Posts Tagged ‘media’

Bookmarks for December 27th through December 31st [del.icio.us]

Bookmarks for December 27th through December 31st [del.icio.us]

Bookmarks from December 27th through December 31st:[del.icio.us]

  • Doctorow, How to Destroy the Book | Electronic Frontier Foundation -
    “When I buy an audiobook on CD, it’s mine. The license agreement, such as it is, is “don’t violate copyright law,” and I can rip that CD to mp3, I can load it to my iPod or any number of devises—it’s mine; I can give it away, I can sell it; it’s mine. But when you buy an audiobook through Audible, which now controls 90 per cent of the [downloadable] audiobook market, you get a license agreement, not a property interest. The things that you can do with it are limited by DRM; the players you can play it on are limited by the license agreements with Audible. Audible doesn’t do this because the publishers ask them to. Audible and iTunes, because Audible is the sole supplier to iTunes, do this because it’s in their own interest….”
  • how to make a living playing music | Ol’ Danny Barnes -
    “i hear so much complaining about this subject, i just wanted to lay my practical experience on you. free. first, three pre-conditions: 1. if you are a very materialistic person, skip this article, i don’t think you are going to like what it says. 2. if you don’t have the music where you want it art-wise, you might want to go work on that, this article isn’t going to help you much either. you will be better off by practicing and studying and working on your music instead. you will need to get the art pretty close to where you want it, before you should worry about making much of a living out of it. 3. determine if you are actually called to be a musician. if you aren’t called, all the gyrations in the world, won’t make it work. if you are called, no matter what you do, it’s going to work. this determination will solve most of the problems you are going to encounter. “
  • Mixed Meters: Could Terry Riley’s In C Be Accepted As Classical Music -
    “I fantasize that someday In C will be programmed on regular orchestra concerts. Yes, getting this piece into the standard repertory is a long ways off. If it happened, In C would change from a “minimalist classic” into an actual piece of classical music. That would provide strong evidence that classical music has some life left in it.” A chamber orchestra would be just the right size. Before the intermission the program could be, maybe, a Rossini overture and a Mozart concerto. And the second half would be a 35-minute performance of In C employing all the performers from the first half. Great concert! Of course, during In C the conductor should sit in the ensemble and play an instrument, provided he or she is capable. Otherwise tell the conductor to sit in the audience.
  • Militant Locationist Rant « 90042 -
    “Recently in our humble corner of Los Angeles, a brewery opened. Which is great news to anyone, (especially myself) who enjoys what Benjamin Franklin said was, “proof that God loves us.” Microbrewing is something I have supported for a long, long, and expensive time. Having a new microbrewery nearby is a wonderful thing. The only problem is the name. And what is in a name? To quote Shakespeare, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Maybe so, but out of the millions of names to engrave on your mast, the brewers of this new brewery have chosen to name their venture after a location here in Northeast Los Angeles. It’s good to represent, right? The name of this new establishment is Eagle Rock Brewery. Great, Eagle Rock is a fine place; home to many of my favorite festivals, restaurants, stores, and newspapers. The only problem is the brewery is not located in Eagle Rock 90041, but in Glassell Park 90065.”
  • Lefsetz Letter » Blog Archive » Gleevec -
    “I’m still reading the responses to my “Leukemia” missive. I appreciate the good will. But I’m reading slowly not only because the missives are all personal, directed specifically to me, but because I’m learning so much. I heard from Steven Page, formerly of the Barenaked Ladies. Did I know that Kevin Hearn from BNL had leukemia? Steven copied him on the e-mail. Turns out Kevin had CML too. Before Gleevec. He had a bone marrow transplant, and it worked.But it’s not. [snip] Because some guy who wasn’t in it for the money, who was willing to sacrifice everything for his passion, put together the pieces to come up with a breakthrough drug that allows me to live.”
  • UbuWeb Sound – Marshall McLuhan -
    “Marshall McLuhan appeared on the Dick Cavett Show in December of 1970 along with Truman Capote and Chicago Bears running back, Gayle Sayers. Both Capote and Sayers participated in the discussion with McLuhan. This recording was made on reel-to-reel audio tape in 1970 and directly transferred to computer in 2005. Unfortunately, the exact date of the show was not noted, except that the show did take place before Christmas. All commercials and breaks were removed from McLuhan’s appearance.”
  • The annotated world « BuzzMachine -
    “Tweet: A view of our annotated world: Hyperlocal is what’s around me and how I search that There are eight million stories in the naked city and soon every one of them will be available on your phone through visual, aural, and geographic search and augmented reality in our newly annotated world. Every address, every building, every business has a story to tell. Visualize your world that way: Look at a restaurant and think about all the data that already swirls around it — its menu, its reviews and ratings and tags (descriptive words), its recipes, its ingredients, its suppliers (and how far away they are, if you care about that sort of thing), its reservation openings, who has been there (according to social applications), who do we know who has been there, its health-department reports, its credit-card data (in aggregate, of course), pictures of its interior, pictures of its food, its wine list, the history of the location, its decibel rating, its news… “


