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PK_日記

river: the joni letters (3)

Posted: October 12th, 2007, 12:23pm PDT by PK_

Enclosure: [download]

“edith and kingpin”
feat. tina turner
skin tone

Posted: October 11th, 2007, 5:24pm PDT by PK_

真係可以攪到好頭痛！
真實性、理想性（+合理性）、一致性，都有考慮。
river: the joni letters (2)

Posted: October 10th, 2007, 12:48pm PDT by PK_

Enclosure: [download]

“court and spark”
feat. norah jones
if u find no jazz in her “not too late”, find it here in herbie’s project!
jazztronik (4)

Posted: October 7th, 2007, 1:08am PDT by PK_

Enclosure: [download]

PATHWAYS “Jazztronik Theme” (Sleep Walker remix)
on “the REMIXES PART: I”
[jazztronik.com]
river: the joni letters (1)

Posted: October 6th, 2007, 10:22pm PDT by PK_

From: [www.herbiehancock.com]

On ‘River: The Joni Letters’ (September 25th, Verve), the always progressive pianist/composer Herbie Hancock aimed to dissect the lyrics of some of Joni Mitchell’s most famous songs. Instead of the instruments accompanying the lyrics, Hancock and producer Larry Klein arranged the music to interpret or express the emotions of the lyrics, all while keeping the melodies Mitchell fans know and love. This goal is most evident on “Both Sides Now,” one of four instrumental tracks on the record, which also features vocals by Norah Jones, Tina Turner, Corinne Bailey Rae, Luciana Souza, Leonard Cohen, and Mitchell.

Joni Mitchell and Herbie Hancock, along with Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Pablo Picasso, and other great artists of our time, share an incessant and profound creative restlessness. They each have always had the desire and need to break fresh ground with each note played or stroke of the brush. It was exactly this kind of curiosity which motivated Davis to hire Hancock in 1963 to be a part of, along with Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams, arguably one of the most important groups of musicians of the twentieth century. It was in fact Miles who told Hancock to “never finish anything.” Hancock, like Joni Mitchell, has gone on to explore many different genres and mediums to express his incessant curiosity, working in the context of jazz, electronic music, funk, orchestral, and film music.

Hancock first worked with Joni Mitchell on the iconic singer/songwriter’s Mingus record, an album comprised of collaborations between Mitchell and the great bassist and composer Charles Mingus. Together with Wayne Shorter, Hancock was part of a small group with which Mitchell tried to craft a new “conversational” approach to coupling lyrics with instrumental jazz.

“At this point in my career,” Hancock says, “I want to do something that reaches into the lives and hearts of people.” For “River”, Hancock enlisted producer/ arranger/ bassist Larry Klein (Mitchell’s long-time producer and creative partner, who has also produced albums by Madeleine Peyroux and Shawn Colvin among many others), to help him go deeply into Mitchell’s body of work to select songs that Hancock and Klein could adapt to a genre-less and conversational musical approach, while trying to portray the breadth of Mitchell’s gift as a musician and writer. To add another dimension to their picture of Mitchell’s musical world, they also included two compositions that were important to her musical development, Wayne Shorter’s asymmetrical masterpiece “Nefertiti”, first recorded by Hancock and Shorter on Miles Davis’ classic album of the same name, and Duke Ellington’s prescient standard “Solitude”.

Hancock and Klein worked for months, carefully reading through Joni’s lyrics and music, eventually paring their list down to thirteen songs that they hoped comprised a panoramic view of the poet’s work. They then assembled a group of the top musicians in the world, including the incomparable Wayne Shorter on soprano and tenor sax, the brilliant bassist and composer Dave Holland, (a musical cohort of Hancock and Shorter’s who shares their adventurousness, as well as the Miles Davis imprimatur), drummer Vinnie Colaiuta (a recent member of Hancock’s band as well as having played extensively with Mitchell and Sting), and Benin-born guitarist Lionel Loueke, also a member of Hancock’s band.

