Remains of the Day

Why "TiK ToK" went #1

Why was Ke$ha's "TiK ToK" such a smash hit? This analysis fascinates me as an example of a field of research that attempts to deduce patterns of popularity in artistic work. Like studies that analyze faces that most people find attractive (we like faces that are symmetrical and that tend to be averages of faces across a large population), the film and music industries have tried to reverse engineer the hit and break it down to a reproducible recipe.

I haven't read Futurehit.DNA, the book whose research is applied here to TiK ToK, but some success elements it identifies in the song are quite specific. For example:

THE DROP OUTS PREVENT BOREDOM

There are two crucial points in the song where the music basically drops out and forces the listener to engage. This is an essential point for any new song to prevent it from being passive. You need it to be active in order to engage people to listen multiple times and actively purchase. The first drop out occurs at 31 seconds when the verse ends and creates a half second of silence before the chorus kicks in. This actively accents the chorus and makes sure you are paying attention before it starts. The second point is just after 2 minutes when the bridge after the second chorus drops out most of the instruments and all the rhythm. Typically most listeners start getting bored right at the two minute mark, so having this change up right at this moment is the smartest move the producers could do. There’s also a subtle, yet crucial change in the chord progressions at this point. This is key as this also creates a shift that engages the listener. This draws from chapters 3 and 4.

LACK OF RESOLUTION AT THE END

The song is in D minor, but that chord first comes in at the 7th beat of the 16 bar progression. So when the song ends cold on the first note of that progression, it ends on Bb. This gives the listener a subtle feeling of an unfinished song, even though it ended on the 1st beat, which is typical of most songs. By not resolving the chord, the listener is more apt to hum the song and therefore more likely to need to listen to it again. This is detailed out in Chapter 5.

A few years back, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article called "The Formula" which delved into efforts to crack the formula of hit songs and movies.

Wait for it.

Sorry, I was just trying the Dropout strategy for my writing, inserting a random gap at about 2 minutes in to see if it would keep you interested.

Anyhow, Gladwell profiled a music company, Platinum Blue Music Intelligence (now Music XRay) which used software to analyze songs and predict their hit potential. The more interesting company discussed in the article was Epagogix, a company that claimed to be able to predict the box office potential of any film project given just the script.

It's not clear whether or not these companies can do what they promise with any degree of accuracy. The secrecy around their algorithms makes it difficult to evaluate their effectiveness. One could argue that if they did work, artists, studios, and labels might all have an incentive to keep it a secret from the public. No one likes to think they've been duped by some paint-by-numbers artistic work that preys on some Pavlovian wiring in their brain.

On the other hand, if these algorithms really did work, you'd think it would be well worth the cost to employ them and that a higher percentage of songs and movies coming out of the big labels and studios would be commercially successful.

Peter Gabriel covers, gets covered

Peter Gabriel is releasing an album of covers on Feb 15th. Titled Scratch My Back, it will include covers of tracks from indie band heavyweights from Arcade Fire, Radiohead, and The Magnetic Fields to Bon Iver and David Bowie.

The twist is that these artists will, in turn, cover some Peter Gabriel songs on a future album. Covers of favorites are no guarantee of quality, but hit that first link for a preview of Gabriel's cover of Arcade Fire's "My Body is a Cage" and a tracklist; count me intrigued.

New Michel Gondry music video

This one may not be as much of a conceptual mind-blower as some of his other work, but in this world of CGI and digital effects, Gondry's work always earns a measure of respect for its analog execution. It's not just the concept itself but his ability to pull it off with sheer human sweat and practice and coordination that have become his trademark.

Contra by Vampire Weekend

Preview the new album by Vampire Weekend, Contra, which Amazon is selling on CD for just $7.99. Back a few weeks, I forgot to set an alarm to fight the Ticketmaster mob for tickets to their show next Tuesday here in LA. The sold out instantly, and I'm still shut out, a 2009 regret I'm still paying for in 2010.

Alicia and Stephen

Monsieur Colbert gives Alicia Keys an assist on "Empire State of Mind."

At the start line of the NY Marathon this year, as we stood at the foot of the Verrazano-Narrows bridge, waiting for them to release our wave, they had someone sing the National Anthem and God Bless America, and then they blasted Jay-Z and Alicia's majestic "Empire State of Mind" over the loudspeakers. We were all so pumped up that when the pistol shot fired to start us, all thoughts of not going out too fast were tossed aside and carried away by the stiff winds that morning. We all blasted through that first mile up the bridge in record time; I'd pay the debt for that some 17 miles later.

When I hear that song, I'll always think of that moment at the foot of the bridge, thousands of people hopping and vibrating in place, all overflowing with anticipation and nervous energy.

Believe it or not

A TV theme song should set your mind in the right mood for the show to come, like candles for a romantic dinner or Drew Brees' Marine-inspired team chant before the Saints take the field.

This oldie, backing the sudden freeze frames over medium close-ups to allow for the actor credits to unfurl with a glow effect, is a great example.

Miscellany

Mira and I saw Dudamel conducting the LA Philharmonic in Verdi's Requiem last Thursday night. After the show, as we were walking out, two women approached and one of them asked if she could interview us. She was from the Christian Science Monitor.

I suspect we were picked out for being the only two people in the crowd who didn't appear old enough to collect social security checks. Apparently Verdi's Requiem just doesn't bring out the kids like it used to.

We ended up quoted at the end of this short online piece. Well, "quoted" should be qualified. Those weren't exactly our words, despite her use of a tape recorder. It's more like she took some of our thoughts and summarized them, then bracketed them with quotation marks.

A few bars into the opening of Verdi's Requiem, one of the more haunting openings in the canon, someone's cell phone went off. After it rang twice, Dudamel dropped his arms and brought the piece to a halt, and the crowd of septuagenarians let out a bile-filled hiss. I tried to see who it was but never identified the person.

Having my cell phone go off in the midst of a quiet performance--a play, a classical music performance, a book reading, to name a few--is one of my greatest fears. Even after I've turned off my phone I check it at least three or four times during a show. Someone just lived out my greatest fear that night.

***

To those who wonder if the Madden Football video game teaches one anything about real life coaching, exhibit A is the New England Patriots. Their offense resembles the way I play offense in Madden. Spread the field with a lot of wideouts, put my QB in the shotgun, and put the defense under constant attack all over the field, perhaps tossing in a no-huddle for added duress. Look for Moss deep in single coverage, then check down to Watson on a deep in or hit Welker dragging shallow across the middle. The Colts and Cardinals are well-suited to that style of offense in Madden, also.

***

Eric and I planned to meet Bill Simmons last night at his LA book signing. We were up in Burbank beforehand for work and had to fight the usual horrific LA traffic to get to ESPN Zone across from Staples Center. The signing started at 5pm, and we got on the 101 at about 6:30. The same way a great quarterback has an internal clock that lets him know when he has to either commit to a pass or dump the ball or risk taking a sack, I had a sense we were pushing it, that he might be gone before we arrived.

As we approached Staples Center, we ran into another microclusterf*** of automobiles. It turns out there was a Clippers game at Staples Center and a So You Think You Can Dance concert that night at Nokia Live next door (in fairness to the Clippers, they probably didn't account for most of that traffic; I blame SYTYCD). As cheap about parking as Eric and I were, we weren't about to mess around with nearby lots to save a few dollars. We paid the $25 king's ransom to park under Nokia Live, then sprinted through the crowds of SYTYCD fans lined up outside Nokia Live to reach ESPN Zone.

Our hustle paid off. We walked in as Simmons was packing up his stuff. We introduced ourselves and he graciously signed our books. We told him we worked at Hulu and he said he was a big fan, that he had used the site to watch Miami Vice and White Shadow (which, being huge fans of his ESPN column, we knew).

We presented him with a Hulu hoodie and thanked him for mentioning Hulu in his column from time to time. He said it would've been the coolest gift he received that night if not for the fact that a porn actress had come in earlier, bought a few copies of his books, and dropped off some DVDs from her, uh, oeuvre. Yep, that's a tough comp.

If you're an NBA fan, Simmons' new book The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy is a must read (it made it to the top of the NYTimes Non-Fiction bestseller list, reflecting his massive fan base). His knowledge of NBA history is impressive (when he says he's one of the last few true NBA fans, he's not kidding), and his ranking of the top 96 players in NBA history is very fair despite his Celtics' loyalties.

In many ways, Simmons is one of the original bloggers, a guy who wrote about what he knew for AOL long before millions of bloggers were doing the same. He's not afraid to write about pop culture and television and sports and all the things he cares about, the same way Chuck Klosterman writes about music and sports and topics he cares about or the way economists like Tyler Cowen and Steven Levitt write columns and books about all sorts of topics that economics touch on.

I was so flustered and out-of-breath when I arrived that I forgot to pre-sign my book for him. He'd made a policy of just signing his name after some of his other book signings ran long, but I'm sure he would have signed his name below any made-up salutation.

"To Eugene, my reader with the greatest length and upside."

"May this 736 page behemoth of a book last you over 300 post-Mexican meal seatings on the toilet."

Dudamel's Inaugural Concert

Thursday night I attended 28 year old Gustavo Dudamel's inaugural concert as music director of the LA Philharmonic. I saw him conduct the orchestra many times last season, so the novelty this night wasn't seeing him in action as much as it was experiencing the city's reaction to his coronation.

That's what it felt like: a coronation. The block of Grand Ave. in front of Walt Disney Concert Hall was closed off for a post-concert gala. Magenta spotlights lit up the brushed metal skin of the concert hall, and a carpet of matching hue ran from the sidewalk up to the entrance. Shouts from the photographer's den rang out each time a movie star strolled past, Hollywood having gained, for this night at least, a newfound appreciation for classical music. In my brief stroll up to the entrance, I saw Rachel Griffiths, Andy Garcia, and Jason Schwartzman. Even those people I didn't recognize were dressed to the nines this night; I felt almost bourgeois in my suit.

My seats this night were in the orchestra viewing area, behind the orchestra, directly below the organ, facing the conductor's podium. It felt like sitting behind home plate at a baseball game. I was concerned the music would sound odd given my seat location, but the acoustic qualities of that hall are so magnificent that the music sounded fine, if spatially reversed.

The first piece was the world premiere of Charles Adams' "City Noir." It is a jazz-infused symphony which the program noted would be the first in a triptych of pieces inspired by the California experience. I never played many jazzy classical pieces growing up, so these types of pieces are more opaque to me. As with many Adams' pieces, I found moments to be evocative and mysterious, with echoes of familiar sounds, but the overall emotional construction was challenging to grasp.

At intermission, complimentary flutes of champagne were set out on tables on each floor. If the interior of the space were more ornate, the gowns on the women a bit puffier, the men's tuxedo shirts a bit more ruffled, we could have been in 18th century Vienna, so excited the crowd seemed to be for classical music.

If Simon Cowell were to offer Dudamel any advice this night, I suspect he would have lauded the song selection. After intermission Dudamel selected Mahler's First Symphony. It's one of my favorites, a piece that showcases so many sections of an orchestra and builds to a rousing finale that is standing ovation ready.

More importantly, Dudamel clearly loves it, conducting from memory. Many times throughout the piece, he broke out in smiles of pure joy. The piece plays to one of his strengths, his ability to draw from his players a torrent of intensity and power. Were there rough patches to give ammunition to the inevitable naysayers? Sure. A bass solo was hit one note flat, the first violin section may not be as precise as one would like, and perhaps the horn section from Chicago which I listened to in my youth is stronger.

But I have yet to attend a Dudamel concert that wasn't exciting. Part of it is his style on the podium, the sheer variety of his broad gestures, as if willing the desired emotion from each phrase of the piece. I could hear his sharp intakes of breath whenever he launched the orchestra into a crescendo.

So moved was the audience that they broke out in applause between the first and second movements. As Dudamel led the orchestra towards the finale of the piece, I got goosebumps, and when he hit the final note, the crowd leapt to its feet in an outpouring of ecstasy I've never seen at a classical performance. About the third time he emerged to acknowledge the cheers, magenta and silver confetti rained down from the ceiling.

Will Dudamel save classical music? It's a silly question but often asked of him. Soccer has a better chance of becoming a major part of the U.S. sports landscape. I didn't see any significant shift in the demographics of the audience this night, nor would I expect to see any such shift in the years to come. It will take more than a conductor to restore classical music to a central role in the cultural landscape for the youth of tomorrow.

But perhaps classical music can continue to survive and thrive at the periphery, sustained by a core base of passionate fans. So much of culture has fractured that all that may be needed is enough of a fan base to fill the hall to 75% some 4 nights a week for seven or eight months a year. If TV shows like Friday Night Lights and Mad Men and The Wire could survive with their somewhat scant (by TV industry standards) but dedicated audiences, why not classical music?

Energizing the base may not be a sufficient strategy if you're the Republican Party, say, and require a majority to return to position of relevance among the next generation, but for this classical music fan, converting the heathen is orthogonal to my enjoyment (and given that just about every Dudamel show this season has sold out already, might be counter to it!). Dudamel is an electric new presence in the classical world, and that's plenty fine for me.

A waking dream

I had a musician friend visiting me all weekend, and while researching music shows, I stumbled across a unique concert: Bon Iver was going to play a sunrise show at the Hollywood Cemetery Sunday morning at around 5:50am. The doors would open at midnight on Saturday, and various events were scheduled through the night.

As with any hot show, tickets were underpriced at $25 each and sold out quickly. I paid a pretty sum more than that for a pair of tickets from a scalper on Craiglist. We met up at a Chevron gas station near The Getty and exchanged cash for tickets like a drug deal.

I don't remember how I first heard of Bon Iver, probably through an MP3 blog, but his first single "Skinny Love" haunted me. Every story about the album's creation focused on the back story: Justin Vernon retreated alone to a remote hunting cabin in Wisconsin for several months to record most of the tracks. I've never heard what drove him to the woods and what feelings he wanted to put into song, but one listen of the album reveals multitudes.

Soon after the album's release, I saw Bon Iver perform live at a tiny bar in LA called The Echo. The bar held maybe a hundred people at most, all crowded around the stage. I could barely see through the crowd to Vernon, who was seated on stage. That my few glimpses seemed to reveal a bearded mountain man reinforced the back story of the album's genesis. Unlike the hipsters crowding the bar, all of whom had paid exorbitant prices to dress like homeless people, Vernon looked like the real thing.

Any other day, I'd arrive at a show like this Hollywood Cemetery gig filled with excitement. But this day, I walked several blocks to the entrance in a stupor. Saturday morning I ran 19 miles, my longest run yet in training for this year's NY Marathon. The run broke me, not physically but mentally. It's not that I can't do the distance, but it's the frustration of not being able to run much faster despite all the miles logged. On a bike, the more I ride, the faster I go. On foot, the more I run, the longer I can suffer at the same pace, until felled by injury, of which there have been many.

After one of my numerous surgeries for my leg, I don't recall which one (maybe to have part of my meniscus removed), a physician said to me, "Some people just aren't built to run." He said "some people" but it was clear he was being more specific than that. I plodded along for 19 miles Saturday morning, but even when I willed myself to accelerate, when I tried to increase my stride or cadence or some variation thereof, nothing happened.

After a late dinner and show at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, we didn't get changed and out to the Cemetery until after two in the morning. The drive over through a rare and dense Los Angeles fog seemed like a journey through an impending apocalyptic wasteland. On the I-10 headed East, I saw a car on the other side of the highway stalled on the median, it's hood popped open, the engine spewing out flames several feet high. Near the cemetery, angry drivers leaned on their horns and gunned their engines to pass each other, apparently in a hurry to run the next red light. We passed a Korean club in K-town where young males milled about outside looking like they were organizing for trouble. The world felt aggressive, angry.

My legs protested even just an 8 block walk to the entrance of the cemetery. The patch of lawn where the concert was taking place was already full of blankets and people when we arrived in the absolute dark. Bottle Rocket screened on the white wall of a building. I love that movie. The quiet conversations of groups of people throughout the grounds mixed with the occasional draft of pot from the guy laid out next to us who puffed on his pipe without shame. Through the fog I could see the shadowy outlines of a few palm trees leaning over in the sky.

As soon as I laid out my sleeping bag and pillow on a blanket, they were covered with a cool dew. I tried to sleep, but I couldn't find a comfortable position no matter which way I rolled. After Bottle Rocket, the first set of music picked by Bon Iver played at a moderate volume (The LA Times has all the setlists from the night). Then, at some point, a screening of highlights from Planet Earth started playing. I don't know when that began as I was fading in and out of consciousness. I'd sit up from time to time and see colorful birds performing elaborate mating dances, frogs hurtling through the air in slow motion, their arms and legs splayed out in all directions for balance, and then I'd pass out again.

After that screening, a shorter second list of songs selected by Bon Iver played over the speakers. The second to last song was Sade's "By Your Side". My sister used that song for her first dance at her wedding. That was a long time ago. The song made me feel old and sentimental.

After the last song of the list, there was a period of silence where all I could hear were the conversations nearby me. A group of people spoke with excitement about evading security guards around the cemetery, near misses punctuated by ducking behind tombstones and crypts while flashlight beams swept overhead.

And then the chanting began, Buddhist monks chanting in that hypnotic, repetitious pattern. This was the designated alarm clock for the day. I wondered how Bon Iver was able to enlist Buddhist monks. Did they listen to his music, too? Are monks allowed to have iPods? It was dark and I did not see where they were, though I saw a group of lanterns hanging in the distance.

And then lights came on towards the far corner of the lawn, revealing a stage set up for the show, and then the members of Bon Iver walked on stage to the cheers of those who'd stayed up all night and those still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes.

The first time I saw Bon Iver back at The Echo, Vernon said little. But at the Hollywood Forever show, he spoke early and often, exhibiting a humble humor that went down easy for a crowd half awake. Hearing Vernon's normal speaking voice, one would never imagine the falsetto he uses throughout For Emma, Forever Ago.

If Arcade Fire sounds anthemic, then Bon Iver sounds sacred. As the sky turned from black to slate to sickly orange to pale morning blue, Bon Iver filled the damp morning air with gorgeous versions of every song they knew while the crowd sat on their blankets in a hushed reverence. Vernon seemed just as amazed as any of us that this was happening.

"This is the weirdest thing we've done. Ever." At one point Vernon tried to tune a guitar. "It's covered with dew."

It's as close as I may ever come to feeling the presence of something holy on a Sunday morning. At one point, someone let out a crazy yell of joy.

Vernon paused. "Was that a dead person?"

A few songs from the end, Vernon said, "I know it's standard for bands to pretend to walk off the stage and then come back and play more songs, but we're a young band, we don't have that many songs. So if it's okay with you, we're just going to stay on stage and play every song we know."

He apologized once more before the last song. "This is the last song. It's the only song left that we know how to play. I'm feeling inadequate." Then they launched into "Wolves". During the second half, at Vernon's request, we joined in to sing, again and again, "What might have been lost."

When the final note cut out, we all stood and applauded. Bon Iver had won our hearts. Then we shuffled out of the cemetery carrying our sleeping bags, blankets, and pillows. The morning sun, diffused through a thick cloud cover, dropped a soft white light from overhead.

Over the past year, I've soured on a lot of the shortcomings of the concert-going experience, but a night like this redeems my hope for what a live music performance can be. With every event of the night curated by Bon Iver, from the location to the movies to the music, this was more of an experience than a performance. Simply gorgeous, one of the most memorable shows of my life.

Live from the Artists Den

We just launched Live from the Artists Den at Hulu. It's a concert series in which an artist is invited to perform in a non-standard venue in a town, the performances recorded for broadcast.

Long before we signed this content provider, I received an invite to attend one of their concerts, an Aimee Mann performance at LA's Vibiana Cathedral.

On the road last week I perused the video to see if I made it into any shots, and 4 minutes in, I caught a glimpse of myself as I was sitting in the front row.

Here's another good one in the series, The Swell Season, of Once fame.

Anna Netrebko

The Asian leg of my vacation is complete, and I miss Hong Kong and Tokyo already. It's never a fair comparison, pitting the hometown where you've spent years living and working versus the places you visit for just a few days with an itinerary set to plunder the destination's peak offerings. The allure of the new and mysterious almost always overwhelms the mundane and the familiar, especially given how many vacations come after long stretches of work which have whittled your creative energy down to a nub.

I had many more days of exciting discoveries left in Tokyo. It's such a massive city that my four days there were just enough for me to feel comfortable there at the exact moment I grasped, in a very physical sense, its sheer density and magnitude. I left with a feeling that there were more things I hadn't visited that I would love than I had crossed off the list. That's rare for me, being somewhat of a travel completist.

But more on Asia later. Today I come to speak of the Russian Anna Netrebko, widely considered the world's greatest soprano and its preeminent diva, that term being a great compliment in the world of opera.* I heard Netrebko this afternoon in the final performance of her short run with the San Francisco Opera performing the role of Violetta Valery in Verdi's La Traviata.

I will preface my thoughts by saying I am no expert on opera, so those looking for a review of the finer points of Italian diction and an assessment of where she took her breaths will be disappointed.

I first heard of Netrebko from a friend who'd seen her perform early in her career, and then I lost track of her until a cover story profile in the NYTimes Sunday Magazine. She was most well-known for two things, not often paired in an opera singer: her voice and her beauty, both sensual and captivating. If you were a baseball scout grading her voice on the traditional 20-80 scale you'd give it a 75. As for her looks, I showed some friends her CD covers today after the show and one compared her to Monica Bellucci, an apt comp in that she does recall in many ways the full-bodied Italian starlets of old.

I don't often go out of my way to see certain performers live, but I make an exception for generational talents: Michael Jordan, for example, or Roger Federer, and in this case, Netrebko. When I saw her calendar for 2009 included two stops in the US, one in NY at the Met and one in SF performing La Traviata, I snapped up tickets almost a year in advance for a weekend date of the later and knew I'd plan some way to attend. As I noted before, I'm at best an opera dilettante, but I far prefer a good opera to a musical, and that makes me a rarity among my generation. I'm just as susceptible to being bored to slumber by a pondering German opera, but the best of the ones I do love have an otherworldly musical beauty that lifts me up in a way no musical can.

One of the problems with opera, and one reason I think it struggles to connect with a younger generation, is the deadly pairing of plot implausibility with wooden acting. The cartoon parody of opera, not entirely inaccurate, is of an overweight woman in a Viking helmet, her diminutive male counterpart barely the size of her thigh, screeching so loudly that windows shatter, said immense woman playing an ageless young beauty despite sporting the looks of a fifty-something housewife.

It's a gross objectification and simplification, but I have left many an opera wondering what would have been lost by closing my eyes throughout and just listening considering that the stage choreography consisted mostly of a singer walking to and fro on stage, all facial and bodily expression an afterthought in the pursuit of accurate diction and musical phrasing.