Bookmarks for October 24th through October 31st [del.icio.us]

Bookmarks for October 24th through October 31st [del.icio.us]

Bookmarks from October 24th through October 31st:[del.icio.us]

  • Brow Beat : The DORF Matrix: Towards a Theory of NPR’s Taste in Black Music -
    “In the weeks since the publication of the All Songs Considered list, I have been puzzling over NPR’s musical coverage—in particular, its approach to black music. I wondered: Could NPR’s musical taste be as lily-white as the “The Best Music of 2009 (So Far)” list? After scouring NPR’s Web site and studying its broadcasts—All Things Considered profiles, Fresh Air interviews, even the music interludes played between segments on NPR’s marquee programs—I can report that the answer is no. It’s not that NPR doesn’t like black music. It merely maintains a strict preference for black music that few actual living African-Americans listen to.”
  • why i’m not afraid to take your money« by amanda fucking palmer -
    “I know this for myself – it’s something you’ve done since you were six years old, and there’s a sense that if you stop giving 100% you are doomed to failure, and that is unacceptable. No wonder so many players hate their sport – the surprise is that so few admit it.” And despite all the kudos, money and silverware, there’s a reason it’s the top players who suffer most – because they’re the ones playing the most tennis, as they don’t get knocked out in the first or second round. So they have the least free time, the most mental stress and suffer the most physically. Agassi’s avowed hatred for his sport is far from exclusive to tennis. British cyclists Chris Boardman, the former Olympic pursuit champion, and Tour de France star David Millar have both admitted to not really liking cycling. “In Boardman’s case,” says William Fotheringham, the Guardian’s cycling correspondent, “he liked the winning not the cycling itself, and he drove himself to win.”
  • Why did Andre Agassi hate tennis? | Sport | The Guardian -
    “I know this for myself – it’s something you’ve done since you were six years old, and there’s a sense that if you stop giving 100% you are doomed to failure, and that is unacceptable. No wonder so many players hate their sport – the surprise is that so few admit it.” And despite all the kudos, money and silverware, there’s a reason it’s the top players who suffer most – because they’re the ones playing the most tennis, as they don’t get knocked out in the first or second round. So they have the least free time, the most mental stress and suffer the most physically. Agassi’s avowed hatred for his sport is far from exclusive to tennis. British cyclists Chris Boardman, the former Olympic pursuit champion, and Tour de France star David Millar have both admitted to not really liking cycling. “In Boardman’s case,” says William Fotheringham, the Guardian’s cycling correspondent, “he liked the winning not the cycling itself, and he drove himself to win.”
  • don’t care about old composers-rogerbourland.com -
    “I asked Aaron Copland what he was composing in fall 1976: “Nothing, and I am not accepting commissions; if people want to play my music, there’s plenty of it available in my catalog.” Today I went through an old journal, listing old UCLA Music faculty and their appointments and salaries. I looked at all the composers and saw their careers over a span of decades. I sighed and thought about how none of their music is heard these days. And I’m sure that this is true for every music school in America.”
  • Brand (Dis)Loyalty « The Quick and the Ed -
    “A couple of days ago a message popped up on my Tivo informing me of a new service, “Blockbuster on Demand.” Ah, Blockbuster. That takes me back, to that period of about four years when all of the mom and pop video rental stores had been driven out of business but Netflix hadn’t yet arrived, so the only way to rent a movie was to drive to the nearest Blockbuster, spend ten minutes trying to find a place to park, discover that your first eight choices were unavailable, wait in line for fifteen minutes, and be informed by a surly, inattentive clerk that you owed the Blockbuster corporation 27 dollars in late fees and other assorted charges. snip This is what happens when organizations use their monopoly status to mistreat customers. Sooner or later the world changes, your monopoly is gone, and you pay the price… If there’s one thing that’s pretty certain, it’s that people will have more education choices in the future than they’ve had in the pas
  • Music review: ‘Einstein’ at the beach | Culture Monster | Los Angeles Times -
    So “Baby Einstein” won’t make your kids smarter after all. Last week, the Walt Disney Co. confessed that plopping kids in front of its video does not count as instant education and offered to refund gullible parents their money. But the few enlightened parents who tried “Einstein on the Beach” instead may have a wiser tale to tell. Saturday night, Jacaranda, the West Side’s new music series, concluded its first concert of the season at First Presbyterian Church of Santa Monica with excerpts from Philip Glass’ groundbreaking opera he conceived with director Robert Wilson in 1976. Glass offers the option of replacing the women’s voices at the end with a children’s chorus and that is what Jacaranda did. Asking youngsters to show up late at night to sing the last eight minutes of a five-hour avant-garde work is, obviously, unreasonable. Then again, little about putting on “Einstein on the Beach” has ever been practical…”


