February 2012
10 posts
Anonymous asked: 95 manifesto
My Favourite Dickens Books
Bleak House
Great Expectations
David Copperfield
A Christmas Carol
Nicholas Nickleby
I’m not actually sure I finished NN. I certainly didn’t finish Our Mutual Friend. Don’t think I ever tried Dombey And Son. Surprised I never read A Tale Of Two Cities. I kind of feel the pace of My Modern Life is too rapid (and my attention span too bollocksed) for monster size Victorian...
3 tags
dauthan asked: Have you played much Settlers of Catan yet? Thoughts?
Fake Non-Fiction Best Sellers - Magical Wasteland →
Elbow: The Mysterious Pattern Inside Everything and How It Will Change the Way We Think About the Economy, Health Care, and the Internet
What is an “Elbow”? As best-selling science journalist Jonathan Brainer explains, it’s a ubiquitous pattern that looks much like its namesake anatomy: a line moves in one direction and then– suddenly– in another. Brainer ingeniously shows us how Elbows seem to...
“Reuters’ Paul Smalera, for example, ordered Twitter’s critics to...”
– http://boingboing.net/2012/01/31/twitters-early-bird-special.html
The whole post is very good.
January 2012
46 posts
1 tag
Records Which I Was Informed Included The Sounds...
Serge Gainsbourg - “Je T’Aime (Moi Non Plus)”
Donna Summer - “Love To Love You Baby” (extended mix naturellement)
Lil Louis - “French Kiss”
Enigma - “Sadeness Pt 1”
Records About Which I Actually Believed This
Erm…
I was a cynical boy :(
1 tag
Every idol a bring down
I really really like / am a sucker for someone turning up with a well-worked-through aesthetic: they always seem obvious after the fact but the fact that you end up groping at combinatorial lists of influences, algebraic descriptions etc suggests . Whether this aesthetic sustains itself beyond a song, over an album or career or w/ever - honestly I don’t really care, that’s not the...
“the album equivalent of a faked orgasm”
– Lana Del Rey: Born to Die | Album Reviews | Pitchfork (via desnoise)
Today in weirdly personal album zings you’d never use for a man*. (And I mean “today in,” damn it; there’s one in every single review, and it’s starting to get uncomfortably telling. Yes, I’m still working on my piece….)
*...
“‘Make good stuff and make it easy for people to buy it’ is so simplistic as to...”
– mikkipedia
Let the market decide. Vote with your dollars. Poor people shouldn’t be overweight. If minorities just worked harder. You can be sexist against men too. Just go to college. Just pay for college. Work harder. Just write. Just make stuff. Minorities can be racist too. Your accusation of...
Wondering "are we gonna laugh at loving this album...
theremixbaby:
imathers:
Preach preach preach.
I’d also say that if you love all of the same stuff ten years from now (or maybe it’d be better to say, if all the same stuff occupies the same place in your heart/mind/life ten years from now), you may want to think about whether that’s healthy.
It is the absolute worst attitude to have as a pop-culture critic. I cannot think of anything more...
parklakespeakers replied to your post: So, What ARE People Buying Instead Of Music?
Seems like acts play much bigger/more shows relative to record sales now. Could be substitution or just live sales not going down in same way, not sure which.
A couple of years ago I read an Economist piece on the music biz which pointed out that while live music revenues were on the up, this growth could be...
So, What ARE People Buying Instead Of Music?
Yesterday I asked the question, “what are people buying instead of music?”. If the free availability of music - legal or otherwise - has led to a relative decline in money spent on non-free music, where has that money gone? I got a bunch of really interesting responses, so here they are.
Tech
“Tech, above all. The most egregious piraters I know spend over $100 on Internet and...
“The amount of data that will get accumulated over the course of a person’s life...”
– “Designers Behind Facebook’s Timeline: 5 Keys to Creating a UI With Soul.”
The stream metaphor works really well to craft narratives, which is what Facebook is trying to have us do. Per Walter Benjamin, I believe the opposite: “History breaks down into images, not into stories.”
(via...
prawnmael:
“reblog like the plague”
who are these irresponsible people reblogging the plague?
What are people buying instead of music*?
Dipped my toe into the ever-circling “piracy debate” again this week: little new to be said. So this is a question I’ve wondered about a few times but not really seen answered. Let’s assume that the music industry has a point and that significant chunks of its core audience are spending less money on records than they did 10 years ago**. What are they spending money on...
“4. I have no idea what these songs are supposed to be about. The lyrics are...”
– Or, you could like, listen closer and think. It’s not that hard. I like Klosterman, but no music writer is ever anywhere near good when s/he tries to parse why others like an artist without doing the actual messy ethnographic work, or (much worse) to be a sportswriter/political wonk and predict an...
The Hermeneutics Of Screwing Around →
Paper by Stephen Ramsay, found via the Stanley Fish article, making the case for serendipitous/chance-driven trails as an alternative to sense-making strategies such as canon-formation or algorithmic big data analysis.
I am colossally sympathetic to this and wish I’d read it sooner (it’s from 2010) - chimes w/stuff I’ve been writing about for ages (like this - from 10 years ago...
1 tag
“When another scholar worries that if one begins with data, one can “go...”
– The Digital Humanities and Interpretation - NYTimes.com, via Tom A. (via new-aesthetic)
Stanley Fish’s interpretation of a line in Milton in this piece really reminds me of KRS-One’s “officer/overseer” riff in “Sound Of Da Police”.