They went on to craft arrangements for songs like the often recorded “Both Sides Now”, and “Sweet Bird” (from Mitchell’s overlooked classic The Hissing of Summer Lawns) that transformed the songs into lyrical and elegant instrumental tone poems, devoid of the trappings of conventional jazz records. “We wanted to create a new vocabulary, a new way of speaking in a musical sense,” Hancock says. Klein adds, “we used the words to guide us. All of the music emanated from the poetry.” They were also fortunate to be able to cast the vocal songs with some of the greatest singers in the music world. Joni herself sings the autobiographical musing on childhood “The Tea Leaf Prophecy”, Tina Turner turns the beautiful prose of “Edith And The Kingpin” into a timeless piece of song-noir, Norah Jones delivers the wistful classic “Court and Spark”, Corinne Bailey Rae turns the mournful Christmas classic “River” into an innocent and optimistic poem of bittersweet romance, Brazilian-born Luciana Souza becomes a dark third voice to Hancock and Shorter on “Amelia”, and in a stark and cinematic closer, Leonard Cohen recites the brilliant and surreal lyric to “The Jungle Line” as Hancock provides film score-like improvised accompaniment.

River: The Joni Letters represents a journey into a new world in Hancock’s search for fresh ground. A world of words.
jazztronik (3)

Posted: October 5th, 2007, 12:24pm PDT by PK_

Enclosure: [download]

“雨音”
feat. taeko onuki
on “grand blue”
哀子淇

Posted: October 5th, 2007, 12:19pm PDT by PK_

嫁入豪門唔係問題，生仔唔係問題，有錢都唔係問題，不過日益失控膨脹既暴發戶式肥c9俗氣，真係好難頂! 您從前個形象好索、好純真、好青春、好有學識架，原來都只係魚餌…

… 其實都KODLS，或者傳媒應該放過市民，發實宴個 look 令人作嘔，醜+俗，qualified for 一級，有無人去影視處 complain！

聯想……狂買狂用狂show名牌鑽石珠寶，無所事事，shopping 飲茶等生仔，呢種係咩生活？咩人版？幸福既典範？……幾十人照顧，未識行先識玩名牌，咁既細路係完美成長既根本，定悲劇既開始？

又聯想……兒童發展基金，無 details，不過如果係等d細路大個就有筆錢過手，咁就死得人多！同毒品無分別！如果筆錢只係一項 entitlement for 佢地將來讀書進修來 claim reimbursement 或者點，就可以！
小李

Posted: October 5th, 2007, 10:24am PDT by PK_

以為係音樂會錄音cd，開盒先知係dvd!

小李其實寫曲好麻麻，行到暈，寫詞好好多

不過佢手字好得人驚

佢講野咬字/語氣好北京

佢既詞唔玩隱悔、充詩意、扮含蓄、假高深，不過道理確係睇得通講得透，情懷率直真緻，令人叫絕

佢係滾石既黎小田？

有本地學生咁款既年青人吹口，香港無，似 classic 底，勝在穩陣，同埋平!

不過其他樂手都唔似係中國人，玩 fusion 幾正

“領悟”真係一首傑作！

梁靜茹腳粗程度，贏埋阿嬌，小腿望落同條頸一樣粗！估佢唔倒。原來唱得 just ok，”夢醒時份”好浪費！
收皮阿0

Posted: October 5th, 2007, 8:42am PDT by PK_

既然法院已經有判決，法院亦被認為係暫時唯一最公正最有公信力既institution，咁何必要輸打贏要，咁長時間之後比人炒都毫無根據咁一口咬定話係雇主報復？

雇員參與工運應該受到保障，但又係米等同領左免死金牌？

唔係要絕對排除 victimization，但我地唯有相信我地想得到既疑點，法院都一定會考慮過，既然法院有決定，就要信從。唔服，得，上訴！不過做咩要係電台非理性咁，連疑點都無討論上，就一味死話個雇主係報復，然後重複三幅被，大氣電波玩罵街，無病呻吟？！

另邊廂，討論點解香港學生唔會熱切對事物有討論，有人認為係因為 class size 太大，老師無法 afford 時間鼓勵同比學生好好參與討論，學生所以習慣唔討論。

小弟就以為學生無討論風氣，係因為個社會已經夠嘈，充斥阿0果d以理性言論包裝既感性純發洩，牢騷當觀點，日夜狂轟。比著小弟係學生，比支咪我都無用，不如慳啖氣，由得你班大人日夜搵話題亂咁噴，make sure 收音機有聲！

唔係反對言論自由，不過言論自由無保證言論質數，which is what i’m speaking abt. 要 9up 就繼續 9up，enjoy urself - as i do myself!
zucker

Posted: October 3rd, 2007, 11:43pm PDT by PK_

from ft.com

Man in the news: Mark Zuckerberg
By Kevin Allison
Fri 28.9.2007 15:02

Dressed in his usual attire of jeans, a fleece vest and Adidas sandals, Mark Zuckerberg looks as if he would be more at home stalking the halls of a college dormitory after a late-night coding session than at the helm of the internet’s next multibillion-dollar company.

Yet at just 23 years old, the founder and chief executive of Facebookis being hailed as a potential new internet mogul. Reports this week that Microsoft – and possibly Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) – are mulling an investment that could value Facebook at $10bn, are an astonishingly rapid endorsement for the fast-growing social network Mr Zuckerberg launched from his Harvard dorm room four years ago. With daily visitor numbers on Facebook having overtaken those on Ebay, some observers have drawn comparisons with Steve Jobs, the mercurial chief executive of Apple, and Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft. Indeed, it is from this older generation that Mr Zuckerberg has drawn inspiration.

Born and raised just north of New York City in the exclusive Westchester County suburb of Dobbs Ferry, Mr Zuckerberg was the second of four children and the only son of a dentist and a psychiatrist. He displayed an early aptitude for computers and got his first computer when he was 10; by high school he was writing his own programmes, such as a version of the board game, Risk.

After graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite New Hampshire boarding school, he enrolled at Harvard in 2002, where he planned to focus on psychology. In 2004, he launched Facebook as a networking tool for Harvard students. Within the year it had spread to hundreds of colleges and universities. It then expanded to high schools and companies. The site now has nearly 40m users – with new registrations doubling about every six months.

Even in those early days, Mr Zuckerberg exhibited that rare blend of technical prowess, self-confidence and ruthlessness found in successful technology entrepreneurs. In 2003, he was hauled before Harvard authorities after hacking into a university database to get photos of students for use on a website he had designed to allow classmates to rate each other’s attractiveness.

Later that year, Mr Zuckerberg helped briefly with a social website being designed by some fellow Harvard students. After a few months he drifted away from the project, only to emerge the following year with Facebook.

As Mr Zuckerberg’s creation became a runaway success, his former collaborators accused him of stealing their idea – a charge Mr Zuckerberg has denied. They filed a complaint with Harvard authorities. The ensuing drama, detailed in the pages of The Harvard Crimson and other student papers, made it to Lawrence Sum- mers, then Harvard’s president. When he declined to intervene, Mr Zuckerberg’s former collaborators filed a lawsuit that is still being pursued in the courts.

By that time, Mr Zuckerberg and two partners had moved their growing operation from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Palo Alto, California, where they ran it from a sub-let apartment. There, a chance encounter with a co-founder of Napster (whom they let crash in their flat), helped them land a meeting with Peter Thiel, a Valley financier and co-founder of PayPal, the online money-transfer system. Mr Thiel eventually became Facebook’s first investor, contributing $500,000 to get it off the ground.

Weighing on his decision to leave Harvard, as he told Forbes in 2006, was a talk Mr Gates gave in 2004 to his computer science class. “He really encouraged all of us to take time off school to work on a project. That’s a policy at Harvard . . . Gates says to us: ‘If Microsoft ever falls through I’m going back to Harvard.’ ”

The same self-assuredness that led Mr Zuckerberg to drop out and create Facebook was evident last year, when he walked away from what is understood to have been a $1bn buy-out offer from Yahoo, the internet portal.

Many observers were incredulous that Facebook’s young and relatively inexperienced founder would make that choice. A year earlier, Rupert Murdoch had bought MySpace, a rival whose audience even today remains bigger than Facebook’s, for $580m.

A year later, in May, Mr Zuckerberg announced plans to turn Facebook into a platform for launching internet applications – a move some contemporaries likened to Mr Gates’s strategy of turning the Windows operating system into the dominant platform for desktop computers. The aim is forFacebook tobecome the main platform for internet users to accesssocial applications. In his presentational style, Mr Zuckerberg has looked to mimic the self-assured swagger of Mr Jobs. His unveiling of Facebook’s strategy in front of an audience of 800 developers was polished and used catchy graphics, but still showed the nervousness that might be expected of a 23-year-old pitching a new idea.

Mr Zuckerberg remains, above all, a geek’s geek, interested more in Facebook’s technological and social potential than in its ability to turn him into a billionaire (as recently as May he was still living in rented accommodation with a mattress on the floor). His desk at Facebook’s headquarters is next to engineers who work the late-night coding shift, and he often works through the night with them. He continued to write code for the site long after most chief executives would have delegated such responsibilities. It took Facebook’s venture backers to convince him to stop coding and focus his full attention on running the business.

Even so, Mr Zuckerberg has shown maturity to carry through his vision, even when it meets resistance from older, more experienced advisers. He recently eliminated a dual-reporting arrangement whereby half the company’s top managers reported to another executive. Now the top seven managers report to him. Mr Zuckerberg keeps close counsel with Adam D’Angelo, a school friend and accomplished coder who is now Facebook’s chief technology officer.

Mr Zuckerberg can sometimes come across as awkward, but he “leads on open ambition and complete and utter confidence in what he is doing”, says one person close to the company.

With Facebook generating revenues of just $150m last year, comparisons between Mr Zuckerberg and Mr Gates or Mr Jobs seem premature. The site remains, in the words of Kara Swisher of The Wall Street Journal, a “lemonade stand” compared with a giant such as Google. Internet users are fickle. Things could fall apart. Yet, as he joked in 2006, “I always say, if Facebook ever falls through, I’ll consider going back to Harvard.”
sexual politics

Posted: October 3rd, 2007, 11:42pm PDT by PK_

from ft.com.

good or bad anson and regina wont do that? : P

Staying abreast of sexual politics
By Caroline Daniel
Published: September 29 2007

Politicians are known for their naked ambition, but now more of them seem to be taking the idea literally. This week, seven attractive female Polish candidates set a new standard in how much flesh to flaunt.

The Women’s party unveiled an election poster that shocked voters in the Catholic and patriarchal country, but delighted male photo editors in western tabloids. The women were naked, bar the modesty of a cardboard sign. “We are beautiful, nude, proud . . . This is not pornography, there is nothing to see in terms of sex,” explained party founder Manuela Gretkowska.

The stunt to get the party taken seriously on women’s rights was reported to have been the brainchild of her boyfriend. Ms Gretkowska defended it, saying: “We do not have our mouths open, nor our eyes closed.”

Many men did not have their eyes closed either. Rather than being inspired to read Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , online reaction tended to misogynistic mockery. “Weirdest bunch of feminists I’ve seen . . . but I’d vote for them any day,” noted one blog. “More assets than Northern Rock,” leered another.

But political nudity is more common than you think. In June, a nubile candidate from a joke political party in Belgium was shown naked, coquettishly sucking on a pen, under the strapline (or stripline?): “I promise you 400,000 jobs.” (The party later clarified what sort of jobs she was offering.) In 2006 a Canadian politician, Scott Brison, posed nude for a calendar behind an open fridge door. In 2005, Keith Locke, a New Zealand MP, lost a bet and walked the streets of Auckland almost naked in body paint.

Even leading figures have not been immune from the desire to strip. Russia’s Vladimir Putin flexed his presidential abs on holiday and earned paeans to his virility. Shots of a bare-chested, surf-frolicking Barack Obama, Democratic presidential contender, on a Hawaiian beach, have done him no harm.

Yet there are limits. For the male politician it only works if you are lithe and toned. Seventy-year-old Senator John McCain would be ill-advised to try it. But for serious female politicians, forget it. Even an inch of flesh is too much. Several have learned the politics of décolletage the hard way. Jacqui Smith, Britain’s home secretary, faced headlines such as the “politics of mass distraction” after revealing cleavage; her breasts were compared with “two peeled pears in a vice” and “two bald men at a head-butting contest”.

