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indie rock album cover generator
Posted on March 17th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Stuff, Elsewhere.
What a great idea: a slightly labor-intensive but fascinating method for generating faux indie rock album covers. The examples shown on Brainiac's page are excellent, but check out the entire archive, too.
When I get home, I'm going to make some of my own.
most visible profile
Posted on March 16th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music.
Early in the year, Boston's Kevin Garnett had most of the media support for NBA Most Valuable Player. Then Boston faded a bit, and they started looking around for competition. Kobe Bryant's partisans started making noise, since he is (supposedly) the best player in the game yet has never won the MVP, and the Lakers were improved, despite Bryant's preseason wish to be traded. So the Lakers' General Manager, Mitch Kupchak, pulls off the trade of the year, stealing Paul Gasol from Memphis, and the Lakers promptly rose through the ranks of the incredibly tough West to the top team. As a result, MVP support solidified for Bryant. Now, in the past when players have switched teams they've received the lion's share of the credit if the team improves. Steve Nash's questionable first MVP award is an example. But I can't remember a candidate's MVP talk skyrocketing like this when someone else gets traded to his team and his team shoots to the top. If Kobe Bryant is the MVP, why did it take Paul Gasol to make it clear?
And now the Rockets have shot to the top, beating the Lakers today for their 22nd win in a row -- the second longest streak in league history -- despite losing star center Yao Ming ten games ago (and he's out for the year). Their other star, Tracy McGrady, is a game-dominating player like Bryant, and McGrady has led his team despite losing his best teammate. Yet no one talks about McGrady as an MVP candidate. Can someone explain this to me?
not really, but
Posted on March 10th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
Is "Time Has Come Today" by the Chambers Brothers (1966) the first dub song? I mean, obviously not in the historical sense, but in the sense that people will call the Stooges (or the Sonics, or the MC5, etc etc) the first punk band. Here's a one-minute example. Is there any earlier hit single fooling around with dub-type studio effects like this? (Probably.) Examples solicited.
it's MIX tape, dammit
Posted on March 9th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Pedantry.
Not "mixed tape". Where did that come from, anyway? I only started seeing it recently, but now I'm seeing it more often. Maybe someone decided that "mix tape" was ungrammatical. But "mixed tape" is just silly. It is not a tape that has been mixed. It is a tape of a mix. Everyone says "mix tape", and everyone understands what it means; the idiomatic use goes back thirty years or more, and has survived into the cd and mp3 era. It's neat and natural and useful, and should not be replaced with something awkward and nonsensical. Stomp out "mixed tape"!
name that tune day again
Posted on March 7th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music.
In half an hour, I'll be running Name That Tune game number nine over at Popdose. Come on over.
exterminate (a continuing series)
Posted on March 3rd, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness.
A couple more rhetorical bugs that signal the brief sleep of the conscious mind:
"Despite ... or perhaps even because of"
"That's not to say ... far from it"
death of the single
Posted on March 2nd, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music.
Well, not really. The single is all about iTunes downloads now. I knew that, but I didn't know how complete the transformation is. Idolator, as an aside in a piece analyzing the current charts, notes:
In a typical week, when there isn't a new CD single from an American Idol winner or a High School Musical star, the No. 1 single on Hot Singles Sales moves as little as 1,000 copies or less.
1,000 copies! (or less!) A single selling at that rate -- a number one single -- would take nearly ten years to go gold. 1,000 copies across the whole country! That's 20 copies per state.
I grew up buying singles; that's how I became obsessive about music: buying singles and listening to the Top 40 countdown every week (and writing down the chart, naturally). The death of the physical single.... I guess I feel like folks who grew up on 78s.
name that tune day
Posted on February 29th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Elsewhere.
Name That Tune #8 goes up in fifteen minutes at Popdose.
perhaps a bit too close to home
Posted on February 25th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Untruths, Cartoons.
Sent to me by Velma:
name that tune day
Posted on February 22nd, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Elsewhere.
I keep forgetting to mention the new Name That Tune games on Fridays. Today, at 12:30 Eastern, I'll be running my Name That Tune game over at Popdose. Come over and play!
another strangely obsessive project
Posted on February 18th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, 70s Survival.
It's probably obvious by now, but the Seventies Survival Project is dead. I've just found too many missing songs to continue in the spirit I originally intended. It's too bad, because it was fun.
But in the spirit of Pointless Obsession, I've decided -- don't ask why -- to really, really know 1990. To that end I am putting all my 1990 albums on my mp3 player, and investigating all the important ones I don't know, and even ones I dismissed at the time. I am using RateYourMusic's top albums of 1990 and esoteric albums of 1990 as my main references. This is especially useful in two ways: there's a lot of hiphop I don't know, and RateYourMusic is over-represented with metalheads. Of all the areas I have been largely ignorant of in recent years, those are the two I have been most interested in recently. Prog and folky stuff are also pretty well represented.
On the other hand, country hardly shows up there, and the annual Village Voice critics poll is unlikely to be much help there either. Anyone know a reliable source of best country albums by year? Modern jazz doesn't fare too well, either (though jazz dominates the RateYourMusic charts well into the 1960s).
I'm also deliberately trying to know as little as possible about the albums before I listen to them. Album titles and covers are often a giveaway, of course, but I'm not reading about albums before I listen to them.
Very preliminary listening reports:
Megadeth's Rust in Peace, despite the stupid title, is a fantastic album. I keep listening to it in headphones three times in a row, and none of it has palled. That one's a purchase.
