Music

I’m curious. How much music do you have on your computer? I just passed the 75 gig mark. iTunes informs me that is 49.5 days worth. That seems like a lot. But I don’t feel that I have too much. How much does the average blog reader have?

In case you don’t have enough music, I kinda enjoyed Grizzly Bear “Two Weeks” (live on Letterman) – downloadable from Stereogum here.

Jim Henley writes :

Oh by the way: “Country First” is a fascist idea. There ought to be a fairly large number of people, things and groups that are more important to you than your “country.”

Well, as a Brit, I oughtn’t to intrude, but I can report that within seconds of reading Jim’s post, a certain Woody Guthrie song was going through my head …..

Sitting here in the UK, I have no idea whether you people in other places can see everything that the BBC is putting out on its iPlayer service. If you can’t, then tell me in comments. If you can then enjoy Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story and the Stax/Volt tour of Norway (1967), both broadcast in the UK a week ago. Superb stuff, and good reason to think of Booker T and the MGs as one of the top bands of all time.

Check out the 1960s dance track (scroll down, after the Dr Who theme).

Quiet around here so I’ll keep up the weekend nonsense posts.

I really like Ladytron’s “Destroy Everything You Touch”. It’s a great single and a fun video. However, it is disconcerting to me, on some level, that the song is basically a cross between Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” all runway cold and post-electropunk. I think that a mash-up of those three songs would be great, if anyone wanted to go to the trouble.

Furthermore, I would like to inquire: what do you think of The Talking Heads? I’ve been listening to a lot of old Heads and I’m puzzled. The first big concert I ever went to was the Heads on the Stop Making Sense tour. It was very early in the tour and Byrne didn’t even have the big suit yet. I would sort of like to be able to claim that this very influential band somehow defined a musical moment, and I was there. But, on reflection, they don’t seem to have had all that much lasting influence. It seems like they matured from a spare, NY-style art rock outfit into a pretty good disco band, sound-wise, with Byrne as flamboyant nerd-showman. But there’s only one David Byrne, so it’s not as though subsequent bands have copied that. And it’s not as though indie music subsequently went the pretty good disco band route. So they were, oddly, an evolutionary dead-end. Am I just talking nonsense?

I’m organizing a book event for Doug Wolk’s Reading Comics [amazon], which is now out in paperback. The event will be nominally hosted at the Valve. I got to know Doug on the strength of mocking him with my masterful New Skrullicism post of yore. Then I read this great book of his, which only made me like him more. I posted about it here. Anyway, this post is mostly a heads-up that the event is going to happen round aboutish July 10. I’ve already got participants lined up, but several people are going to participate just by posting on their own blogs so you are welcome to show up in the usual ‘I’ve got a blog too’ way.

In other news: I’ve really been enjoying a lot of music by people named Finn. The two albums currently on heavy rotation are The Hold Steady’s Stay Positive (lead singer Craig Finn) and Liam Finn’s I’ll Be Lightning. A couple YouTube links: Liam Finn’s “Second Chance” and The Hold Steady’s “Little Hoodrat Friend” and “The Swish”. But the one you really need to listen to and watch is “Stuck Between Stations”. Bruce Springsteen wishes he was as awesome as vaguely Randy Newmanesque Craig Finn. Who is apparently starved for groupies. I’m not really eligible myself.

A short appreciation by Phil Jupitus available for a short time here.

For newcomers, here are renditions of You Don’t Bring Me Flowers, Life on Mars (beautiful, actually), and, for the many Dick Barton fans out there, the Devil’s Gallop. I can’t find Anarchy in the UK, I’m afraid, you’ll have to see them live for that.

This ArsTechnica write-up of some recent research of mine has received numerous votes on the recommendation site Digg in the last few hours. I wonder if it will make the front page of Digg, although as a Twitter contact of mine noted, since it’s not a top-10 list (nor, if I might add, does it cover Google or Apple), that may be unlikely.

The post reports on a study in which we found that male college students are more likely than their female counterparts to share creative content online even though both men and women in the sample are equally likely to create such content. However, when controlling for online skill, the gender differences in posting go away.

