It's not that Moore hasn't written great stuff. I swooned over what he did with Swamp Thing back in the '80s and I agree with Time magazine that Watchmen was one of the best novels of the '80s (I'm not sure I'd go as far as "one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century," but give me a late night and the right lubrication and I might make either side of that argument). And I admired From Hell, thinking it too…
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On his website, Neil Gaiman pulls off the difficult accomplishment of making me want to read Alan Moore's Lost Girls in a longer version of an essay published in Publisher's Weekly.
Friends like John Marks actually send me stuff like this John Derbyshire National Review book review of Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn. Derbyshire's essay is argumentative and intriguing—the very qualities that Wade seems to have mastered in his book.
Marks pulled this quote for his email: "Then a tremendous event occurred. A small band of modern humans—it may have been as few as 150 people — crossed from Africa into Arabia via the Bab al-Mandab (“Gate of Grief”) at the southern end of the Red Sea. Their descendants proceeded to populate all of Eurasia, Australasia, Oceania, and the…
The Beeb is canceling Top of the Pops. Not that I ever watched it, but it's one of those things like the Grand Canyon that always seemed like it was eternal.
Country International Records
Starfish Records
Starfish Records
Making a summer record is something to proud of and while the Sugarplum Fairies may not ring the Summer 2006 bell the loudest, the smooth tones, quiet vocals and jangle moments on this, their third full length, become more vivid when it’s sunny, over 80 and cares begin to slip away. The vibe from this duo of Austrians, Silvia Ryder and Ben Bohm, is easy to dissect: whispery, unruffled vocals from Ryder backed with lots of midtempo guitarage (slide, acoustic, chimey, tremolo) from Bohm, all of it bathed in the glow of earnest…
Overheard (coming out of mine and other nearby mouths) at a tavern in Brooklyn:
Installment 12,009 in the long running Lyrics vs Music argument.
Is Dylan a poet?
Well, let's see.
"I want you I want you I want you, So bad."
That would be a big NO!
(much laughter).
Oh fuck you, you always were a music guy anyway. How about this?
"They sat together in the park As the evening sky grew dark, She looked at him and he felt a spark tingle to his bones."
(much silence)
With cheeks to match her pretty pink dress, Morgan Jet walks into the office, a pleasant wrinkle upon the day's usual sights and sounds. She sings.
She steals my seat, knocks my cell phone to the floor, spreads pencil shavings all over my desk, scribbles across dates on my calendar, and, with a few lucky deft strokes, manages to shut down my computer. She smiles.
The EFF's Fred von Lohmann posts about the Consumer Electronics Association's (CEA) new ad reminding Congress that the RIAA;s (and MPAA's) high dudgeon over copying is nothing new—and that such hysteria has been historically short sighted.
Run in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, the ad's headline reads: "You've heard this song before!" Following are four alarmist predictions from John Philip Sousa (player piano), an unnamed record label executive in 1925 (FM radio), the MPAAA (VCR), and ASCAP (cassette tape). The prediction each time: technology will strip artists of their ability to…
The Wall Street Journal ran a DRM debate between the MPAA's Fred Attaway and Brooklyn Law School's Wendy Seltzer that is a thing of beauty. Attaway calls DRM "the key to consumer choice."
Umm hmm. To quote Corey Doctorow, "I don't think any consumer ever woke up in the morning and said, 'Today, I'd like to be able to do less with my discs.'"
Seltzer responds: "I have not been asking for media free of charge. I have been asking for it free of usage and interoperability restrictions that go beyond copyright. The difference is critical -- I fully support a market in which creators…
Half the time when I'm talking about music with my friend Jeff Wong, mention of some album will elicit the response, "I got turned on that when Elvis Costello covered/mentioned that." Okay Jeff, here are 500 records recommended by EC—how many do you know?
Obviously, there will be a test.
Japanese physicists have built a bi-directional single-electron ammeter that can detect individual electrons flowing either forwards or backwards. Practical applications might include nanoelectronics, calibration devices, quantum computation, and biology. That banging noise you hear is John Atkinson in Sioux Falls pounding his head against the desk, muttering "Want one!"
Well, who doesn't?