Bathory's Hammerheart is not bad, but kinda silly. I mean, even for metal. Viking concept metal is just hard to take seriously, and much of it drags. Hugely influential, apparently.
Brand Nubian's One for All is very very groovy. I don't know why I'd never listened to it before, since I've known for a long time that I like most of the Native Tongues-related stuff. Another definite purchase.
Ice Cube's AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted, despite the dumb title and the standard tiresome braggadocio, has monstrous beats. Probable purchase.
Mike Oldfield's Amarok sounds like a meandering mess.
look back in embarrassment
Posted on February 12th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Words.
We forgive the things we liked as children, and maybe even still enjoy them, because we didn't know any better and there's an innocent joy in returning to that total open-mindedness. But we often can't forgive the things we enjoyed as adolescents, because we were beginning to try to be adults, often self-importantly, and it can be excruciatingly embarrassing to be reminded of what we thought was deep and mature then.
hey that sounds like
Posted on February 12th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
The chord progressions for
"25 or 6 to 4" by Chicago,
and
"Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" by Led Zeppelin.
what, a bus? a truck? a helicopter? i think we should be told.
Posted on February 9th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness.
A headline right now on ESPN's front page:
Did Stewart hit Busch with more than car Friday?
Hitting him with a car by itself merits a suspension, I think.
advisory note for blades of grass
Posted on February 5th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Badness, Stuff.
If you're going to leave political propaganda in my weblog, have the courtesy to sign your name and the sense to link it properly.
preliminary thoughts on jeeves and wooster
Posted on February 3rd, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Stuff, Comedy.
We have only watched the first two episodes, and it's not unusual for a comedy series to take even a full season to get its legs. So I'm certainly not writing off the series with these remarks. But for a purchase that seemed like a can't-miss -- Jeeves and Wooster played by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie! adapted from the actual stories! -- I'm getting an uneasy feeling that I may end up watching more from duty than enjoyment.
Overfamiliarity with the original material is never a good recipe for enjoying stories transfered to television or cinema, and I'm obsessively fond of the Jeeves and Wooster stories. I knew from the start that one key element in the humor -- Bertie's narrative voice -- was unlilkely to translate, so I was prepared to let that go. All I really want is a reasonable approximation of the tone. And they've largely managed that. But they've managed it far better in the sequences when they're lifting dialogue whole from the original; rewritten scenes tend to miss a little, and the scenes created entirely new have been weak. And unfortunately, this means the best scenes have been the ones where I already knew all the jokes and incidents. (Not their fault.)
Some of the portrayals are better than others. I gather one of the odd features of the series is that the actors playing the supporting characters change from season to season; but in these first two episodes, at least, Bingo Little is perfect, and Roberta Wickham, Sir Roderick Glossop, Aunt Agatha, Honoria Glossop, and Claude and Eustace are all good enough. The imbecility of the Drones Club is perhaps played a bit broadly. Aunt Dahlia is badly underplayed, which is too bad, since she's my favorite supporting character in the series, and ought to be the most loudly and enthusiastically played. Hugh Laurie is a fine Bertie.
Which brings us to the huge problem that may well ruin the series for me: Stephen Fry's Jeeves. Fry is a very funny man, and I've always enjoyed him before. And I don't doubt that what he's doing here is funny. But it's not Jeeves, and I'm going to have a lot of trouble moving past that. Fry's Jeeves is smug. He wears a perpetual smirk, and radiates an air of superiority. Now, Jeeves as written would be hard to play for a funny man. Jeeves is largely expressionless and unreacting; the humor proceeds from the barest variations in his manner and tone. His verbal humor is as bone-dry as humor gets. Instead, Fry (and the writers) have turned up the volume, making Jeeves both more obvious and less likeable. He strikes me as more of a stand-in for a modern audience's class sensibilities than a real attempt to portray Jeeves as written, a failure of interpretation which unfortunately doesn't just affect Jeeves but the tone of the whole enterprise. Orwell noted that Americans who read a class critique in the Jeeves and Wooster stories were missing the point, but in this case they wouldn't be far off. Worst of all for the tone, they have made Jeeves sarcastic. Fry's Jeeves scores points with cutting remarks off Bertie's stupidity -- and that of his friends -- in a way that is simply cruder -- lower -- than Jeeves would ever stoop to. All of these smartass remarks are original to the television series, and, alas, none of them (so far) have been especially clever or funny: conventional put-down humor that sails over the head of the target. The literary Jeeves's dry remarks may contain implications, but he is not so baldly disrespectful, ever.
So, well. I'll continue watching, and at the very least look for my favorite segments. The singing of "Sonny Boy" was well done; I'm eager to see what they do with Gussie Fink-Nottle's address to the graduates. But I no longer have much hope that I'm going to love this series, and that's too bad, because my hopes were very high.
hard to dispute
Posted on February 1st, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music.
Jane Dark has a brief but pointed piece about country, the genre critics don't see.
i'll bet it was about making a statement. yeah.
Posted on January 24th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians, Badness, Quotes.
Quoted from Idolator:
The Spice Girls are walking away with "£50 million between them" for their sold-out 17-night stand at London's 02 Arena. "The truth of the matter is, to put on this tour has cost £18.6 million," Ginger sez. "This is not a money-making expedition...Hopefully we will break even but it has never been about that."
I'm soliciting theories on what the Spice Girls reunions shows were really about, since they were never about making money (or breaking even), as pretty much everyone on the planet who isn't a Spice Girl might naturally assume.