marks.dk
Roskilde Tweetup #Twølstafet
If this is not proof enough that I won, I don’t know what is.
Oh yeah, that’s right. The rules stated we should tweet where we ran around the beer can, not once we reached the finish line.
I blame @mortensax, not @jacobpackert who was “the winner”.
Six Items Or Less
Interesting experiment:
Starting Monday, June 21st, a group of people from California to Dubai are going to take part in a little experiment: each participant gets to choose six (and only six) items of clothing and pledge to wear only these six items of clothing for a month.
— What Not To Wear: The Six Items Or Less Project « BBH Labs.
Roskilde Recap
Seeing that I misread the itinerary for my trip to Berlin that will not happen today, but tomorrow, I find myself with time to do a recap of Roskilde Festival anno 2010.
It’s the seventh time I visited the land of Dusty Piss, and it was both a very familiar visit, and a completely new experience. Familiar because I visited with old friends I only see at Roskilde, and, let’s face it, nothing really changes at Roskilde.
On the other hand, something had changed. I don’t know if it’s me getting older, or Roskilde growing up, but it seems much more of a restrictive playground now, instead of being the anarchistic melting pot I remember it to be previously. Lots of people have moaned and groaned about the new prohibition against bringing your own beers to the festival site (not camping site, mind you).
Who the fuck ever brought beer to the festival site? You cut open a 1.5 litre bottle and filled it with two bottles of vodka and whatever juice you could find room for. I don’t mind Roskilde wants to make money (they donate the profit to charities anyway), but it seems that the youngsters who used to drink magic liquids had to stand in line with everybody else for beer. That is a problem.
Also, the food was better than ever. I had quite a few salmon sandwiches with fresh-baked bread, cabbage, dill and a lovely dressing. And what’s wrong with that? Everything’s wrong with that. You’re supposed to eat canned foods, lousy bread and season with leftover weed.
It’s getting nicer and nicer, and on one hand I love it, but it’s bringing Roskilde to a level where it shouldn’t be.
[Old man rant/appreciation over]
The music program this year didn’t impress me before the festival, and it didn’t impress me while I was there. But that’s not to say there weren’t great music to be heard:
Thursday:
Electrojuice – 5/6
The guys are 16 and 17 years old and they stirred up a party like few others could do it. Deeply impressed.
When Saints Go Machine – 4/6
It’s difficult to be an upcoming band and awaken all of Roskilde from Orange Stage, but they did a good job and people seemed to like it. On the other hand, it couldn’t be worse than Petter or Teitur who’ve been opening acts the last two years. (How Roskilde Festival can deem them “upcoming Danish acts” have always baffled me.)
LCD Soundsystem – 5/6
Hot, steamy, overcrowded. Biggest misplacement of the year (Cosmopol has room for 6000 – LCD needed Arena’s 17000!). But it was a great concert anyway, though I never even saw the band.
Gorillaz – 4/6
Everytime they got a rhythm going with a few upbeat songs in a row, they’d slow the concert down to a halt. It sounded amazing, and the band is incredibly tight live — it just doesn’t work when you break the flow continuously.
Friday:
Baron Criminel – 5/6
Biggest surprise of the year. Kristian Leth from The William Blakes has made a project that focus on Haitian voodoo and the rhythms associated with the religion. Combined with Troels Abrahamsen on “electronics” and Kresten Osgood on everything he could get his hands on, they succeeded in mesmerizing an otherwise sleepy Cosmopol stage on an early Friday afternoon. Incredibly hard task, but to me they succeeded, though I’ve heard many others didn’t like it. Comes down to taste, I guess.
Florence + The Machine – 2/6
They are the new Evanescence. Listening to Florence Welch sing for an hour is about 50 minutes too long. She’s incredibly talented, but combined with a sound volume way too low, it just became monotonous and annoying to listen to.
Delphic – 3/6
Incredibly talented guys, and I love their record. However, it just wasn’t their day, even though they tried with all their might and power to convince people to rock out.
