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May 29, 2007
Shorties
The Village Voice creates a music playlist for a road trip.
Glide interviews singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston.
Looking back, how do you feel about The Devil and Daniel Johnston?
When it first came out I didn’t really know what to think. It was really exploitation, in a way. But then I just got to thinking that it was hilarious. I wish they’d put a laugh track on the movie. So people could laugh. I watched it and I laughed. I thought, “I am kinda stupid, l can’t believe I did that.” I did some really dumb things. I’m such a fool, really. But you know deep inside I am a wise man.
Modest Mouse guitarist Johnny Marr talks to Manchester Confidential.
“Formulaic indie”, it turns out is one of Marr’s pet hates. “So many bands today put X next to Y and get Z. It’s like they had it all planned out before they’d even picked up an instrument. It’s because these days, bands are so tied up with big business. Even the indie scene doesn’t have room to be experimental.”
Stylus recaps the 2007 edition of the Eurovision song contest.
Popmatters examines the "death of serious science fiction" films.
Bloomberg suggests a summer reading list for Bank of Japan officials.
The Human Clock lists songs that mention a specific time of day.
The lineup for this summer's Pitchfork Music Festival has been announced.
NPR's All Things Considered previews the summer film highlights.
The Guardian examines Universal Music Soundtracks, a record label that "aims to get exposure for fledgling acts by placing their music in British films."
"It's a cheaper way to break someone like Luke Toms," says Matt Biffa of the film-music production company Air-Edel, which supervised the Magicians soundtrack. "Let's say a guy who's 30 years old, he's a fan of Peep Show, he's not an NME reader or on the gig scene every night - he'll go and see the film and might really like the music, and buy the album as a souvenir, and then he'll come across Luke Toms. He'll say, 'I'm digging this guy. I'll seek out his other work.' "
Author Gore Vidal talks to Toronto's Xtra.
"Let's get one thing straight," he says within minutes of our meeting on the line from his home in the Hollywood Hills. "I was never an expatriate. I was never an Italian. I never was a European. I had no interest in any of that. I know writers are supposedly terribly poor and indigent and the begging bowl is always out, but I had two houses for 40 years, one in the Hollywood Hills and one in Campania in southern Italy. I lived back and forth."
In the Christian Science Monitor, A.B. Curtiss, author of Depression is a Choice: Winning the Battle without Drugs, recounts his experiences with Amazon reviews of the book.
Thanks to Amazon, everybody sees themselves as bona fide literary critics – whether they've read the book or not. Here's P. Burke's review of my book, "Depression is a Choice": "First off, since I haven't READ the book (I refuse to pay for something that I can't even stand the title to), my review may be off-base." You think?
O'Reilly Radar uses the music player Songbird as part of the current "beyond the browser" trend in software applications.
Songbird is an even better example. It's an open source media player built on the Mozilla application framework but it doesn't run in the browser, in fact it embeds a lightweight browser within the desktop application. Like iTunes, Songbird acts as a local desktop media player, media library organizer, and media device manager and also allows you to purchase music/movies online and add them to your library. But it also does more than iTunes. The embedded browser means that you can surf to any website, not just one company's dedicated store pages. When you hit a site with links to media files, Songbird creates a dynamic playlist of all the media on that page. So you can surf to a music blog, and while you're reading the blog listen to its virtual playlist. You can add songs to your library from the online playlist with a simple "Add to library" button, and Songbird maintains a "Web Library" of the music you've encountered while surfing so you can find it again.
At the Huffington Post, Danny Miller shares an anecdote of when Jeff Tweedy met Charles Nelson Reilly.
My brother-in-law, Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, was a huge Charles fan. A few years ago, when Jeff was in town mixing the Wilco CD "Summerteeth," we brought Charles to the recording studio for a visit. Charles immediately had the entire rock crowd under his spell. They all wanted to pose for pictures with him and they seemed more excited to see Charles than if a member of the Rolling Stones had wandered in. Someone handed him a CD by a band called the Didjits called "Full Nelson Reilly" and Charles signed it to Jeff, "From one rock star to another."
Chronicle your comic collection online at My Comic Pile.
Threadless is holding another $10 t-shirt sale.
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