Van Hunt's new album: What were you hoping for

One of the big names in music, Van Hunt, is about to release a brand new album, entitled What were you hoping for. I just found it and started the listening of a few songs, but already it looks very interesting to me: it seems that he's enjoying a lot the freedom of lacking pressure from the big business. Anyway, you can listen to streams of all songs in this page and make your own opinion. On my side, I'm fairly convinced this will be one of my favourite albums of 2011, judging from my gut feelings after the initial listen.

New competitor for the iPad: Kindle Fire

Only a few months before, we saw a great fanfare to introduce three supposed very serious competitors for the iPad: the Xoom from Motorola, the TouchPad from Palm, and then the Playbook from Blackberry. By now, the market has given a definitive thumbs down for all those products. Furthermore, Palm disappared after selling WebOS to HP, which in turn seems to be trying to sell WebOS to someone else. Yet the race continues, and now is time for a really serious competitor, Amazon, who knows one or two things about marketing and online sales. After releasing the Kindle e-reader with (so I read) success, now they are trying to enter into the tablets territory, and just released a new model, called Kindle Fire, including a brand new browser called Silk which utilizes extensively the big powers of their cloud computing. Further info: Kindle Fire: Silk: I really have no idea what's going to happen. According to recent reports, this product has been developed in a hurry taking the PlayBook hardware as template, with the main goal of having it in the market in time for the Christmas 2011 season. So maybe we have to wait for their next Kindle Fire to see a real player in the tablets game.

Interview with a brutally sincere trader

No words needed: you can say it louder, but no clearer. It's definitely time for action to stop these vultures.

Update: this interview is so shocking that some people are guessing it might have been done by someone from the activists behind The Yes Men.

Some like it hot

A couple of days ago I had the pleasure of watching, for the first time in full, Billy Wilder's masterpiece "Some like it hot". I guess there's nothing left to say about it, and I am not inventing the wheel when I say that I enjoyed it a lot. Everybody does a fantastic job in the film and the fine sense of humour invades every frame.

But of course the final of the movie is the very best. I had watched it countless times before, yet I was drawing a big smile when I watched it again:

Warm days in Princeland

These are warm days in Princeland, for many reasons.

We have seen a long series of gigs in Europe, in a move that was somehow surprising: after the European tour of 2010, many people expected a long tour in the US, expanding after the winter gigs in New York and Los Angeles, among others. Yet possibly the, ahem, limited success of the last shows in LA prompted Prince to return to Europe, where his followers seem to be more interested in attending massively his live performances.

And what was more striking, there are many fans -including yours truly- which consider that the European Welcome 2 America summer gigs have been the most successful tour since ONA. Of course I am speaking both about commercial success and also musical success: the 21 Nights in London was already a resounding success in economic terms. But the music quality was, in my opinion, non comparable to some of the performances from last summer in Europe. And in particular, I'd like to stress the sheer quality & inspiration of the second show at Melkweg, followed by the second and third shows at the North Sea Jazz Festival. These three shows, together with the fantastic "standard" show done at Perugia, evidenced, even to the most exigent among hardcores, that Prince remains the king onstage, no matter what they say.

But I won't discuss today the quality of those shows: I discussed in detail Melkweg 2Night, and there are plenty of comments around the net praising the North Sea Jazz performances. Now is time to listen quietly the recordings that surfaced from this tour, and there's plenty of stuff to enjoy, even if you want to restrict your listening pleasure to one-off shows. The big news in Princeland is, by now, that we are seeing two bold landmarks in the world of video: first, we had an absolute premiere in the shape of the first Blu ray releases, made by fans for fans: the three performances at the North Sea Jazz festival were captured by a number of fans with different devices, providing enough material to cover pretty much the whole shows. And then other fans managed to carefully combine the videos with audio recordings, assembling the very first Blu-ray DVDS ever released in Princeland, as no official or unofficial labels had entered this territory before. Only by having a quick look at the material, which includes magnificent HD footage, excellent audio recordings, and fully professional artwork, you will realize that this is one of the strongest statements from fan labels; they have often demonstrated a tremendous level in previous releases, but in this case they have outdone themselves with a set which is a model for both official and unofficial labels. Chapeau! to Love or Money, Uci & Confusion for their truly impressive work: this is pure art, from fans, for fans, no money involved.