Bookmarks for October 2nd through October 8th [del.icio.us]

Bookmarks for October 2nd through October 8th [del.icio.us]

Bookmarks from October 2nd through October 8th:[del.icio.us]

  • (Glen) Beck Tries to Kill Parody Website : Dispatches from the Culture Wars -
    “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Did Glenn Beck Rape and Murder a Young Girl in 1990 website, but it’s fairly amusing. It’s a political satire of the style of argument Glenn Beck likes to engage in, which involves requiring that someone prove a negative (“prove you didn’t do X”) and making claims in the form of an interrogative (“Hey, I’m just asking questions here. I’m not saying he did this. What’s wrong with asking questions?”). Well now Beck is trying to kill the site by making a formal complaint (PDF) to an international internet governing body, the World Intellectual Property Organization. He wants the domain name taken away from the person who registered it…”
  • Manifesto (this one’s for you, Lindemann) « Là ci darem la mano -
    I, Maura, aka mlaffs on twitter, “so white I glow,” do hearby declare my intent: Firstly, that classical music is awesome. In fact, it’s so great that we should all take Alex Ross’ suggestion and start calling it “Awesome Music.” After all, “classical” is an arbitrary label, has negative connotations, and isn’t very sexy. Second, that my friends are the best. I was shocked and flattered by the overwhelmingly positive response when I suggested that I might want to start a blog. I can’t believe that people actually want to hear what I have to say! I’m just a mousy little second-year employee at a regional orchestra that likes to whine. Third, that strawberries are the best snack ever. I am going to start buying them more frequently. Actually, I’m going to start eating more fruits & veggies in general. I am so much more focused and energetic this afternoon than usual. Love it. …”
  • David Cross: An Open Letter to Larry the Cable Guy -
    “…Okay, here’s what I said in the RS interview: “He’s good at what he does. It’s a lot of anti-gay, racist humor – - which people like in America – all couched in ‘I’m telling it like it is.’ He’s in the right place at the right time for that gee-shucks, proud-to-be-a-redneck, I’m-just-a-straight-shooter-multimillionaire-in-cutoff-flannel, selling-ring tones-act. That’s where we are as a nation now. We’re in a state of vague American values and anti-intellectual pride.”
  • Will California become America’s first failed state? | World news | The Observer
    “Few places embody the collapse of California as graphically as the city of Riverside. Dubbed “The Inland Empire”, it is an area in the southern part of the state where the desert has been conquered by mile upon mile of housing developments, strip malls and four-lane freeways. The tidal wave of foreclosures and repossessions that burst the state’s vastly inflated property bubble first washed ashore here. “We’ve been hit hard by foreclosures. You can see it everywhere,” says political scientist Shaun Bowler, who has lived in California for 20 years after moving here from his native England. The impact of the crisis ranges from boarded-up homes to abandoned swimming pools that have become a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Bowler’s sister, visiting from England, was recently taken to hospital suffering from an infected insect bite from such a pool. “You could say she was a victim of the foreclosure crisis, too,” he jokes.”
  • Dudamel’s press briefing – The Arts Blog – OCRegister.com -
    “Dudamel was charming throughout, and genuine. I’m not cynical. The hype surrounding him may be hard to take at times, but he’s good, and appears to have his head on straight. His music directorship is going to be marked by his efforts to take classical music to the people, to the regular guy, but I don’t sense that he equates that with cheapening the product in any way. Just making it available to more folks. The phrase “creative use of digital platforms” was uttered, though not by him… …Underneath the hubbub, there are plenty of naysayers, atheists if you will. They give looks to each other, roll their eyes, just to show they’re not chumps. It doesn’t matter. It’ll all come out in the wash. The music’s the thing and we’re about to get to that”

