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October 31, 2005
Ian Svenonius of Weird War Ties Together Neo-Folk and Electroclash
On Marketplace last week, Ian Svenonius related current music trends to today's economic serfdom [via]. Here's the Real Audio stream.Posted by timothompson at 04:28 PM
Adam Green Coming Out With New Album
He tells Rolling Stone Beck attempted to pitch Scientology to him:
The former Moldy Peaches singer says he's halfway through recording his new album, after popping in and out of a New York studio throughout the summer to lay down a handful of tracks. Among them are "Hollywood Bowl," a tune about "dancing, teenage arcades and bowling," and "Novatell," inspired by a day hanging out with another sardonic singer-songwriter.
"When I was nineteen, Beck tried to take me into the [Scientology] Celebrity Centre," says Green. "I met a bunch of people, but I decided that it wasn't for me. I don't think I could get any kind of religion -- I never felt like I belonged to any kind of group other than my family."
Posted by timothompson at 12:02 PM
October 30, 2005
Documentary About Arkansas Prison AIDs Scandal
Sunday Herald [via]: "The film, Factor 8: The Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal, made by the US film-maker Kelly Duda, will reveal new details about how inmates at a US jail were paid to donate blood despite the authorities knowing they had AIDs and hepatitis. It shows how the US state of Arkansas, under former president and then-governor Bill Clinton, allowed contaminated blood from Aids and hepatitis-infected prisoners to be exported around the world during the 1980s and 1990s to be used in the manufacture of clotting agents for haemophiliacs." More here.Posted by timothompson at 11:24 PM
October 27, 2005
Record Labels Take Note
Ryan responds favorably to Merge including an mp3 download coupon along with the new Clientele vinyl album and adds some advice to quash album leaks:
Anyway, also, Merge, since you seem open to these new ways of thinking w/r/t this digital music stuff, here's another idea: You know how labels send out promo copies of an album months before the official release? And then those copies inevitably end up getting ripped and shared digitally (months before the official release)? How about this: At the same time promo copies go out in the mail, you immediately also make the album available for purchase from iTunes. You don't need to stop any of that other normal prep work that may be going on, like finalizing artwork, putting together PR stuff, etc. -- just make the album available on iTunes *in addition* to all that.
Here, here! I know that labels want to have all their press and magazine coverage in order, which requires a few months of lead time, but with the speed of the Web, a lot of buzz that could be capitalized on is lost by the time the album comes out. Who in the Hell reads magazines to learn about music releases anymore anyway? In the case of artists with large fanbases, fans will buy the album regardless of press commentary, and if the album does receive bad reviews, you can make mucho sales before the public reacts to them.
And when did this release tradition happen anyway? The Beatles used to record an album one month and release it a month later. The White Album was completed on Oct. 14, 1968, and released in the UK on Nov. 22, 1968.
"Eminem will finish his highly anticipated fourth album, ‘Encore’, days before it is to go on sale, according to published reports. This tactic is to be used by parent label Universal to crack down on pirating of the album which is due in November, a problem which affected ‘The Eminem Show’ in 2002. This resulted in its release date being brought forward by one week."
I'm sure accelerated download release schedules will become standard practice someday. But hurrah to Merge for being so forward thinking with mp3 coupons.
Posted by timothompson at 01:10 PM
October 26, 2005
Bobby Bare Makes a Play for the Younger Crowd
A la Jack White and Loretta Lynn, Bobby Bare Jr. helps his 70-year-old father to record a new album with Mark Nevers from Lambchop, mixing country and indie sounds in the smooth country tradition.
Posted by timothompson at 10:38 AM
October 25, 2005
Mission of Burma Reaches Out To A New Audience
How odd to find a post from Roger Miller amongst the political screeds at HuffPo (along with a nice bit of comic relief from Jonah Peretti).Posted by timothompson at 01:47 PM
October 22, 2005
Ben Barnes, Harriet Miers and GTECH
Could the Texas Lottery Commission/National Guard scandal be the time bomb that blows up the Bush administration? More here and here.
