Tag: Music and Sound

YouTubian Reality

Even though YouTube is drawing all the kids away from bloggging and into gawking, I like it. It is simple to use, provides me with access to most every video I can think of from my university days and even some sports events that I enjoy remembering. Its days, however, may be numbered:

Universal Music Group, the world’s largest record company, contends the wildly popular Web sites YouTube and MySpace are violating copyright laws by allowing users to post music videos and other content involving Universal artists. “We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars,” Universal Music CEO Doug Morris told investors Wednesday at a conference in Pasadena. “How we deal with these companies will be revealed shortly…bwa-haha” [Ed.: ok. I added the “…bwa-haha”.] Universal’s talks with YouTube Inc. have deteriorated and the recording giant is set to file a copyright infringement lawsuit against the video-sharing company if no agreement is reached by the end of the month, according to a person familiar with the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the confidential nature of the negotiations.

Is anyone surprised? If I owned video that I received revenue from and found it was avaliable for free on the next website, I would be gutted as well. And while Napster was all about peer to peer sharing care of a bit of software, YouTube is centralized and therefore far more prone as a concept to being shut down. That is in addition to the question of its unclear business model and how the YouTubians make a buck.

Yet in celebration of what it is and what it soon will be was, I give you the Pretenders playing “Middle of the Road” live (song circa 1983/84, concert much later):

Never Was A Friday Chat So Richly Deserved

The whole concept of TGIF has been laid aside somewhat since the disco era. Something happened around the time the Smashing Pumpkins were being miserable. I think it was then because when the Smiths were miserable at least you could still dance to it even if you had to try a little too hard sometimes.

  • Update: What is it with today that there is muchly going on? Anyway, here is another lunchy update. John Gushue has provided this excellent passage on the Colbert Report‘s addressing o’ the nuttiness that is wikipedia and its attack on reason in favour of buying bulk:

    Over the last month, Colbert has given us another gem: wikiality. “What we’re doing is bringing democracy to knowledge,” Colbert said on his July 31 episode, as he introduced the word. He then invited his viewers to log on to Wikipedia – the open-source encyclopedia that allows any user to edit most any document – and write that the population of elephants had actually tripled in the last six months.

    The population of elephants has in fact declined, but Colbert – the persona, it should be remembered – argued that environmentalists could be corrected on anything if enough people said it was so. Colbert’s fans – heroes, he calls them – did so, with enough volume to crash the site temporarily, and (more enduringly prompting Wikipedia to lock down almost two dozen articles containing data about elephants.

    Colbert made his point, but that was just the start. A month of so after it was coined, “wikiality” at this writing returns more than 290,000 hits on Google, and has spawned a funny site by that name. (With, yes, a full – and fictitious – entry on elephants.) The so-called Web 2.0 revolution has been made fun of before, but never so sharply or so well.

    “Wikiality” now joins Web Twenny as my favorite “new era” commentaries.

    One further thought: won’t it be nice when we soon have a word for the sort of dope who believes what is read on a blog over authoritative sources? I suspect that will be one characteristic of the impending but not yet here new broader era of post-post-9/11 thinking. We are still, as you know, locked into the many forms of gullibility in the pre-post-post-9/11 world that that terrible tragedy unleashed as one of its many unanticipatible, incoherent and tangential off-spring. I am thinking of a word. It might be “clog” but I sorta used that up with the concept of “clogging” though they are not unrelated.

  • Update: David Frum just said this on NPR’s The Connection:

    Military action has a better record of solving problems than social work does.

    Exactly one pack o’ lie. If you, as it is reasonable to do, include social welfare and public health in the concept of social work, this is the classic example of an unchallenged toss-off line that a guy like Frum uses as a bullying smoke screen hovering above his eloquent vacuity. He moves on to pose the argument that if you do not have regard for the policies of George Bush, you cannot have regard for human life. Dopery. Next time you are with Frum, please ask him to slow down and explain himself before he moves on to the next unfounded postulate. It is a technique that would make the finest used car salesman blush.

  • Update: Nicholas quotes a quotable quotation about blogging that is worth a link and a repeat:

    Sadly, I’m willing to bet a fairly hefty sum of money that almost none of the [. . .] bloggers who linked to it originally will link to my attempts to rectify their misunderstanding. Because after all the point of blogging is not to have an interesting discussion; it is to make fun of people who don’t agree with us, in the company of like-minded companions who will reinforce our conviction that other opinions are risible. But we’ll know, won’t we, dear reader. And the important thing, of course, is that we all agree . . .

    I have had to use and separatelty defend the use of my manners policy this week and I am happy to do so. I believe that there is a place between demanding and enforcing gawk-jawed fawning acceptance of the blogger’s party line on the one hand and, on the other, promoting mean-spirited auslandering and screaming finger-pointery of any and all. That zone is called civil discourse and that is that thing I want here. It is ok, therefore and because the world is full of them, to call some one a dope and their ideas dopey but only if you can support the allegation with supportable examples and links to evidence. It is never right to call someone a mother(#&$*&ing dope even if you have such examples. Fair?