Health – 1/6
I recognize the attraction of punk in a small, sweaty room with 50 people going nuts. However, a band that isn’t really focused on which kind of style they want to play (or project at least) just doesn’t cut it for me. Their drummer was incredibly talented, though.
Tech N9ne – 4/6
He was there. He rapped. He did well, but I don’t remember anything other than the lyrics to “I’m a player”.
Den Sorte Skole – 5/6
They had the difficult task of playing 40 years of music from artists that have performed at Roskilde in two hours. We heard everything from Neil Young to Bob Marley and Kraftwerk to Malk de Koijn and what we heard was good. Seeing a sea of lighters to the sounds of Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” was a moment to remember, but again they got the flow going and kept interrupting it — instead of just building up the tension throughout the concert with a few bursts in between. A shame, because that might have made it a legendary act, instead of just a great experience.
Saturday:
Kings of Convenience – 4/6
It doesn’t get more hipster than Erlend Øye, and they did a great job of delivering a sleepy, dreamy experience to the tired festival-goers. However, I ended up liking the stories and cover version of Leslie Gore’s “It’s my party” much more than their own music in the end.
FM Belfast – 5/6
They entered the stage dressed in suits and bow ties and ended up in their underwear and shirts in the end. A full-on party in the middle of the afternoon with good music, but fucking amazing energy. I haven’t seen a band in many, many years that openly enjoyed playing as much as FM Belfast. They smiled at each other, joked with the audience and generally spread a lot of joy. Even a cranky old bastard as myself ended up with a big fat smile on the face.
Brother Ali
Only heard a few songs, but it was great, and I hope to catch the freestylin’ albino another time. You should too.
Kashmir – 3/6
I used to be one of their biggest fans, but I really don’t like the new album. It’s boring and incredibly monotonous. They’ll do better in the end, I hope.
Turboweekend – 4/6
Great live-band that only gets better and better each time I see them. Silas Bjerregaard is one of the best lead singers in any Danish upcoming band, and it’s a joy to experience it live. How they go from a great concert to a magnificent one, I don’t know. They do everything they can, and it’s great, but still lacks whatever it is that takes it to the next level. I really hope their next album is a homerun — they need a few more songs as good as “Trouble Is” and “Something or Nothing”.
Robyn – 5/6
How she transformed herself into the new Madonna is beyond me. Instead of taking the crap pop-route, she now rules the intersection between house-y, electronic, dubstepping, dancehall’ing pop music. It’s not as extreme as M.I.A., but broader appealing. And that’s not a bad thing, mind you.
The Prodigy – 2/6
They get the two stars for “Firestarter” and “Smack My Bitch Up”.
Matias Aguayo – 4/6
Chilean/German house act signed to Kompakt featuring live vocals and lots of fun and gags. Great warmup for Moderat.
Moderat – 6/6
The only act that moved beyond great and into the realm of “fantastic”. It might have been because of the time slot at almost 3 in the morning, or the general exhaustion, but it was rough, hard and loud. Modeselektor in itself is really good, and Apparat is great, but it’s only when you combine the strong beats and the flickering sounds you reach beyond it. I can’t wait to hear more of their new stuff.
Sunday:
Local Natives – 4/6
Slight problems with hitting the high notes, but in general a great band with lovely songs. I hope I get to hear them again when they have even more to offer, and not at a festival.
The National – 5/6
I listened to “Boxer” about a year ago and didn’t like it. I don’t know why, but I recall finding it a bit boring. Then I saw a stop motion movie which used “Slow Show” as the background music and fell in love. “High Violet” taught me how to listen to The National, and now I find “Boxer” almost as good. I guess you just have to let it lie for a bit before being able to unlock it. If I didn’t like The National before I saw them live, I’m not sure I’d have liked them afterwards. Matt Berninger’s voice is low-pitched and melancholic until he suddenly runs amok and screams like a madman. It’s perfect in any way, but I’m not sure they get many fans out of their concerts. They do treat their fans, however, and it was quite the experience to see him jump the stage and run into the crowd.