There are more useful things...
I sold Jimmy Page a Graphic Novel
natepatrin:
rockandrolltedium:
I used to work in a bookstore in Central London whilst I was at university studying.
One day I looked up from my computer to see a small, very tanned, white haired man wearing a long black coat holding out a graphic novel to buy. It was none other than Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page.
by Benjamin Law Smith
And now the only thing I’ll be able to do with my...
The Last Three Years In Music According To My Pazz...
Alicia Keys; AraabMuzik; Arcade Fire; Azealia Banks; Beyoncé; Bounty Killer (Ft. Timberlee); Buraka Som Sistema; Cam’ron; Charli XCX; Cher Lloyd; Cold Cave; Dizzee Rascal; Electrik Red; Florence & the Machine; Fuck Buttons; Girl Unit; Gold Panda; Guido; James Ferraro; Joy Formidable; Jürgen Müller; Kanye West; Katy B; Kelis; Lady Gaga; Lily Allen; Lindstrom & Prins Thomas; Nadia Oh;...
judyxberman asked: Saw that you left a comment on my Flavorwire post about Lana Del Rey pointing out that British critics especially love her. (I had totally forgotten "Video Games" was the Guardian's #1 single of 2011.) I'm wondering why you think the critical conversation about her has been so different in the US vs. the UK. Are Brits less hung up on authenticity? Did the song's mainstream...
“To British ears, West can come across as an unbearable show-off. But in his...”
– Is this Telegraph writer literally implying that British people cannot bear Kanye West and the aspects of him that make him a “confident black” man? (via oneweekoneband)
There’s a (really terrible) strain of thought in British cultural criticism that basically casts American racial politics...
Non Alcoholic Drinks Of The Middle Ages →
nom nom sekanjabin
1 tag
House Is A Feeling
I’m looking for songs about the emotional lives - and lack thereof - of houses and furniture. “Live Bed Show” by Pulp would be a good example, Bacharach/David’s “A House Is Not A Home” another one. Any more?
“The Problem with Gamification is that it tries to solve a problem that doesn’t...”
– Greg Costikyan @ Play This Thing! (via toffeemilkshake)
And the broken-ness of this universal points system is the problem gamification is trying to solve distract us from, surely.
Doldrums
I’ve just realised I went 10 days without posting - remarkable! What have I been doing?
Not writing
Except for a thing on Behavioural Economics for Research magazine.
Entertaining the boys with augmented reality dragons.
Going to Center Parcs Longleat for two days on a company team building exercise. I built the team enthusiastically, to the point of volunteering my lodge for the...
Me On Lana Del Rey →
popcornnoises:
tomewing:
I wrote this for the Village Voice Pazz & Jop issue - very cool to be asked to do an essay, and doubly fun because after a couple of years writing more and more trend pieces it was great to do something digging into a particular song and what’s happening in it.
I don’t necessarily want to keep talking / thinking too much about Lana Del Rey because it’s exhausting...
It's Not About The B-Bling B-Bling
Also I was talking to Lex and others in the pub about Jessie J and we were basically admitting that she’d moved from “GO AWAY” to a secret - not quite admiration, but respect maybe - for her unwavering commitment to being as terrible as possible in every creative decision all the time. “Love to hate” is not as well-populated a category as the cliche would have you...
Me On Lana Del Rey →
I wrote this for the Village Voice Pazz & Jop issue - very cool to be asked to do an essay, and doubly fun because after a couple of years writing more and more trend pieces it was great to do something digging into a particular song and what’s happening in it.
1 tag
Clean Slate
For the first time since the end of 2006, I have no pending paid writing commissions from anyone, and no pitches waiting for a response. I am, for the moment at least, a former music journalist.
I’m caught between hoping this state of affairs doesn’t continue, and looking forward to enjoying it while it does.
Lost Post Crisis*
*fsvo
Somebody in the last day or two posted something the gist of which was “why did anyone care about ‘mystique’ in pop anyway?” w/reference to SOCIAL MEDIA or stars on Twitter or something, and I thought “ooh I should think about that”. If I liked it then I should have put a like on it. But I did not. So who was it and what was it about?
My one and only writing tip!
If you’re stuck for an ending paragraph, don’t worry. You’ve already written one, you just have to work out which it is.
2012 (2): The House Always Wins
blackbeardblog:
The most memorable conversation I had at the ESOMAR 3D conference this year wasn’t about research at all: it was about poker. Josh, from BrainJuicer’s marketing team, is a keen online poker player, and explained the extent to which online poker in particular is a percentage game – playing for incremental gains on multiple virtual tables. All the regular players, he said, are using...
→
This is my last column for the Guardian’s Film & Music section (the section itself is ending next week, folding back into the paper - a sad day IMO) - blogging got me the gig so if this does turn out to be the last regular thing I write there I wanted something hopeful but faintly valedictory, and a feature on Tumblr’s positive influence on music writing felt like just the thing....
1 tag
Look Ma, Validation! →
I like Neil Perkin’s Post Of The Month things - I don’t always like all the posts but I usually enjoy some, and they’re a good guide to the kind of things planners are worrying about. So it’s a small but genuine pleasure to be nominated for one. (Someone else has pimped their nomination on Twitter w/link so I don’t feel too bad about ego-blogging this here.)