  • Gary remembered the Pretenders this week which was definitely a band that you could dance to as you were thinking about how Monday took you back to the chain gang. Both their self-titled first album in high school and Learning to Crawl nearing the end of undergrad were massively important.
  • Speaking of undergrad, I started it 25 years ago this week. That is uncomfortably more than Oldie Olson when I think of it. I remember thinking I was getting creeky when I hit 25. Jeesh.
  • So what if we are chilling the relationship with China? It is a totalitarian dictatorship. That should be a simple, straight-forward rule. No kissy face with dictatorships. And while we are at it, how about doing it with these guys, too.
  • Is modernity getting you down?

    The fast pace of modern life is the biggest health worry, a survey says. The public cited lack of exercise, lack of sleep, fatigue and stress in their top five concerns with passive smoking and drinking much lower down the chart.

    I have a trick. Ignore expectations. And now that I am truly Oldie Olson, I can be left alone to do so. For years I was a junior slob, a man ahead of my time in terms of going to seed. Now my age is catching up to me and I am thinking that middle age is the true era for Gen X slackers. Like childhood, it is an era in which much is done to you. Unlike childhood you have a credit card and know how to use dirty words usefully.

  • This is actually interesting. One of the reasons we have shock of the new is that the internet for a long time has effectively erased the past by not archiving pre-digital era events in a handy-dandy fashion. Through YouTube we have regained the videos of our youth and Google has now launched the Google News Archive Search which apparently goes back 200 years. Soon I will be able to meet my old anxtity youthful self on the internet so that we can look at each other and call each other losers.
  • Watching local New York state TV as I do – as I am doing – I am getting the election ads and I have to admit watching ads with strong leaders without right wing agendas is quite refreshing. Say what you like as you demonize Hillary Clinton, she is a shoe-in for repeat Senator due to her hard work as a local representative for the state. The funniest thing is people who thought she was a carpet bagger. No one with the name Clinton can be a carpet bagger in upstate New York as far as I can tell.

Must run now as I leave you earlier to hoist weights each morning. I am aware that “hoisting” implies something more than the actual weight I throw around but if I use words like “hoisting” and “throwing around” it sounds cooler and more effective than it actually is.

I Was This Close To The Stage

As time passes and you get older you forget you laughed a lot over bands like Foreigner and so you now think it is kind of cool to walk around the New York State Fair and listen to them. Apparently a lot of people are of the same mind. They were tight and from 500 feet looked pretty good, especially the guy (or dot) in the white jacket.

I had a far better view of the Dinosaur BBQ ribs.

Friday Chat, Bad Day Chat

I can hear them even now – whiff, whiff, whiff. The sound of my new back to school cords, junior high late 70s. Crisp now, they would weigh me down in that cold October rain waiting for the bus, absorbing like a new sponge technology. This is the first bad day in the calendar since February. Mellow fruitfulness? HAH!

  • Here’s a bit of what I lost when I was taken to school as a kid. My access to Uncle Bobby and his ilk. I always thought that Bibmo the Birthday clown was freakish and the Mars landing quality picture of him under that link does nothing to help his cause.
  • Remember when Scotland always won at soccer? And by the way, that blown catch at Fenway by Rios the Blue Jay last night was the funniest thing I have seen in months.
  • I now like the Foo Fighters even more because it what you want to listen to when you are down under down under:

    The men were stuck in a Tasmanian mine when it collapsed in May, and passed the time listening to the Foo Fighters on MP3 players handed to them. Grohl said he would meet the two when the band tour Australia in November. “I’m not just having one beer with those dudes – we’re going for it,” he told the country’s ABC radio. “This is going to be a big night.”

    I have always thought that the mining disaster survivior population would be a nautral fit for rock star adoration.

  • Big doings with our forces in Afganistan who are going to take a province, Panjwaii, back soon. It is an example of how the Taliban are not terrorists or really even insurgents if this quote is correct:

    One Afghan leader from the area said NATO is in for a tough fight that won’t end once troops move in. He said the alliance should attempt some form of reconciliation with local militants. Haji Agha Lalai, the chief Panjwaii district elder who was chased out of his village by Taliban, said the insurgents have infiltrated every aspect of life there. “They own shops, they own homes there, they will not retreat,” Mr. Lalai predicted. “There are many types of Taliban, but these are the warriors. They have been told to fight and they will fight.”

    Whatever they are, they are nasty pieces of work and as will be actually capturing a large area from them and holding it. This is the area where Canadian troops killed 72 Taliban soldiers a few weeks ago after they ambushed an ambush.