Update: Ex-lottery official may testify (unless the nomination is withdrawn). But Opinion Journal says there's no chance this will be invoked during the nomination process.
Posted by timothompson at 12:38 PM
October 21, 2005
AICN: Notes on the Tenacious D Movie
With a reply from Liam Lynch.Posted by timothompson at 01:04 AM
October 20, 2005
He Was Smiling
What they said: "If you saw Congressman DeLay's mugshot, he was smiling," DeGuerin told reporters. "He's eager and he's ready to go."
What I thought: "If you saw Congressman DeLay's mugshot, he was smiling," DeGuerin told reporters. "He's eager and he's ready to go (to jail)."
Related: "I was told to smile for prison photos."
Posted by timothompson at 11:18 PM
October 19, 2005
Silver Palace 7"
Turns out to be a joke novelty.
Related(?): K-Rock Brings You Pavement mp3 (courtesy of WFMU).
Posted by timothompson at 01:22 PM
October 18, 2005
Judy Miller: Another Perspective on Sources
From Christopher Dickey in Newsweek [via]:
The righteous response is that such stories should not be made public until we can report them from the bottom up, not just the top down. That’s what Craig Pyes believes, and one of many reasons he wrote a scathing memo to the Times editors back in 2000, when he was forced to team up with Judy on a reporting project about Al Qaeda that eventually won a Pulitzer. "I'm not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller," he wrote in the memo, which recently leaked to The Washington Post. "I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her.... She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies." Worse still, she had "tried to stampede it into the paper."
But Craig, whom I’ve known even longer than I’ve known Judy, is an obsessive investigative reporter who spends months or years working on a single project. Currently on contract with The Los Angeles Times, he’s a very rare breed today. Few newspapers, magazines or networks are willing to pay for that kind of high-priced low-volume journalism. It’s so much easier—so much more cost effective—to take mass-produced information off the shelf and embellish it with a few opinions, or just to receive wisdom from the folks in power. Many critics are complaining about all the money that Judy’s case has cost the Times. But maybe they’re missing the point. Think of all the money she saved the Times by getting headlines day after day from top-level sources instead of working on a project year after year just to shoot those sources down.
Of course I’m being ironic. But I’m also serious. Burning Judy won’t light the way to better journalistic standards and ethics in a media marketplace that long ago concluded having access to power is more important than speaking truth to it. Worst of all, there’s very little public demand from the public for solid, prize-winning, and oh-so-expensive investigative reporting from the ground up. American audiences have been conditioned to expect amusement, even in their news. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said recently, “we're the best-entertained and the least-informed people on the face of the earth.”
Posted by timothompson at 05:53 PM
October 17, 2005
Cute-tastic
Kangacast by the Kangaroo Alliance (who did the animation for Of Montreal's "Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games.") .Posted by timothompson at 12:45 PM
Our Media Is Being Led By The Nose and Missing the Big Picture
Stanley sums up some good points about Judy Miller and the media in a comment on Huffington Post:
"I did the best I could" and "We tried our best" are often the victim postures of an abuser begging for understanding. Okay, we know she is not a victim and we know she abused her position, but why? It wasn't really because she was a covert agent for the right planted in the left wing NYT. Her track record shows Judy as a hefty lefty. So the conspiracy theory is misguided. What Judy obviously is egotistical. She talks of her top secret clearance as if she was better loved by the journalism angels and preens about it like a child ranting "I got a secret, I got a secret." Her self-importance got in the way of her job and obligation as a journalist. Her problem was she was in as much risk of prosecution for revealing "top secret information" like the identity of Valerie Plame as anyone else being scutinized in government. She is in bed with Scooter and Karl because she was just as much at risk of going to the big house. Like the Ethel Rosenberg of the New Millenium, Judy saw the political football and she was gettin kicked in the teeth and going through the goalposts. She didn't tell any managing editor because she couldn't. She didn't write the story and got scooped by Novak because she couldn't. She didn't reveal her conversations with Skooter because she was waiting for a waiver from him but because she was waiting for a waiver from Fitzgerald, because she couldn't without being in the same boat. Judy is a victim of her own conflict of interest and her egotistical notion of having