Prince – 4/6
When Prince plays the guitar and sings the hits we all know and love, it’s perfect in every way. Seeing him live is like being able to say you saw James Brown or Michael Jackson before they passed away — and I’m happy I had the chance to do so. That just makes it even more sad that he feels the need to have his choir ladies sing gospels while he exits the stage for 15 minutes. It dragged on for way too long, and I felt that the time was better spent in the company of Prince than his backup musicians.
tl;dr
Not much anarchy, but great food. Music was decent, but it desperately lacked the special stuff that would take it from being just “great”, to an otherworldly experience.
NY Times’ article on Noma and René Redzepi
Great article on Noma, René Redzepi and the worldwide sensation it has become. I particularly like the term “locavore”, describing someone that only eats local food (local in this manner being from the Nordic region):
Denmark, after all, isn’t Provence or Catalonia. For a locavore chef, in particular, it has limitations. But Mr. Redzepi has air-dried, pickled, cured, foraged and researched his way around them. He has taken what could be a set of ankle weights and turned them into wings, his culinary accomplishments drawing all the more regard for the degree of geographical difficulty built into them.
— A Danish Chef Draws Worldwide Acclaim – NYTimes.com.
Drinking. American Style.
American Drink is one of my absolutely favorite new blogs. It mixes cocktail recipes with longer stories about bars and fond memories from the authors’ childhood. Just read this paragraph:
I told him about that time in kindergarten when I accidentally punched a girl in the face while fooling around, and about that other time when I fell into a hotel swimming pool at Disney World and was within mere seconds of death when I saw my dad’s arm come through the gin-clear water to yank me out.
(Also, their motto is the best: “Be responsible. Drink for fun.”)
— American Drink | “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a bartender…”.
Don’t be cheap
Best advice you could ever get on freelance work:
Work for free or for full price. Never for cheap.
And a great article to follow up on the quote:
— Two Choices for Rates and Cheap Isn’t One of Them.
Another reason to love Copenhagen — green rooftops
How cool are we?
As part of its overall strategy to become a carbon neutral city by 2025, Copenhagen has become the first Scandanavian city to adopt a policy that requires green roofs for all new buildings with roof slopes of less than 30 degrees.
— Copenhagen Adopts a Mandatory Green Roof Policy | Inhabitat – Green Design Will Save the World.
Paginating on-the-fly
This is clever:
Paginate.js is a JavaScript bookmark that adds Instapaper-style pagination tap zones to any page in Mobile Safari. It also works on WebKit-based desktop browsers, namely Google Chrome (extension available) and Safari.
— grantheaslip’s paginate.js at master – GitHub.
Anti-Social
Fred Stutzman, the creater of Freedom, a Mac app that turns off internet access for a preset timeframe, has just released “Anti-Social”.
In using Freedom, Fred Stutzman found that he often wanted to look up something on the internet while reading a paper etc. The only way around this was to reboot the computer or write it down on a piece of paper and look it up later. With Anti-Social, he’s made an app that closes off Twitter, Facebook, Bebo etc., but still gives access to searching on Google.
What I like in partiuclar is where Fred writes how you can get around the block (before it’s run out, that is):
When Anti-Social is running, the only way to get around the block is by rebooting your computer. As you will feel a deep sense of shame for rebooting just to waste time on Twitter, you’re unlikely to cheat.
— Anti-Social – Mac/OS X Social Networking Block Software.
Write well, get rewarded
Nailin’ it:
Here’s what Jim and the rest don’t seem to realise. Revenue from Adsense and its ilk is a reward for writing content that made people want to visit your website and grant you a pageview. If you do it really well, you’ll get a bunch of pageviews, and a bunch of money. Employing tricks like needless pagination, auto-refreshing (see Salon.com), misleading headlines, and the like is cheating. You didn’t earn those pageviews, you tricked people into giving them to you.