Netrebko arrived on stage in style, in the backseat of a classic Buick. She is a bit heavier now than in photographs I've seen of her, but that's understandable considering she had a baby not too long ago. The voice is still the voice. What's amazing to someone like myself, who can't sing along to more than a few songs at a concert without losing my voice, is how effortlessly she can generate a massive, rich sound. At times she barely appeared to be opening her mouth and yet filled the house with her voice. The ease of her vocal power was such that if I didn't know who se was I'd think it was some odd form of lip synching. This incredible vocal power is a huge advantage when acting out more tender emotions. A lesser singer who'd have to contort her body and strain her face to generate the same output is much less likely to convey emotion than sheer physical exertion.

Netrebko actually matches her vocal expression with acting. No one will confuse the work that can be accomplished while vocally navigating passages of coloratura with the type of method acting Meryl Streep accomplishes in a close-up shot, but Netrebko makes it easier for those who don't understand Italian to understand what she's feeling. There were several moments where I missed the text on the prompter because I was peering through binoculars, but as long as I kept my eyes on her I never lost track of the emotional or plot throughline of the scene.

Having just arrived back in U.S. timezones less than 24 hours earlier, I was worried I'd succumb to jetlag during the show, this being a Sunday 2pm performance that was 6am Tokyo time. But a quick powernap and a rare espresso before the show, combined with the excitement of seeing Netrebko live in a fast-moving La Traviata kept me sharp throughout.

I've never seen La Traviata live, and my lack of knowledge of the finer points of opera preclude any other thoughts on this particular rendition. Two other memorable moments from the performance: at the first intermission, I saw a sign that said Netrebko would be in the lobby after the show signing her CDs and DVDs. At that precise moment I knew that about half the cash in my wallet had just been lit on fire, and I felt a pang of regret that I'd left my SLR at my friend's apartment and would have to rely on my iPhone camera in the underlit lobby. Second, at the end of the performance, when Netrebko came out to a standing ovation, she put a hand over her heart in appreciation and blew kisses to her adoring SF fans, here at the site where she'd made her US debut many years past. As the curtains fell for the last time, just as they were halfway down, she suddenly threw inhibition to the winds and hopped up and down like a young girl, waving her arms frantically overhead, as if sending off departing friends from summer camp. It was a youthful, exuberant expression of joy that I just couldn't picture coming from someone like an Angela Gheorgiu or a Jessye Norman, for example.

I waded through a crowd in the giftshop and picked up some $70 worth of Netrebko CDs for the signing, then jumped into a long line that wrapped around the corner of the lobby inside to wait for her to appear. After twenty minutes in which I saw opera house staff running back and forth with some distress, I felt a hand pull me sharply back to clear a gap in the line to a side door to the orchestra seating of the hall. I looked up to see an older man with a staff badge, and who should walk up from behind him than Anna herself, a young female assistant in tow. The old man rushed to open the side door to give her a shortcut through the hall to get to the autograph table in the lobby, but Netrebko took one look at the door, discerned his intentions, and turned away without breaking stride to walk down the hall past her waiting fans instead.

The old man finally popped back out, puzzled as to why she hadn't come on through. By then Anna was halfway down the hall, waving and clasping hands with fans as they greeted her with shouts of "Anna!" and other phrases in Russian and a variety of other languages.

The line did not move quickly, and while we waited a woman from the opera house came walked down the line with a post-it note pad writing down patron names in block capital letters so we wouldn't have to teach Anna how to spell our names. Good idea, but when she came up to us she also said that we could only give Anna one item to sign. Having purchased four CDs at significant price premiums to what I could have paid on Amazon, I was not pleased. If it were an opera I would have burst out into a fiery aria.

But Anna had already defied the opera staff once, and so I held out hope that she wouldn't adhere to such arbitrary house rules. As I turned the corner and saw her, I understood why the line wasn't moving more quickly. While the staff tried to hustle her fans through, Anna would look each fan in the eye, listen to what they had to say to her, respond, often in their native language (I heard her speak in English, Spanish, Russian, and French to various fans), pose for photos, and sign each CD or DVD with the same deliberate pace.

When I reached her, I chose a double disc set of her performance of La Traviata from Salzburg as the item most worthy of her signature, and she signed it right on the cover of the case. I mumbled something about having been honored to hear her sing, and she thanked me with a warm smile. I turned to leave, but then she saw the other CDs in my hand and reached out her hand.

"Here, let me sign those for you," she said, grabbing the stack. She signed each of them on the cover, but when she reached the last CD, she paused, furrowed her brow, then opened the case and signed the back of the paper insert instead. Then she grabbed the CD of La Traviata back from me.

"I am not sure if this will stay,", she said, rubbing her finger across the ink of her previous signature on the plastic CD cover. But the ink had already dried and did not smear.

"Oh, it is okay!" she beamed.

I usually dread meeting famous people, especially those I admire. The imbalance in relationship of worshipper to hero is so severe as to lead to disappointment more often than not. What can be conveyed in a single autograph line encounter of any substance or genuine emotion between a fan and a celebrity who doesn't know that fan as much more than one of an adoring throng of millions? The usual exchange of pleasantries:

1. Fan expresses admiration for celebrity.
2. Celebrity thanks fan, then asks what the person's name is and what they'd like to have signed.
3. Celebrity signs item while fan perhaps gushes a bit more, perhaps elaborating on the earlier admiration to name a specific moment or instance of the celebrity's work that particularly struck them.
4. Celebrity thanks fan for that more specific example in which his/her work has touched the fan, hands back the autographed item, and then turns to the next fan.
5. Rinse, repeat.

I've just recently met two celebrities to have items signed, one being another classical music performer I've followed for decades now, and the other being one of my favorite movie and music video directors. In both cases, the celebrities were brusque, borderline cold, and the encounters left me feeling like a silly fanboy who'd wasted their time by forcing them to indulge in such banal and forced interactions with the ungifted masses.

What Netrebko conveyed in our short encounter was subtle but, given my previous two hero encounters, momentous. She showed genuine appreciation for my appreciation of her work, and she displayed a thoughtfulness that, amplified by the previously noted disproportionate one-way admiration that is typical of fan-to-hero relationships, bordered on genuine intimacy. This ability to convey a genuine warmth and caring in short interactions with complete strangers is something I'd only read about from skilled politicians like Bill Clinton. Netrebko has it in spades, and one has the sense that if she could spend even more time meeting her fans she'd have a relationship with them that not opera critics or vicious opera bloggers could mediate. She can be the people's diva, and more than that, she seems like a genuine person, and so she brings a realism to the flawed operatic heroes she plays on stage.

My friend who was with me said afterwards that Netrebko's charms seemed particularly tuned towards men, but I didn't hear her at first, I was so engrossed in flipping through my stack of autographed CDs with a big smile on my face. If opera is to survive and thrive in the next generation (I could not help but notice, once again, that the median age of this crowd was likely in the late 50's), there is something to be learned from the Netrebko's of the classical music world, and it is not about selling out with sex appeal or crossover albums.

* The term prima donna comes from Italian. Prima is the feminine form of primo--"first"--and donna means lady. The prima donna is literally the first lady of an opera troupe. It's not a coincidence that the term is more often used in English to describe a vain, temperamental person. But the operatic sense of the term looks at the glass half full and connotes someone able to fill the seats of a massive opera hall and satisfy patrons paying hundreds of dollars for the privilege of witnessing a performance from someone with a personality and stature to match the ticket prices in scale. At least that is my layman's interpretation.

Sunday

I saw Up in 3-D at the El Capitan last night. It's the richest, most moving script from Pixar yet. Animation lovers will love the references to Howl's Moving Castle and Castle in the Sky.

I will be curious, when it comes out on Blu-Ray, to see it in 2-D also, but this is probably the most polished 3-D movie I've seen to date. There is a level of control with digital animation that allows the 3-D effects to be extremely precise, with much less of the distracting blurring that makes other 3-D movies feel like gimmicks.

***

So, did Susan Boyle win in the finals of Britain's Got Talent? Go see for yourself.

I keep forgetting you don't have to sing to be on that show. The finals are like America's Best Dance Crew vs. American Idol.

***

Last survivor of the Titanic dies. I knew she was ready to pass on after she dropped that blue jeweled necklace into the ocean.

***

Nadal loses at the French Open. Massive upset. This makes Robin Soderling the future answer to a trivia question. Djokovic is out, too. Federer, the door is open. This is your best, and maybe last chance, to walk down that red clay carpet and on through.

***

In the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert reports that we are likely in the midst of the sixth mass extinction in Earth's history. By the end of this century, nearly half of Earth's species may be extinct. The suspected cause is the pace of human activity.

Three musical pieces

As an espresso shot of inspiration, this musical number (YouTube) which many many people forwarded me yesterday. What would be perfect is if I heard she'd started dating Paul the opera singer.

Also moving, also musically related, is Anvil! The Story of Anvil, a documentary about a metal band. Like many who come to this movie, I had not heard of Anvil, nor am I a metalhead. My first thought on seeing the trailer was that I wanted to see it but perhaps just on DVD given how far on the periphery of my interests it fell.

But I kept getting pitched to see it from UCLA film schoolers who raved about it, and given that it was only in LA for a one week run at the Nuart, and after reading a rave review by Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, I planned an outing to see it last night and invited a bunch of friends.

Just one person responded, in the negative, and the remaining radio silence I read as tacit declines, perhaps reacting the same way I did to the trailer. So I went by myself; once I saw the documentary, that seemed only fitting.

Anvil was a seminal metal band, and in the early 80's, people in that genre of the industry foresaw big things for them, but for reasons not entirely clear to me as an outsider to that genre, they slipped into obscurity while bands like Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica, and Slayer went on to fame and fortune (in the documentary, they are referred to as The Big Four, a bit of trivia that was news to me).

Lead singer Steve Kudlow is known to all but his family as Lips. The drummer's name is Robb Reiner, a coincidence that seems so improbable and perfect that I thought he might have changed his name at one point, but no, this is art and life together in a winking conspiracy. The two of them are the founders and soul of Anvil, and even now, in their 50's, bicker, make up, repeat, like an old married couple.

What always surprises me is how sweet all the people involved in heavy metal music seem to be, from the musicians with their face paint and outfits heavy on leather and endless waves of hair to the fans with their heads bopping and tongues hanging. Lips is the star of the documentary, almost childlike in his optimism. He and Sally Hawkins' Poppy from Happy-Go-Lucky should get together, just to see if their buoyancy might generate a harmonic convergence that could bring about world peace.

Not that Lips doesn't have his moments of despair, but much of the wonder of this movie is watching him, on screen confronting his despair, and then setting it aside with what comes to seem a courageous perseverance and good cheer.

I can see why so many film students gravitate towards the story, as all who enter the arts confront the issue of "what price my art?" on a daily basis. The internet has made critics of us all, but it has not simplified the question of why people pursue art, and at what cost to themselves and their loved ones.

It's a touching story about which I will reveal little else other than to recommend it highly. See it if/when it makes it to your town. The director Sacha Gervasi, who wrote the screenplay for The Terminal and who is teaching screenwriting at UCLA Film School this quarter, showed up after the screening for an unpublicized Q&A. He was gracious and shared some intriguing stories:

• Gervasi met Anvil when he approached them backstage in London and introduced himself as their number one fan. Lips said it was their first time in London and asked Gervasi to show them around town, leading to the humorous image of Gervasi, a young metalhead, leading Lips and Reiner through the Tate Gallery. Gervasi claimed credit for introducing Reiner to the works of Francis Bacon, a story that is less humorous when you learn, in the movie, that Reiner paints Edward Hopper-esque scenes with considerable skill.
• At the screening at Sundance in 2008, a woman during the Q&A asked Lips if he'd ever considered what toll his pursuit of his music placed on his family, and Kudlow broke down and started crying, and then the woman started crying. And she said to him that at least he'd taught his son one of the most valuable lessons, and that was to never give up on his dreams.

Lastly, as part of our documentary launch at Hulu, we added a documentary I saw at Sundance years ago and loved, called DIG!. It shares some parallels with Anvil in its exploration of why artists do what they do.

Director Ondi Timoner, the only two-time Grand Jury Prize winner ever at Sundance, spoke to Hulu editor Rebecca Harper recently. One of the reasons this appealed to me more than many documentaries is that Timoner used one of the principal characters as a narrator, and not an unbiased, omniscient narrator. It's a twist that works, something Timoner spoke about:

Why choose to have Courtney narrate the film?

Courtney was a huge breakthrough for me. I'd attempted to tell the story without narration, but I needed an anchor. I didn't want omniscient narration; I wanted it to be a ride, a journey. So I woke up very pregnant in the middle of the night a month and a half before I finished. I called Courtney right away. He happened to be in Europe at the time, but he was flying into L.A. the next day. He didn't change any of my words; he was gracious and generous. I appreciate him for that.

This age we live in

Right now on Amazon, it costs more to purchase the MP3's for Neko Case's new album than it does to buy the CD and have it shipped to you. It's as if they're discounting the CD to compensate for the hassle of it's physical form factor taking up space in your home, having to be packed for your next move, etc. This is the opposite of what has been the rule to date, which is that it's cheaper to buy the digital good because they pass through the savings of foregoing shipping and handling of an actual good.

---@---

Silicon Alley Insider reports with seeming surprise that Jeff Bezos is working in an Amazon distribution center for a week. That shouldn't surprise anyone--almost everyone at Amazon went to work in the distribution centers over the holidays for many years to help handle the spike in holiday orders (at the time, there wasn't enough temporary labor in any of the markets where the DCs were located to handle the seasonal volume surge, though in this economy it might be different). With increased distribution capacity and automation, such stints are no longer required annually, but when I left Amazon every new employee spent at least some amount of time working in customer service inquiries and the distribution centers. It was always part of being the world's most customer-centric company.

---@---

I'm with Khoi Vinh on this one: the SXSW badges, program, and maps this year were all but unusable. Not to minimize the difficulty of producing these with a volunteer team, but one thought on how to leverage some talent is to ask for help from one of the many participating design firms or panelists in exchange for prominent credits on the materials, and maybe some free advertising inventory. One's work would certainly reach a very chatty and influential crowd there.

Movie Theaters and CDs and MP3s as mere marketing tools

Sasha Frere-Jones reads in recent concert ticket bonus offerings the completion of the transition of recorded music from standalone product to mere advertisement for concerts.

If you buy a top-price ticket to one of No Doubt’s upcoming shows (between $50 and $150, roughly), you will receive a free download of the band’s entire catalogue. This makes sense, as touring is the one verifiably healthy part of the music business. Prince will release a new three-CD bundle on March 29, available exclusively at Target for $11.98. That may seem like a rollback to bargain prices of yesteryear (even though one of the CDs is by Prince’s protégée Bria Valente), but it’s more likely that Prince is seeing into the future—again. In 2004, he gave away a copy of his “Musicology” CD to everyone who attended one of his concerts, making concrete what is now almost axiomatic: recordings have become advertisements for shows.

As anyone who follows the movie industry knows, theatrical releases long ago became the most expensive commercials in the world for selling DVDs which generate most of the profits. Many movies don't even make back their production costs during their run in theaters, but investors count on sales of $17 DVDs to cover the shortfall and then some (international sales help, too, but DVD was the gamechanger.

Concert ticket sales have made up for the erosion of recorded music sales due to piracy. If DVD sales for television programming go down due to piracy, TV folks don't have an obvious backup plan like musicians have with concerts. If advertising can't cover TV production costs and DVD sales disappear, I suspect we'll all be watching a lot more reality TV.

It's one reason I want to see Hulu succeed, to provide an alternate revenue stream to continue to subsidize the production of shows in genres other than reality TV, which really isn't my cup of tea.

M83 and the LA Phil

Last night I attended a sold-out concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall uniting M83 with the LA Philharmonic. Being a subscriber this season paid off as I ended up sitting dead center in the third row, Anthony Gonzalez's U-shaped bank of Macbook Pros and synthesizers directly in front of me. The program looked promising...

1. The music of M83 (solo)
2. Arvo Pärt - Fratres
3. Debussy - La Mer
4. M83 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic
   

...but though I love M83 and the LA Phil and the music of Pärt and La Mer, and though I think the acoustics at that venue are near perfect, as with your favorite foods it's not clear that the whole will equal, let alone surpass, the mix of the parts.

A valid concern, it seems, as the collaborative piece that concluded the concert was the least appealing of the program. Sean O'Laughlin, who arranged similar collaborations between the LA Phil and rock acts like Belle and Sebastian and The Decemberists, opted for a sort of earnest and straightforward melodrama that lacked the type of unique slow build of peculiar sonic landscapes that makes M83's music so appealing to us introverts. The collaborative arrangement featured a choir of women garbed in white, like nurses, a drum set, and overwhelming strings that left me unclear what Gonzalez was doing with his gear, so drowned out was his input.

As an event, though, it was an overwhelming success. I haven't seen the hall so full all year, the usual crowd of aged patrons replaced by a sea of what looked like hipsters dressed for prom. In this recession, an event that can bring in a younger audience and expose them to some classical pieces that are musical neighbors to a rock act they know is an event worth learning from. Having to read body language, always a dangerous task, I'd say half the orchestra bought into it and half had to strain to keep their eyes from rolling, but I find events like this more appealing than so-called crossover discs, with classical musicians playing with, say, Bobby McFerrin.

M83's solo set made good use of the acoustics of the space (aided by some aggressive lighting design), and I'm partial to Fratres and La Mer. It was a well-designed program. M83's work has always occupied prime real estate on my iPod, perhaps because it feels like an anthem of an introvert. Letting someone know you listen to M83 is like saying, "I may be quiet, but I contain multitudes."

Spider-Man, the musical

Titled Turn Off the Dark, with music and lyrics by Bono and The Edge and direction from Julie Taymor (Lion King), the Spider-Man musical will preview on Broadway beginning Jan. 16, 2010 and open officially on Feb. 18, 2010.

I can't help but picture a three melody ensemble piece: Neil Patrick Harris as Peter Parker, singing in his Spiderman suit, perched on the precipice of a tall building in NYC, Mary Jane (no thoughts who'd play her), many miles away, singing from a fashion catwalk where she stands as various assistants attend to her hair and makeup, and finally, Ewan McGregor as Eddie Brock, harmonizing from a NY city alley, as as Venom's inky black creeps across his skin and possesses him.

Bizarre.

Yuja Wang, and my return to vinyl

Last Thursday I heard 21 year old Chinese piano prodigy Yuja Wang play Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto with the LA Philharmonic conducted by Charles Dutoit.

I'd never heard this piece, nor had I heard much about Wang. She emerged from the wings in a fire engine red strapless dress, but the outfit was the flashiest part of her performance. She's all business on the piano, and she was as impressive a pianist as I've heard in a long time. From my seats along the first violin side of the concert hall, I could only see her back, but it was clear her fingers were flying all over the keyboard from one end to another, and her long, slender, but toned arms pulled a huge sound from the belly of the instrument. Technical mastery, a command of musical phrasing, she showcased it all, and the crowd gave her a standing ovation.

The program concluded with Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherezade, one of the first classical pieces I remember my father playing for me when I was young, one of the first orchestral pieces to imprint itself in my memory. I can't think of many pieces more evocative, of another time, another land, and a timeless mythological tale. In so many movie scores I hear the musical lineage of Scheherazade and picture thick, crimson curtains sliding open to reveal a Technicolor panorama unfolding on screen.

As a side note, I've bought a turntable and am going back to vinyl. Cue obvious mid-life crisis/aging jokes, but for music I really love, CDs don't offer quite the sound I want (don't even start in on MP3s), and the selection in the SACD market is poor to nonexistent. I loved playing my dad's LPs when I was a kid, I love the big album cover art, and I love that crackle when the needle drops onto the vinyl: it generates a timeless Pavlovian anticipation.

Let me know if you have any recommendations as to good stores to buy vinyl, either online or in the LA area.

Animal Collective

Finally got my hands on the new Animal Collective album Merriweather Post Pavilion. Critics have fallen all over themselves to praise it, and now that I've heard it, I can add my acclamation. This is an album that needs to be played loud.

The track that will hook you is "My Girls" and it's currently available at their MySpace page. Don your headphones and crank it up.

The vinyl is backordered already, and I'm anxiously awaiting my copy. What I'd really love is to hear them at Walt Disney Concert Hall, where I saw a similarly big-sounding Grizzly Bear last year.

Merriweather Post Pavilion

Yeah, we put a ring on him

I was watching an ABC interview with Beyonce last night, and she was asked about how it felt to sing "At Last" at one of the balls for Barack and Michelle's dance, and Beyonce said it was hard to answer because she was tearing up just thinking about the moment, and then she did start crying and gushing about Obama like a teenage girl, and I confess I teared up a bit because, well, damn, our awesome President is awesome.

Here's that Beyonce interview:

And here's that first dance. Watching it feels like being at the best wedding ever.

Onward into 2009

There's this shot in The Wrestler, a steadicam shot behind Mickey Rourke as he walks through the back offices of a grocery store out to the deli counter. It echoes many other shots in the movie, from better times for Randy "The Ram" Robinson, and the visual reference is unmistakeable and poignant.

But just in case you're oblivious, the sound designer slowly mixes in the sounds of a raucous wrestling crowd chanting his name, just as he hears it when he prepares to walk out through the curtains at a wrestling event. It rises to a crescendo just as he's about to walk through the hanging plastic flaps out to the deli counter.

I wish they'd had the restraint to leave the shot as is and leave out the audio clue. What was an understated and lyrical moment is transformed into something overly sentimental, and I felt that way about many instances of the score in the movie which is otherwise shot in an unfussy, documentary style.

Besides that, though, it's a very moving film. You don't just feel for Randy "The Ram" Robinson but for Mickey Rourke who is nearly unrecognizable, at least to me. This is the guy from Diner and 9 1/2 Weeks?

***

The Israel Consulate is using Twitter to manage their message during this military campaign against Hamas. It's a challenge, trying to communicate complex messages with a 140 character limit, as many organizations are learning while trying to use Twitter for unmediated communication with users. Lots of URL shorteners and common online abbreviations are used, lending an oddly casual air to what are serious messages.

Two perhaps adventitious consequences of this medium: the character limit forces a concise and often more forceful statement of a message, and users who write you are forced to adhere to the character limit also, so it's a level playing ground.

***

Jay-Z crossed with Radiohead = Jaydiohead (from DJ Minty Fresh Beats)

***

A movie trailer that is just one scene, perhaps not truncated or edited down from what appears in the movie itself? Effective.

***

Given NYC's economic dependence on the finance industry, you'd expect Manhattan real estate to have taken a disproportionate beating in this recession.

In fact, New York's real estate market is proving more resilient in this downturn than that of other U.S. cities.

