Fred Wilson posts an mp3 of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash singing Girl of the North Country. Stunning. Well, if you’re travelin’ in the north country fair, Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline, Remember me to one who lives there. She once was a true love of mine.
August 21, 2006
Continuing Examples of Music Industry Stupidity
This is worth a lengthy quote: NY Times: Now the Music Industry Wants Guitarists to Stop Sharing Lauren Keiser, president of the Music Publishers’ Association, says guitar tablature Web sites reduce the earnings of songwriters. In the last few months, trade groups representing music publishers have used the threat of copyright lawsuits to shut down […]
August 18, 2006
Weekend Fun, Friday Edition
George W. Bush reads Camus August 11: My anger at The New York Times subsides somewhat as I skim Foucault and Sartre. Surveillance serves its disciplinary function only if the populace is conscious of it. And if Americans aren’t wrenched from being-pour-soi to being-en-soi (at least in relation to an observer who is Other) by […]
August 8, 2006
Helvetica, The Movie!
Very exciting. A movie about a typeface. Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which will celebrate its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration […]
August 7, 2006
The Collision of Two Tendencies
Hannah, bless her heart, happened to quote something from The Little Prince that spoke to me, and created an hour of research unrelated to any of my pressing commitments. The dominant idea in the story of The Little Prince is to be found, of course, in chapter XXI, in which the little prince meets, tames, […]
August 3, 2006
Small-Scale Music Marketing
Last weekend I recorded my friend Chris and his band, testing out the new gadget. I sat in the second row and held the recorder in my hand on my thigh. Considering the situation, the recording is surprisingly good. I gave Chris copies of the audio and the .wav file, and encouraged him to post […]
July 31, 2006
Too Cool to Bluff
On today’s errand walk, another sudden lyric occurrence, in isolation, apart from the song, leaving me wondering. She was too pat to open and too cool to bluff If you follow that link, you’ll find I got a lot more than I bargained for. After some preliminaries, there’s a lengthy excerpt from my old haunt […]
July 24, 2006
What Matters
Falling asleep last night it occurred to me that in the past few days I have * Really gotten motivated playing guitar, reminding me how much I loved playing when I was young. It’s hard to remember that in the mid-1970s I was the best guitar player in my school district, and I just walked […]
July 23, 2006
Weekend Snapshot
After seven hours of financial straightening (I’m probably one-third through the project) I offer 15 minutes of guitar snapshots. Detective Mystery.mp3 (2:01) Swimming.mp3 (4:19) Dee Vee.mp3 (1:48) Simple Chords.mp3 (2:01) Big Noise.mp3 (3:58) Are You Fire.mp3 (2:36) Now it’s all about dexterity and stamina (ain’t that always the way) until I start to work out […]
July 22, 2006
Rainy Ghost of the Golden Age
An impromptu music video I shot this afternoon…. Rainy Ghost of the Golden Age (YouTube, 4:35) A mood hit and I grabbed the camera and restarted the song. The video compression makes it hard to tell how hard it was raining, and hard to see the ghost. But watch carefully and pay attention, and you […]
July 22, 2006
Guitaring
On Thursday I picked up the guitar for the first time since at least January. The last time I had callouses on my fingertips was at least a year ago. Around that time I had wanted to build a positive feedback loop with my playing, and rented a gadget that connected to the computer to […]
July 21, 2006
Perfect Music Marketing
This whole weblog thing is pretty amazing. I wrote that post the other day on finding music – it was a toss-off, essentially, a cool service that made me think about how I used to find music and how much harder it is now (for me). Then, in the comments, this: Hello Michael J. I […]
July 18, 2006
Finding Music
Finding enjoyable new music is hard. [Is that “is” of predication or “is” of identity?] Radio gave up the ghost years ago due to industry consolidation. Now all we have on the dial are programmed playlists driven by payola. I can drive for hours and hear the same manufactured songs over and over regardless of […]
July 17, 2006
E-Prime
From The Sourcebook of Magic, pg 351ff: Alfred Korzybski (1933/1994) warned that the “is” of identity and the “is” of predication present two dangerous linguistic and semantic constructions that map false-to-fact conclusions. The first has to do with identity—how we identify a thing or what we identify with. The second has to do with attribution—how […]
July 13, 2006
More Philling Photos
Executive summary: Wednesday July 12 at the Champlain Valley Expo near Burlington, VT. Live music mid-week and the guilty irresponsible feeling that comes with. Pouring rain all day and night. Dancing in the mud. Crowded covered grandstand. Happy happy people. The Benevento/Russo Duo opened the show at 4:00. This was the scene during the middle […]
July 13, 2006
AI@50
Meg Houston Maker is doing some fantastic live blogging of the Dartmouth AI@50 conference. This gathering celebrates, explores, and, to an extent, reprises the original Dartmouth Summer Research Project in artificial intelligence of 1956, which proceeded “on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in […]
July 13, 2006
Nine Lives Is Nine Too Many
If the Internet turns into this, then I’m switching it off. Please, god, no.
July 11, 2006
Examples of Categories
Art: Leonard Cohen and Sonny Rollins on live TV. (Thanks Jon.) Commerce: Do Patents Encourage or Stifle Innovation? Culture: On media elitism and the “derivative” myth Technology: On playing with my Holux GPS unit… Cool: Velcro Being Pulled Apart