Gina Walejko and I published the paper “The Participation Divide: Content Creation and Sharing in the Digital Age” this Spring in the journal Information, Communication and Society. We examine the extent to which college students share creative content online and whether we can identify any systematic differences by user background. In particular, we looked at whether students create and share the following types of material: poetry/fiction, artistic photography, music, and video (both completely own and remixed in the case of the latter two), including both private and public sharing. [click to continue…]

Eurovision isn’t really my bailiwick but you can learn history reading about this stuff. From Reuters UK:

“Other countries got support from their neighbours. Germany didn’t get any support at all from its neighbours.” …

“Russia won thanks to considerable help from its neighbours. The Russian song wasn’t bad but it wasn’t any better than the rest.”

Even though Germany shares borders with nine countries, it has a turbulent past – having invaded most of these nations.

I guess this is Russia’s reward for always being nice to its neighbors. Discuss.

Or watch some classic J-pop. This one is from the 3rd episode of “Pink Lady and Jeff”, a show that perhaps did not fail due to lingering resentment about that Pearl Harbor business. This is “Chameleon Army”, sung to the tune of “Rawhide”, give or take. (Note the changing colors of the outfits.) And “Monster”. Very Discozilla Chic. The ladies are still looking good. Here they are in 2004, remaking “Pepper Keibu”, which is – I think – Japanese for “Viva Las Vegas”. I couldn’t think of a good title for a Pink Lady post, so Belle suggested that one. How do you like it? (Honestly, until an hour ago we had never even heard of Pink Lady.)

Man, if ever there were a time I regretted not saving up the pun in the title of my “I Sought the Serif” post – this would be that time. The time I bought The Serif Fairy for the kids, that is. “The Serif Fairy has lost her wing, keeping her from performing magic. This book follows her through an airy, immaculately designed typographic landscape as she tries to recover her wing. Along the way, she makes friends and has adventures as she wanders through the Garamond Forest, visits Futura City and eventually ends her quest at Shelley Lake …”

It’s cute. Honestly, I was hoping it would be even cuter. But it’ll do. Plus it confirms Belle’s suspicions that I will indoctrinate the kids in my repetitive ways.

And I just finished Letter By Letter, by Laurent Pflughaupt. A history of each letter of the alphabet, plus soapbox from which to broadcast the author’s stern views about the morally improving qualities of calligraphy. “Revealing the fundamental characteristics of writing (rhythm, relation to the body, readability, meaning), the study and practice of calligraphy constitutes an essential basis for this new direction since it encourages the integration of skills and gestures that are indispensable to all future forms of creativity.”

The book is interesting, whether it will do all that for you or not.

I have one significant, non-typographic bargain to report. Amazon has a download of Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings for only $19.95. It’s out of print and the cheapest used copy I can find is $150. So I consider that a good deal.

Humphrey Lyttelton has died. The Guardian has an obituary written by George Melly, who also happens to be dead.

I first came across Lyttelton not on Radio 4, but in Peter Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, of all places. He pops up there in an anecdote showing why some kinds of social practice are in principle not amenable to precise predictions derived from some (putative) social physics. Lyttelton was once asked if he knew where jazz was going, and replied “If I knew where jazz was going, I’d be there already.”

For our many George Formby fans, the first of a two part bio of George Formbys Sr and Jr. Less mournful than the bio of Kenneth Williams, and more hard-hitting than the one on the SWP (though that’s not saying much!). Here’s George jr, with his greatest hit of all.

Who would win in a fight between the Rhythm Bug and the Rhythm Thief? (By the by, I think the Swingology Prof. of Katnip Kollege could go toe to toe with Roosevelt Franklin any day.)

Like Henry, I bought the Old School Sesame Street collection for, uh, my kids. Yeah, totally for them. There’s all kinds of good stuff in there, including the God of the Classroom, Roosevelt Franklin. The improvised interactions with children who don’t always do what they are supposed to are also great. For instance, here is a great moment where Paul Simon sings an short version of “Me and Julio Down by the School Yard.” Slightly sour as always, Simon takes the song quite fast, as if he wants to just get it over with. He is immediately upstaged by the improvisations of the little girl sitting next to him. After he cuts her off, so he can start singing, she waits for her opening and then upstages him again. But by then even he is enjoying himself.

And as an added bonus, Here is Stevie Wonder playing “Superstition” live on Sesame Street. Beats the shit out of Barney, I’m telling you.