securtiy clearance as a position of journalistic superiority led her down the path to report the false WMD information verbatim from the disinformation masters at WHIG and the CIA. Why would they convince the world that it was real and then convince the world that it wasn't? Where is the CIA on this now that they are either fools or liars? According to the White House we were all mislead by bad intelligence which is a pardonable offense. But being mislead by purposely bad intelligence is co-opting the Constitution and seperation of powers that require public agreemnet on declarations of war. Harriet Miers isn't on the court to help Roe vs. Wade but is positioned as damage control to basic Constitutional questions that loom in the not to distant future. Judy isn't a conspirator but a preening egotist who got in the middle of the worst mess in a very long time. The misleading of the country to get into war leaves questions open that are without end. Did the anthrax terrorist attack that occurred days after 9/11 which was traced to domestic labs occur as part of a WMD bio/nuclear scare to initiate the connection between terrorists, WMD's and Iraq? Did the CIA take part in this plot or not? What about this forged Niger letter that provoked this controversy...who really wrote it? Why would this administration have such a passion about war with Iraq? Who benefits from such an effort? Let's see so far it's Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, American oil companies, military suppliers and weapons companies, and let's not forget the big drug companies and their huge contracts for Anthrax vaccines and now bird flu. Now lets not jump on the conspiracy theory bandwagon but let's get reasonable. Follow the money and find the reasons for everything. This administration whether knowingly or not has a tremendous talent for communicating fear and having knee jerk reactions that cost huge amounts of money. Their tremendous competence turns into tremendous incompetence, but only after we spend a trillion dollars on stuff we didn't really need. We now have more "boogey men" than I've ever seen. Osama, Anthrax, Terror Alerts, WMDs, Saddam, Al Quaida, Zarquawi, Social Security Insolvency, Insurgents, Katrina, Oil shortages, Bird Flu, etc. All the while the major public debate is on gay marriage, Scott Peterson, ten commandments in public spaces, Michael Jackson, Runaway Bride, intelligent design, etc.
Posted by timothompson at 12:20 PM
October 16, 2005
If Your Sources Are Wrong, You Are Wrong
J.D. Considine on music writers:
Now, there’s nothing wrong with daily paper reporters on short deadline filing stories that essentially amount to This Is What the Person Said. The news is frequently like that. Unfortunately, where news reporters sometimes follow up their quote-driven stories with investigative pieces that confirm or contradict what was said, pop music writers almost never do. Worse, other writers then reiterate those quotes without bothering to check their veracity, and before you know it, conversational bullshit has been enshrined as historical fact.
Judith Miller on her WMD story: "W.M.D. -- I got it totally wrong. The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them -- we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong. I did the best job that I could."
Posted by timothompson at 08:26 PM
October 15, 2005
Remember
Remember when you found a new Internet thingie that was cool and then everybody else found it and then it got really slow and then it got bought by some boring megacorporation that sucked all the fun out of it? Yeah, those were good times.Posted by timothompson at 01:22 PM
October 13, 2005
My First Video iPod Email Spam
Posted by timothompson at 03:55 PM
Our Selfish Times
I've started reading Coming Apart by William O'Neill, a reissue of a book written in 1971 analyzing the '60s. The author wrote a revised introduction for this edition that seems to hit our current zeitgeist on the mark:
My remarks at the end of this book about the liberal failure of nerve have proven more prescient than I imagined they would be. New Deal-Great Society liberalism never recovered from Lyndon Johnson's failures and the success of Richard Nixon, Watergate notwithstanding. President Gerald Ford vetoed almost every significant Democratic bill. President Jimmy Carter, hardly a flaming liberal in any event, spent much of his term performing damage control. President Ronald Reagan made conservatism popular, and his policies continued under President George H. W Bush. Bill Clinton won his two terms by appropriating Republican issues, such as welfare reform, being tough on crime, producing budget surpluses, and the like. These benefited him but not the Democratic party, which lost both the House and Senate during his presidency. As I write, President George W. Bush is pushing an agenda even more radically right wing than that of Ronald Reagan. Meanwhile, Democrats are divided over racial and other issues that weaken the party and strengthen conservatives.