But wait, there's more: if North Sea Nights was not enough, we have recently seen another unexpected release, this time from a commercial bootlegs label: the very praised performances of Prince at the Montreux Festival 2009 were professionally filmed, and there were countless rumours about a supposed official release on DVD. Yet for unknown reasons, such official release never saw the light of day. And right when many people had forgotten any hopes, we have seen first the release of the soundboard audio recordings of the shows, and now, the pro-shot DVDs have also been released by a (ahem, ahem) new label of theoretically Japanese origin.

Anyway, regardless of the label, these DVDs contain stunning material: the Montreux 2009 shows had been widely acclaimed by many fans, in all justice in my opinion. Now we are lucky to watch in very good quality the actual performance, and it is a real pleasure. Sure: Prince was, at the time, in no perfect physical shape, but still he managed to entertain a discerning crowd who was enjoying every track, from massive hits to boutique songs, beautifully played with a fantastic band (including my beloved golden-handed Renato Neto and the grooving machine of John Blackwell).

I really can't understand how these DVDs failed to be officially released, as Prince fans and connoisseur music lovers alike are goint to love it, and it would have been a perfect time to show to the music world how big a performer is Prince. But I guess the same reasoning goes to the lack of Musicology official DVDs, or the lack of 21 Nites in London official DVDs...

Now we only need new music to top it all; after a good tour, after stunning one-off shows filled with mojo, after amazing video releases... it would be the perfect occasion to be surprised, anyday, with a brand new album released in the net, for fans, from the heart.

Daydreaming is for free, you know...

The new mirrorless Nikon camera

It is just around the corner, including -as in many other modern publicity campagins- a countdown.

In the mean time, internet is playing the scoops game, as usual. And this site posted a supposed scoop, which has been later demonstrated to be a fake.

The biggest robbery in the history

The recent news on an additional round of "banks capitalization", urgently needed in Europe (according to experts) reminds me of this enlightening article from Michael Moore:

The Rich Are Staging a Coup This Morning ...a message from Michael Moore

It starts with this precise quote, which seems of huge actuality these days:

Let me cut to the chase. The biggest robbery in the history of this country is taking place as you read this.

Can Obama still be trusted?

His behaviour during the last years made me very skeptical, but this proclamation about his plans to reduce deficit has some features that could suggest he might still be trusted:

In depth review of Pentax Q at DSLR Magazine

Well, for those like me interested in the new Pentax Q camera, you have already the first quantitative, in depth review, posted by the very respected DSLR Magazine.

Their conclusion is quite interesting, but I won't spoil it. This is well worth to read, even with google translation. And it is particularly striking to have a look at their test of high ISO.

Review of iPhone 4 camera at Imaging Resource

For years I have visited Imaging Resource as one of the main and best sites to read reviews on photography cameras. For instance, when I purchased my Pentax K10D, it was in big part thanks to the positive comments they posted about it.

Well, this week I was shocked when I found out that their most recent review is... of the iPhone 4 camera; which says a lot about the status of photography, about the quality of the iPhone 4 camera and about the merging situation of plenty of pocket devices.

After all, as they say, the best camera is the one you always have in your pocket; and for loads of people, it means the iPhone 4.

Regarding the future, recent rumours suggest that Apple has chosen an 8 megapixels camera to be used in the forthcoming iPhone 5. I don't know about others, but my current compact camera is a Fuji Finepix F30 of 6 megapixels, which is more than enough for 99% of my pictures. If the iPhone 5 gets a reasonable price, and if its camera is good enough, maybe it might become my next compact camera as well.

The future of computing: Windows 8

Sorry for laughing, but they say that Windows 8 is the future of computing.

"Paradise", new single from Coldplay

Not sure yet whether this is a good or bad song, but catchy, it is catchy as hell:

Sunset time lapse video made with a Pentax Q

I found this video posted in Pentaxforums by the user devorama, owner of a Pentax Q. I find it really nice and evidences what can be done with the new camera from Pentax.

Duet Tony Benett-Amy Winehouse: Body & soul

Preview of the duets album to be released by Tony Benett; this is the duet he did with Amy:





I guess this is just one of the countless posthumous songs we are going to listen in the forthcoming months.

Carpe diem 2011

You know how it goes: this started as a personal tradition several years ago, in Housequake.com. And it has continued later. Here I am posting a few pictures taken during the summer of 2011, when we spent a week in Portugal, in Lourinha with a couple of trips to Lisbon; then we were sharing another week near Cádiz with two couples of good friends. And finally we came to my hometown to pay attention to the old traditions, including good food and good company.

The glory days of Sinéad

Yesterday I was digging for information on the recent headlines made by Sinéad O'Connor, who is apparently in deep need of sex.