Today’s Case-Shiller housing price figures indicate that New York City’s prices dropped 7.5 percent in the last year, while prices in Los Angeles declined 27.9 percent. Nationwide prices dropped 18 percent. New York is the only major metropolitan area with prices that are still 90 percent above prices in January 2000. According to National Association of Realtors data, New York is the only city in the continental United States, outside of San Francisco Bay, where median sales prices remain north of $500,000.

Despite Wall Street’s suffering, the New York area’s unemployment rate, 5.6 percent in the latest figures, is lower than that in many other major cities. The comparable unemployment rate for Los Angeles is 8.2 percent. The comparable number for Chicago is 6.4 percent.

What's going on? Economist Edward Glaeser attributes it to faith in the city's talented citizens and concentration of said people.

New York still has an amazing concentration of talent. That talent is more effective because all those smart people are connected because of the city’s extreme population density levels. Historically, human capital — the education and skills of a work force — predicts which cities are able to reinvent themselves and which ones are not. Those people who are continuing to pay high prices for Manhattan real estate are implicitly betting that New York’s human capital will continue to come up with new ways of reinventing the city.

***

The first album of 2009 that's gathering critical buzz and mp3 blog lust: Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion

***

The statistics behind the B.C.S. are not just inscrutable but fundamentally flawed.

Statistically, the system is such an abomination that at least one expert — Hal S. Stern, a professor of statistics at the University of California, Irvine — advocated that no self-respecting statistician should have anything to do with it. In an article published in The Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports two years ago, he wrote that the B.C.S. computer rankings serve as little more than a confirmation of the results of the two opinion polls the system also uses to create its rankings. The people who run the computer rankings, he noted, have never been given any clear objective criteria to design their programs, and they are not allowed to use the score or site of a game in their calculations. Stern urged a boycott, a refusal by the community of statisticians to lend credibility to a system he regards as scientifically bankrupt.

In the end, it comes down to money.

“The six big conferences don’t want to share money with the smaller conferences,” Stern said. “That to me is the story that people don’t tell.”

I've never understood the fascination with college football. The quality of play is noticeably inferior to that in the NFL, the BCS system encourage Division I powerhouses to pad their non-conference schedules with patsies, most players on teams are complete unknowns so the individual storylines have no range, the concept of the student-athlete is a farce at many schools in football, and the B.C.S. system, as noted above, doesn't clarify anything at season's end.

It feels like college football fans watch in part to try to reclaim some bygone university solidarity.

***

According to CNET News, one of six sure things for 2009 is that Hulu will start its own porn site.

Alexandre Desplat

One of the reasons I'm looking forward to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on Christmas Day is the opportunity to hear the new score by Alexandre Desplat, my favorite film composer working today.

Janelle Monae at Dakota Lounge

Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, a few of us self-declared LA refugees went to check out the opening party for Dakota Lounge, formerly Temple Bar, in Santa Monica. I wanted to catch Janelle Monae who I'd seen perform at the Viper Room previously.

Though we had to stand outside in line for a bit, we managed to get inside before her set began. Despite our late entry, we managed to walk right up to the front of the stage for her set.

Just as in her set at the Viper Room, Janelle was a dynamo on stage. At one point, I looked down at my camera to adjust the settings, and WHAP! Something hit me in the face. It was her white sportcoat, which she'd flung into the crowd.

Afterwards, we were at the bar grabbing a drink when she walked out. Someone saw us looking her way and asked if we'd like to chat with her. Turns out he was her manager.

I showered her with effusive praise. She thanked me and said, "Keep me in your prayers."

I had her manager snap a photo of us with her.

Best of 2008 lists

The New Yorker issues its best of lists for 2008:

• Sasha Frere Jones best of the year in music.
• John Lahr's ten best plays.
• Alex Ross's ten best performances.
  
• Anthony Lane's ten best films.
• David Denby's ten best films.

Morning Becomes more, or less, Eclectic

Nic Harcourt has left Morning Becomes Eclectic. It will be strange to not hear his voice on the radio each morning on KCRW.

Currently, Harcourt is serving as a music supervisor on The CW's "90210."

"It’s expanded my musical palate, to be honest with you," Harcourt says. "You can sort of get known as the cool guy at KCRW, but at '90210,' you have to find songs that will turn on an 18-year-old girl. So what we’re doing with that show is featuring artists like Rihanna, Pink, Lady Gaga and people like that. At the same time, we’re putting cool stuff in where we can. We had Stereolab in last week’s show."

Hah. Aw, Nic, Rihanna is not cool stuff?

Like a Wii OS

A video demo of a Minority-Report-like interface.

In the near-term, for us classical music aficionados, I'd love a Rock Band-like game for the Wii or another console that allows me to control an orchestra by waving a baton-controller. True, it would be a niche game, but I'd pay a premium for that.

So we all can fly

Jay-Z on this Election:

Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk.

Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run.

Obama's running so we all can fly.

lala

It's a bit hard to tell many of the new online music services apart, from Pandora to Last.fm to iLike and so on. Lala adds a bit of a twist. It's a streaming music service that lets you play any of its 6 million tracks once for free, and $0.10 to unlock it for unlimited future online playing. The twist is that it will also search your own music library, and if any of your tracks are in its 6 million track library, those will be unlocked for unlimited online streaming as well. So instead of having to keep your home computer on all the time to act as your music server, you can save some electricity bills and just stream your music from lala through a browser.

It's one step closer to the universal music locker online, an idea which has seemingly been batted around for years now. The main problem right now is that 6 million tracks is not that large a selection for anyone with reasonably diverse musical tastes, so it's far from an endgame. But the concept is appealing.

Jay-Z

I went to the re-opening celebration concert for the Hollywood Palladium tonight. Jay-Z performed with an assist from DJ AM and a special guest cameo by T.I.

Between songs, mid-concert, Jay-Z stopped to talk politics. He's clearly an Obama supporter, and he offered his "homeboy" some advice (paraphrased from memory):

"I shouldn't talk about this...but f*** it, I'm an American citizen. Free speech and all that. If I were to give my boy some advice on how to deal with homegirl -- you know, 'you betcha' -- I'd tell him..."

And he jumped straight into "99 Problems":

"If you're havin' girl problems i feel bad for you son

I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one"

Preview "Tell Tale Signs"

Until the CDs are released next week, you can preview Bob Dylan's upcoming bootleg 2-CD album Tell Tale Signs at NPR.org.

Timbaland

Sasha Frere-Jones discusses Timbaland in this week's New Yorker.

When you hear a rhythm that is being played by an instrument you can’t identify but wish you owned, when you hear a song that refuses to make up its mind about its genre but compels you to move, or when you hear noises that you thought couldn’t find a comfortable place in a pop song, you are hearing Timbaland, or school thereof.

PC Guy!

Damn, I missed PC Guy at the Fleet Foxes concert at the El Rey the other night!

How I would have loved to ask him about the latest Microsoft "I'm a PC" ads.

Human - Carpark North

I saw this video for "Human" by Carpark North during a Scandinavian music video screening at the LA Film Festival earlier this summer. It was by far my favorite of the bunch which is saying something considering the series included a new Gondry-directed Bjork video.

The talented Martin De Thurah directed. If you're willing to navigate down through a Flash site, you can find a higher-res version of the video here.

Chairlift gets uplift

[via Buzzfeed] Every time a new iPod is introduced, Apple features it in a commercial set with music from some obscure indie band that rides the publicity to newfound fame.

The lucky winner this time around? Chairlift.

View the new iPod nano ad.

New iPod Nano

If the new iPod Nano, supposedly to be unveiled on Sep 9, doesn't look like the pictures on this web page, this 3rd party iPod case manufacturer is going to have a lot of wasted inventory (another leaked photo via Engadget seems to echo the previous photos).

I use my iPod all the time, but it's harder to get excited for every next iPod release. The differences from one iPod Nano to the next aren't that significant anymore; they tend to center on greater storage for the same price. The major form factor benefits have been realized.

Not that there's still not huge revenues and value to be extracted from the iPod line. Google's search ranking algorithms haven't noticeably improved (to my eye) for many years, but they continue to rake in cash because no competitors have been able to leapfrog them.

YouTube's first 100,000,000 view video

It's the video for Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend."

Bob Dylan

I saw Bob Dylan at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium tonight. I've never heard Dylan live before. He's more mythical to me than real, seen mostly in black and white photos, documentaries, and movies, played by a variety of actors.

I'm a lifelong developing Dylan fan. My first real exposure to Dylan came in high school as one of my friends was a huge Dylan fan and would play Dylan in the tape deck of his car all the time. Recently I found a good deal on Amazon for a used copy of the Bob Dylan SACD box set, and I've been working my way through it, one disc at a time. His sound transports me back in time and across America like a musical road trip in a convertible with its top down, with the wind tousling my hair.

I will remember tonight, but not for the venue. The Santa Monica Civic Auditorium is fugly, and the acoustics of the cement-floored space are awful and muddy. The speakers were balanced to lean to the left, and it sounded like Dylan was singing from a space floating about 20 feet over the left third of the stage when he was in fact standing about two thirds of the way to the right of the stage most of the evening.

It's a credit to Dylan's songwriting that despite the terrible acoustics (which made his already incomprehensible lyrics sound like the language used in Apocalypto), my toes were tapping the whole time. Given the state of my Achilles, that's no small feat. I nearly fell over from exhaustion a few times--for some reason, tearing your Achilles reduces your endurance for standing--but managed to stay upright to the bitter end, through the second song of his encore.

As a fan of speech, I admire Dylan for his sui generis command of the rhythms of English language. He really is the poet laureate of American music.

NOTE: You can download "Dreamin' of You", a previously unreleased track from Tell Tale Signs, from BobDylan.com.

The woman who should sing the next Bond song

Last night at the Viper Room (famous as the venue outside which River Phoenix died), I heard the woman who should sing the next Bond theme song, and her name is Janelle Monáe.

Her set was short, just 5 songs, but it was one of the most energy-packed, blow-your-mind 5 song sets I've heard since, well, ever. I've heard her songs online via MySpace, and I was impressed, but seeing her live is an experience unto itself and not to be missed. She's like a live bolt of electricity on stage, and frankly I'm not sure she could keep maintain it for a 15 song set without just passing out and getting carried off in an ambulance.

The Viper Room's concert hall is tiny, and that was part of the experience. Being able to see her animated expressions, being able to see her dancing like her life depended on it. I'm sure I'll never experience her music that way again. For her last song, she crowd-surfed, and I nearly ruptured my other Achilles trying to help guide her across as she passed over my head.

She has an interesting style (that hair!) and sound, both futuristic yet classical. That's why she'd make a great choice for the next Bond theme song. She can bring some of the Shirley Bassey funk and marry it to a more modern, hip-hop sound. With her interest in science fiction--she references androids in her album cover and some of her songs--she might even be able to write lyrics that incorporate "Quantum of Solace" in an organic way.

Her music is hard to describe. She went from the propulsive drive of "Many Moons" to the hushed emotion of "Smile". My favorite track is "Sincerely Jane". There's funk, hip hop, soul, pop, and bits of other musical goodness in there.

After the concert, we all stared at each other wide-eyed, and then I ran over to the merchandise table to buy her CD, because all I could think was "this girl's going to blow up" and "I need to buy stock in her."

You can buy her CD Metropolis: The Chase Suite or mp3's from Amazon. Here's the rest of her appearance schedule for 2008; those of you in SF, Portland, Seattle, Arlington, NYC, or Chicago should get your tickets now.

A quick trip through Buzzfeed

Is Obama announcing his running mate tomorrow morning? Drudge thinks yes.

Funny bust, err...bus stop ad.

Speaking of the Wonderbra, they came up with another clever billboard, a photomosaic made up of hundreds of photos of women in their bras.

If I work on the top floor of this building and they announce that they're doing a fire drill test some day, I'm calling in sick.

Backlashes seem to have been accelerated by the Internet, so it's surprising that it took so long for the Radiohead backlash. Me, I'm going to see Radiohead at the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday and I couldn't be more excited.

At this moment, there might not be a bigger way for a woman to summon a world of fame onto herself than by dating Michael Phelps. First contender: fashion model Lily Donaldson.

How artists work

A long set of links to articles or interviews in which various artists describe how they work.

"La Vida No Loca"

Well-written review of "Coldplay's expanding gas" by Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker this week.

Is Coldplay warm milk or just quietly dependable? Don’t ask Martin, who has transformed the English art of diffidence into a masochistic religion: “We owe them a career, really,” he has said of Radiohead. He has also said, “Like millions of people in the world, I can’t listen to Coldplay.” He’s half right about Radiohead—Coldplay exhibits a taste for melancholy and smeared, stretched-out sounds that leads straight back to Thom Yorke and his friends. The main antecedent is U2, who invented the form that Coldplay works within: rock that respects the sea change of punk but still wants to be as chest-thumping and anthemic as the music of the seventies stadium gods. Translated, this means short pop songs that somehow summon utterly titanic emotions and require you to skip around in triumphant circles and pump your fist, even if it is not entirely clear what you are singing about.

And later:

The title track of “Viva la Vida”—also known as the “iPod song,” because it is used in an Apple ad—is easily the best thing about the album. Don’t go to the lyrics for any cues; it is entirely obscure why such a jaunty, upbeat song would be referencing “Roman cavalry choirs” or revolutionaries or St. Peter. Martin is the king? Was the king? Whatevs. Coldplay knows how to build a song that draws you in with easy, karaoke-ready moves. I spent a weekend hearing an eight-year-old and an eleven-year-old sing the song (fighting about the lyrics, and sometimes rewriting them), and I never tired of the melody. After that, though, you are on your own. There are Eno touches that catch the ear: the chattering strings and bell-like keyboards that close out “Death and All His Friends,” or the timbre of the instrumental “Life in Technicolor,” which sounds like it’s emanating from the end of a long metal tube. “Technicolor” is one of the album’s few concise, concentrated pieces of writing; the rest sounds both incomplete and puffed up, like scraps of previous records scrambled and rearranged. This upending of their style isn’t even radical enough to be bad. “Viva la Vida” is an album that keeps going out of focus, a series of disconnected pieces that is impossible to hold on to. And why are they wearing all those vaguely military jackets? What’s with Liberty leading the people on the cover? They must know that beyond the cozy confines of London there are a couple of major conflicts going on. It does not feel like the moment, especially for such a vague band, to be playing with any symbols of war.

49

Paul Westerberg has released a 49 minute, one-track album titled 49:00. The best thing is that the DRM-free MP3 is available at Amazon.com for the princely sum of $0.49. I was going to think of 49 reasons you should buy this, but you won't need them if, like me, you used to cruise around in your parents car in high school listening to Replacements albums on cassette tape and hoping you could date Winona Ryder.

Doveman covers Footloose

Doveman covers the Footloose album for his friend Gabriel as a memorial to Gabriel's half-sister Jenny who died as a teenager in the 1980's.

When I was very young, my half-sister Jenny died tragically. She was a teenager, and it was the 80's. She left behind a wardrobe of brightly colored clothes, rainbow stickers, life-size paintings, doodles on lined paper, and hundreds of tapes. These constitute most of my memories of her. It's sad for me to look at these things, and usually I don't. But a couple of summers ago I found a tape of hers with a startling cover photograph - this was Footloose. I couldn't stop listening: it was a portrait of 80's love, desire, pain, freedom, and frenzy; of being a teenager in a time of change. By listening, I could step into Jenny's shoes, see things from her vantage point. I could be emancipated by rock and roll and walkmen, just as she had been. We could listen together.

I asked my friend Thomas to cover the album, which, sheltered as he is, he had never heard before. I was clear that I wanted to him to cover the whole album - the point wasn't to rework any one song, but to re-imagine the picture they made together. With a new Footloose we could reply to the past, tell our own story about being young. This is what he made.

-- Gabriel Greenberg

A cease-and-desist letter from a music label means you can just stream the album from that link above or from imeem, but there's a rar of mp3s at this link.

Largo

Los Angeles gets its fair share of crap, and I'm as guilty as anyone. Elsewhere, people complain about the weather. Here, people complain about the traffic, the strip malls, and, well, the traffic.

But today I want to focus on one of LA's treasures. Betina asked me in the afternoon if I wanted to go with her and Justing to Largo, a movie-theater-converted-to-music-hall in Hollywood, to hear Fiona Apple. I haven't heard her sing live since a concert at the Paramount back in Seattle many years ago, but I've always enjoyed her voice, that deep and smoky megaphone.

Largo is a cozy little theater tucked on the not-so-cozy mega street of La Cienega, a long stone's throw from the Beverly Center shopping mall. Such are the geographical realities of LA.

It turns out the headliner this night was the Watkins family, consisting of sister-brother duo Sara and Sean Watkins, of Nickel Creek fame (Nickel Creek's self-titled Alison-Krauss-produced debut album is a great place to start if you want to grok them; of the 267 customer reviews on Amazon it has 213 5-star ratings).

But during their long show, they were accompanied by one guest musician after another. Dan Wilson, former leader of Semisonic and recent Grammy nominee, came out for a few tunes. Then Fiona Apple strolled out, with that introverted, nervous body language, until she opens her mouth and that powerhouse of a voice takes over the room. She is our nation's little waif, our little Edith Piaf.

Then Fiona left and Glen Phillips of Toad the Wet Sprocket fan took his place. I haven't seen Phillips since a concert at Stanford back when I was an undergrad. I'm glad he still looks reasonably young, or I would have felt even older than normal.

And then Dan Wilson came back, and who did he bring on stage for a duet than John C. Reilly, of, well, Talladega Nights fame. Reilly, besides being one of the few people I know who carries his middle initial almost like an honorific, can actually hit his notes.

Great music all night long in the larger but still intimate of two performance spaces at the Largo, and yet there were empty seats in what was an arthouse movie theater sized hall, with tickets only costing $25 each. How that place does not sell out every night is a great mystery to me.

Just the previous night, I was out with some coworkers, and we were comparing LA to Seattle and NYC, and we discussed how one problem with LA seemed to be the lack of a public place you felt you could call your own. Largo feels like such a spot, and I could see myself becoming a regular.

In contrast, I went with some coworkers to The Forum in Inglewood on Monday night to see Coldplay, and that venue is one of the fugliest buildings I've been in. It's like an oversized high school gym, and picturing the Lakers playing there after seeing them at Staples Center is difficult to fathom. Since Coldplay's debut, I've liked each successive album less, and their last album had me swearing them off, but their newest album caught my ear's interest again.

The show was good, but not great. They did not bring a full musical outfit, so on string sections of songs like "Viva La Vida" they just piped in the missing backing instruments which is always disappointing. I also didn't love all the arrangements. But Chris Martin seems like one of the nicer guys in rock, and they have a long list of big anthems to call upon.

The handicapped parking at the Forum filled up, so I had to walk what felt like two miles from the stadium back to the car in the parking lot. I felt like Jude Law in Cold Mountain. When I got home and took off my walking boot, I found a big bloody spot on the back of my sock, recalling Curt Schilling's famous bloody sock. I'm going to frame it as a memento of my heroic effort on that night.

Purchased song sync via the iPhone

Rock Band 2

Rock Band 2 is coming in September, exclusively on the XBox 360, then on to other platforms later in the year. More music, new peripherals, new online modes, but backwards compatibility for DLC and previous instruments.

Exclusive on the XBox 360 at launch? I guess that's just too bad for me and my PS3 version of the game.

Jay-Z's "Wonderwall" into "99 Problems"

Noel Gallagher thought it was "wrong" that they added hip-hop to Glastonbury. Jay-Z, said hip-hop addition, responded by punching him in the face.

No, just kidding, he just decided to cover Oasis during his act.

Weekendery

30 Tables of Contents

***

When I'm working on my computer on a project, like wireframes or sketches or just writing, one of my favorite CDs to pipe through my headphones is Ghost In The Shell: Original Soundtrack by Kenji Kawai. I'm not sure why it sells for $57 on Amazon. Perhaps because it's an import. If you can find a cheaper copy somewhere, perhaps on eBay or on your next trip to Tokyo, I recommend it.

***

Andrew Stanton consulted with Johnathan Ive, Apple design guru, on the design of Eve, the white robot in Wall-E.

A call from Stanton to Jobs in 2005 resulted in Johnny Ive, Apple's behind-the-scenes design guru, driving across the San Francisco Bay to Pixar's converted warehouse headquarters to spend a day consulting on the Eve prototype. Stanton said that it was a "lovefest" with Ive, but that the notoriously tight-lipped design wizard offered few specific modifications. "Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn't even really allude to where the future of technology was going," says Stanton. "The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do." (Through a spokesman, Ive declined to comment.)

***

Speaking of Wall-E, a bunch of us caught the midnight showing Thursday night at the El Capitan theater. No surprise, I enjoyed it on many levels, in particular the early scenes on earth. With a score by Thomas Newman and Roger Deakins-consulted cinematography, the creative talent was A-plus-list. Comparing it to Hellboy II, which I saw Saturday night at the LA Film Festival, helps to illuminate why the latter fell flat for me.

Wall-E and Eve, though they are robots without mouths or noses or much in the way of facial muscles other than articulated mechanical parts and blue digital LEDs for eyes, respectively, move with a fluidity and expressiveness that was lacking in most of the characters in Hellboy II. Under all that makeup, Hellboy is working with a more limited facial muscle repertoire than a middle-aged actress on her tenth round of Botox. The fish character, Abe, and a new character, Johan Strauss, have even less expressive faces. Abe wears a rubber fish mask that can do little other than blink, while Strauss has no face at all, just a glass dome for a head. Voice work can only take you so far.

Hellboy II also suffers from what plagues stories for most sequels, which is a sort of character stasis. Sequels that are conceived of only after the success of the first installment tend to be "the further adventures of..." rather than stories with any character arc. From the first movie, we know Hellboy is a sarcastic, wisecracking brute who likes to pummel monsters first, ask questions later. In this movie, he still is. The screenplay has several storylines, including one about Hellboy's uncomfortable relationships with the humans he protects, but the mix of fantasy and real-life isn't organic and tightly woven the way it was in, say, Pan's Labyrinth.

I look forward to more work from Guillermo del Toro, but I hope it's original stories and not more installments of Hellboy.

Girl Talk - Feed the Animals

[via Uncrate] Girl Talk has a new album out. Like all the cool kids are doing, Girl Talk lets you name your own price for 320Kbps MP3s. Pay more and you get more, like an option for FLAC files at $5 and an actual packaged CD at $10 (packaged CDs! how quaint and retro!).

His previous album, Night Ripper, was one long mashup of all sorts of popular tunes into one long danceable French bread loaf, and I suspect his new album is similar.

Remains of last weekend

I had my leg cast swapped out last week. When I walked into the office, the nurse who admitted me took one look at my leg and recoiled in shock.

"What the hell kind of angle is your foot set at?" he asked. My foot was pointed straight down, like a ballet dancer on point.

