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July 27, 2006
Shorties
Popmatters talks to singer-songwriter Matt Costa.
Stylus lists music videos (complete with YouTube clips) never in contention for the Stylus top 100.
Jhumpa Lahiri celebrates the 100th anniversary of author R.K. Narayan's birth in the Boston Review.
Malgudi is on that wonderful map of places in the literary universe, either real or imaginary, that not only provide a setting but possess a soul. Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, García Márquez’s Macondo, and Joyce’s Dublin are just three examples of the way certain writers cling stubbornly to a single terrain, entering its countless doors and portraying the residents within. Narayan does so with the assiduousness of a census taker but with an artist’s compassion and intimacy.
Author Marjane Satrapi talks to the Independent about the film version of her graphic memoir, Persepolis.
Work is now under way on the animated version of Persepolis, with Satrapi overseeing a team of 85 animators. "All my life I've worked with myself - and I found that unbearable," she says. The entire movie is hand-drawn. Satrapi disapproves of computer animation, which she thinks becomes quickly outmoded. "What the hand can make is never dated."
The Memphis Flyer previews Mucklewain, the "Southern American Rock Festival" to be held August 19th in Harriman, Tennessee.
Among the 30 artists scheduled to play the festival are plenty with Memphis connections: local faves Lucero, Memphis-bred singer-songwriter Cory Branan, Murfreesboro/Memphis band Glossary, and onetime Memphians Todd Snider and Garrison Starr. Other acts of note include headliner Steve Earle, Nashville country-punk pioneer Jason Ringenberg, Drivin' N' Cryin' frontman Kevin Kinney, alt-country chanteuse Allison Moorer, and roots-rockers Dash Rip Rock.
The Sadies' Sean Dean talks to Exclaim!.
“Dallas’s relationship with country was always love/hate,” Dean says. “He grew up with it, so he got into rock as a kid to rebel against that. Even in Phleg Camp, I was feeling kind of trapped playing this punky art rock; I was interested in getting into traditional music a bit more. Dallas and I discovered that we had the same sensibilities, so the Sadies became this outlet for doing whatever music we wanted to do.”
The Philadelphia City Paper lists five unlikely Sleater-Kinney covers in its eulogy for the band.
The B-52's "Rock Lobster"
Given Tucker's vocal debt to Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson, it's only fitting that S-K took on a couple of B-52's songs. Filling in for Fred Schneider: K Records honcho Calvin Johnson. It couldn't sound more amazing if you dreamed it on a belly full of red wine and chocolate.
Singer-songwriter Inara George talks to the Telegraph.
Until now, Inara George has mainly supported herself through session work. "I do think that I can sing, though I actually like voices I can't imitate." She is rightly compared to Suzanne Vega and Cat Power, and likes their music, but their moody, introspective vocal timbre is not her thing.
Cracker's Johnny Hickman talks to the Richmond Times Dispatch about the band's latest album.
"'Greenland' has been compared sonically to early Pink Floyd, early Led Zeppelin," Hickman explained. "It's definitely a rock album when it rocks. Musically, it reminds me some of our other albums like 'Gentleman's Blues' or 'Kerosene Hat' with the blues and roots rock elements."
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that an uncensored version of Jack Kerouac's On the Road will be published in its original scroll form by Viking Press.
"Incidents in the original were edited out of the published version because of the censorship of the time," said Sampas, who noted that some of the edited sections refer to drugs and sex. "On the scroll, entire paragraphs are crossed out and not included in the published version."
Cool Hunting lists 11 messenger bags for guys. I'm holding out for the Firefox Ogio bag.
Reuters profiles Snocap's Linx service for selling digital music.
"All in all, the Linx is an impressive new way to purchase music, and like MySpace is a powerful new tool that quickly and easily raises the bar for independent artists," the music blog Coolfer (http://www.coolfer.com/blog/) wrote on Wednesday.
At Information Week, Cory Doctorow speaks out against Apple's iTunes DRM, pronouncing it bad for both the consumer and the company.
There's no good answer to designing a "good DRM." Or rather, no DRM is good DRM. iTunes is instructive again in this regard: Apple sold a billion tracks in three years in spite of its DRM, not because of it. No Apple customer bought an iTune because of the DRM. What's more, every track in the iTunes music store can be downloaded for free from P2P networks. Apple proves that you can sell music without DRM all day long -- all adding DRM to Apple's music does is give Apple the ability to abuse its customers and its partners from the labels.
The Atlas of Fiction maps "real places imagined by great writers."
The Roots Music Listening Room offers many mp3 downloads of music from the 20's & 30's.
The AskMetafilter community discusses mp3-tagging the rock genre.