Bookmarks for September 28th through October 1st [del.icio.us]

Bookmarks for September 28th through October 1st [del.icio.us]

/a>Bookmarks from September 28th through October 1st:[del.icio.us]

  • Taruskin, vol.5, page 220 « The Rambler
    “I’ve just recently, and belatedly, started leafing through Richard Taruskin’s monumental History of Western Music, one of the musicological banner publications of 2005. Now, I’ve been an occasional fan of Taruskin’s work – his Grove article on Nationalism is flawed, but significant, and Defining Russia Musically was an inspirational book for me… There’s far too much to go into here about what winds me up about this book (how about the laughable Europhobia, in which European music after 1950 is merely a Cold War sideshow, and after 1960 non-existent), much of which will have been said elsewhere, but I just wanted to get my reaction to one page in particular off my chest. This is page 220 of volume 5, on which Taruskin is discussing (speculating on) the Cold War implications of Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. I fear, as an example of the lazy thought and downright falsehoods of this book, it may not be unique.”
  • Music Apps Blur the Gap Between You and Clapton – NYTimes.com -
    “And this is where it gets back to being like a video game. Many musical apps offer the ability to record a track, then add layers on top of it. Doing this between disparate apps is impossible without external recording software, but a multi-instrumental app like Moocow’s Band gives novices the opportunity to record and edit tracks with drums, bass and guitar, and make sure it all sounds pretty good (even if one doesn’t know how to play a lick of music). It’s as much a game as Guitar Hero, only instead of trying to keep up with prerecorded music, the goal is to make music of one’s own.”

Bookmarks for July 16th through July 19th [del.icio.us]

Bookmarks from July 16th through July 19th:[del.icio.us]

