February 2012
1 post
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The Brief Histories & Modern Journey of a Vinyl... →
See: A record being made in Brooklyn, from the recording studio to the store
August 2011
1 post
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An essay on music and people →
With so many options for control and power over our music, we run the risk of falling prey to a fantasy of what Baudrillard calls “potentialitites linked to usage.” Instead of employing our music and mp3 players as conduits to our “psychological” sanctuaries, we fascinate ourselves with the mechanics of music curating.
July 2011
2 posts
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...Two parts bourgeois museum gathering and one... →
“Attendants guided the line through a disorienting path of back doors and service hallways before corralling us into the bottom level of the Guggenheim’s famous rotunda. Here the scene became generally bizarre–funny to see, disorienting to be in–three parts rave, two parts bourgeois museum gathering and one part carnival.”
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June 2011
12 posts
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Some General Instructions →
This is good:
Do not bake bread in an oven that is not made of stone Or you risk having imperfect bread. Byron wrote, “The greatest pleasure in life is drinking hock And soda water the morning after, when one has A hangover,” or words to that effect. It is a Pleasure, for me, of the past. I do not drink so much Any more. And when I do, I am not in sufficiently good Shape to enjoy the hock and...
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Oxymoron: Classy GIFs →
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It's an experience--not a message →
I really enjoyed the Samuel Delany interview, for a variety of reasons. Top one being this right here:
This was the major thing I took away from the interview—the major thing I found a great amount of truth in: that the greatest gift from literature isn’t some message you can bottle into a line or two and treat as a transferable commodity, a message you can quote and insert into...
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But Is Anyone Looking? →
In the commercial sphere, marketers are also looking beyond facts and bits of information, in order to determine not just what you have bought, but what kinds of pitches appealed to you when you did. Once they have compiled your “persuasion profile,” they will refine those targeted ads even further. And if marketing companies can do this, why not political candidates, the government, or...
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The New Music Industry Blueprint →
I’m still under the impression that the new music industry has yet to be designed.
No one yet has figured out how to blueprint the post iPod marketplace.
With the announcement of iCloud, I believe we’re getting a glimpse of what at least part of the marketplace foundation will look like. Spotify’s stateside release is another significant piece of that foundation. The missing...
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Money in the Streams? →
Most interesting thing here is (1) Parker’s involvement w/ Spotify and his interest in the catalogue of the label. How valuable will the catalogues become once the streaming services take off? WIll the streaming services have traction? It’s going to be a battle b/w the streamers and the lockers, Spotify vs. ICloud and the others. The field is wide open right now.
“In the last 10 years we have...
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Instagram Band Photos, Pre-iPhone →
The woman on the left, Alma Gluck, sold 1 million records of her 1916 hit, “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.”
One has to think that, if this photo was in wide circulation, her success was as much a result of her stylish branding & image as it was her talent. Check out that hat.
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Call it Indie and call it a day →
Yet according to Adam Klein, its chief executive, eMusic has stayed strong and stuck to its indie roots by serving a niche clientele with sophisticated tastes and a tendency to buy more music than the average pop consumer. “Everyone wanted to see if we were going to become a puppet for pop-culture music,” Mr. Klein said. “We said we never would, and we will continue to service this segment of...
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Joan Didion & The Managerial Elite →
I’m enjoying this line immensely.
“The process today gives everyone a chance to participate,” Tom Hayden, by way of explaining “the difference” between 1968 and 1988, said to Bryant Gumbel on NBC at 7:50 AM on the day after Jesse Jackson spoke at the Democratic convention in Atlanta. This statement was, at a convention which had as its controlling principle the notably non-participatory...
May 2011
10 posts
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Modern Musician =Musician+CEO →
One third of Radiohead’s management team on the new music biz:
“Under the new way of doing things, you’re a chief executive of an artist’s business with multiple revenue streams that go across multiple countries.”
Every musician who’s not @ Jay-z’s level has to hustle a living (oddly enough, sort of like the character Jay-z himself created in his raps). The current...
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New Kid on the Block: Byliner →
Tayman took issue with the idea that people have too much to read. “I don’t think readers ever suffer from having too many *great* stories to read,” he wrote. “The idea is to save readers from wasting their time on reading that might not be satisfying — to steer them away from unsatisfying stories, and point them to stories that not only are great reads, but great reads that will resonate with...