"I don't know! I woke up from surgery and my foot was set that way," I said, suddenly concerned.

"Man oh man," he said, shaking his head. "That's the most severe angle I've ever seen."

The guy who was responsible for recasting me looked like Milton from Office Space but about 200 pounds heavier. He had an exasperated "seen-it-all" weariness about him, as if he wished this train of patients with ruptured Achilles would stop appearing in his office but knew that it wouldn't. He looked at me and shook his head, and I felt judged, guilty of some hubris that had led me to this sorry state.

To remove the cast, he pulled out a small handheld circular saw and made two cuts from top to bottom on either side of my leg. The saw blade protruded about an inch, and my cast looked to be about an inch thick, so when Milton put saw to cast I strained as hard as possible to push my leg as far away from the blade as possible. I was terrified, and my leg cowered against the opposite side of the cast. Milton didn't seem concerned and pulled the blade straight down with an almost bored nonchalance.

He pried the cast off, and for the first time in weeks, I saw my leg. There was a four inch wound running up the back of my leg from my heel, stitched together with black thread in a cross-hatched pattern.

The surgeon came in, took a look, said the wound looked to be healing fine, and left. Milton asked him about the crazy angle of my foot, but he replied that my wound was healing and that was the important thing.

Milton had my lie on my belly, and then he rubbed some local anesthesia on my wound. Just as I started to feel it burn, he began (I think) removing my stitches. It felt as if someone was putting a soldering iron to my ankle, and I bit my arm to stomach the searing pain.

Then it came time to pry my foot up partway towards the normal 90 degree angle that feet are at when you stand normally. There was only one problem: after two weeks of being pointed down, my foot did not want to come back up. Milton asked me to try pulling it up myself, but despite urgent messages from my brain, my foot did not move.

I couldn't see Milton over my shoulder, but I pictured the slightest of grins on his lips as he grabbed my foot and a board of some sort and pried my foot up.

I let out a grunt as a violent pain shot up my leg. He continued to pry, I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. If someone had walked in on us, it would've looked like a UFC fight, with Milton trying to break my foot to get me to tap out.

I didn't submit, but Milton did notice that I was in pain.

"You think this hurts? I just pulled your foot up like 20 degrees. Next time I'm pulling it up the rest of the way, like 40 degrees. You better take some painkillers before you come in." And then he cackled maniacally: "Bwahahahahaha!"

Okay, he didn't cackle. But after seeing the beautiful nurses in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I can't lie, the walrusian Milton was a bit of a letdown.

I hobbled out of Milton's torture chamber with a new, slim cast on my leg but in enormous pain. I sat in the waiting room and immediately inhaled two Vicodin, which I hadn't touched in a week and a half.

The best thing to come out of this office visit was obtaining my doc's signature on a form authorizing me for a temporary handicapped parking placard. I mailed that off to the California DMV as soon as I got back to the office.

Milton, we will meet again soon, but I will be bringing my two friends, Percocet and Vicodin.

***

Amputees sometimes experience phantom limb. There's an analogous videogame sensation. Whenever I hear a song from Rock Band on the radio, I feel a phantom guitar in my hands and see green, blue, yellow, red, and orange notes dropping from the sky.

***

After trashing his teammates in the preseason, Kobe Bryant goes and says he stayed with the Lakers because he tweaked his leadership to instill his teammates with his DNA. Arrogant, yes, but also maybe not the best thing to say given his, uh, personal history, both past and present.

***

Yes, the Lakers have Zen master Phil Jackson as coach, but let's not forget that Doc Rivers has the Celtics shouting "Ubuntu!" coming out of every huddle. Open source operating system? That seems pretty zen to me.

***

Sometimes it feels like the web is too big. Look at this list of sites of "Top 60 music websites that deliver the greatest free music."

60 sites! I'd be more than happy with, say, 10, but to be honest I probably use maybe 3.

***

Now that I'm on crutches, and now that a temporary handicapped permit is on its way to me in the mail, I flash dirty looks at any non-handicapped person I catch coming out of the handicapped stall in the bathroom.

If I hadn't had to pee so badly after the Indiana Jones screening that morning it opened, I would've stayed around until I caught whoever had occupied the handicapped stall at the Hollywood Arclight.

Speaking of the new Indiana Jones movie, I've read a lot of fans of the new Indy movie who dismiss anyone who didn't like the movie as elitist. Sorry, but those people are wrong.

I don't care if you did like the movie, but don't tell me about summer popcorn flicks. Raiders of the Lost Ark was a great summer popcorn flick. This latest Indy flick...cost me three hours and $11.

***

This is old, but still worth posting. Chris Matthews obliterates a right-wing lunatic on TV. One of Matthews' finer moments.

Musical notes

Valleywag offers the annotated Weezer Pork and Beans video. Below is the video itself, one of the more perfect viral videos in that it's a viral video that's about other viral videos.

***

You can download a free 320Kbps MP3 of the new Sigur Ros single "Gobbledigook" from their website. It's off of their new album, releasing June 23, titled Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust. That means, uh, something in Icelandic.

***

Chuck Klosterman selects the 10 musical artists with the "most dedicated, least rational fan followings":

1. Slayer

2. Tori Amos

3. Sublime

4. Kiss

5. Bruce Springsteen

6. Black Sabbath (particularly the Tony Martin era, for some reason)

7. Jimmy Buffett

8. Iron Maiden

9. Guided By Voices

10. Morrissey

She & Him

I caught She & Him at the Vista Theatre on Monday night. She & Him are actress Zooey Deschanel and indie music star M. Ward, touring in support of their first album together, Volume One.

Their music is simple and has a nostalgic charm. Zooey is not going to compare to Matt on musical talent--if real-life guitar skills transferred to the videogame world he'd be dominating people on Guitar Hero--but she has a strong, clear voice and that same sweetness that she's showcased on screen. They both have a relaxed, confident stage presence that draws the crowd over to their side.

On the "do they sound better on CD/MP3 or do they sound better live" question, based on this concert it's the latter. M. Ward die-hards may feel a bit short-changed that he doesn't sing as much in this collaboration, but I'm not familiar enough with the oeuvre of M. Ward to know what I missed. Live, their sound is bigger and richer than on CD.

Radiohead

Radiohead performing "House of Cards" for Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

I'm still fuming over my recent attempt to get tickets off of Ticketmaster for the Radiohead concert at the Hollywood Bowl in LA this summer. It was half hour of trying to get through the phone lines - do de di....all circuits are busy - while simultaneously going through the Ticketmaster.com checkout process online about 450 times and getting denied at the end each time (they should just post a little video of Dikembe Mutombo at the end, wagging his index finger, cackling evilly). A perfect way to launch into your weekend feeling angry and homicidal.

In Rainbows was really damn good.

More current songs

I wish Rock Band would add some more genres of music to its downloadable song lineups. There are too many heavy metal and classic rock tunes for my taste. Judas Priest? Boston? Do people in Rock Band's core demographic really know how to sing these tunes? I sure don't, and neither do my friends.

Saturdays = Youth

M83's new album Saturdays = Youth is really good. If you're looking for one of their albums to try, I'd start with Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts which is still my favorite M83 album and a classic of the shoegazer genre.

Saturdays=Youth

Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts

Dudamania

If you can attract fans from Karen O to Eva Mendes, and you can get a hot dog named after you at Pink's, and you can call Frank Gehry "Pancho," then, well, I'd say you've made it.

This past Sunday, I caught Dudamel's last concert with the LA Philharmonic until Nov. 24, next season. Again, it was a sold out show and we had to wait in a long standby line for tickets to free up via returns. The program consisted of Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun, Leila Josefowicz playing Bartok's Second Violin Concerto (with the encore being a piece by "our friend Esa-Pekka" as Josefowicz announced to the delight of the crowd), and finally, Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe which, at its best moments, is my favorite of Ravel's work.

There were only two odd moments. One was awkward, when a French horn player dropped his mute during a quiet moment in the Ravel. As it clattered to a stop, the guilty party hung his head sheepishly.

The second strange moment was the intrusion of a horn from the rear of the concert hall, also in the middle of the Ravel. Was it coming from outside? Through a speaker? Was it supposed to be part of the performance? If someone knows, let me know. Many in the audience looked towards the back of the auditorium, but I never figured out what it was.

Odds and Ends

Oh, I'll just set aside my $80 for this now.

Kevin Love, making like Lebron James in that Powerade commercial.

Friday Night Lights greenlit for Season 3, but only in a unique deal in which it airs on DirecTV first, starting in October, then moves over to NBC in 2009?

Howard Shore scoring, Guillermo del Toro directing...The Hobbit sounds promising.

The sometimes bizarre effects of scarcity: a used copy of the CD of the score to The Transformers is running, at a minimum, $89.99 on Amazon.com.

Believe the hype

Sunday afternoon, Mira grabbed me for the matinee performance by the LA Philharmonic. Classical music fans under the age of 50 are a rare breed, so I'm always glad when I can find a classical music buddy in each new town I move to. We didn't have tickets, the concert having been sold out long ago, and Craigslist prices were out of control, so we headed downtown to see what the classical music scalping scene would be like. I pictured some shady character resembling a homeless bum making eye contact with me, pulling me aside, and turning open one half of his jacket to reveal a thick stack of tickets in his breast pocket.

Having dealt only with those quick-witted scalpers I'd meet outside Wrigley Field or Yankee Stadium over the years, I couldn't help but picture classical music scalpers looking and talking the same.

"What you want, brother? I got a pair, orchestra, third row. Face $120. I'll let'em go for a hundy each. Say what? Sixty? Get outta here, we talking Dudamel, man, I ain't no dummy."

We were lucky. The box office had some extras, and we snagged terrace seats. There isn't a bad seat to be had in the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Venezuelan Gustavo Dudamel conducted the orchestra in three pieces:

• Salonen's Insomnia
• Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 1 (pianist Simon Trpceski)
• Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique

Prior to this concert, I'd only read about Dudamel in the New Yorker profile of Esa-Pekka Salonen, the LA Philharmonic's current music director (whose most visible work is as conductor). This was Dudamel's first visit to Walt Disney Concert Hall since he was announced as Salonen's successor. So my opinion of Dudamel, as I walked out of the concert, was not based on anything other than his work on this afternoon.

And my judgment was this: Dudamel is the most exciting conductor of my lifetime.

In 2009-2010, Dudamel will take over from Salonen as the musical director of the LA Phil. Dudamel is 27. In tapping him, the LA Philharmonic snared the most gifted young conductor of this generation.

The orchestra sounded fantastic in a performance recorded for iTunes. Dudamel's conducting style is infectious, unmistakeable in its verve and passion, and no piece showcased it to greater effect than Symphonie Fantastique which he conducted by heart, without a score.

At times, he leapt off the podium, while at other times, he stood with arms at his side and let the orchestra just run with the music. His gestures are uninhibited and grand; his body appears to literally be a conductor of the music, all of its emotion erupting out through his hair, which from a distance reminded me of a cross between the coifs of Malcolm Gladwell and Sideshow Bob. He would've made a great horse jockey if you substituted a crop for his baton. It was the most electrifying conducting job I've ever witnessed.

It's not just on the podium that his enthusiasm comes through. In rehearsals, he must be able to communicate the emotion and musicality he seeks to musicians two to three times his age, and more than that, he has to extract that performance from them, show after show. Dudamel succeeds on both counts. Lest you think that all classical musicians are a polite and harmonious people, witness the strife in the Seattle Symphony between the musicians and their musical director Gerard Schwarz. Watching the orchestra, you could tell they love him and would follow him anywhere he leads, and video of him leading orchestras around the world seem to confirm that he's a born leader of musicians, a true prodigy in a world that's too quick to throw that term on any young, technically proficient practitioner.

When he's not conducting, Dudamel's body language is humble, boyish, and gracious. After Symphonie Fantastique, the audience erupted in applause, summoning Dudamel back out some four or five times. Each time he insisted on trying to pass the acclaim onto different members of the orchestra, never standing back on the podium but always hiding in amongst the orchestra, shaking hands with various soloists. But there was no doubt who the city had gone crazy for.

[Contrast Dudamel to Simon Trpceski, the Macedonian pianist who walked on stage wearing a cream-colored turtleneck under his sportcoat and who leapt off the piano seat at the end of his performance. Trpceski is good, but his every gesture speaks to his knowing it. Trpceski's favored response to the audience applause was to hold his hands up to either side of his head, about four feet apart, palms facing inward, and shake them forwards and backwards, as if articulating the size of his own ego. Look, you're either the type of artist who takes a promotional photo like the one below, or you aren't. Mira and I thought it was fantastic.]

On the way home, still giddy, I plugged into all the web had to say about Dudamel and realized I was hardly the first to go gaga for Gustavo. There are hints of the predictable backlash, various reviews of his albums citing him as just overhyped, more energy than nuance, and unable to carry an adagio passage to save his life. To those people, I say that we're more than delighted to have him here in LA.

If there is a Dudamel subscription package for the LA Phil next year, I'm buying.

NYTimes Sunday Magazine profile

Gustavo Dudamel on 60 Minutes (especially entertaining is this clip, "There Will Be Blood")

More good video available at the Deutsche Grammophon site for Dudamel

Time Magazine: "Gustavo Dudamel: The Natural"

Newsweek: "Gustavo Dudamel: Wunderkind"

Anti-emo riots?

Actually a serious story, but the headline seems like it could be stripped from The Onion: "Anti-Emo Riots Break Out Across Mexico."

I had an image of frightened Death Cab for Cutie fans fleeing down the streets screaming.

Grizzly Bear, Walt Disney Concert Hall

I'd only really ever heard one song by Grizzly Bear, "Knife", but I really wanted to experience the acoustics of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in action, so last Saturday I attended a crossover concert composed of two halves: before intermission, the LA Philharmonic played three pieces that inspired Grizzly Bear, and after intermission, Grizzly Bear played a set on the same stage.

The 2,265 seat main auditorium is the most intimate classical music venue I've ever been in. The audience surrounds the stage, a contrast to the usual alignment in which the entire audience sits behind the conductor. All the seating is stadium style, so even seated behind Yao Ming you'd have a decent view of the stage.

The acoustics of the auditorium (designed by Yasuhisa Toyota of Nagata Acoustics) are stunning. Seated inside, with curved cedar sound panels like ribs on the ceiling, you feel as if you're in the belly of a whale carved by Gepetto himself.

The classical pieces on the program:
Boccherini (Berio) - Ritirata notturna di Madrid
Britten - Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes
Stravinsky - Firebird Suite (1919)

It's been a long time since I've been to a classical music concert, though in years past I've always tried to attend at least three or four shows a year. Hearing pieces I've played before reminds me of my childhood, and classical music in general recalls weekend nights home with the family, my dad reading a Chinese newspaper, my mom cooking, my sisters on the phone or playing, me buried in some book, a classical LP playing in the background.

At intermission my friend showed me around the hall, outside and in. Gehry's work doesn't always work for me, but this structure is gorgeous and alive. A series of pathways allow you to navigate between all the hall's shaped metal petals, with many sweeping views of surrounding downtown LA.

Grizzly Bear's music is difficult to describe, all vocal harmonies over dreamy sonic landscapes, psychedelically mesmerizing as transported by the crystal clear acoustics of the hall. Just a well-conceived concert.

Grizzly Bear - Yellow House

Technorati Tags: architecture, LA, music, grizzlybear

NIN

Along the same lines as Radiohead's In Rainbows, Nine Inch Nails are releasing their new album, Ghosts I-IV, direct to users through the web. You can download the first nine tracks as DRM-free MP3's, pay $5 for all 36 tracks, $10 for a 2-CD set, or $75 for a deluxe edition with 2 audio CDs, 1 data DVD with the tracks in multi-track format, and a Blu-ray disc with all tracks in 96kHz/24-bit high-resolution.

Their servers were down every time I checked over the past 24 hours, but they appear to be up now for downloads. This new model for selling music is so much more sensible.

Alexandre Desplat

If pressed to name my favorite film score composer working today, my reflexive answer would be Alexandre Desplat. His latest for Lust, Caution lives up to his previous work. I was more taken with the score than the story adaptation, though it is the first movie I can recall that reveals hidden depths to shoe who are well-versed in the rules and strategy of Mah Joong. There are hidden clues in the moves and tiles in the game that only a fraction of viewers will understand.

Perhaps that subtlety is the movie's chief flaw, that it keeps too much under wraps for too long until the main actors, Tony Leung and Tang Wei, are literally unwrapped on screen in some athletic love scenes. It can't help but sound prurient, but the love scenes are the most emotionally complex in the movie.

Bon Iver

I have not heard the entire album yet, but the one single I've heard from Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago is "Skinny Love" and it's friggin' gorgeous. You can hear it at his MySpace page, and you can hear other tracks here.

There's even a Walden-like story behind the album. Bon Iver is a deliberate misspelling of bon hiver, French for "good winter." Justin Vernon holed up in a cabin in the woods of Wisconsin at the start of winter, and out of that came this album.

Stop the downloading =)

Technorati Tags: music, video, youtube

State of the arts

Bryan Caplan on Tyler Cowen on the state of the arts:

From the standpoint of the consumer, the supply of great art has clearly never been better. And even from the standpoint of the producer, it is easy to argue that, overall, this is the best of times.

From Caplan's five points on why that is:

5. One of Tyler's best points: The past often looks better than the present if you compare the best to the best. There is no living composer as great as Bach. Nevertheless, the present looks much better than the past if you compare the fifth-best to the fifth-best. Who even wants to listen to the fifth-best Baroque composer? But the fifth-best punk rock band (say, the Dead Kennedys) is excellent.

That's almost certainly true for television. In music, thought CD sales are down, distribution via the Internet means I can more easily discover new music than in the days when radio was my primary means of exposure.

I'm less certain about the quality of movies overall, but there's no doubt that accessing classic movies via DVD and services like Netflix has broadened my viewing canvas in a huge way.

Musical notes

That catchy ditty from the Macbook Air commercial? "New Soul" by Yael Naim.

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Okay, I could barely fit on the bandwagon by the time I climbed on board a few weeks ago, but the new Vampire Weekend album is a lot of fun.

You can preview a few of the tunes at their MySpace page, and you can also snag the MP3s from Amazon's MP3 store where it is currently the number one album.

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I thought this would be the year that broke my Sundance visit streak, but a few last-minute breaks brought me back out to Park City for opening weekend. One of the movies I caught out there was U2 3D.

It was, flat out, the most immersive 3D movie I've ever seen. The technology has come a long way. You still wear goofy-looking glasses, but the 3D technology (this movie used tech by 3ality Digital) has come a long way. It's even more impressive than the 3D from this summer's Beowulf which I thought was decent. It's hard to imagine ever watching a plain old 2D concert movie and being satisfied. 3D is all grown up.

The celeb-packed screening was like a rock concert. During the introduction of the movie, when Geoff Gilmore, director of the Sundance Film Festival, uttered the words, "Ladies and gentleman, the greatest rock band in the world...", all I heard afterwards was a collective eruption from the crowd as everyone shot out of their seats and clapped like pre-pubescent girls at a Hannah Montana concert.

Even if you're not a U2 fan, the movie's worth seeing to experience what I believe is a groundbreaking moment in the evolution of film technology.

Here's one of my pics from that screening. A handful of my other pics from Sundance are here.

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Gnarls Barkley has a new album coming out April-ish, and one of the tunes that's leaked off of it is "Run."

The label is playing whack-a-mole and pulling it down wherever it pops up, but if you're persistent and web-saavy you can probably catch it somewhere. It's funkalicious.

Technorati Tags: 3D, concert, film, movies, mp3, music, sundance, u2, video, youtube

Conan O'Brien playing Rock Band

Since I got my repaired guitar for Rock Band (looks like there was a design flaw that they've since corrected in other shipments, thankfully), it's the only game I spend any time playing. When I hear a song that's in Rock Band come on the radio, my ears try to pick out the guitar or drum line, and I visualize the notes in the guitar line scrolling down towards me as in the videogame. It really does engage you with music in a very deep way. It's the same bond I feel with classical pieces I played when I was in the violin section of various youth orchestras.

I'm not the only one who feels that way. In just two months since Rock Band launched, players have purchased more than 2.5 million new songs to add to their game libraries! I'm responsible for at least a good 10 to 12 of those song purchases. $1.99 for a song I can play forever in the game seems entirely reasonable to me. I would love to see them allow third parties to offer songs for the game, though, as the trickle of 3 new songs a week already feels paltry (though they added some Oasis songs this week--can't wait to try my hand at those!).

This past weekend, the morning after one particular late-night Rock Band session, I found a notice hanging on my front door for a Community Violation. The box for "loud music" was checked off. At first I was perturbed, but then a certain sense of pride took hold as I realized I was still young enough to keep the neighbors up.

My one and primary complaint is that stand-alone guitars are still not available for the game, so you can't play with a full four piece band. Unless you invite over a Rock Band-playing friend who plays it on the same console as you do and is willing to bring over their guitar, you're limited to playing either guitar or bass but not both. That guitars from one game, like Guitar Hero, don't work with other games, like Rock Band, is extremely disappointing as they all use the same basic control scheme.

My only guess on this is that they rushed the game out for the holidays and couldn't ramp up production in time to have stand-alone guitars available. Forecasting in the gaming industry seems dodgy, at best. You'd think after so many years that the Nintendo Wii would be readily available, but no.

Bloody Monday

Zooey Deschanel is coming out with an album of tunes with M. Ward. They call themselves She and Him. Indie people everywhere swoon. Stream the songs at this MySpace page, pre-order the album Volume One from Amazon.com. The new Magnetic Fields is streaming on MySpace, too.

I enjoyed the film City of God, and now we have City of Men, with City of God director Fernando Meirelles as producer. View the trailer here. The movie starts a limited run in the US this Friday.

Old school civil rights leaders turn a cold shoulder on Obama.

It's pretty clear Blu-Ray is going to win this high-def DVD format war. The downside, in the near term, is that it's near impossible to get a Blu-Ray DVD from your Netflix queue.

I think it's safe to classify "I drink your milkshake" as a meme now. I saw the movie last week and enjoyed it, and damned if there haven't been some stellar scores this year by folks you think of as rockers first: Jonny Greenwood and Nick Cave. I'm a huge fan of Brahms' Violin Concerto and of Arvo Part, so to put music by both in that movie is almost like cheating.

Technorati Tags: barackobama, bluray, DVD, film, m.ward, movies, music, netflix, obama, politics, video, youtube, zooeydeschanel

Holidays 2007 in Scottsdale

Free wi-fi at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. Boo-yah. (I wrote that back on Dec. 30, when I started writing this post, and now, weeks later, I'm still trying to finish)

With the addition of so many little kiddies to the family, we tried something different for the holidays this year and rented a vacation home for a week in Scottsdale. The four bedroom house had a pool, a hot tub, a grill, a pool table, a home theater room, and lots of flat screen TVs. My favorite was the home theater room. It had six plush, reclining, leather theater seats with cupholders, arranged in two rows of three, the back row raised off the ground slightly in a stadium seating configuration. A small and somewhat middle-of-the-road projector hung from the ceiling, shining its picture on a screen flanked by theatrical curtains. The kicker was an old school theater-style popcorn machine.