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  • WNYC – New Sounds: Minimalist Music Theatre (July 2009) -”Minimalist Music Theatre Hear some music theatre pieces on this New Sounds show. Listen to Philip Glass‘s recent release “Waiting for the Barbarians,” adapted from the novel by the South African writer and Nobel Prize Winner John Coetzee. Also, there’s music by Paul Bailey – his post-minimalist music theatre piece “Retrace our Steps.” He describes it as a four act vocal/instrumental spectacle based on texts by Gertrude Stein, Guy Debord and Jenny Bitner. The “alt-classical garage band” Paul Bailey Ensemble performs the work”
  • Big Brother Is Listening – The Classical Beat (Anne Midgette) – washingtonpost.com - -Anne Midgette neatly sums up musoc.org “But statements like “Art Music is in many ways objectively superior to Pop ‘Music’” (note the quotes) make me grit my teeth and want to play Talking Heads albums really, really loudly. And this, from the FAQ, is just stupid: “The ‘music’ is melodically, harmonically, rhythmically, structurally, texturally, dynamically, thematically and conceptually barren compared to Art Music; it’s also spiritually and politically shabby by comparison. It’s short, trite and highly repetitive.” One is tempted to order a copy of Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” for the site’s editors, just for starters, but one wouldn’t know where to send it. Indeed, there’s something vaguely creepy about musoc’s deliberate anonymity, which is evidently part of its philosophy, though there are limits to how much an audience will care about what a website says if one doesn’t know who’s writing it.”
  • Celebrating Cronkite while ignoring what he did – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com – In the hours and hours of preening, ponderous, self-serving media tributes to Walter Cronkite, here is a clip you won’t see, in which Cronkite — when asked what is his biggest regret — says (h/t sysprog): What do I regret? Well, I regret that in our attempt to establish some standards, we didn’t make them stick. We couldn’t find a way to pass them on to another generation. It’s impossible even to imagine the likes of Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw and friends interrupting their pompously baritone, melodramatic, self-glorifying exploitation of Cronkite’s death to spend a second pondering what he meant by that.
  • Philip Glass to perform film, opera works at Hollywood Bowl – Los Angeles Times – With “Koyaanisqatsi” — the name means “life out of balance” in Hopi — Glass had more than two years to work on the score. “There was no one waiting for the film — there was no distributor! So we were left alone to make a film — which I realized later was a great luxury.” Today Glass is struck by how pertinent the film seems, at a time when its notions of the world’s interconnectedness and the runaway power of technology have gone mainstream. But the film’s identity has changed since its premiere in 1982.”When we first showed it,” he says, “people thought it was a head trip. People seriously thought you had to get high before you watched it. It wasn’t too long, only four or five years, for people to realize there was actually a movie.”
  • Guest Blog: The Actors Diet: How I’m Recovering – Carrots ‘N’ Cake -Guest Blog: The Actors Diet: How I’m Recovering “…I’ve been struggling with binge eating and anorexia for a while; if you read my bio on our blog page you’ll see a little more about my history with food. I know a lot of women look up to actresses, and there are plenty of them who are in great shape, healthfully (my co-blogger Christy being one of them). As somebody who has been celebrated for her figure (in my feature film debut I played a ballet dancer AND got naked), I am proof that sometimes it is a false ideal, even when you have all the resources available to you, like a personal trainer, meal deliveries, a shrink, hypnosis coach, a best friend who’s a nutritionist…I felt like I had legitimate reasons to obsess about my weight – after all, my career depended on it.”
  • Intolerable Beauty: Chris Jordan Photographs American Mass Consumption – Photographer Chris Jordan describes the photos in his series “Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption” as his “first foray into being an engaged artist.”
  • US State Department employees ask Hillary clinton for Firefox – Video – “Have you been trying to get your corporate IT staff to let you use Firefox or another web browser instead of Internet Explorer? Then you apparently know how a fair number of folks at the US State Deparment feel. At a recent town hall meeting with staff, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received a question from one government employee who wanted to know if they could “please” use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer. You can see the Q&A by skipping to the 26:32 point in the video above. ” [del.icio.us]
  • Los Angeles News – Russian or Armenian Mob Used “Model Employee” Con at PCH Arco --
    An organized-crime ring that police believe is Russian or Armenian targeted a high-volume Redondo Beach Arco gas station, assigned a low-level soldier to infiltrate it and waited eight months while he worked himself into a position where he could implant a tiny, high-tech “skimmer” to steal customers’ credit-card information.
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