  • Interesting to note that King for a bit more Ralph admits the Alberta boom was in fact unexpected, unprepared for, caused by a shift in a natural resource and is causing economic problems like local inflation and the inability to get projects off the ground due to shortgages. Interesting given those who say it was through hard work and conservative economic principles even though the same hardwork and conservative economic principles applies and have applied to most of the rest of the country for the last decade and a half.
  • I have been spending an inordinate amount of time at the Cooperstown Ballcap Co. . Their research prowess is phenomenal. Check out the cap for “BANANA WORKERS, 1935”.

So there you are. Enjoy the last real day of summer. A prize to the first person who spots some one else at work and an extra prize if that person is actually conscious.

Is Rock Dead?

Thankfully, I no longer have to worry about what the young kids are listening to as I have reached an age where I am confident that I have experienced throughout the years of my life the very apex of rockdom. Yet it is still disconcerting to read this:

“It’s not trendy enough to do guitar solos,” suggests Mike McCready, lead guitarist for Pearl Jam. “Maybe people aren’t writing songs that they think need guitar solos, or people are telling them not to do that. I want them to come back.”

This is a dull musical era. There is no doubt about that. We all wait for the next wave of ska. We wait for the next garage band movement. In the interim, you might suggest the best guitar or, if ska related, trombone solo we might find comfort with until that good day comes.

Update of Reflection: do you really need another post today when the very existence of rock is the question? I think not.

Sunday Without Travel

I am sufficiently dimwitted to have not twigged to the fact that this weekend is a single break amongst six where I am not on the road in some way or another. How luxurious is the ability to do nothing. And I have. But this is something you really ought to try. Frozen scallops. Get your morter and pestle out and fine grind some good crackers like stone ground or water crackers. Then make a paste of chives, olive oil and garlic. Hot sauce, too. Mix in the cracker dust until you have a glom. Pat dry the scallops and roll them in the tasty glom. Put in a pan and bake in a 500 F oven for three to five minutes. Lordy lordy. Even the scallops are grateful for having given up their bivalvey lives in such style.

And yet I missed the 25th Northeast Dulcimer Symposium.

Thinking About Stuff As I Wait

I try to organize my life so as to not think about stuff too much. Ben is in that unhappy phase of life when he has to think too much and such consequences resulted that I felt compelled to give the advice that Oldie Olsons always give. But here in the moment when there are ribs basted enough for now, one kid having the nap he needed and the other of to learn another smidge about the piano there is that moment to think. And what do I think about? The high cost of banjos, that’s what. I go looking for a decent one to buy for a fella and we are looking at $600 price tags. Dear oh dear. How is the world going to be moved to take on the plunkity-plunk as its own universal voice of peace if we are looking at $600 bucks a pop when there are decent enough $125 start-up models to be had for the wise internationalist shopper. So I will defer again and buy south. And why not when the currency exchange is going in the right direction.

After I thought about that for a while, I realized I have mislaid my copy of Lew Bryson’s New York Breweries. I hate that, not having a work of that importance right at hand just when I was going to make a pithy observation about it in my review of A Good Beer Guide To New England, as important a work of art as I have come across in these few years the Lord has spared for me. Worst of all, Lew knows I have read it so I can’t hit him up for a review copy. Dang nab it. Cornered myself. By the way, each of you really ought to go buy these books.

So then I was done thinking about that and had a nap and then basted the ribs again and I was pretty much done thinking and I was checking out blogs I like and I noted that Junk Store Cowgirl, my favorite Rochesterian read, is truly down for the count – sad I thought…unless it is not sad, unless packing it in was good. Maybe she was able to see something ahead that Ben can’t yet see for him. And then I thought about the ribs again. Fine looking ribs.

So what do you do with all this? I say build upon it. I’ve been in places where you find an end or a corner but I much prefer the times I find a foundation of the next thing. Something is going to come of those ribs and something is going to come of that beer review. I’ll likely find that copy of Lew’s book as well. Maybe even something’ll come of the banjo. Yesterday or the day before, driving in rain and listening to American Routes I heard a jug band recording that featured not only a banjo but a trombone and banjo – maybe it was “Bring It With You When You Come” by Cannon’s Jug Stompers now that I check the playlist. Worse ways to head towards the mid-forties as we pass on though the mid-decade than to build on those two new things plus the ribs and the beer…though a mute for the trombone might be in order.

Radio Orchestra

I had no idea there was one of these still around:

Trombonist and composer Alain Trudel has been named the principal conductor of the CBC Radio Orchestra. He’ll officially take over musical leadership this fall at the Vancouver-based orchestra, North America’s only radio orchestra.

I am sure this puts me a few rungs down the ladder if any of you are CBC 2 types but I can only go so far to accommodate you people. But, really – who knew? What we really need is a state light orchestras. And state ale, cake, (pipe) and tea houses where they might play. One pal has a father-in-law who is/was a member of a state folk orchestra. Followed him around with brass band players for the days before his wedding. Best wedding video ever: there’s your pal, there’s central Europe, there’s the om-pah band. That is what the CBC needs to bring to the nation.