Riding OTR
David Gates is grumpy about the hoopla over <I>On the Road</I>'s 50<SUP>th</SUP> anniversary. Grumpy, but not to the point of ignoring the occasion.
Wes Phillips
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Rolling the Stones
Has Scorsese made the ultimate up-close-and-personal documentary about the Rolling Stones? While I'm sure it's a good concert movie, I'm not sure there <I>is</I> any reality to the Stones any more. As a student of film, Scorsese knows that when the legend becomes fact, you shoot the legend.
Honeyboy in Pictures
A Flickr photoset.
The Last Delta Bluesman
Garth Cartwright profiles David "Honeyboy" Edwards on the eve of his European tour. He heard Charley Patton and Tommy Johnson, the musicians regarded as Delta blues founders, play when he worked on a plantation. Big Joe Williams taught him music and how to hobo. He busked with the Memphis Jug Band, hung out with a teenaged Howlin' Wolf, and recorded for Alan Lomax. And in 1945 he took Little Walter to Chicago.
Need a Piano?
We have a few for sale.
Brooklyn Overlook
As Jeff Wong and I took our daily constitutional along Brooklyn's Greenbelt this morning, we spotted these colorful boulders along the shore. You never know who you're going to run across in this borough.
The Language of Homer
How <I>The Simpsons</I> has embiggened the English language.
Stephen King on Harry Potter
Now that the dust has settled on <I>The Deathly Hallows</I>, Stephen King weighs in on the series and on J. K. Rowling. King, of course, is one of the few fiction authors who can write about Rowling's success without bitterness, and his thoughts on Rowling's craft are sharp. He also knows just a little bit about toiling in the genre-novel wilderness.
Industry Update: Is It CEDIA Yet?
<B>XM/Sirius:</B> Did we just hear the other shoe drop on the XM Satellite Radio/Sirius Satellite Radio merger? On July 25, XM founder and CEO Hugh Panero announced he would leave the company in August. The company named COO Nate Davis president and interim CEO.
UMG Kicks DRM—Mostly
Universal Music Group CEO Doug Morris isn't exactly a fan of portable digital players—in November 2006, he referred to them as "just repositories for stolen music." Yet, on August 9, UMG announced that it would offer at least some of its artists' music as MP3 files without digital rights management (DRM) on RealNetworks, Wal-Mart, Amazon, Rhapsody, PureTracks, Transworld, and artists' own websites. Everywhere, that is, except on Apple's iTunes Store, where UMG files will have Apple's FairPlay DRM installed.