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DJ, What's That Tune? →
Jamaican DJs, to prevent rival DJs from learning what hot new record they recently acquired and played, would scratch off the record label and rename the disc w/ something related to their DJ name or club:
By the time tunes came into Jamaica their original US release date was pretty much irrelevant. Their exclusivity was what was valuable, thus the most important piece of equipment for a sound...
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This technology (internet) is ruining civilization →
One of the things that John Brockman’s collection on the Internet and the mind illustrates is that when people struggle to describe the state that the Internet puts them in they arrive at a remarkably familiar picture of disassociation and fragmentation. Life was once whole, continuous, stable; now it is fragmented, multi-part, shimmering around us, unstable and impossible to fix. The world...
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The Doers are the Knowers →
My thought seems to be leading me toward the conclusion that in art the doers are the knowers. And that the doers, though they are rarely paying customers, are nevertheless to us the most impressive of all consumers, because they use us not merely in the living that they are doing, as ordinary customers do, but also in the art that they are making. For no work is uninteresting to a workman. And...
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The First A&R--Fred Gaisberg →
Fred Gaisberg (1873-1951: 78yrs) was in many ways the first record producer and A&R man (A&R being artist and repertoire—the division of a record company that acquires, nurtures, grows talent).
From the Continuum Encyclopedia Of Popular Music (an invaluable resource):
“In 1899, the Gramophone Company of London sent recording engineer Fred Gaisberg on the first of many field...
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Byliner Blog: Kevin Smokler joins Byliner... →
thebyliner:
Hi everyone! I’m Kevin Smokler, Byliner’s new VP of Marketing and I’ll be manning the controls here at The Byliner Blog. You’ll still be hearing plenty from the talented journalists and editors on our team but this corner of Byliner is my responsibility. Put simply: If you don’t like what TBB is…
Be interesting to see early drafts of the pieces published in Byliner. Mark...
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Billboards Starting to Learn Who You Are | Adweek →
Immersive Labs in New York City has created billboards and in-store displays that use facial-recognition software to determine the age and gender of the people looking at them—and can change the ad that’s displayed based on who you are.
That’s comforting.
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April 2011
13 posts
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GrantLand? →
Consulting editors to the site will include:
Chuck Klosterman, a best-selling author of books, a former columnist for Spin,Esquire and ESPN.com, and a feature writer for New York Times Magazine, Esquire, GQand Spin. Chuck will be writing about sports and culture exclusively for Grantland.com;
Malcolm Gladwell, the international best-selling author of The Tipping Point,...
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Maybe the circus is easier →
Holy smokes is Saunders quotable:
“…when the writer “imagines” his reader—i.e., imagines where the reader “is” at that precise point in the story. This is more of a feeling thing than an analytical thing, but all that is good about fiction depends on this extrapolation. Which is pretty insane, when you think of it. The writer, in order to proceed, is theoretically trying to...
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The American Male Age Ten →
A great essay opening.
essayist:
by Susan Orlean
If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. We would ’ wear shorts, big sneakers, and long, baggy Tshirts depicting famous athletes every single day, even in the winter. We would sleep in our clothes. We would both be good at Nintendo Street Fighter II, but Colin would be better than me. We would have...
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Why Do We Read Non-fiction? →
“Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art?” he asks in The Lost Origins of the Essay, another omnium-gatherum that suggests the answer to be the latter. Except, as D’Agata shows, “to receive information” can be equivalent to the experience of art.
Not so sure about this one here. There’s a lot at play to make a simple act of consuming...
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Higher Education=the next bubble to burst? →
“To see an education, college or otherwise, as merely a way to increase the amount of money you make is a terrible corruption and fundamentally unsustainable.”
Not surprising, Peter Theil sees an opportunity here. His new venture is to:
Pick the best twenty kids he could find under 20 years of age and pay them $100,000 over two years to leave school and start a company instead.
...
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Derrida's mother would be...Derrida →
Interviewer: If you had a choice, what philosopher would you like to have been your mother?”
Derrida: [smiling, to camera] His style? This is his own style? … [really beaming now] I don’t know how to properly answer this question… Give me some time.
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Shouts, Murmurs, Bills →
Speaking of long form journalism:
EXPLAINING YOUR TIME WARNER BILL
$12.71 — Oops, we had the wrong address
$104.23 — Keychain Restocking Fee
-$5.95 — Credit for improper charges on previous bill
$5.95 — Psych!
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Behind the music: Is it OK for bands to court... →
futureoflistening:
More praise for OK Go as marketers.
Yes, 100%. I think bands have to be brand + market conscious in the new music industry market place (post iPod/ Music Piracy). If not, if a musician assumes a label will sweep in and create a career for him, then a musician faces the prospect of just being a waiter who plays music on the side.