I wanted to call this book Good Riddance, and the galley proofs bore that title. But Ivan Dee and I finally agreed that it was a bit too dismal. In time we came to regret our decision. The greatest accomplishments of the decade, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare and Medicaid, continue to bear fruit. But the pleasure principle, epitomized in the sixties by the odious mantra "Do your own thing," has flourished beyond belief, raising divorce and illegitimacy rates, lowering marriage rates, as also standards of taste and behavior. In polls the public claims to want more money spent on health, education, the environment, and other good things. But it votes for tax cuts and to hell with public services, most of which have deteriorated since the 1970s. In this respect selfishness is the principal bequest of the sixties.
Posted by timothompson at 02:28 PM
October 11, 2005
Son of a Son of a Son
YABI in Magnet Magazine [via]: "As for the haters, let them picket the awards dinner when I’m inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. I can just see it now. It’s January, in the future, and old (rock critic) Jim DeRogatis is all bundled up against a bitter wind coming off Lake Erie, steam coming out of his maw. He’s breathing hard, leaning against a frosted flagpole, with a rough-hewn picket sign fallen at his feet. It is only then that you notice he’s bleeding."
Not sure what DeRogatis did to inspire the comment. Interviews with Thurston Moore and the Dandy Warhols are also up.
Posted by timothompson at 03:00 PM
October 07, 2005
Links/Quotes (as usual)
Charles Cross gets the Art Chantry treatment:
I wrote a cover story for The Rocket, which is still legendary because we had an insane art director at the time, Art Chantry, who I was feuding with at the time. I wrote the first story, arguably, that anyone had ever done in appreciation of the Sonics. I tracked all of them down and wrote about their legendary tours and recordings. It was a massive, 5,000-word story, the biggest story that [The Rocket] had ever run. Art decided to get me back—he would run the entire story, but he would run it in 8-point type. So he has a gigantic out-of-focus picture and then here's this massive story that fit onto one single page. I mean, literally, you need a magnifying glass to read the story.
Mark Jenkins on the ubiquity and mediocrity endemic in today's bands (as epitomized in Spin's Band of the Day):
Oranger is OK, a designation that seems to fit most, if not all, of the other band-of-the-day (BOTD) acts. Perhaps it's unfair to describe BOTD as a sort of ghetto, but it does seem designed to give a little cyber ink to groups that Spin would otherwise feel compelled to ignore. It's a Web feature, so you can browse the list in various ways: most recent, alphabetical, and top five based on votes from the site's visitors. Last time I checked, the No. 1 of all time—which is only a few months, so far—was the Coral. Now, really, what other musical index is so dedicated to marginality that it could put the Coral in the top five? (Other than the U.K. charts, that is.) You can like or dislike the group, but no one's going to hail the Coral—or such other BOTD picks as I Am Kloot, American Analog Set, and Say Hi to Your Mom—as The Only Band That Matters, or The Beginning of a New Age. They're the 2005 equivalent of the Cyrkle, or Gerry and the Pacemakers, or the Beau Brummels (all of which had their charms, of course).
Posted by timothompson at 12:56 PM
October 05, 2005
New Music
I've fallen into a rut musicwise lately. Devendra and Co. just don't scratch my itch. So I'm going to actively try to reach out and discover new stuff. Since we all need another place to blog, I'm going to start posting my efforts to this last.fm journal.
The Dust Congress has a couple old and new Berman interviews for ya. And I found this article in the Ice Rocket engine recently.
Re: the DeLay indictment: Three strikes and you're out, right? Well, here's one and two. Let's hope Ronnie Earle can pull this off without any more fuck-ups.
Posted by timothompson at 05:11 PM
October 04, 2005
Oldies But Goodies
I am dry. A drink would do me well (a link sent from a friend). There's always J.R. Cope's lists to tide us over as well. My favorite drink is the following: 1/3 OJ, 1/3 Ginger ale, 1/3 vodka (aka the Ginger and Mary Ann). Back to radio silence.Posted by timothompson at 05:12 PM