James and Angela had said before the trip they planned to rent a Toyota Solara convertible. So as I stood curbside waiting for them to pick me up from the airport, I thought it odd that a flaming red Mustang pulled up next to me, the passenger waving at me. A second glance revealed that it was Angela sporting her giant movie star sunglasses.

"We decided it was too cold for a convertible," she explained. So we drove back from the airport in a cousin to the future KITT (Knight Industries Three Thousand). The engine makes a suitable American sports car growl, a low, menacing rumble.

That car is no friend to the environment. "I can see the fuel gauge needle moving!" Angela said as she drove.

We all have our natural roles at the holidays. Mine are chiefly around entertainment: I'm responsible for bringing lots of movies on DVD, bringing by Nintendo Wii, and taking photos or video. The parents did most of the cooking. James and Angela bought most of the groceries. Joannie was our liaison to the vacation home owners. Karen looked up info for our social outings into Scottsdale, like the location of hikes and downtown attractions. My dad was responsible for playing with the grandkids in a semi-educational manner.

I brought two movies from the past year for people to watch: The Bourne Ultimatum and Once. James bought Pan's Labyrinth. When the kids weren't watching the Pixar Short Films Collection in the home theater room, those three movies occupied most of that room's screening time.

Usually we'd put on a movie after the kids had gone to bed and the dinner table had been cleared, dishes washed. That meant starting at 10pm some nights, so it took some people a few days to find the time to watch a movie start to finish without having to run off to collapse in bed.

Every one enjoyed all the movies, especially Once.

Our family has just the right mix of personalities to escalate things, so the day someone mentioned the durian, the so-called "king of fruits," and discovered that most people at the table had not eaten it before (come to think of it, that someone was probably me), it was inevitable that we'd end up buying one from Ranch 99 and forcing every one in the family to take a bit on video camera. See, the thorny-skinned durian is famous for its polarizing taste and odor. Those who enjoy it worship it and, I suppose, are the ones who dubbed it the "king of fruits." Those who find it revolting describe the odor as similar to that of rotting sewage or trash. I count myself among the latter.

The durian we bought was not as malodorous as the ones I'd encountered before in China. I remember the scent of raw durian to be so revolting that I couldn't bring myself to eat it raw. I was only able to consume it after it had been incorporated into a pancake, which was actually decent. But under the glare of my father's video camera, there was no escaping it this time. My dad chopped it open and scooped out the yellowish flesh onto a styrofoam plate.

James, the most curious one of us all, stepped up first. Or perhaps it was Sharon. Either way, both found it neither tasty nor awful. I was next and spooned a generous heap into my mouth.

Big mistake.

The taste of it reminded me of its smell and nearly made me gag. It took me about a minute of stomach-turning chewing and mental fortitude to swallow it without coughing up my dinner. I seem to recall breaking out into a sweat as I tried not to heave in front of my family, a sign of weakness that would be recounted at family reunions until my funeral. Karen, Joannie, Mike, and Angela had similar reactions.

My dad was convinced our revulsion was merely in our head, that we had prejudged and condemned the fruit without giving it a fair trial. To prove his point, he took two large bites and chewed away with no reaction. I'm convinced, however, that my dad has lost all feeling and taste sensations over the years. I've seen him slice his finger open nearly to the bone and have minimal reaction, and I thought his nonchalant reaction to the taste of durian was related, somehow, to his indifference to pain. Still, he pitched out the rest of the durian, giving our trash that evening the smell of, well, trash.

Some random holiday notes:

• Most played song: No One by Alicia Keys. By the end of vacation, was I sick of the song? Probably. But for the one week before you reach saturation with a catchy tune, it's toe-tapping good times.
• Most listened to local radio station: Phoenix's Movement 97.5. Like the music they'd play at a dance club that you're just slightly embarrassed to admit you like (think Tone-Loc, Timbaland, Fergie). Driving around in the Stang, blaring 97.5, I realized that James, Angela, and I were a parody of suburban cheesiness.
• Some random food consumption stats: 4 boxes of Gobstoppers, two bottles of Scotch (one Macallan, one Glenlivet), two gallons of Tampico (my brother's private equity firm owns them, so drinking this was a show of solidarity), about twenty bottles of wine, somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty dozen eggs, maybe six cases of water. Last chance for some fun before the New Years resolutions kicked in.
• Most watched movie: Once. That scene in the music store? I've seen it about 28 times now. Best scene of the year.
• Most played video game: Wii tennis. I'm impressed by how hard and flat my four-year-old nephew Ryan can crack the ball in Wii Tennis. Wii sports is the great equalizer. Young children who have infinite patience can, through repetition and immediate feedback, can develop some wicked skills in sports like Wii tennis and bowling. I discovered this the hard way when I ran into a six year old girl who nearly dropped a 300 in bowling on me. I was not amused.
• Number of kisses planted on my nephew Connor's cheeks: 389.

Some personal highlights:

• Scoring 100 in pop-a-shot at the Sugar Bowl ice cream parlor in Old Town Scottsdale. I'm pretty good at pop-a-shot, but for one transcendent moment, I entered the zone. The rules are simple: 45 seconds to shoot as many baskets as possible. Each basket counts for two points, except in the final 10 seconds, when they count for three each. You shoot with a cantaloupe-sized basketball at a smaller than normal basket. I think I missed two shots the entire round, breaking 100 on my last shot. I felt like Michael Jordan in that first half against Portland, or Reggie Miller at the end of the game against the Knicks. "That will be your opus," said James. If so, then that will have been one sad life.
• Scoring a birdie on hole 10 at Troon North. On a good round, I usually shoot one birdie out of sheer luck. But not having played golf in a while, I wanted to snap my clubs over my leg while hitting on the driving range before the round. I thought I had a better chance of actually killing a bird than scoring a birdie during the round (hundred of wild guinea roamed around the golf course, apparently oblivious to the dangers posed by amateur golfers like myself). But by the last several holes, I started to slow down, and my swing started to come around. On the last hole Alan and I played, I hit a drive about 270, a pitching wedge to within 5 feet, and toilet-bowled a putt for my birdie.
• The craziest moment of the holiday, by far, occurred on the third hole of Monument Golf Course at Troon. This par 5 hole is known as the Monument hole for the massive rock sitting right in the middle of the fairway about 260 yards out. Just past that hole, as I walked towards my ball to play my third shot, I spotted what appeared to be a small tiger sitting on the hill. The golf instructor who was riding with us was strolling up the fairway. James and I asked him what it was, and he said it was a bobcat. I stood my ground, expecting it would wander off, but our presence didn't faze it in the least. Soon it wandered into the fairway, past my ball. I took a couple steps back, but it didn't even look my way once, even when our instructor tried to shoo it away. The bobcat was gazing across the fairway. I followed its line of sight and realized it was looking at a rabbit sitting just off the fairway. It crept slowly across the fairway. I couldn't believe the rabbit didn't spot the bobcat which was now within 25 or 30 feet. Though the bobcat was now crawling on its belly, it wasn't hard to spot against the green fairway, and its tail wagged expectantly. And then, just as I thought it might be sitting there for a half hour, the bobcat shot towards the rabbit which dashed off through the bushes across the cart path. The bobcat didn't go after the rabbit but hurled itself into a bush. A narrow escape for the rabbit, I thought. But I was wrong, on both counts. First I spotted the bobcat coming out on the other side of the bush, another rabbit in its mouth. Then I heard our instructor Ryan hitting the brakes on his golf cart. The first rabbit I'd spotted had run across the path just as Ryan was cruising by in the golf cart, and Ryan had hit it. I walked over and saw the rabbit's cotton ball of a tail sitting on the cart path, and we found the rabbit nearby, limping around, one of its back legs broken. Rabbits are pretty damn cute, and we all felt awful, but I wasn't about to pick up a rabid rabbit and try to fashion a splint for it or anything like that. I thought it would be dramatic if I took an 8-iron to it, put it out of its misery, tears in my eyes, screaming "Damn it all to hell!" as I brought the club down again and again, but I didn't. Life, death, the circle of life, and a three putt bogey, all in the course of one hole. Only in Arizona.
• Seeing Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West. I've seen Taliesin in Wisconsin and Robie House in Chicago, and both were inspiring. Now I just need to get out to Fallingwater. Many Heloise Crista sculptures adorn Taliesin West, and they're great.

Most mornings, I'd be woken around 6 or 7am by the sound of my nephews running around. This would be after I'd stayed up until 3am by myself, maybe watching 30 Rock - Season 1 on DVD in the home theater room, or reading The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, or something else. So I'd spend the day sleepy. But not tired. The thing about vacation that keeps me running on so little sleep is the thought that I could get sleep at any time. When you're working, you're never sure how much sleep you'll get from one night to the next, and that worry is more mentally exhausting than anything else.

Most awkward moment of the holidays. Just as we were about to wrap a book I'd bought for my nephew Ryan, he burst into the room and surprised us. He grabbed the book, looked at the cover, and said, "Don't get me this book. I already have it." Then he ran out.

I went running with James and Angela and even Alan a few times. There's a budding movement to try and get as many of us together to run the NY marathon this year as possible. Will it happen? I'm not sure. It's a new year, though, the time to resolve such things.

Technorati Tags: christmas, connor, family

At the dark end

Cat Power's second cover album Jukebox releases 1/22. Stereogum's evaluation is mixed, but I'll still get it because her voice makes my speakers purr. Butter.

I am disappointed, though, that she chose not to include her cover of "Dark End of the Street" on the final tracklist. I heard her sing it for the first time at her concert in Hollywood last year, and it had me swaying with joy. If someone has a bootleg of her cover of that song, I'll trade you something really nice for it. In the meanwhile, we'll have to settle for this brief YouTube clip of a chunk of that song, from a studio session.

Technorati Tags: catpower, chanmarshall, music, video, youtube

Vanity Fair on Indy 4

The cover story of the latest Vanity Fair is Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

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An article about how to deal with regret in a healthy way.

Complexity reflects an ability to incorporate various points of view into a recollection, to vividly describe the circumstances, context and other dimensions. It is the sort of trait that would probably get you killed instantly in a firefight; but in the mental war of attrition through middle age and after, its value only increases.

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Basia Bulat covering "Someday" by The Strokes.

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Kanye West gets p0wned by Beyonce in Connect Four.

Some random links perused over the holidays

Tyler Cowen lists policy areas in which his views are uncertain. It's refreshing that even an economist of his stature can admit that he is uncertain on so many issues. Cowen links to Arnold Kling's list of what he is certain about.

Vladimir Putin is Time's Man of the Year? Interesting.

RIP Borat, RIP Ali G. May you live on through the annoying and lousy impersonations of thousands of young males across the world.

Google, without asking permission, decides to share all your shared items in Google Reader with all of your GMail contacts.

Warner joins the DRM-free movement at Amazon's MP3 store.

M. Night Shyamalan has another of those twist movies in the works, releasing next June: The Happening.

Sleeveface is the art of augmenting the art on a record sleeve with your own body. You can't do that with a CD cover, unless, of course, you are a really small person.

Rock Band...oh dear

I got my copy of Rock Band for the PS3 on Wednesday, and I had just a few hours to bang on it before packing for my Thanksgiving trip.

The game, in theory, is fantastic. It comes with a guitar, a drum set, and a microphone, and you can play one of the four (the guitar can be used to play lead guitar or bass). I started with the guitar, and for about fifteen minutes, all was good. And then my guitar just stopped working. It seemed as if the keypad was frozen on the up direction. I tried all sorts of things to get it to work again, to no avail. I jumped online immediately and ordered a replacement guitar via the warranty site.

Now come reports that lots of people are running into issues with their Rock Band hardware. The "one of my instruments is broken" thread at the Rock Band tech support forum is long and growing. The problem most people are experiencing is problems with the down strum on the guitar. I didn't even get to play long enough to encounter that issue.

Now, there's a chance that this is just selection bias, that reading a thread specifically opened for hardware problems will only scare you. But to see so many threads on the web about hardware issues is really suspicious.

What could have been a triumphant launch could quickly turn into a disaster for Harmonix. Let's hope there's a recall on the horizon, because otherwise there could be a revolt. I'd love to be able to recommend Rock Band; the drum set still works for me, ditto the microphone, and the music selection is great. It's just a great concept for a game. But the shockingly poor QA on the guitar means I can't recommend the game for anyone until the hardware issues are addressed.

Harmonix needs to address this issue. They can't sweep something like this under the rug in the age of the Internet, or a promising franchise will be doomed from the start. Another question: all these glowing reviews I read of Rock Band, yet not a single reviewer noticed this issue with their review copies?

Last weekend

If you ever want to experience what it would be like if there was a run on goods because of impending disaster, come to LA and go shopping at Costco or IKEA on weekend. I was with my roommates at IKEA this past weekend and a woman riding in one of those motorized chairs drove into the back of my right foot in an effort to get into a cashier's line. I hobbled around for a day with what felt like a contusion on my Achilles tendon.

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Why can't DirecTV put another set of satellites in the North? I moved to an apartment on the north side of the building, and now I'm relegated to standard def because our complex signed a deal with Clear Bay Communications, and they're too cheap to rewire the building for high definition for DirecTV. My only choice is standard def DirecTV. In my previous apartment I could just get a view of the southwest sky from the balcony, on which I mounted a high-def DirecTV satellite. Now I can't see the southwest sky, but I can sure see the clouds...no, wait, those aren't clouds, those are the huge pixels of my crappy television image through standard def.

DirecTV has a great product if you can get it, but the "if you can get it" part of that is more of a catch than it should be.

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I was unpacking more boxes this weekend, and I found my passport and an iPod nano that I thought I lost two years ago. I should unpack more often.

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James Surowiecki on the writer's strike. Both sides believe strongly in their positions. The studios aren't making much off the web yet (nowhere near what they make in syndication or DVD sales), so they don't want to strike any long-term deals now. The writers did not get their fair share on DVDs from their last agreement, and they don't want to get burned again if the internet takes off as quickly as DVDs did.

Given all this, the two sides should strike a short-term rev share % agreement and go back to the negotiating table after it expires. The money online really isn't significant yet relative to DVD and syndication, and a more just % deal will buy some time for the online market to mature.

But the smarter long-term view for writers and directors and producers and actors, in my opinion, is to look to the Internet as a way to bypass the network and studio system altogether and get more fair value for their work. It won't happen right away, as the theatrical and DVD markets are still quite lucrative marketing and distribution systems while the Internet is still in its infancy in this space. But it may happen sooner than people realize.

There's an entire new generation coming up that's used to watching programming on a computer, or getting content from the computer to their TV. Broadband penetration and web speeds will continue to increase to the point where getting high-def content through the Internet will be just as fast as getting it from a satellite or cable. At that point, for many creative types the equation will shift so that it's more efficient for them to go direct to consumer rather than through the studio system. It won't be worthwhile for them to cede so much of the profit to a middleman who probably can't market their product efficiently anyhow.

Blockbuster mass-market movies may still benefit from launching on thousands of screens opening weekend, but most other programming will benefit more from efficient Internet-driven targeting. Maybe no such mechanism exists today online, but it's not difficult to imagine a company like Amazon is for books arising on the web to help people find the film and television programming they'll love.

The last foothold for studios in this distant future may be the theatrical distribution space. It's not easy to replicate a network of thousands of movie theaters nationwide. That's just not a lucrative business. But even as much as I love the look of film, the advent of digital technology will lower the cost of distribution to the point where building a network of theaters that only downloads massive digital files of movies will be feasible, avoiding the massive cost of generating all those prints. Cameras like the Red One will enable indie filmmakers to shoot films that can be projected on a massive theater screen and look fantastic at a much lower cost than shooting 35mm film. These files can be edited on a desktop workstation, and the digital output can be distributed to theaters with digital projectors.

The other things artists have traditionally depended on studios for is financing. But even there, times have changed. I took a class at UCLA last year called Indie Film Financing, and every week a different type of financier came in to talk about some film project they'd funded. It's not just studios anymore. We heard from old-fashioned banks, private equity, ultra-wealthy individuals, and on and on.

We will get back to a world where the scarcity is not in theater screens or financing but something much harder to solve, and that's true creative talent.

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Speaking of the future of content distribution, the stats from the Radiohead experiment in direct distribution of their album "In Rainbows" are fascinating. The average price paid among people who paid for the download was $6.00. Given that over 60% of customers chose not to pay at all for the download, the average price paid worldwide was $2.26 per album.

Sounds low? It's still more than Radiohead would have made per album if they'd gone through a studio. I think they could have easily gotten sales if they'd chosen to sell their album at, say $4.00 a pop, instead of letting consumers name their own price. But this turned out to be a much more interesting, and I think, successful experiment.

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Last Saturday I went downtown and caught the Takashi Murakami exhibit downtown at the Geffen Contemporary at the MOCA. I love his massive prints and his appropriation of pop and high culture. His works seem to distill so many elements of Japanese culture.

I had hoped to buy a print there, but the museum only carried limited editions of 300 of a few of his prints, and they had all sold out already. I had to settle for a t-shirt.

Murakami collaborated with Marc Jacobs, artistic director for Louis Vuitton, on a series of handbags. On display at the museum was a luggage chest with about a dozen or so compartments inside, each holding a Louis Vuitton handbag. Out of curiosity, one of my friends asked how much the chest was. It turns out you can take that chest and all the handbags inside it home for the meager sum of $500,000.

Not for sale were these two NSFW scultpures.

Also playing at the exhibit was Murakami's music video for Kanye West's song "Good Morning" off of Graduation. I guess it hasn't released to the world yet as the only copy I can find online is at YouTube, some bootleg from the Murakami exhibit. Not the best way to enjoy it.

Swell

Last night I caught The Swell Season at The Wiltern (Martha Wainwright opened) with Mira and Jill. The Swell Season is headlined by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, the co-stars of this year's indie film that could, Once.

The concert was, as my new roommate Hazel is fond of saying, lovely. I'd never seen The Frames in concert before (Hansard and a few others from The Swell Season play together in that band as well), but it's difficult to imagine the band drawing such an adoring following prior to the film's word-of-mouth success earlier this year.

Not that they don't deserve it. Hansard is a gifted songwriter and a winning stage presence, humble ("Tanks, tanks!" he said over and over again in response to adoring screams) but impassioned. Listening to him trade easy banter with the crowd, I imagine that if I ever visited Ireland I'd meet garrulous raconteurs like him in pubs everywhere, each of them spinning stories and songs on their guitars deep into the night while I nibbled on various preparations of potatoes.

Marketa is less comfortable on stage. She forgot the lyrics midway through her first song, and the rest of the time she said little when she wasn't singing. Hansard guarded her with an avuncular presence, the rumors of their romance leaping from screen to stage hovering over every one of their hugs, glances, and whispers.

During the show, a portly, disheveled, middle-aged man wearing an untucked white undershirt pushed his way past us and shoved an unmarked pair of CD-Rs in a white paper sleeve into Jill's hands. Great...another promo for some neighborhood hip-hop band.

But after the concert, Jill glanced at the CD and found a note scrawled in ballpoint pen. It turns out it was a bootleg of The Swell Season in Chicago. We popped it in the CD player on the way home. Damn if it wasn't one of the higher quality bootlegs I've heard. So thank you, portly disheveled middle-aged man in untucked white undershirt, for the digital memento.

During a break in the show, someone screamed "Oscar!" Best Original Song for Glen Hansard? There's a good chance, though Mira thinks he'll have to contend with Eddie Vedder for the Into the Wild soundtrack.

Finally...internet access at new apt up and running

Akira-like electric motorcycle prototype from Japan. (official website in Japanese)

Moby offers some free music for film students, indie filmmakers, and others for their non-profit film projects.

A cool use of the Hulu.com embed player. Extends the water cooler discussion of great moments in your favorite TV shows to the web, allowing you to not just tell people about the scene but show it to them as well.

Amazon's MP3 Store Beta

Amazon unveiled it's MP3 store beta yesterday, and all the MP3's are DRM-Free. That's hot. Congrats to Bill and the team in Seattle for getting this out the door.

One of the issues with trying to buy music legally in the past was always that lack of parity with music you could rip off of CD's yourself or download illegally. Buying through iTunes Music Store meant living with its DRM.

There are sites like eMusic that allow you to download DRM-free songs (eMusic offers MP3's at 192K VBR), but you had to buy a monthly subscription. That's a limited market because consumers have a psychological hurdle when it comes to subscriptions, even if it works out better for them price-wise in the long run. Consumers want to be able to buy one song at a time. It's been pretty hard to do that up until now. Apple now has some DRM-free songs in their library, but they cost $1.29 each, and only a subset of their library was available that way due to lack of movement on the part of music labels.

Apple's DRM wouldn't be as objectionable to most consumers if Apple would just license it's DRM to other retailers so that they could also sell music that could play on iPods, by far the most popular portable music player. But that hasn't happened (I suspect Apple refused to license Fairplay to keep a moat around their iTunes Music Store), and so I rarely buy songs through the iTunes Music Store. DRM is a penalty to those who want to buy music legally (and hardly deterrent for those who don't), and that's a terrible message to send to the marketplace.

The end around is just what Amazon did--wait until the labels were ready to release lots of DRM-free music that can be played on iPods. It helps Amazon that many movie studios and music labels are not happy with Apple. Amazon, on the other hand, has never been anything but a massive sales partner for them.

The net result is this: now if you want to buy DRM-free music legally and support the artists who sell it, you can do it for a lot of music fairly easily. The type of person who refuses to buy music legally at all is a lost cause for the music industry. You can throw them in jail, but you're not going to make much money off of them anyhow. But there are still lots of people who want to support the artists they love and who want to be able to listen to their music anywhere, on any device.

I won't sit here and pretend I haven't downloaded my share of MP3's over the years off the Internet and MP3 blogs. It's easy to be seduced by the dark side when you feel like the music industry is colluding to keep CD prices high or to make it as hard as possible for you to download DRM-free music legally. But there's no excuse now. The labels let a lot of time go by, but hopefully they've acted in time to salvage the good guys among the music buyers.

Sidenote: I'm not entirely sure how the track pricing works yet. For example, for In Our Bedroom After the War by Stars, all tracks are $0.99 except track 3, which is $0.89. That's not the shortest track, so I'm not sure why it's $0.10 cheaper.

She's Got You

Last night, after a good meal at The Bowery in Hollywood, I saw Cat Power (aka Chan (pronounced Sean) Marshall) at the Avalon. She performed with the Dirty Delta Blues.

