Stuff:
David Bowie is organizing a big music/arts festival for NY for 2007. [link]
In the meantime he's being a big old slacker:
"I've been fed up for quite some time. I'm taking a year off — no touring, no albums. I go for a walk every morning and I watch a ton of movies. One day, I watched three Woody Allen movies in a row."
An interesting development in downloading in Canada is that a coalition of artists have come out against the recording industry's strong stance against downloading. They're basically saying that suing downloaders hurt musicians by souring the fans. This has lead to the sight of one of the members of Broken Social Scene on Report on Business Television, which is basically a 24-hour lets discuss the stock market channel.
What's interesting is that the Copyright Act in Canada doesn't yet address digital downloading (amendments to the Act keep dying on the order table), so this split between creators and industry might be a real glitch in the groups lobbying for a stronger creator's (and publisher's) rights in the Copyright Act. From what I understand, the last amendments to the Act were heavily weighted in favour of creators rights, and a lot of groups including libraries and educators were not happy. (The way the bill was set up, it meant that schools would have to potentially pay a license to surf the internet.)
As it stands now, downloading is not illegal in Canada, but uploading is.
Carl Wilson has been weighing in on the Stephen Merritt kerfluffle:
[link]
The real reason FEMA failed in New Orleans is that they were pouring their resources into producing this.
Oh wait...
I don't know whether to laugh or cry....
Whoops! A tip-o-the-hat to the Boucher!
Great live performance of Hocus Pocus by Focus (introduced by Gladys Knight!) [link]
Hocus Pocus by Focus
"doodle doo / doodle doo / doodle doo / doodle doo / doodle doodle oot doot doot doot doo"
Albini is predictably scathing in his disdain.
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Flash! Jessica Hopper is a reactionary idiot! Sasha Frere-Jones is a New Yorker critic!
Having had a distaste for hip hop since its earliest days, I have run afoul of this mentality for twenty-odd years. If you are involved in contemporary music, it is presumed that you appreciate hip-hop, or are at least deferential toward it as an arm of black culture.
Since I have no taste for this profoundly stupid genre I have been called a racist on occasion. I am not bothered by this. I know that as a white man in the US I am directly and inderectly benefitting from genuine racism both specific and institutional. I have done so all my life, and I am ashamed of it. There is no uglier part of our culture, and I believe it influences almost everything in the public sphere. It may have had some dilute influence on shaping my tastes unbeknownst to me. I am even ashamed of the possibility of that. This is an attempt by someone else in my position to express and distance himself from this shame, and I understand it.
I have equivalent genre distaste for almost all heavy metal (hip hop's culture-mirror equivalent), pastiche production pop music like Brintey Spears, Beyonce, Avril Lavigne et al, the REM-U2-Radiohead axis of millionaire dabbling, trash auteurs like Outkast, Beck and the Beastie Boys, teenager fake punk, and melismatic divas like Celine Dion. This is less in service of elitism than in making it possible for me to walk directly to the part of the record store where the good records are. I know what kinds of music speak to me the least, so I don't spend my energy combing through them looking for exceptions.
Does this mean I limit myself? Certainly. I don't listen to as much bullshit as other people do. I am happy to carry this limitation. The groaning of the shelves under my record collection indicates that I am not wanting for variety in my listening because I don't own have either a Garth Brooks album or a Kool Keith 12-inch sitting there unlistened-to.
Picking on a tiny Southern queer for his music tastes and calling him a "cracker" is about as stupid as criticism can get.
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steve albini
