random thoughts about some of your surface world culture.
I’ve got some more posts from the past to share with you on that critics site.
The best stuff that I encountered from last year is on my top 10 of 2008 list.
I’ve also encountered a lot of good stuff from this year:
Two of the best EPs that I found were Exquisite Corpse from Warpaint and Wake the Earth from the Honey Trees.
A couple full-length albums that I liked were (a)spera from Mirah and Replace Why With Funny from Dear Reader.
…but I definitely won’t be.
I don’t get why people like Animal Collective so much because I really don’t. And their new EP doesn’t change my opinion about them at all. My Merriweather Post Pavilion review from the beginning of the year explains a bit more about my first encounter with the band. Don’t worry though, if you like Animal Collective we can still be friends…as long as you promise to never play them when I’m around.
Starring: Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion as Captain Hammer, Felicia Day as Penny
Screenplay By: Joss Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen, Jed Whedon, and Zack Whedon
Directed By: Joss Whedon
Produced By: David Burns, Michael Boretz, and Joss Whedon
Plot Outline: The story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.
Music by: Joss Whedon and Jed Whedon
Lyrics by: Joss Whedon, Jed Whedon, and Maurissa Tancharoen
Score and Orchestration by: Jed Whedon
It seems that some of you have discovered my set of “Top 80s” posts by searching for Devo. Maybe the recent interest has something to do with these new bits of information:
Devo recorded a new song titled “Watch Us Work It,” which was featured in a commercial for Dell. The band has announced in a July 23, 2007, MySpace bulletin that a full length music video for the song is forthcoming. Casale said that this song was chosen from a batch of songs that the band was working on, and that also this is the closest the band has been to a new album.
In an article called Are You Not Devo? You Are Mutato, LA Weekly says that “After touring sporadically over the past decade but not releasing any new material, Devo are spending December at Mutato trying to create an album’s worth of new material and contemplating a method of dispersal in the post-record-company world.”
I have no words to describe how the death of OiNK makes me feel, so I will share what some others have said:
Paraphrased Wikipedia: Copyright agencies described Oink as an online pirate pre-release music club; former users described it as one of the world’s largest and most meticulously maintained online music repositories. There were around 180,000 members at the time of closure and all of their avatars had to be cute.
“If you’re not familiar with Oink, here’s a quick summary: Oink was was a free members-only site – to join it you had to be invited by a member. Members had access to an unprecedented community-driven database of music. Every album you could ever imagine was just one click away.”
[Read the rest on: When Pigs Fly: The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide.]
…and it wasn’t just me:
What do you think about OiNK being shut down?
Trent Reznor: I’ll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world’s greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted. If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn’t the equivalent of that in the retail space right now. iTunes kind of feels like Sam Goody to me. I don’t feel cool when I go there. I’m tired of seeing John Mayer’s face pop up. I feel like I’m being hustled when I visit there, and I don’t think their product is that great. DRM, low bit rate, etc. Amazon has potential, but none of them get around the issue of pre-release leaks. And that’s what’s such a difficult puzzle at the moment. If your favorite band in the world has a leaked record out, do you listen to it or do you not listen to it? People on those boards, they’re grateful for the person that uploaded it — they’re the hero. They’re not stealing it because they’re going to make money off of it; they’re stealing it because they love the band. I’m not saying that I think OiNK is morally correct, but I do know that it existed because it filled a void of what people want.
[the rest of the interview is on: Trent Reznor and Saul Williams Discuss Their New Collaboration, Mourn OiNK]
How one Walt Disney Cartoon was made:
(Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs behind-the-scenes)
Here are a couple quotes from the documentary:
“…the thousands of pencil drawings go to the inking department. Here, hundreds of pretty girls…”
“The inked celluloids next go to the painting department where more pretty girls apply the final colors.”
Damn…Walt Disney was a bigger genius than I ever realized. Unfortunately, to some degree, we also have the Disney Company to thank for possibly being detrimental to cultural diversity. One can argue that a rich, continually replenished, public domain is necessary for continued artistic creation. Disney as we know it wouldn’t exist if the current copyright laws were in place years ago because many of Disney’s animated films are based on Nineteenth Century public domain works, including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Pinocchio, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Alice in Wonderland, and The Jungle Book.
There has never been a time in history when more of our ‘culture’ was as ‘owned’ as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now. (pg. 28 of Free Culture)
Free Culture is a book about the social dimension of creativity: how creative work builds on the past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and technologies.
get a digital copy of the book for free
And here’s a humorous, yet informative, review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms:
A Fair(y) Use Tale
the work that must have gone into this…woah.
Because Jimi’s top 80s LPs of all time post has been getting so many hits lately I decided to share some of my eighties opinions. These are definitely not my favorite albums from the 80s though…I’m saving that for later.
These are the 13 albums from the 80s (listed in chronological order) that I think are the most “important”: the ones that were the most influential and had the biggest impact on pop culture. Feel free to point out anything that I may have missed…because I’m sure I missed something. And share your thoughts if you don’t agree.
AC/DC – Back in Black (1980)
Journey – Escape (1981)
Rush – Moving Pictures (1981)
Pink Floyd – The Final Cut (1983)
The Police – Synchronicity (1983)
Madonna – Like a Virgin (1984)
Metallica – Master of Puppets (1986)
Run-DMC – Raising Hell (1986)
Guns N’ Roses – Appetite for Destruction (1987)
U2 – The Joshua Tree (1987)
N.W.A – Straight Outta Compton (1988)
R.E.M. – Green (1988)
Pixies – Doolittle (1989)
(a response to Jimi and Christin. Also…I might have cheated with a few of these, but they didn’t seem to fit into my real “best of” list.)
…Hungry like the Wolf, to be exact. The last time he was everything.
Old Spice continues their efforts to make their product cool.
I still haven’t seen 300…
but here’s another parody video
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog