a publication as august as the NYRB such errors seem vanishingly rare, so when they do occur, they are interesting.
Of course, automated spellchecking will catch malformed words that appear in no dictionary, but there is no substitute for the human eye for misplaced valid words—in this case an extra "a" in Louis Begley's review of a newly translated biography of Simon Wiesenthal by Tom Segev. (NYRB Dec 8-21, 2011, vol LVIII, No 19, p46, col 4, line 69).
This has the look of a remnant of a hasty (and partial) deletion of a few words from the offending sentence, most likely as part of a last minute tweak to get the text to fit nicely into the allocated space in the editorial plan. The nature of the content makes one fantasise about last minute legal or political pressure on the editorial team, but this is sheer fantasy. A Freudian slip?
I once met a young man whose team at a big bank spent its days tracking missing millions. This happens all the time apparently. He assured me that cock-ups outnumber conspiracies by a huge margin. This is probably the case here, but it seemed worth adding to the mysterious disappearance sequence anyway.