Revival

Monday, 18 October 1999
The flashing images of MTV don't really captivate me. I can't stand it for more than a few minutes. The images are far to nervous for me. The music sounds too synthetic. Am I wrong, or is contemporary music really computer generated garbage with lots of rhythm, very little melody and a total lack of creativity? It's impossible to hum along. To me Tapping the beat with my fingers is no alternative.

Some people sincerely like this junk. It's hard to imagine for me. I run away from TV, to the midnight radio shows. When the sun down, the most beautiful music sounds in wonderful (Sorry, all Dutch) programs such as "de nachtzusters" (www.vpro.nl/nachtzusters), "Damokles" (damokles.kro.nl), and of course "De gezamenlijke zenders Peazens & Moddergat" (www.vpro.nl/peazens). I experience my most creative hours at "For The Record" (.../vara/radio/fortherecord) hosted by Mart Smeets. His bizarre choice of music keeps me away from sleeping, often a trigger to write another Nut's Weekly.

Each and everyone of these radio shows are creative, with a personal touch, that require preparation and a careful composition. Quite often I catch myself humming along, when the song appears to be twenty years old. Oops, this chap is getting older, or more phrased more beautiful: The world around me gets younger. A nice remark to minimise my own grey hears.

Music from my own high school time is popular again. It's funny to see which music has survived the ravages of time. ABBA (.../abba/singles.html), used to be "not-done". But the band is going through an unseen revival. Pink Flloyd (www.pink-floyd.org) already lost count on the number of revivals. old-days pupils are today's suburbians. They seize the cultural power and have sufficient financial strength to purchase all music that were unaffordable in their youth. New power for old creativity.

It's the same story in the computer world. The power of current computers revitalises old ideas. Hypes come and go, but the high quality basics remain. A number of technical Déjà vu's:

Relational databases
are hyper modern again, as long as you call them E-Commerce technologies, or data-driven-websites. Shout "MySQL" instead of good old DB2. An experienced database designer sees it all and thinks to himself: "C'est comme je suis heureux avec DB deux!" (It's just like being happy with DB2)
Object Orientation
revives like never before, although it will remain work for specialists. Most OO principles of the trusted Smalltalk language find their way in modern Java. Even the typical Smalltalk memory garbage collection is now a hot feature in the Java virtual machine.
Interfaces between computer systems
are back in fashion, but do call it "E-Commerce" and shout XML every now and then.
Interpreters
have never been off the market, and are rapidly regaining popularity. The religious battle between interpreters and compilers is ending into a victory for the much more flexible, platform independent and productive interpreters. See the success of HTML and scripting languages such as PHP.
A bit or a boolean, a half word or a smallInteger, a core address or an object, a 4K block or a result table. They are all old tricks in new colours. Never mind. My fingers will tap along a bit, on any type of keyboard. You won't hear me complain as long as it fills my rice bowl well.

Till next week!
Nut

With special thanks to Mirjam Kruiniger and Annie Dorenbos for their inspiration
September 1999 · One and a half · Nipple · Revival · Lure · November 1999
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