She's got a second Covers album taxiing on the runway for Jan 2008 liftoff, and many of the songs she performed seem destined for that release. Two highlights: a couple songs into her set, a cover of Patsy Cline's "She's Got You," and later, one of my favorites, "Dark End of the Street." I can't find an MP3 of Marshall covering either, but if anyone has one, I'd be greatly indebted if they could pass it along to tide me over until the CD hits next year. In the meantime, you can find the Patsy Cline at any number of places like Amazon or iTunes, and there are a gazillion covers of "Dark End of the Street."

I wish I could list off all the other songs she covered, but one of the things that makes her one of the best cover artists around is also the thing that makes her covers so difficult to identify: Chan makes the melody and tempo and cadence of the songs her own (though still preserving their emotional marrow). Making song identification even trickier last night was the inconsistent sound mix. At times, I had no idea what she was saying because her voice was drowned out by guitars, and a few times her mic just plain cut out. Someone with sharper hearing and an encyclopedic knowledge of musical lyrics may have her full set list. If I find it I'll link to it here.

But back to that Cat Power voice. That voice. It's a gift, and it works best with minimal dressing, simpler arrangements that let it carve aural contrails in the air. Maybe just a piano, a dollop of guitar, and a small serving of bass on the side.

The keyboardist, some guy named Greg who Cat Power introduced as "Mr. Beautiful," was another stage distraction. He looked like a cross between Tommy Lee and Criss Angel and played the keyboards with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth. Every time Marshall threw attention his way, he preened. How could a keyboardist have so much attitude? I kept hoping he'd hiccup and swallow his smoke.

Control

The trailer for Anton Corbijn's movie about Ian Curtis and Joy Division, Control, is at the movie's official site. Some people close to Joy Division, like members of New Order, are said to not appreciate the movie's liberties with the truth, but I'll probably see it anyway.

Joy Division and New Order are the music of my childhood. Joy Division for those days when I was oscillating between self-loathing and defiance, and New Order for happier times. It's hard for me to not feel a bit nostalgic when I hear "Atmosphere," the last song that plays in the trailer. And I own one of these "Love Tears Me Apart" t-shirts, whose design actually echoes the waves on the Control website interface.

Abracadabra...uh, open sesame...uh, hocus pocus

Last night, I got home from work around 1 in the morning and pulled up to the electronic gate to my parking garage and pressed my remote key fob button. Nothing happened. I waved it out the window, then got out of the car and walked up to the gate, pressing the key fob near any place I thought the sensor might reside. No luck.

One car pulled up behind me, then another, and soon a few others. We all stood outside our cars, pressing our key fobs. In our neighborhood, there wasn't any street parking, so we were stuck. It was 1 in the morning, I was dead tired, and I was not a happy camper (though if my key fob was out of order then I was on the verge of being literally an unhappy camper).

So I turned my attention to the exit gate, just next to the entrance. That was one of those gates that opened as soon as you pulled up to it. The sensor for that was a bit further inside the garage, but by sticking my tennis racket through the gate I could just reach far enough to trip it and open the gate. I managed to lean my tennis racket against the sensor and then directed traffic through the exit like John McClane waving the planes home at the end of Die Hard 2.

A different discontent plagued me in the nanosecond before I passed out. The security in our parking garage is not good, not good at all.

***

Kanye vs. 50 Cent, as judged by Amazon Sales Rank: Decision to Kanye. Critic's average judgment? The same. From guns to lyrics to now sales...hip-hop conflicts are progressing to more civilized playing fields.

***

Jon Stewart will host the Oscars in February. He seemed a bit nervous to start the last time (even the coolest customer can experience some jitters in the face of so much star power), but he loosened up by the end of the ceremony. I think the second time will be the charm.

***

My favorite Microsoft application was always Excel. I spent a good portion of my early career in that application building massive models, writing macros in VBA, pushing it to its limits. It didn't always keep up--I always had problems getting linked workbooks to update and calculate quickly, and sharing workbooks among my team never worked quite as we wanted to--but of the Office suite, it's always been king.

I hate Powerpoint, and Word's formatting quirks always drove me batty. So when Apple came out with Keynote, and then Pages, I was willing to switch over. I haven't yet, but only because I don't use Word or Powerpoint anymore. All my writing now is done in a plain text editor, e-mail client, script formatting software, or with an actual pen and notebook. As for Powerpoint, I haven't had to make one of those in years, hallelujah.

But I was curious about Numbers, the new spreadsheet app in iWork 08, so I fired it up, imported an Excel spreadsheet, and gave it a whirl. I attempted to update the spreadsheet

Though I like a lot of the interface decisions made in Numbers, I will remain, for the time being, an Excel guy. And it isn't because Number lacks advanced features like pivot tables. My main complaint with Numbers is that it's not keyboard friendly. You have to use the mouse to do so many things that Excel allows you to do without leaving the keyboard. Mousing around a spreadsheet is just counter to my working style.

Numbers might be the "spreadsheet for the rest of us," but I guess that makes me one of Them.

***

George Saunders appears on David Letterman.

***

Looks like I won't be seeing The White Stripes in concert after all. Disappointing.

***

Patriots fined and penalized for videotaping NY Jets defensive signals. Outside of the Bears, the Patriots were once one of the few teams I rooted for because they seemed to win by being smarter than their opponents. Outside of Tom Brady, they didn't have too many marquee names, and they didn't have a crazy financial advantage like teams like the Yankees or Red Sox because of the NFL salary cap. They were the Oakland A's of the NFL.

I suspect that the advantage they gathered from videotaping opponent signals is overstated (as is the case with many forms of cheating in sports), but what's disappointing is the hubris and stupidity/arrogance represented by the videotaping scheme. They were playing a team coached by one of their ex assistant coaches; how did they think they were going to get away with it?And anyone watching the two teams would think it ridiculous that the Patriots had to resort to such scheming to defeat the Jets.

If Mangini was part of such a practice when he was with the Patriots, and if he was indeed the one who snitched his ex-team out, then there's a beautiful tragic resonance to the sequence of events. Every one involved with the scheme is getting what they deserve: Mangini is seen as a rat, Belichick (never a warm fuzzy personality to begin with) is seen as a win at all costs Nixon of the NFL, and the Patriots now will never get the full credit they deserve for their accomplishments.

People are always going to be jealous of and resent perennial winners, but it certainly helps the cause to have ammunition. Brady fathering children out of wedlock and dating supermodels, Harrison using HGH, Belichick and staff using videotape surveillance...it's more than enough.

As a sidenote, a cyclist caught using HGH nowadays is looking at a minimum of a year's suspension and a lifetime of disgrace. A pro football player caught using steroids or HGH gets a four game suspension and then is back on the field, or in the case of Shawn Merriman, on to the Pro Bowl or Nike television commercials.

The NFL has been rocked by all sorts of scandal for a year straight now, from Michael Vick to HGH to PatriotsGate to the revolving convict lineup on the Bengals to who knows what else, and you know what? The league is as popular as ever. The NFL is so popular that it doesn't seem to absorb any economic penalty from scandal. Perhaps because of the violent nature of the game, fans seem far more tolerant of steroid use in the NFL than in other sports.

New iPods

New iPods announced (among other things) at the special Apple event today.

Every time I hear about one of these special Apple events, I just wave my credit cards in surrender.

Heima

Here's the trailer for the Sigur Ros movie Heima. I have no idea what it's about, but if ever there was a band whose music could inspire a new Qatsi trilogy for this age, it's Sigur Ros.

Shine a Light trailer

Martin Scorsese has a Rolling Stones documentary called Shine a Light coming out, well, I think in 2008 sometime. Here's the trailer in Quicktime 480p and smaller if you're scared to see the crevices in Keith Richards' face with too much clarity. The trailer is good, energetic.

I've always been partial to Scorsese's musical docs. The Last Waltz is fantastic.

UPDATE: Ken asked that I add a warning about the graphic footage of Mick Jagger grinding up against "young-enough-to-be-his-grandaughter (or at least a fifth girlfriend)" Christina Aguilera. Instead of a May-December, this is more March-December. I was just surprised to discover the two had sung together in concert.

Silver Lining

I didn't get a chance to listen to all of Rilo Kiley's new album Under the Blacklight at their MySpace page before they pulled most of the tracks down. What tracks I did hear are sure to elicit some gagging from a subset of their diehard fans upset with their move over to a major label and a more mainstream pop sound.

I like "Silver Lining" a lot, though--it's a sweet little tune (that one is still up at their MySpace page). And since I, like many in the indie music world, heart Jenny Lewis, I'll be trying to catch them on their new album tour.

A good place to start, if you want to delve into the Rilo Kiley most of us have known and dug up until now, is with their earlier album Execution of All Things.

Concept art from Ratatouille, Imogen Heap

Hmm, an old post I forgot to post from a few weeks back...

You can see the goodness here. At the time I wrote this, I hadn't seen Ratatouille yet. Every one seemed to have seen it by the time I decided I couldn't wait any longer, so one night I just drank a Coke and caught the late showing one night after work. It was all that and then some. The animation was stunning.

***

Via FreshArrival, here's a WMV file of a live performance by Imogen Heap at the studios of Indie 103.1 here in LA back a . A friend from Starbucks got my a pass to go see her perform at the Starbucks music lounge at Sundance in 2006. Watching her work was intriguing because she used a series of gadgets, including a Macbook Pro, all of which she demonstrated to us before she played her set. She's one person but with all that gear she can sing with herself. The video gives you an idea of how she creates that big sound. Here are a few of my pics from the show at Sundance.

Technorati Tags: animation, art, music

Remains of a long day

You want a proxy for the state of Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD? Sales of 300 on Amazon offer a good proxy. The movie was available on both formats. On Blu-Ray the sales rank is currently #5 on Amazon.com. On HD-DVD? It's Amazon sales rank is 12. Slight edge Blu-Ray. Of course, none of this matters because so few titles are available on either format, let alone both formats. In fact, most titles that are available on Blu-Ray are not available on HD-DVD and vice versa.

A brief history of shoegazing, a genre of music I should have been listening to in high school to express those oh so hidden depths of soul and heartfelt yearnings behind my otherwise shy facade.

NYTimes doing away with TimesSelect soon? Let's hope so.

Two new Nokia phones, the 7500 and 7900, look like...well, the analogy I'd us is that these new phones are to old Nokia candybar phones as Bizarro Superman was to Superman in the looks department. Cubist, or maybe crystallized?

Facebook is all the rage. I held out until I realized how many of my classmates were using it to communicate. I've now had a few months to fiddle around with it. It's a huge step up from the loud mess that was MySpace and the cleanest designed social networking site to date. It also did a smart thing in opening up for application development by third parties. But I have a lot of thoughts on how the site could improve and where it's vulnerable. I'm not sold on its longevity. Those thoughts will have to wait for another day, when I have more time. In the meantime, this article is a good read.

Technorati Tags: amazon, dvd, gadgets, mobile, music, nytimes, phones, facebook

Robert Ludlum titles for the 20th-century music lover...

...courtesy of Alex Ross. I like The Reich Reich and The Scarlatti Inheritance.

If I were to contribute to the list, I'd add The Ligeti Project. Oh wait, that is a title already.

In another humorous post, Ross reflects on the fact that everything is dead: classical music is dead, rock is dead, and so is hip-hop, jazz, cinema, newspapers, and of course blogging. Also, the United States of America is dead. James Brown Is Dead. Microsoft is dead. Sinbad is dead...is dead. Actually, I never even heard he was dead, so Sinbad is dead is dead is also dead. Dead is Dead.

This post is dead.

Technorati Tags: humor, music

What the?

James sent me a link to this poker video featuring Johnny Chan, Phil Hellmuth, and...well, I don't want to embarrass the other pros in it. Because when I saw video, I don't mean a video of them playing poker. This is a music video, and it is stunningly awful. I tried to watch it all the way through and ended up clawing my eyes out.

I suspect that the same gift that allows them to read their opponents' behavior renders them shockingly blind to their own vibe. I'm going to go watch it again now.

Technorati Tags: music, poker, video

Secret Spoon Show

I lucked out and managed to snag two tickets to the Spoon "secret" show (if it was really a secret I wouldn't have gotten tix for it) on Monday night at Little Radio. Spoon was out in support of their new album. The venue is a cool little warehouse near downtown LA. It's an intimate space, and apparently they broadcast concerts live over the web. The place looked to hold about 300 people tops, standing. If I'd wanted, I could easily have been five feet from Britt Daniel and his mates on stage. In addition, there was an open bar (at least if you wanted the drink of the day, Dewars and Ginger Soda),.

There was just one problem. In this long, rectangular space with a giant bar jutting out in the middle, there was no air conditioning and only one opening to the outside world, the entrance. Within a few minutes of being inside, I felt like I had worn a snowsuit into a sauna. Under such conditions, the space might have been able to put up with about 100 people and still feel comfortable, but instead I sweated off about a pound during the show.

We managed to find a semi-tolerable temperature zone around us against a wall near the end of the show, when the heat had dissipated the crowd. It didn't do much to dissipate the cigarette smoke, though. If they had a way to open up the back then at least the air could move over us from one end of the place to the other. Even Daniel commented on the oppressive heat at one point during the show. The one standing fan in the entire place was pointed on stage, but I still have to imagine that Daniel had to wring himself out after performing in a long-sleeve black shirt and pants all night.

Spoon was great. Their new album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is excellent. And Little Radio, if they ever install some A/C, would be the perfect intimate venue at which to see your favorite bands perform.

Technorati Tags: concert, LA, music

In Our Bedroom After the War

I'm a fan of the Canadian band Stars and their indie pop, with its hints of Morrissey*. Their new album, In Our Bedroom After the War, comes out September 25 (as of today Amazon doesn't even have it listed). However, as Stars noted on their website:

Traditional music business practice says we are to begin sending out copies of this album now. We give advance copies to print publications in hopes of securing features that coincide with our September date. We meet with radio stations in hopes of securing airplay. etc, etc.

Inevitably someone will leak the album.

Throughout this process, the most important people in this value chain, the fans, are given only two options - wait until September 25th to legally purchase the new album or choose from a variety of sources and download the album for free, at any time.

We hope you'll choose to support the band, and choose to pay for their album. However we don't think it's fair you should have to wait until September 25th to do so.

We believe that the line between the media and the public is now completely grey. What is the difference between a writer for a big glossy music magazine and a student writing about their favourite bands on their blog? What differentiates a commercial radio station from someone adding a song to their lastfm channel? or their myspace page?

As such, we are making the new Stars album available for legal download today, four days after it's completion. The CD and double vinyl versions of the album will still be released on our official release date, September 25th. We hope you will continue to support music retailers should a physical album in all it's packaged glory be your choice of format.

It's our hope that given a clear, legal alternative to downloading music for free, you will choose to support the creators.

Here's a link button to purchase the new album through iTunes. It's a good one.

*Their new album is mixed by Joe Chiccarelli who has worked for Morrissey, the Shins, and the White STripes.

Technorati Tags: music

Once

Yesterday I thought I had a pass for a preview screening of Danny Boyle's Sunshine. What's even better is that it would be held at the lovely new Landmark theater in LA, one of the few with a handful of 4K projectors and swanky stadium seating. But after cursing my way through a standstill of traffic, I found no line at the theater. I looked down at my pass.

July 19.

Oops. I blame the steady diet of decongestants which have left me with crazy dreams for several days now. I haven't had such a disorienting stretch since the last time I was on malaria medicine.

With half an hour to spare, my buddy and I rushed across town, me at the wheel, cursing and driving like a maniac, in the hopes of catching a 7:40pm showing of Rescue Dawn at the Arclight instead. We arrived exactly 10 minutes after the movie had started.

The lady behind the counter shook her head at me. Apparently the Arclight does not sell tickets to a movie beyond 10 minutes past the start time. Thwarted again. I was more demoralized than upset.

We scanned the board. Between the two of us, we'd seen most everything on the board. Except for Once. I'd missed it at Sundance in January, but while there I ran into a friend who'd seen and loved it.

So this story has a happy ending because Once is one of the better movies I've seen this year. Most fans of The Frames have already seen the movie and know the back story, but for those who don't, the director John Carney once played bass for them, and he directed Frames lead singer Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, Hansard's collaborator in his solo effort The Swell Season, in this indie film about the joys of artistic collaboration.

I don't really like musicals, and this movie technically is not a musical, but if this was a musical, then I would like musicals. The music in the movie is actually the music the two of the leads wrote together, and the way it's woven into the movie feels organic. You can hear some of the lovely tunes at the movie's official website or on the charming soundtrack.

The movie put me in enough of a musical mood that meeting up with some classmates for a farewell karaoke session (a couple of them are headed overseas on a travel video internship) was more enjoyable than I remember karaoke could be. If you are going to sing karaoke, by all means, take it seriously.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, music

Spiderman the musical?!

Marvel is in pre-production on Spider-Man the musical, to be directed by Tony-winner Julie Taymor with music and lyrics by Bono and the Edge.

Nice Flickr collection of the evocative name placards on apartment complexes here in Santa Monica. I agree with the photographer - these are the sole redeeming feature of the otherwise fugly apartment architecture ubiquitous in Santa Monica (and Los Angeles in general). You've never seen so much stucco and old shag carpet.

Kaoru Kubo is the famous voice heard on Airport Limousine buses ferrying passengers from Narita Airport to Tokyo. Very soothing.

A montage of beautiful title sequences by Kuntzel+Deygas who did the titles for Catch Me If You Can, among others.

Classified government report says Al-Qaeda is the strongest it's been since 9/11. How did this country ever elect Dubya? Perhaps Bryan Caplan is right.

Technorati Tags: LA, musical, photography, politics, travel

Pepper

Lots of good stuff in this week's New Yorker:

• James Surowiecki gives an overview of prediction markets which he is qualified to do since he wrote The Wisdom of Crowds
• Alex Ross on Sibelius
• A short piece by David Sedaris
• A short story by Stuart Dybek
• Louis Menand reviews Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies
• Anthony Lane reviews The Transformers and Rescue Dawn

MacArthur Grant winner Luis von Ahn is using online games to allow humans to help solve computing problems. For example, he's using human evaluations of photos to give computers an aesthetic judgment sensibility. The games, when they're show ready, will be online here.

Taiwanese director Edward Yang died yesterday of complications from colon cancer. He was 59. His film Yi Yi is humane and moving, not to mention a fascinating specimen of Asian long-shot cinema.

AllofMP3 now officially dead, shut down by the Russian government. It seems, however, to have arisen from the dead under a new URL.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, music, newyorker, tech

Aarrgghh! (and other cries of agony)

I just spent an hour trying to purchase Arcade Fire tickets through Ticketmaster.com. I want to kill myself. It was one of the most painful experiences of my life. I received just about every possible website malfunction and error message that website can put out, and 9 times I made it to the last page to enter a credit card # and a perfect 9 times I was turned away. Most of the time I got "Error Completing Your Request" and was just bounced back to the Ticketmaster.com home page.

I had my phone dialing Ticketmaster.com at the same time, and finally that went through. But all the good seats are sold out. I want to cry.

Technorati Tags: music, ticketmaster

Two sequels tonight, one good, one bad

I caught Rodrigo Y Gabriela for the second time tonight, at the Ford Ampitheatre under a surprisingly clear LA evening sky, the temperature a perfect 69 degrees. It was a bit of a risk because bands with one album under their belt often lack enough material to fill a full set. At the same KCRW Sounds Eclectic concert where I first heard Rodrigo Y Gabriela, Lily Allen mailed in a set where she played her same set list for the umpteenth time. But Rodrigo Y Gabriela were so so good that night...

About a quarter of the way into tonight's performance, Rodrigo addressed just that topic when he said they didn't want to play the same set list they'd been playing all over the world. So he asked for requests, and the usual litany of cries popped out from the audience.

"Freebird!"

"Nirvana!"

After one person cried "Shakira!" Rodrigo played a few bars from "Hips Don't Lie." But the best cover of the night was when they dipped their toes into "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd--just a few strums from the opening bar--and then decided to keep rolling with it when the crowd started to sing along. Just one of those special moments when crowd and performers meet each other halfway, the type of spontaneous thing that can only happen live. They also riffed on Dave Brubeck's "Take Five," and I look forward to the day when they put out an entire album of covers.

After a few songs, early in the concert, Rodrigo took the mike and, in halting English, said, "I want to ask a question." He hesitated. And then he asked us if wanted to stay seated or to stand. They weren't used to performing in front of a seated audience, he said. "Do you want to stay seated..." Silence. "...or do you want to stand?" Everyone cheered and stood up, and with that, a charge arced through the crowd.

Few musical groups rally the crowd to their support with such unanimity. Even their constant use of the Irish-inflected "fookin" (picked up when they were playing on the streets of Ireland, just before they landed their first record deal) failed to deter the elderly woman seated in front of me, who danced a jig like there was no tomorrow. The music just takes you there.

One thing that always leaps off the stage at their show is the sound engineering. Two acoustic guitars sound like an entire band under the skilled hand of their sound engineering team. A revelation at this show was the video projected on a white sheet behind them featuring live black and white video footage of the two of them on stage, cut together in time with the music. I couldn't see the cameras from my seat, but I'm guessing they were portable wide-angle cams attached to the guitar or mic stands.

The Mexican guitar duo are touring the world for most of the remainder of 2007, so do yourself a favor and get out to see them. They just set down in LA after rocking a 15,000 person crowd at the Glastonbury Festival, and prior to that they've blown folks away at Coachella and Bonnaroo, among others.

After that, I rushed back down to the Bridge to catch another sequel of sorts, Live Free or Die Hard. Hollywood has been in sequel mode for years and years now, but I'm hard-pressed to recall another period beyond the last year in which they've deluged us with more (off the top of my head: Rocky Balboa, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Shrek the Third, Evan Almighty, Spiderman 3, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Ocean's Thirteen, Hostel II, Saw 29). And I haven't seen one yet that caused me to feel much of anything (I haven't seen them all, but perhaps that's for the best).

Tory, Phil, Jen and I were the only ones in our theater cackling our asses off at the sheer risibility of Live Free or Die Hard. In its sheer earnest absurdity it did offer that pleasure along with the usual communal joy of the company of opening night fanatics. As a night out I got my money's worth but

Timothy Olyphant, as the chief villain, gives an epically terrible performance. Just mind-blowingly awful. The grand tradition of Die Hard was the bombastic bad guy, from Alan Rickman to Jeremy Irons. Olyphant is like a constipated Ryan Seacrest for the duration of the movie. I've long considered trying out season one of Deadwood, but it's tough to get over the fact that Olyphant is one of the leads. Then again, we did live through 8 seasons of Robert Iler on The Sopranos, so perhaps you can carry a weak link with a strong ensemble.

