The Spanish Apartment

On Monday night, I went to see The Spanish Apartment, a French comedy about a group of students from all over the EU sharing a flat in Barcelona (think Amélie meets He Died With A Felafel In His Hand, or something). I enjoyed it; the film managed to capture the experience of going to a new location, the initial feeling of displacement, making friends, having fun, and then the deflated feeling of returning to your everyday life at the end of it all quite well; the use of stylisation, of sped-up movement, compositing of moving video, and use of double exposure to simulate intoxication worked quite well. And the character of the English student's grossly tactless visiting brother (who couldn't seem to open his mouth without making an insensitive remark on one ethnic group or another) was an amusing comic relief.

Locking down the edge of the network

How about that? Howard Dean, the digerati's favourite US Presidential candidate, comes out in favour of "trusted computing", i.e., replacing these evil, pirate-friendly general-purpose computers we have today with closed, tamper-proof boxes that let you do only what the copyright industry agrees to. As if to prove that the main difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is that, where the former favour oil companies and military contractors, the latter favour Hollywood and the big 5 record labels.
(via Charlie Stross, who also has this essay about the looming potential of technologically-enabled totalitarianism.

(no subject)

My copy of Native Instruments FM7 arrived in the mail today. I bought it directly from Native Instruments it cost me US$311, including shipping. This came down to a bit over 400 Australian pesos. Which is rather good, given that the Australian list price is A$699, the best price Manny's were able to quote me was $640, and the best price a guy in Brisbane (who said he could get it at a little over the internet price) was $540 or so.

It also came with a bonus CD titled "FM7 Sounds Vol. 1", containing 256 extra presets.

On the horizon

In an interview in today's Beat, Richard Lowenstein said that he is preparing a DVD version of Dogs In Space. It's about time too; I wonder what extra features it will have (commentary tracks would be the obvious ones).

Meanwhile, Neil Halstead said here that there may be rereleases of the Slowdive back-catalogue, and possibly some of the many unreleased tracks (you know, the ones that have been floating around the file-sharing networks for some time). I concur with slowdive.co.uk; I'd like to see a box set and/or a DVD.