 ear for years. So it happens that I have only recently arrived at Brian Eno, about whom I knew next to nothing but now would describe this way: lovely bald man who sees what he hears and invents dream noise that somehow seeps into the very furniture of our lives. His relationship to sound is not like yours or mine. If you can have him in your band, you probably will.
My unschooled image of Eno had been that of a hyper-serious musical string-puller who wrested David Byrne away from the other Heads and forced him to make “Remain In Light” in order to reroute popular music. He had also, in my mind, become attached to the dreaded word “electronic” at a time when I disdained button pushers who spewed artificial womb noise instead of opting for the moral fecundity of drums and guitars.
Furthermore, he didn’t seem to say much, or sing much, and I liked words. I even preferred paintings with words on them. Music without words had no meaning assigned and therefore I was twice as likely to misunderstand it.
So what changed? Everything and nothing. I discovered that Eno liked words too, at least sometimes, and that when he used them he was as witty as Randy Newman without the self-flagellation. And that on many of his early adventures he was wise enough to bring along Robert Fripp, whose electric guitar sounded like a cat with its tail caught in a car door.
Plus he sang in funny voices.
he’s the knife and he’s the waiter.
Blank Frank is both the London blitz and a nuisance at dinner. If complaining about one thing, why not everything? Robert Fripp’s guitar buzzes the molars while Eno’s voice, in horror-film fashion, collapses over and over into a mad wobble. No one has more fun singing than this.
Here Come the Warm Jets is the very first album Eno made after escaping a crucial but too-limited role in a very young Roxy Music. I’ve heard from an irreproachable YouTube source that he was ecstatic upon leaving that band. And on Warm Jets and the several records that followed in the 1970s – Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy), Another Green World and Before and After Science – he’s clearly working with happy abandon (but also with care) to incorporate the oncoming rush of his ideas, both lyrical and musical, into his songs.
To fall for Eno-in-the-‘70s in the two-thousand teens is to hear in his music so much of what so many have been listening to for the past 40 years. Some of Eno’s vocal tics are uncannily David Byrne-like, until one realizes it’s the other way around, as Here Come the Warm Jets came out four years prior to Talking Heads ‘77. His deadpan English-isms also serve as a handy bridge between Syd Barrett and his legions of emulators. David Bowie was clearly tuning in as Eno was tuning into Bowie, and the overt musical wackiness that surfaces occasionally on both Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain call to mind They Might Be Giants and others who have, in all seriousness, made excellent ‘funny’ music.
These examples don’t quite plumb the point, however; the sights and sounds of Eno’s 1970s records are “modern” in the sense that they sound like they were cooked up yesterday. They’ve aged better than most of us. And they presage a mountain of music born over the subsequent 30+ years. While I’d assumed Eno’s principal influence had been on the famous records he produced for Bowie, Talking Heads and others you’ve heard of, his schooling of these acknowledged innovators, and therefore countless others, dated from well before he worked with them and flowed from the music that he himself had made. This won’t be news to everyone – particularly fans such as David Bowie and David Byrne – but those paying only partial attention (like me) might easily mistake ground broken by Eno for someone else’s plot of land.
Or maybe it’s a “lawn chair.” Perhaps it doesn’t matter which kind of chair, perhaps it does.
The through-the-nose petulance of “Baby’s On Fire” (“baby’s on fi-yaaah”) evokes all the attitude of a sixth grader leaving a burning turd on a teacher’s doorstep. But it’s not a turd on fire, it’s baby. The song reserves three full minutes to allow Fripp’s guitar to go screeching this way and that, anyway it pleases – a thumb in the eye of radio programmers who might’ve considered playing this catchy romp about a woman who seems to actually be on fire, with no metaphor intended.
Who writes in this caressingly romantic fashion nowadays? Seeing a miracle in every arrival and departure, the song provides the room to come and go. How fortunate that I’ve come upon these records at this very point. Source documents have a way of surfacing when most needed; maybe that’s because they’re always needed. As the poet (Rilke) says, it’s praising that matters: find what you love and lift it to the heavens for others to love too. And don’t delay, because, as already noted, baby’s on fire.
Mark Donato spent the late 1980s, the '90s and the early '00s a grateful prisoner of New York's Downtown music scene. Then he moved to a rural Upstate community, where he can be found in his garage, playing songs. He drummed, sang and played harmonica for John Linnell of They Might Be Giants; the legendary country orchestra Flat Old World; Rosine; the Oswalds; Amy Allison and the Maudlins and others. Lately he's been playing music and writing all manner of things in the general vicinity of Woodstock, NY. His website is www.markdonato.com.
This entry was posted in Memoir, Monday Rock City, Music, Popped Culture, Popular Culture, The Arts, Uncategorized and tagged baby's on fire, brian eno, coldplay, here come the warm jets, mark donato, talking heads, u2. Bookmark the permalink.
What a beautifully written ode to one of modern music’s most revered pioneers. I discovered Eno as a teen growing up in the suburban backwoods of Calgary in the late seventies. Luckily my best friend at the time had an older brother who somehow received messages from space regarding the coolest music on the planet and would occasionally loan me an album… “here, go listen to this” gruffly.
Even though it was 40 years ago, I distinctly remember him handing me Here Come the Warm Jets and being enthralled by the British otherworldliness of the cover images and the title. Then listening to it the first time… something wonderful happened… a switch activated in my brain somewhere… or a door opened.
Another lp you might like is Lucky Lief and the Longships by Robert Calvert. Produced by Eno. Great record. Sort of a lost Eno lp.I know of no easy way to do this in PowerShell, or C# for that matter. Arbitrary precision numbers are simply not in the scope of the CLR. You'd need an external library capable of storing decimal numbers with 500 digits of precision. `Decimal`, the built-in precise number type, is limited to about 28 decimal places, which is more than enough for most non-theoretical calculations.

I'm also not sure this would be a performance measure of anything except the GNU program itself and any libraries.

Additionally, `bc` stands for basic calculator, not binary calculator.May 3rd & 4th at 7:00pm.
Don’t live in Helena but still want to check out the event? Click here to stream the video during the above air times only.
This was a great event that shared the innovative work happening in Helena and around Montana for sustainable food systems, watch it if you can!The word “unblowuppable” is thrown around a lot these days, particularly when it comes to smartphones. No OEM wants to put the next Galaxy Note 7 on store shelves… especially not Samsung not after what happened with both the original batch of Note 7 phones and the “safe” ones they shipped out later.
Samsung has already taken steps to ensure that the devices it manufactures are safe, like implementing a more rigorous battery testing process. Now they’re also looking at safer alternatives to the lithium-polymer batteries that they’re using today.
According to a report from Korea Herald, Samsung SDI will be ready to ship solid-state lithium batteries within the next two years. Solid-state batteries have a number of advantages over conventional lithium-ion ones. First and foremost is the fact that they’re inflammable they don’t catch fire easily.
They’re also more energy-dense and have much longer life spans — up to five times as long. Solid-state batteries also charge up to six times faster. Given that it takes about 80 minutes to fully charge a Galaxy S8 today, a future iteration with a Samsung SDI solid-state battery could go from stone dead to fully replenished in as little as 15 minutes.
There’s no guarantee that Samsung will turn to Samsung SDI just because they start churning out solid-state batteries, of course. That’s all up to the execs at Samsung Electronics, according to the anonymous