And Hillary Clinton was ridiculed for showing a shadow of cleavage in a Senate debate. A female fashion writer prudishly observed that she had given the “sense that you were catching a surreptitious glance at something private”.

Still, Mrs Clinton exploited the outrage, sending out a letter to drum up funds calling the press coverage “insulting”. So it seems women can still use sex to save their political skin - without showing as much of it as the Polish candidates.
jazztronik (2)

Posted: October 3rd, 2007, 8:09am PDT by PK_

Enclosure: [download]

“tiger eyes (NEEDS remix)”
on “the remixes part ii”
ipod touch

Posted: October 3rd, 2007, 8:01am PDT by PK_

收到。真係好玩！物有所值！amazing!
jazztronik (1)

Posted: September 30th, 2007, 2:22pm PDT by PK_

Enclosure: [download]

“heat”
on “grand blue”
alan tam (6), feat. dominic chow

Posted: September 25th, 2007, 12:37am PDT by PK_

雖然最早可能係 1983 年”霧之戀”入面既”午夜麗人”，不過周啟生同 alan 要去到後期 (1990s) 先有真正緊密合作！

1. “這一刻妳可想我”，編得盡興，玩得盡興，曲末有成一分四十幾秒既 guitar 同 synth solo

2. “hello goodbye”，輝哥徒弟，電子亦無問題

3. “elaine”，作曲+編曲，唔知 eason 或者學友唱既話，可唔可以比倒相稱既爆炸力！編曲好有氣勢，好有戲劇感。

4. “夢美人”+”只有你”+”月下戀人”，完全劇場。donald 打倒都要編倒先！歌番唱，編曲絕對新。

5. “情人”，作曲+編曲，小品，味道卻幾好。
送失落中秋的您

Posted: September 24th, 2007, 8:50am PDT by PK_

Enclosure: [download]
我寫

Posted: September 24th, 2007, 2:39am PDT by PK_

很多事很早嘗試，卻沒繼續。不是光榮，也談不上遺憾，就是淡淡的一棒軼事。

早前提過小學畢業用單反機照黑白相，是其一，還有的，是向報章投稿，最初寫的是唱片評論。

祖家一向買新報，中學二年級某日下課回家，無緣無故一口氣用原稿紙寫了三張唱片的評論，然後投到新報。新報的編輯不久便親筆回覆接受稿件，稍後會刊登。那編輯的字，寫得很美。

那時年紀少，家裡不曾有信件是自己的，能收到用新報公司信紙寫的信，來自編輯大人，還說會刊登自己的文章，感覺多麼利害，兄弟姊妹間集體興奮起來。這種年少時，在資源匱乏、單調的生活環境中，所獲得的純快樂，這麼多年來都沒再感受過。

編輯大人來信之後，每天都把每版報紙詳細檢驗，日子過去，文章還是刊登無期，興奮越來越少，失望淡淡然滲入。最後，當那些唱片的歌手都已經出另一張大碟時，盼望便終結。

原來可以在一天內爆發的傷心、失望，將它攤分開一年慢慢品嚐，就變成麻木。時間的力量，驚人！

麻木是怎樣？是懶去追問編輯大人是什麼回事，懶再去投稿，懶再去寫碟評。編輯大人和爸爸一樣，說好那天上茶樓吃蝦餃，最後總是完全忘了，不了了之。

投稿這念頭，那時開始消失，再一次寫東西到報館，要到二十多年後，南華早報的”致編輯的信”。兩封論述公共政策的長信，都先後獲刊登。文章有少許改動，但外籍編輯先生總致電查問確認原意，方落實修改。

文章能上南早是好事，但談不上興奮，那時想測試的，是英文書寫能力，最重要是水平能及，獲採納；至於刊登出來，在報章上讓自己、讓別人讀到自己的油墨文章，已非過癮之處。

此後又不再公開寫什麼，直到二千年開始的風月文章，才走上網上討論區和部落胡亂寫的路。這時，文章是工具、是宣傳品、是遊戲、是笑話。

再數下去，最近的，是星島的每日一blog，女編輯電郵查詢，有禮，好，一口答應；”我不愛護貼” 最後刊登了。跟處理 drinkazine 的情況一樣：想要

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