A lot of people like to attribute my distaste for a movie like this to being a film snob, but that's far from the truth. I got my start in movies watching popcorn movies, and I'm still the guy who waits in line to get opening night seats to take a big group of friends with me to see the big blockbusters at midnight. I loved Die Hard and think Bruce Willis is quite underrated.

But too many sequels are just excuses for us to hang out with characters again. They've long since halted in any development, and these sequels are excuses for us to see them repeat a song and dance. Story and drama are decoration, draped on a spine of action sequences. I'm not so naive as to think studios would ever initiate plans for blockbuster sequels by focusing on character, but I don't think it has to be an afterthought, either. A character that undergoes some sort of arc during a movie--that's the basis for compelling drama, especially in movies like this where we all know the ending going in.

John McClane is the same guy in Live Free or Die Hard that he's been since the first movie ended. His character doesn't evolve in this movie; he arrives fully-formed and runs around while lots of gear explodes around him. What's worse is that the quasi-realism of the action set pieces in earlier Die Hard movies has been replaced by some of the most preposterous action sequences I've ever seen. Here is where I may spoil an action sequence or two, but maybe not since half of them are in the trailer. Anyway, consider that your spoiler warning.

In one sequence, the bad guys are in a helicopter chasing Willis and his sidekick, the Mac guy Justin Long. Though they are right next to the car firing away with a machine gun, they can't hit anything. It's just shoddy blocking. Then Bruce Willis takes out a fire hydrant and the resulting spray knocks the shooter out of the helicopter. A bit ludicrous, but funny as a sight gag. Willis then drives into one of the NYC tunnels to avoid the helicopter, so Olyphant orders his hacker team to direct traffic into the tunnel from both ends, and then he kills the lights in the tunnel while the cars are driving towards each other. For some reason, none of the drivers think to turn on their headlights so they all crash into each other and nearly crush Willis and Long, the monkeys in the middle. Angered, Willis drives his car into a tollbooth which somehow causes the car to launch up and out into the the hovering helicopter.

In the most ridiculous sequence, though, Olyphant orders an F-35 military jet to take out Willis, who's driving a semi. Thanks to Wikipedia I've learned that the F-35 featured in the movie is of the short-takeoff and vertical-landing (STOVL) variation, and it can fly under highways and hover over the street like a Harrier. The entire sequence culminates with Willis somehow hanging off the back wing of the airplane as it spirals out of control and...well, I won't continue.

As a form of disposable inanity, perhaps it delivers what lots of audience members want, and so part of the responsibility lies with the audience. In the bathroom after the show, a couple guys were high fiving and saying it was the best movie they'd seen all summer. Just now I perused the Metacritic page for the movie and was shocked to see how many critics stamped it with approval. Maybe the critics really have given up and realized they have no effect on popular fare like this. Or maybe I am that film snob.

Technorati Tags: concert, film, movies, music

Required a not-so-modest amount of work

[via Photojojo] A couple Modest Mouse fans got together and entered a stop motion video in the band's "Missed the Boat" contest. They printed out each of the 4,133 frames of footage provided by the band and then incorporated those printouts in stills shot on their digital SLR which were then fused into this video. Very clever. This required a huge amount of work--I sure hope those guys won the contest.

Technorati Tags: music, photography, video, youtube

iPhone--it was who we thought it was

David Pogue publishes the first official iPhone review I've seen yet in the NYTimes. Very comprehensive and worth reading for all who want a balanced report from someone who's tested it firsthand. Some highlights and lowlights:

• the glass screen doesn't scratch easily though it smudges
• the software is fast and beautiful and simple to use
• the phone is fun to use; once you buy the phone, you choose your phone plan at home in iTunes
• call quality is average and dependent on your AT&T signal strength
• e-mail and the web browser are great, and so is the battery life (Pogue suspects you'll recharge once every other day); however, someday the battery loses its charge and will have to be sent to Apple for replacement
• no chat program, voice dialing, or memory card slot
• you can't install programs from anyone other than Apple
• web browser can't handle Java or Flash
• the 2MP camera is good, but only for motionless, well-lit subjects, and it doesn't capture video or send MMS photos (i.e., picture messages). =(
• a biggie: typing on the screen keyboard can be frustrating, and Pogue doesn't see it besting the BlackBerry on that front
• the biggest issue all along for me is confirmed, to my dismay: AT&T's network is lousy
• the EDGE network is super slow; web browsing will be painful

After the crush of hype, it turns out most of what was rumored and suspected about the device turns out to be true. Since I always carry my iPod and cell phone with me, the iPhone is attractive as a way to consolidate gadgets, and it sure would be great to get the real-time traffic reports via Google Maps here in eternally-congested LA. However, I had such a lousy experience with AT&T (in its Cingular guise) that I feel comfortable not waiting in line on Friday. I really wish Apple had found a better partner for this venture.

UPDATE: Walt Mossberg has his review of the iPhone up now as well. Here are some of his thoughts, which confirm my worst fear, that the iPhone is held back by being tethered to AT&T's network (when it isn't connected via wi-fi). Overall, he still liked it, but like Pogue, notes that it isn't a grand slam:

We have been testing the iPhone for two weeks, in multiple usage scenarios, in cities across the country. Our verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer. Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry, and its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well, though it sometimes adds steps to common functions.
The Apple phone combines intelligent voice calling, and a full-blown iPod, with a beautiful new interface for music and video playback. It offers the best Web browser we have seen on a smart phone, and robust email software. And it synchronizes easily and well with both Windows and Macintosh computers using Apple’s iTunes software.

It has the largest and highest-resolution screen of any smart phone we’ve seen, and the most internal memory by far. Yet it is one of the thinnest smart phones available and offers impressive battery life, better than its key competitors claim.

It feels solid and comfortable in the hand and the way it displays photos, videos and Web pages on its gorgeous screen makes other smart phones look primitive.

The iPhone’s most controversial feature, the omission of a physical keyboard in favor of a virtual keyboard on the screen, turned out in our tests to be a nonissue, despite our deep initial skepticism. After five days of use, Walt — who did most of the testing for this review — was able to type on it as quickly and accurately as he could on the Palm Treo he has used for years. This was partly because of smart software that corrects typing errors on the fly.

But the iPhone has a major drawback: the cellphone network it uses. It only works with AT&T (formerly Cingular), won’t come in models that use Verizon or Sprint and can’t use the digital cards (called SIM cards) that would allow it to run on T-Mobile’s network. So, the phone can be a poor choice unless you are in areas where AT&T’s coverage is good. It does work overseas, but only via an AT&T roaming plan.

In addition, even when you have great AT&T coverage, the iPhone can’t run on AT&T’s fastest cellular data network. Instead, it uses a pokey network called EDGE, which is far slower than the fastest networks from Verizon or Sprint that power many other smart phones. And the initial iPhone model cannot be upgraded to use the faster networks.

The iPhone compensates by being one of the few smart phones that can also use Wi-Fi wireless networks. When you have access to Wi-Fi, the iPhone flies on the Web. Not only that, but the iPhone automatically switches from EDGE to known Wi-Fi networks when it finds them, and pops up a list of new Wi-Fi networks it encounters as you move. Walt was able to log onto paid Wi-Fi networks at Starbucks and airports, and even used a free Wi-Fi network at Fenway Park in Boston to email pictures taken during a Red Sox game.

But this Wi-Fi capability doesn’t fully make up for the lack of a fast cellular data capability, because it is impractical to keep joining and dropping short-range Wi-Fi networks while taking a long walk, or riding in a cab through a city.

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Short interview with Atul Gawande in the Freakonomics blog.

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Today is the day of silence for Pandora and other Internet radio sites to protest the increase in licensing fees for online radio (a move driven in large part by the RIAA). Save Net Radio!

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The Beastie Boys' are on Flickr.

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Paul Shirley, having played with both Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant, assesses the possibility of the two of them playing on the same team:

Having spent a similar amount of time in the semi-intimate company of both men, I can say confidently that two people couldn't be more different. Kevin Garnett is one of the most impressive humans I've ever been around.

Kobe Bryant isn't.

Technorati Tags: Apple, basketball, camera, flickr, gadgets, gawande, medicine, mobile, music, NBA, nytimes, phone, photography, pogue, puppy, radio, review, sports

Do

Preview the new White Stripes album at MTV.

Technorati Tags: music

GIF (Good it's Friday)

Ivan Basso confessed to "attempted doping," and now Bjarne Riis admits that he used EPO during years that include his 1996 Tour de France win. Eric Zabel and Rolf Aldag, who rode for Telekom during the Riis and Ullrich Tour de France wins in the 90's, also fessed up to EPO use. So did Telekom rider Bert Dietz. And Udo Bölts, and Christian Henn. Cycling is detoxing, and it's necessary, though not pretty.

On this the weekend of the Star Wars convention here in LA, psychiatrists have diagnosed Anakin Skywalker, later Darth Vader, of having a personality disorder. It sounds so obvious as to be an Onion headline, but apparently it's not. If you read me this line, I'd swear it was satire:

The diagnosis came to [psychiatrist Eric] Bui, a Star Wars fan, as he watched the series. "I thought to myself, 'That guy is crazy.' But he's not crazy. He's borderline."

Speaking of Star Wars, there's a rumor going around that George Lucas will announce a new Star Wars movie tomorrow at the convention (Saturday).

New ride at the Kennedy Space Center simulates 17,500 mph liftoff of a Space Shuttle. Now that sounds cool.

90% of handset owners believe iPhone is better than their current phone. That's when you know your marketing and brand are strong, when your product hasn't even reached consumers and yet they're crowning it the champ.

Michel Gondry directs Natalie Portman in the video for Paul McCartney's "Dance Tonight." Maybe not as conceptually brilliant as his other videos, but he still is able to pull off his effects in camera. Here's another Michel Gondry video, for Cibo Matto's "Sugar Water," which is built around a supremely clever conceit.

Someday our kids will laugh at us for ever having been impressed with regular old HD resolution. By then they'll be watching Ultra HD, with a resolution of 7680 x 4320 (16X sharper than HDTV), shot on cameras that can capture 4000 fps.

Technorati Tags: Apple, cycling, doping, drugs, gadgets, michelgondry, movies, music, psychiatry, HD, sports, starwars, tech, theonion, video, youtube

Do the D.A.N.C.E.

Video for the catchiest dance tune this year.

Technorati Tags: music, video

Control

That Anton Corbijn film about Joy Division opened strong at Cannes. Can't wait to see it.

Technorati Tags: cannes, film, movies, music

Cajun Dance Party

Insound's free MP3 of the week is "The Next Untouchable" by the much-buzzed-about Cajun Dance Party.

Technorati Tags: mp3, music

Back from NYC

Back from an exhausting but fun weekend trip to NYC for various family events. The weather in Manhattan was perfect. I only wish I'd been able to spend more time with family and less time in transit (traffic around NYC Sunday was brutal due to the 5 Boroughs bike ride and street fairs and car accidents).

With gas prices over $3 a gallon nationwide, I got myself a Discover Open Road credit card which offers 5% cash back on gas and auto maintenance purchases (and 1% back on other purchases). No annual fee.

Maria Sharapova lists her top 10 dream mixed double partners. Yao Ming?!

"Fluorescent Adolescent" by the Arctic Monkeys is my favorite new rock tune this year (here's the album). Alex Turner is a fantastic lyricist.

Help to fight global warming by having fewer children. Since U.S. citizens tend to be the world's worst carbon dioxide emitters, this is especially true for us. A simple way to encourage this would be to impose tax penalties on families for each additional child. Take that Shawn Kemp.

I was born without replacement teeth for my top two canines. Those two baby teeth have been hanging on forever. I went to a new dentist here in LA last week who recommended I get them replaced before they fall out. I asked how much it would cost, roughly, and she told me to talk to the receptionist up front. Always a bad sign when you ask how much something costs and get the runaround. The receptionist's quote: $8,000, not covered by insurance. Are you kidding me?! I may just have to go toothless if they fall out. At any rate, I'm going back to my insurance company on this one. That hardly seems just for a congenital condition.

Technorati Tags: finance, music, sharapova, sports, tennis

Nibble

One of the things about LA bike culture is that cruisers predominate. Going down the beach boardwalk on your tricked out road bike doesn't impress anyone. Perhaps "The Ride" by Ellsworth is a suitable compromise: a high-tech cruiser. What a beauty, at least until someone knocks you off of it and steals it.

A whole lotta free MP3s over at WuTangCorp.com, home of the Wu-Tang Clan & Killa Beez.

Weng Weng, the 2' 9" Philippine dynamo, Agent Double 0, lives on thanks to YouTube. I think I'm impressed that someone actually took the time to write that rap.

Technorati Tags: bike, cycling, gadgets, LA, music, mp3, video, youtube

The free and the not-so-free

"Let's Get Digital 1" is a free digital song compilation from Insound.

Two reports on the Red 4K camcorder from NAB (Part 1, Part 2). Peter Jackson shot a short movie with two Red prototypes to show in 4K at NAB, and a version of that should be available to download from Red.com in a couple days according to a forum post by Jim Jannard.

Also at NAB, Panasonic debuted the AG-HPX500, the big brother to the HVX200. The HPX500 shoots DVCPRO HD with 4:2:2 sampling on 3 2/3" CCDs, and unlike the HVX200 it accepts interchangeable lenses. It will retail for $14,000 which is good for what it does (though whether or not you agree depends on whether you're a pro in the biz or just your average joe).

Technorati Tags: camcorder, cinematography, filmmaking, gadgets, music, video

Bye tunes

A crippling blow to Internet radio. That's a damn shame.

Technorati Tags: internet, music, law, radio

Rodrigo Y Gabriela

I went to the KCRW Sounds Eclectic concert last night at the Gibson Ampitheatre in Universal City, an entertainment complex that sprouted up around Universal Studios sometime since my last visit when I was just a wee lad. The lineup went:
Bitter:Sweet
Breakestra
Cold War Kids
Rodrigo Y Gabriela
Travis (this year's unannounced guest)
Lily Allen
The Shins

Each group played about 7 tunes or so, a format that seems to encourage artists to play the biggest 2 or 3 new tunes off of their latest album plus a retrospective of their greatest hits.

The group that got the largest ovation was the Mexican acoustic guitar duo Rodrigo Y Gabriela. They were electrifying. You can hear samples at their Myspace page (try "Diablo Rojo"), but this is one group you have to see live. If you have speakers worth a damn, compressed audio won't do justice to their sound, and seeing their fingers and hands working into a frenzied blur will drop your jaw.

The propulsive pace of their first song got everyone's heads and feet tapping, and then they wove in a sweet cover of "Stairway to Heaven" that brought a hush down across the crowd. At one moment they even snuck in the opening cue from Metallica's "Enter Sandman"; it was there, a subtle flourish, and then they were on to the next bit. Not only is the music good, but they've got a flair and a sense of showmanship that really works. You don't have to take my word for it; more credible music names have already paid their tribute.

Here's a link to their latest album. A CD this good deserves a mongo image:

Rodrigo y Gabriela (with Bonus DVD)

Technorati Tags: concert, LA, music

Sometimes, the best things in life are free

As an experiment, The Washington Post asked Joshua Bell to pull out his Stradivarius violin and play, unannounced, at the L'Enfant Plaza Metro Station one morning. On January 12, for 43 minutes, that's just what he did. 1,097 people walked by him. How did they react, and how much money did he collect? Click through to find out (includes some amusing video clips).

Technorati Tags: art, classical, music, violin

Grab bag

Interview with the producer of Mad Hot Ballroom over the adventures of music clearance. Considering all the pitfalls, it's a miracle any documentaries get made.

Ha! Apple launches new product-unveiling product.

skrbl is a handy web-based whiteboard.

The NYTimes now offers a TimesSelect University Discount, free access to TimesSelect to those who have a .edu e-mail address.

Technorati Tags: Apple, documentary, humor, IP, movies, music, nytimes, web

Take two

Pirelli has produced another short film/ad, "Mission Zero," directed by Kathryn Bigelow and starring Uma Thurman and the Ultimate P Zero tire. It's no Point Break.

Sasha Frere-Jones analyzes the appeal of Arcade Fire in this week's New Yorker. Their latest album Neon Bible streets March 6.

Technorati Tags: ad, advertising, film, movies, music, newyorker, products, video

New Bloc Party

Over at Scenestars, stream the new Bloc Party album Weekend in the City.

Technorati Tags: music, blocparty

Jack is back, a bit earlier than anticipated

The first episode of the new season of 24 leaked out onto the Net. The torrent is out there. It took about 35 minutes and then I was sold on this season. Giddyup!

Stream the new Shins album.

Preview a track each from the upcoming albums by Arcade Fire, Modest Mouse, and The Good, the Bad and the Queen.

Links to loads of free classical music available online (in Ogg format)

Free album from Talib Kweli and Madlib called Liberation.

It was 72 degrees in Central Park yesterday, setting a new record.

Technorati Tags: 24, classical, free, globalwarming, mp3, music, torrent, tv, weather

Why is my suitcase always last to appear on the airport carousel?

MacRumors has a roundup of all the rumors surrounding next week's Macworld in San Francisco. With all the leaks and speculation, it's difficult for Apple to continue to surprise anyone at the show, but I'm hoping they still manage to.

Download two tracks off the new album by Air, Pocket Symphony. (thx to Wolf Notes)

Richard Dawkins calls the execution of Saddam Hussein an act of vandalism because it deprived us of the opportunity to study his mind, something Dawkins considers a prime piece of evidence in the study of cruel dictators. I have no idea if that's true--can one learn that much from an individual mind/brain?

Scientific American lays a popular myth to rest: peeing on a jellyfish sting doesn't do any good. Try a little vinegar instead.

Gracenote is working to license lyrics from all the major labels with an eye towards offering a legal, commercial, and accurate song lyric service to launch in early 2007. Good news for karaoke on the computer services (I don't actually know if there are any, but I'm sure there will be soon if there aren't already), though not as big a deal with all the unofficial lyric resources all over the web.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, music, mp3, science, tech

You too?

In the YouTube era, it seems as if everyone, even U2, has the equivalent of a dorky high school yearbook picture.

Technorati Tags: music, U2, video, youtube

RIP RA

Last week (or was it the week before?), on my way into school, I was listening to NPR when I heard that Robert Altman had passed away. We'd just watched a print of his Nashville the week before for class, and his passing saddened me much more than most celebrity deaths. He seemed like such an avuncular soul, and perhaps his death resonates so much because he was a director sui generis. Who else could have made Nashville? And who would've thought that Emilio Estevez, of all people, would try to channel Altman and Nashville?

Can you spot all 75 bands represented in this photo?

What policy issues do most economists agree on?

I saw Mabou Mines DollHouse tonight, a truly unconventional adaptation of Ibsen's A Doll's House, source of the most famous door slam in literary history. In this Lee Breuer version, all the male characters are played by little people, none taller than four and a half feet. The women, on the other hand, are played by very tall women. I don't see much avant-garde theater, but I recognize it when I see it. The only Ibsen play I've read is Hedda Gabler, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Krogstadt doesn't get a blow job from Kristine in Ibsen's original text. And I can't imagine another production of this play that could elicit more laughter. Not all of Breuer's choices spoke to me, but it's been a while since I've seen a production with as many ideas that got me thinking long after I'd left the theater.

Yep, there's no shortage of Obama 2008 paraphernalia at Cafe Press.

Technorati Tags: economics, film, filmmaking, movies, music, Obama, play, politics, barackobama, puzzle, theater

The Touch

Random bit of movie trivia I heard today: "The Touch," the song that Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) sings in Boogie Nights, is from The Transformers - The Movie (20th Anniversary Special Edition). It adds another layer of absurdity, or perhaps it's the cherry on top. The lyrics are truly a work of staggering banality.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, music

MOG

MOG.com allows you to inform the world of what music they've been playing on their computer. But most people probably don't care what music you're playing. They'll be more interested in the artist MOGs, to see what folks like Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie or Matthew Caws of Nada Surf or Tom Gray of Gomez have been listening to.

Technorati Tags: music

A little bit of that

James Surowiecki writes about how the powerful illusion of housing as a guaranteed investment winner persists. Some of the economic errors he points out in rising housing price statistics are so basic that you'd think they'd have been corrected long ago. Two examples are not adjusting housing prices for inflation and failing to account for housing improvements. Sample bias is another problem: data on housing prices comes only from houses sold and don't reflect houses that don't sell because the owners aren't happy with the market price.

A collection of links to blog posts apologizing for not having posted in a while. Funny. People probably overdo it on the blog absence apologies. People can probably figure it out: you're too busy, too lazy, or on vacation.

Soundtrack.net has song by song previews from the new Casino Royale score. Some tracks evoke early John Barry, and many of those early Bond cues from Barry evoke my childhood like no other movie themes. My dad loved James Bond movies, and I used to hate it when ABC or another network would air a Bond movie late on a weekday night because I'd always have to go to bed early for school and miss the ending. I don't know why so many people are down on the new Bond movie before it has even hit the big screen. It's arguably the most successful and durable film franchise in Hollywood history, and the mythology is still alluring: play with the most advanced gadgets, travel to the world's most exotic locations, save the world from the craziest of megalomaniacs, and bed the world's most beautiful women. It's just a twist on the superhero movie genre, one that surmises that if such a super spy existed he probably wouldn't be the shrinking violet that is Clark Kent or Peter Parker but rather a somewhat sadistic, cocky SOB who'd want to indulge in all the perks of the office. If the perks weren't there, who'd take the job?

David Lynch's daily LA weather reports return. I listened to it this morning and felt unusually happy about the good weather having heard about it from Lynch.

Clive Owen will play Sir Walter Raleigh opposite Cate Blanchett's Elizabeth I in the sequel to Elizabeth, The Golden Age. Both are actors I love. I saw Blanchett from the first row in a production of Hedda Gabler at BAM in Brooklyn, and she was awe-inspiring. I saw Clive Owen walking out of the Mercer Hotel in Soho about a year ago, and he confirmed what I suspected, that wherever he is, he's the coolest character in the joint. But it's not entirely coincidental that we'll have the bonus of a bit more heat from our modern incarnations of Sir Walter Raleigh and Elizabeth I. Sure, standards of beauty change over time, but come on. I think natural selection and the passage of time are working in our favor here. But judge for yourself:

Another Michel Gondry video

Not super new when you consider how quickly news travels on the Internet, but still.

For "Cellphone's Dead" by Beck. Here's a 43.6MB Quicktime, or you can look at the crappy flash video version on YouTube.

"The Hardest Button to Button"

Michel Gondry's video for the White Stripes' "The Hardest Button to Button" (Quicktime) was, as is par in Gondry's world, brilliant. The Simpsons' tribute to said video? Pretty damn good, too.

A team of Italians calling themselves HAL9000 has created an 8.6 gigapixel photograph of an Italian fresco by stitching together 1,145 pictures from a Nikon D2X. At 96,679 x 89,000 pixels, it's likely the largest digital image in the world, and on their website you can browse and zoom in on the image.