But let's go to more interesting stuff, like this mind-blowing version of "Nothing compares 2 U" that was released in 1990. It's one of the very few cases I know where someone makes a version from a Prince song which is quantum leaps above the original.

For a number of personal reasons I won't explain, this song was heavily played in the summer of 1990 by yours truly. But regardless, what a truly fantastic rendition it is:

The return of Housequake.com

The regular readers of this blog are well aware of my connections to a legendary forum devoted to Prince and his music, called Housequake.com, where I was moderator once upon a time.

Well: recently I noticed that the address that was so beloved to me, www.housequake.com, is back online, although for the time being it has no content available, other than the homepage for the site, the HQ logo and the headline "In Funk We Trust", the one that used to be at the top of my web browser since 2004 to 2009.

I'm very curious and very interested to see what Aaron has in his mind about that page. In whatever case, I wish him all the best.

Detailed review of Pentax Q at Quesabesde.es

The Spanish web Quesabesde.com has published a detailed review on the new Pentax Q system; it seems a very balanced overview to me, showing both the good sides of the new camera and also its limitations. All in all, possibly the most informative article I have seen on this system, and certainly worth to read even if you need to use Google translation.

The galactic release: Melkweg 2Night

In one of my lasts posts in July, I hinted about a galactic release that was about to come to princeland.
And yes, you can hardly get it confused: I meant a set released under the name of "Melkweg 2Night", from Love or Money. It captured the ubermagnificent show performed by Prince and his band during their second performance at Melkweg, on July 26th, 2011.

This set has been my daily music diet this summer. The whole show evidenced a rare, perfectly tight status of the band (even for Prince standards), who was that night enabled to make the most difficult songs to sound deliciously phonky and engaging. The first example smashes already at top power: What's my name, a song which in theory appears to be excessively repetitive, yet in this performance becomes a real jewel, with a bass than gets the definition of "phat", using the words of the artwork.

But that was just the begining, as this show is flawless from beginning to end: in one of those nights when everything fits just right, the audience quickly understood they were watching another unattainable show from Prince, one of those times when Prince and the band manage to get the absolute top in live music performance, one of those times when simply nobody can attemtp to come close.

And then you listen a pure wonder along 144 minutes, with the musicians delighted of delivering a peerless experience to fans, and with fans in awe under such amazing evidence of greatness from their favourite musician. And you listen to many of the attending fans that it was the best show they ever attended. And it all makes sense.

I don't know if it is worth to get into detail, but for the sake of discussion, let's mention the lengthy take of The Ballad of Dorothy Parker, which besides industrial amounts of mojo includes the icing of the lines of "Venus de Milo"; a heartful rendition of Beautiful Strange, once more in a long take, followed by one of the most inspired versions of "Guitar" ever.

Then they achieve to reinvent such a classic as "Kiss" with a funky flavour in line with the rest of the show, something that has shocked some of the most astringent fans around. And non content with that, the enter into the other peak (after "What's my name") of this gig, the duo "Chocolate"/"Mutiny", in possibly the tightest way I have heard. It's pure audio candy, you can't avoid to tap with your full body in face of such a terrific groove.

But there's more, much more, although I won't describe in detail because the best you can do is to look for this release and enjoy it: the ferocious I like it there, the delicacy of "When we're dancing close and slow", the fantastic jam in "Flash Light"... or that warm feeling of listening for the n time the song that made me fan of Prince music, "If I was your girlfriend".

This show was beautifully recorded by devoted fans who could hardly avoid screaming for our listening pleasure, and it has been carefully enhanced by more devoted fans. To top it all, we have phat artwork from another fan, in a design which perfectly fits the grandiosity of the content.

We have a real landmark here, ladies & gentlemen, and I couldn't be happier after deeply enjoying this show last August.

9/11, ten years later

Not sure if anybody around is interested in this; I remember very heated discussions in HQ around this story. And ten years later my position remains the same: the official truth is not the truth.

It's the end of the world as we know it

The headlines today made me think of the famous song from REM, as indeed you read newspapers lately and you feel it's the end of the world as we know it.

Surely the real thing is less serious than they want us to believe; in the mean time, "the markets" managed to change our constitution in a matter of weeks, when politicians had repeatedly stated in the past that changing the constitution was a very difficult matter and that it needed loads of time and consensus among political parties. Yet this time, curiously, only the two big parties agreed in the change, and it will be introduced in the main law in my country with a record speed. What a shame.

Anyway, this is my first post after holidays, and as usual, I come back with plenty of projects. Hopefully some of them will be fulfilled.

Carpe diem.