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Rolling Stone Writers Talk Long-Form Journalism at...
Fingers crossed for the continued interest in long form/literary journalism.
My hunch is that there will always be readers. And there will be people willing and able to create the good content. I’m less sure but still hopeful that there will be professional platforms to pay and support the writers who provide content for these readers.
thirteenny:
“… to the over-capacity crowd at...
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"With its real-time synchronization, "The Clock"... →
Zadie Smith on the 24-hour long ‘real time’ film, The Clock:
We are tied to the wagon and it’s going in only one direction, whether we like it or not.
Film constantly reenacts and dramatizes this struggle with time: except in film, time loses. We are victorious. Narrative is victorious. We bend time to our will.
Only in the fictional realm can we beat the clock, sort of speak.
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U.S. not last in everything →
[Europeans’] working hours, vacation, and parental leave are staggeringly more family-friendly. We’re falling behind. Debts and wars, income inequality, a curdling political culture, and Charlie Sheen have knocked us off our national stride.
I have but three words for those flag-torching ingrates who don’t know how good we have it in the homeland appliance department:...
March 2011
4 posts
4 tags
Biggest thing since Gmail? Dunno about that... →
Sure it’s going to piss people off. But it’s smart and smart people will use it. This is the biggest thing since Gmail. Expect over a million users in 12-months. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.
Donald Webb via Vol.1 Brooklyn
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Sad Whale...Happy Whale →
Things happening in the world:
A Sad Whale:
…”American Public Media’s Rico Gagliano and Brendan Newnam featured the story of “a lonely whale with vocal problems whose love song supposedly chases lady whales away.””
To make matters worse, the high-pitched whale “does not follow the known migration route of any extant baleen whale species.”...
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Reading, Later, And Still Seeing →
If reading heightens your responses, shapes your idea of the world, gives you a sense of the purpose of life, then it is not surprising if, over time, reading should come to play a proportionately smaller role in the context of the myriad possibilities it has opened up. The more thoroughly we have absorbed its lessons, the less frequently we need to refer to the user’s manual.
Geoff Dyer
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Reading On The Web is Shopping & Narrative... →
You think you’re reading the Web these days, but it’s reading you — gathering data on you, trying to sell you stuff, pushing you to other links. On the Web, reading is shopping. And sometimes you don’t want to shop.
I never thought I’d back off the Web, but I have. The once-glorious freedom of the Web was not free. Its price is a bone-deep commercialism that cannot yet be circumvented....
February 2011
9 posts
6 tags
David Foster Wallace | The Brass Ring →
There’s part of me that wants to get attention and respect. It doesn’t really make very much difference to me. Because I learned in my 20’s that it just doesn’t change anything. And that whatever you get paid attention for is never the stuff that you think is important about yourself anyway. So a lot of my problems right now is that I don’t really have a brass ring....
lizarnold asked: Hello! This is not a question, but a comment. I was so happy to see your name, as a "new follower" on Tumblr, connected to the Rumpus piece about Nicholas Felton. So great! Loved it. Glad we've connected. ^5 -Liz
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Saunders/Vonnegut: "...let's not get all flaky... →
I wrote last month about how ‘gaps’ in writing are important b/c they allow the reader to make the connection herself, between ideas, images, people, etc. The writer should have confidence in his reader to use her imagination to make the text real in her own head. As Zadie mentions, it’s important to keep the mystery intact:
(From the vid. w/ Zadie Smith and Nathan...
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Radiohead's 'brand': "serious listening" →
No other band makes so many fans turn quite so studiously patient and open-minded. It’s as if the world has agreed that this is the one flagship group everyone will turn to for that experience — the band people will enjoy taking seriously, approaching slowly, and pondering as art rather than entertainment. The whole concept of “serious listening” has somehow become this one...
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"I'm on a jihad within Gawker against fake news." →
To follow the daily or hourly news cycle is the media equivalent of day-trading: it’s frenzied, pointless and usually unprofitable. I’d much rather read an item which just showed me the photos or documents. And if you’re going to write some text, take a position or explain something to me. Give me opinion or reference; just don’t pretend you’re providing news....
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Virginia Woolf (1) v. Kurt Vonnegut (0) →
Kurt:
Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. Kurt Vonnegut, A Man without a Country
Virginia, for the win, by example:
She felt herself transfixed by the intensity of her perception; it was his severity; his goodness. I respect you (she...