I know I'm late with this, but such is my school workload that I'm really out of it these days.: here's that controversial photo taken on 9/11 by Thomas Hoepker of Magnum Photos. Frank Rich wrote about it in the Times, then on Slate David Platz disagreed with Rich's interpretation, then two of the people in the photo wrote in to defend themselves against Rich and Hoepker's reading of the photo, and finally Hoepker himself weighed in. So in this case, a picture really was worth a thousand words or so.

1001 books you must read before you die--the list. Note that the book that the list is pulled from is not on the list itself, so it's a good thing the list is published on the web.

Hallelujah! Undercover Economist articles are finally available for free on the Financial Times website as of late September. Tim Harford is part of the transformation of economics into a sexy field.

How to turn your photos into Lichtenstein-esque pop art.

Hua Yang Nian Hua

Music video of "Hua Yang Nian Hua" as sung by Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Niki Ng. Originally only available on the French Region 2 collector's DVD of In The Mood For Love. Directed by Wong Kar Wai. May not be of much interest to most, but WKW fans tend to be completists.

Tangerine

Tangerine is a Mac OS X Tiger app that lets you create playlists in iTunes based on BPM and beat intensity patterns. Very cool.

The fashion equivalent of Superman donning his cape: from plain Jane to model in 60 seconds.

A washing machine commercial with a clever conceit (Quicktime).

OO5

This week's OO5 mix theme: "Pure Genius: songs with a legitimate claim to being the greatest pop song ever" (ZIP file)

Baby-sized bong sold separately

Rockabye Baby! Lullaby Renditions of Radiohead, because it's never too early to get your baby started down the road to music elitism (and I say that with all due respect, because I adore Radiohead). But if Thom Yorke and company aren't the direction you want your toddler leaning, there are analogous Rockabye Baby renditions of Coldplay, Metallica, Pink Floyd, The Cure, Tool, The Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, The Pixies, Bjork, Queens of the Stone Age, No Doubt, Smashing Pumpkins, and The Beatles.

Stereogum has one cut from Baby Rock Radiohead up temporarily - "No Surprises" (MP3)

Hey, everyone needs an occasional break from The Wiggles.

iTunes 7.0 crash-happy

I updated iTunes to 7.0 today, and now it crashes every time I try to play a song on my MacBook Pro. Not good, not stable. Just my environment?

Whatever it is, it's driving me nuts.

UPDATE: Looks like I'm not the only one. More complaints here. I would recommend waiting for 7.0.1 to upgrade unless you're dying to download movies.

An eclipse, or the end of the world?

What I've been listening to this week while trying to finish all my reading for class: Ray LaMontagne's Till the Sun Turns Black. Good, good stuff.

Happy Labor Day

A thorough explanation of why Chinese is so difficult to learn. I grew up hearing Chinese in the house and even attended some Chinese school, and I found it to be a bear. I never did really learn to write or read cursive Chinese handwriting very well (yes, Chinese has both print and cursive, like English), another item I'd add to this writer's litany of complaints. Just when you think you've memorized a character, someone scrawls it in their own cursive style and it's as if someone took a print character's brush strokes and tied them in butterfly knots. Of course, without cursive, writing Chinese, with its numerous strokes, is like writing English in neat block capital letters...sloooooooooow).

Curse of the Golden Flower, a movie by Zhang Yimou, starring Gong Li and Chow Yun Fat, releases this Christmas season (trailer). Yeah, I hate dandelions, too, but I wouldn't go so far as to call them a curse.

Crocodile hunter, felled by a stingray. Stung through the heart by a stingray...brutal. I guess it should be obvious from their names, but I didn't realize stingrays were that dangerous. Earlier this year, on a dive trip down in the Turks and Caicos islands, Dave and I fed stingrays just off the beach with some fish our guides had brought along for that purpose. We were soon overrun with stingrays, and one ran up my back and bit me. I popped out of the water, and Dave said the ray had drawn blood. Shortly thereafter, two lemon sharks wandered over, and I hustled out of the ocean.

Get your bootleg Van Goghs and Da Vincis: a city in China is the world's leading producer of reproductions of famous paintings. It doesn't surprise me one bit.

A computer program named WebCrow defeated dozens of human competitors in a crossword puzzle competition. Humans managed to defeat the program in two Italian crosswords featuring lots of puns and political clues.

That green lump that resembles playdough, the one they dump on your platter of sushi? That's not wasabi. Real, fresh wasabi is rarely served at sushi restaurants, but whenever a sushi restaurant offers it I'll request it. Real wasabi is not as hot as the faux stuff, but it's better for you. Unfortunately, the real deal costs a fortune.

Michael Apted's next in his Up documentary series is about to release. He interviewed many children at age 7 about their lives and dreams for 7 Up, and since then, he's gone back to check up on them every 7 years (each doc in the series is named after the age of the characters, so 14 Up, 21 Up, and so on). This next installment will be 49 Up. All the previous installments are on DVD.

The new Sunday Night Football theme (MP3) is by none other than John Williams.

Four words no man wants to hear: bleeding in the scrotum. It's been that kind of year for the Cubs.

HiveLive is a site that allows you to post and share files and information among public or private hives, or groups of people.

The Statistical Review of World Energy 2006, by British Petroleum, including historical data series in Excel format.

You got the touch! Feel, feel, feel, feel, feel...feel my heat!

To terrorize or not to terrorize

Two Tuesdays ago, I attended the NY premiere of the opera "Grendel." Elliot Goldenthal was the composer, and his partner Julie Taymor (seemingly most well-known for Broadway's musical "The Lion King" and for directing Titus and Frida and for her acclaimed production of Die Zauberflöte at the Met last year...my review of that here) was director, co-librettist, and puppet designer. George Tsypin, who collaborated with Taymor on Die Zauberflöte, reunited with her as set designer.

This was an adaptation of the novel by John Gardner that retells the story of Beowulf from the monster Grendel's perspective. I've not read the novel, but if the Goldenthal-Taymor adaptation was faithful, then both transform Grendel from a mindless beast into a Hamlet-esque brooder, an introverted philosopher wearied by the weight of his own thoughts. As with the revisionist musical Wicked, the opera traces his monstrous soul to mistreatment at the hands of cruel children in his youth because of his physical appearance.

I enjoy opera, but most are a bit long for me. It would be a lie to say I've survived all three hours of any German opera without my eyes and ears and mind wandering around the theater more than a few times. "Grendel," an English (of the new and Old variety) opera, is no exception, but a few things helped to focus my attention. Taymor/Tsypin always provide a dazzling palette for the eyes, and by the oohs and aahs of the opening night crowd, that might be enough in and of itself to earn a checkmark. Tsypin's main contribution is a gigantic, rotating wall with a pivoting cutout in the center that swings back and forth like a drawbridge. Taymor's puppets include those with her trademark geometric grandeur, including a massive dragon head. Constance Hoffman's costumes supply a pleasing contrast to the puppets, some of the other monsters in Grendel's cave looking like some first grader's terrifying crayon scrawls come to life.

I enjoy me some Taymor puppets dancing around Tsypin sets as much as the next guy, but the music is what stays with you. Goldenthal is most known to me for his film score work, and "Grendel" reminded me at moments of a Stravinsky-influenced film score. Much of the vocal line given to Grendel (hard-working bass Eric Owens, looking from my cheap seats like a man in a slate-colored body cast) reverberated past me, literally and figuratively, and I had to read the notes to the opera to catch all the nuances of the story.

At times, the opera includes a bit of welcome post-modern humor. I recall one scene, or perhaps it was the first act, ending with Grendel shouting, "Bullshit!" His first line upon appearing on stage: "And so begins the twelfth year of my idiotic war."

At the opera's conclusion, the crowd gave an enthusiastic ovation, and the snippets of conversation I heard in the mass exodus all concerned Taymor's puppets, Hoffman's costumes, and Tsypin's monolithic wall.

"Just beautiful, wasn't it?"

"Oh, it was just so gorgeous. Just wonderful to look at."

I won't go so far as to refer to "Grendel" as "The Lion King" for adults or with loftier aspirations, but sometimes I think you could set Taymor puppets on a Tsypin set to music from a CD and people would turn out eagerly, so visually starved are opera fans.

One benefit of attending opera (and theater) is that it's one of the few remaining social outings that makes me feel young, the average age of the audience at the Met skewing into another generation. One of the countless reasons I'm so depressed to be leaving NYC is that the Met's upcoming season includes more than one show I'd love to see: Anthony Minghella's interpretation of "Madame Butterfly," Tan Dun's "The First Emperor" starring Placido Domingo (with help on the libretto from novelist Ha Jin and some production assistance from Zhang Yimou), and Franco Zeffirelli's production of "La Boheme."

Gnotorious B.I.G.

Gnarls Biggie, the musical union of, well, you can guess. Up until the lawyers chase it into the shadows, where it will live forever because, you know, digitized content is like a cockroach in its survival capabilities.

The header from the footer

The Daily Mail hires a lipreader to decipher what Materazzi said to Zidane to provoke the header heard round the world. It turns out Materazzi called Zidane the equivalent of n***** and then said "we all know you are the son of a terrorist whore." And then, "So just f*** off." Given Zidane's Algerian background and quick temper, the headbutt is not at all shocking. I'm none too fond of Materazzi; he's a well-known punk. Still, I think if you're Zidane, you hold off on retaliation until after the game. Then, at the exchange of handshakes, you pull Materazzi's jersey over his head and then pound his face into the turf. It's not like this is the first time someone has used truly offensive trash talk to take another team's best player out of the game. If they miked more players in sporting events, people would be shocked at the type of things you hear on the playing field. [from Kottke]

In New York Magazine this week, a quick and dirty guide to happiness, with lots drawn from Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness, which I've just about finished. Among the tips of interest:

• Those who seize the first option that meets their standards (which don’t have to be low, just defined) are happier than those who insist on finding the perfect solution.
• Don’t go to law school. Lawyers are 3.6 times more likely to be depressed than members of other professions.
• Send the kids off to day care, summer camp, and boarding school. On a day-to-day basis, caring for children creates roughly the same level of satisfaction as washing the dishes.
• Take the local, and don’t wait for the express. Inaction gnaws away at the mind relentlessly.
• Order from the same takeout menu every time (as long as you're not ordering takeout every night of the week). Variety is the spice of life only for heavily repeated experiences.
• Take advantage of your exercise machine’s “cooldown period,” because adding a slightly less grueling epilogue to a grueling but valuable experience—like a workout—makes you more willing to repeat it in the future.

Bubblesnaps, a quick and dirty way to add speech or thought bubbles to your pics.

For Mac users, a way to play Quicktime videos in full screen without paying for Quicktime Pro.

An interesting dialogue at Slate between Jason Furman and Barbara Ehrenreich on the merits of Wal-Mart for the American working class. Decision goes to Furman, I think, though it's a bit of a mismatch as Ehrenreich acknowledges.

Ninja lessons [from Thrillist]

From Skype, for its US and Canadian users, 3 weekends of free SkypeOut calls to the UK, Mexico, and Japan.

Some nifty covers for download.

A more secure shoelace knot. I use another method that may be equivalent. I don't make two loops to tie my shoelaces. I make one loop and then tie the second lace around it once before pulling the second lace through to form the second loop. If I just swing the second lace around my thumb twice instead of once before pulling the second lace through, the knot never seems to come undone.

Parallels for Desktop for Mac is $49.99 through July 15, then its price goes up to $79.99. ArsTechnica gave it a positive review.

A Scanner Darkly

[SPOILER ALERT: Contains a spoiler or two, especially if you have not read the book, though the movie isn't really plot-twist-driven. It's not as if I'm going to reveal that Rosebud was a sled or that he's a ghost or anything of that magnitude.]

Wednesday night, I attended a preview screening of A Scanner Darkly at the Lincoln Center. After the movie, Robert Downey Jr. and Richard Linklater were to host a discussion about the movie.

Lingering jetlag zonked me out in the afternoon, and by the time I awoke from a long, long nap and rushed up to Lincoln Center on the subway, I was late for the event. Fortunately, these things never start on time, and I found a decent seat on the aisle. Ethan Hawks was directly ahead of me, two rows up. While catching my breath, I felt someone hovering over me in the aisle. I looked up and it was Keanu Reeves, chatting with someone who knew Rory Cochrane, one of the other actors in the movie.

I've heard Keanu speak a handful of times in person now, and he is an enigma with that awed surfer voice wrapping itself around such a wide range of ideas. I caught snippets, "So he can read Proust and Goethe in the original languages? That's fantastic." Seems like a nice guy.

Linklater was caught on an airplane so he missed the introduction which Robert Downey Jr. and Reeves provided instead. Downey Jr. is a huge talent, with boundless supplies of charisma, and the two of them warmed up the crowd with some improvised comic banter.

I have read some Philip K. Dick, but not A Scanner Darkly, so I can't comment on the faithfulness of the adaptation, but some of the guests addressed the issue in Q&A.

Notes from the Q&A, with guests Richard Linklater, Robert Downey Jr., Keanu Reeves, Jonathan Lethem, and PKD's daughter Isa:

• The first PKD novel Linklater ever read was Valis.
• After Waking Life and post 9/11, Linklater was searching for another use for the rotoscoping, and this PKD novel just felt timely.
• Though they used the same software as for Waking Life, they were able to generate more detail this time. Linklater noted that what they did was not pure rotoscoping; he refers to their process as interpolated rotoscoping.
• They use style sheets to maintain some consistency. As Linklater put it, style sheets told the animators, "This is how you draw Keanu's beard. This is how you draw Winona's..." [when he paused here, the crowd laughed, because Winona is topless, albeit in animated form, in some of the movie] "...jaw."
• Keanu was the one person on the set who had his nose in the book the whole time (Downey Jr. did not read the novel).
• Linklater wrote and rewrote as they went along, always trying to maintain the spirit of the book. Someone, I think it was Lethem, mentioned that when PKD first saw Blade Runner, he said that the movie was okay, but he wished that someone would make a movie that honored the ideas in his books. Lethem felt that A Scanner Darkly is the most faithful PKD adaptation ever, the only movie that honors the ambiguity and indeterminacy of PKD's work.
• Jonathan Lethem, a PKD expert, was consulted upon before production to help the cast and crew to understand PKD's vision.
• A Scanner Darkly is the most autobiographical of PKD's novels, a cautionary tale. PKD was addicted to amphetamines and saw many loved ones submit to drug addictions of one form or another. "If it wasn't for drugs, our dad would still be writing," said Isa. She found the end dedications to be the most moving part of the film because she knew the people referenced.
• With an $8 million budget, Linklater had to get Isa and the rest of PKD's family to agree to a lower option fee.
• Linklater screened the movie for Radiohead, and they liked it, so they allowed some of their music to be used in the soundtrack, including a single from Thom Yorke's new solo album The Eraser to run over the end credits.
• Downey Jr., jokingly, I think, on Linklater, "He's a monster. I know you're thinking he's such a nice guy, softspoken, sitting here, but he works you like a rib. 'You want lunch?! This is for PKD! His daughter is sitting right there!'"
• The biggest change they made in the movie versus the book is a twist in which Winona Ryder emerges from the second scramble suit, worn by Fred's superior on the force. It was an added twist, but one Linklater and others felt was still faithful to the spirit of the novel.
• Where did the title A Scanner Darkly come from? Isa thought it was from Biblical scripture, while Linklater thought it might refer back to the Bergman film (I assume he meant Through a Glass Darkly.
• The look of the movie was intended to be that of a graphic novel.
• Linklater never thought to do a live action version of the movie. "Someone could pull that off," said Linklater, "but I couldn't."
• Lethem liked the use of animation because "animation gives a more seamless division between reality and hallucination." Prose can do that better than most any medium. Photography is too literal. Animation helps moving pictures to capture language's potential for metaphor.
• A lot of famous faces were used as models for images on the scramble suits, including PKD. Something to play around with once the DVD comes out.
• The advantage of rotoscoping was that they could stick things in the scene that could just be ignored during animation, like microphones. It allowed Linklater and crew to focus on the scene as a whole while ignoring random details about getting the shot perfect, things which often consume so much time on set.
• The shoot itself, a 25 day shoot, went smoothly. Once they shifted to animation, they hit some snags. It took longer than expected to finish.

This is about as far from a popcorn movie as you'll find in theaters this summer, a departure since most PKD novels have been transformed into sci-fi action flicks. The movie is challenging in a way that other PKD film adaptations have not been. In making the central character an addict whose personality has been splintered by drug use, and in nesting one conspiracy inside another in a Russian doll of dark forces (government, pharma, the police, among others), Linklater and company have left the movie bereft of any easy emotional handle for the audience, no one character to identify with. The dialogue-to-action ratio might frustrate the average filmgoer. On the other hand, this movie stands as a testament to the idea that Hollywood can turn out animation for adults, animation about ideas.

If you've ever sat around listening to the seemingly meaningless babble of a group of stoned buddies, you have a sense of what it feels like to listen to watch much of this movie. It's occasionally hilarious, especially the verbal parrying between Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson, but often maddening and obtuse. The rotoscoping is effective at heightening the sense of reality's dissolution. Every moment on screen looks the same, whether it's a hallucination, a flashback, video on a surveillance screen, or reality. You can't tell one from the other. On the other hand, I occasionally wished I could see Downey Jr.'s character in live action. His face operates on a frequency that rotoscoping can't capture.

So finally, a most faithful PKD adaptation to the silver screen. PKD fans will rejoice, but the studio, I'm guessing, may not when box office receipts come in. I, for one, am glad we don't have another PKD story pillaged for an action dud like Paycheck.

Swimmin' with Dylan

Download the instrumental version of "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley, as well as "Nel Cimitero di Tucson," the spaghetti western track Danger Mouse sampled for Crazy. Something to tide us over while we wait for Paris Hilton's cover.

True height measures the effective height of a basketball player. Good news! Tyrus Thomas measures out as nearly a 7-footer in true height. I'm pumped up for the Bulls upcoming season, though it will still be ugly on offense.

Shina Tsukamoto's horror film novella Haze on Region 2 DVD.

Soundtrack.net has a sneak preview of James Newton Howard's score for Lady in the Water. Oddly enough, the soundtrack includes a bunch of Bob Dylan covers.

Wired Magazine has a profile of banned Tour de France technology. Most are just bikes that fall under the UCI minimum weight limit, though, and for a recreational cyclist that's nothing to get excited about. A few ounces here or there isn't going to turn the average club cyclist into a champ, and trying to descend a long, steep mountain on a featherweight bike is terrifying.

A long-standing conspiracy theory holds that the moon landing was staged, perhaps by Stanley Kubrick. The moon hoax is so popular that NASA had to address it.

Clemens-Liriano

On tap for tonight: Roger Clemens vs. Francisco Liriano, aging vs. young gunslinger.

The trailer for Borat.

Stream clips from Thom Yorke's upcoming album The Eraser, which releases July 11 in the US.

The White Sox are a good team, but Ozzie Guillen is a punk. Someone put a pacifier in his mouth. Can we get Jack Nicholson to order the code red? Of course, his efforts to defend his use of a homosexual slur have the entertainment value of a car accident:

[Guillen] also said that he has gay friends, goes to WNBA games, went to the Madonna concert and plans to attend the Gay Games in Chicago.

WNBA games and a Madonna concert! Gay friends! Pin a rainbow medal on him. Of course, no one really likes Jay Mariotti, either, so this is either a win-win or a lose-lose situation, I can't tell which.

Mixed nuts

"Happy Mornings" is a commercial for Folgers, though it's difficult to see how.

The winner of Bruce Schneier's Movie-Plot Threat Contest involves the destruction of Grand Coulee Dam, triggering a chain reaction that knocks out the rest of the dams on the Columbia River and leaves the West Coast without power for months, taking down the U.S. economy in the process.

Well, if the terrorists do go after Hoover Dam, perhaps our best hope is to send in the Transformers, who are already doing work at Hoover Dam. On that note, is this test footage of Optimus Prime from the new Transformers movie?

As for terrorist plots, the one that's scaring New Yorkers right now is the aborted plot to gas NY subways (as described by Ron Suskind in his new book The One Percent Doctrine, excerpted in the latest issue of Time).

Not new, but still cool music video: man juggles in time to Fatboy Slim's "That Old Pair of Jeans" (thx Ken). That's one of the two new tracks on Fatboy Slim's greatest hits album Why Try Harder, releasing tomorrow.

The new Apple "I'm a Mac" ads are clever and funny. But are they all that effective in moving Windows users over to Macs, or do they just preach to the converted? I'm with Stevenson, I think it's the latter.

Raising children doesn't make one happy. In fact, when children finally leave the next, parents experience an uptick in happiness. So writes Daniel Gilbert in an essay for Time. But, he notes, that capacity for humans to sacrifice for the good of their children is why we have holidays like Father's Day. At his weblog, Gilbert includes footnotes for those interested in delving more deeply into the research cited. Gilbert is the author of Stumbling on Happiness, a fascinating book I've just started reading this past week.

At Winged Foot this weekend, a score of 5 over par won the U.S. Open. That's not entirely surprising as the U.S. Open always has the toughest setup of the four golf majors. As long as the course is equally tough for everyone, the final score relative to par doesn't matter. But Matthew Rudy of GolfDigest.com feels this year's setup rewarded robotic play, with little decision-making required, and punished the world's true best players. Ron Sirak of Golf World disagrees.

He Poos Clouds

Listen to clips from the new album from Final Fantasy He Poos Clouds, featuring vocals from Arcade Fire's violinist Owen Pallett over a string quartet. Pallett is an unabashed nerd--son of two entomologists, he scored a videogame at the age of twelve and two operas by the age of twenty-one--and this album is an attempt to modernize each of the eight Dungeons & Dragons schools of magic. Yep.

iToors sounds cool in concept--Podcasts for travelers to various cities--though the content on the site is still skimpy. For now there are podcasts for Paris, Prague, London, Glasgow, and Santa Monica(?!). The site also has a search engine for suggesting books, movies, and music to accompany a trip to each city, though again the cupboards are still quite bare. I'll withhold judgment until I hear their NYC podcasts, releasing sometime this next month. In general, though, I think the podcast market for travelers is underserved right now, especially having just returned from a month long trip in which my iPod was a permanent fixture. No podcast can replace a seasoned guide who can answer questions that pop into your head as you stroll around town, but a podcast is sure to be cheaper.

Handy list of useful Mac OS X freeware.

The Flock web browser beta is now available. It's a Mozilla-based browser with built-in features to simplify common web activities like bookmarking, blogging, newsreading, and photo-browsing.

Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Three Times, which I saw the NYFF in 2005, is playing in a few theaters around the country. The movie comprises three shorts, each starring Shu Qi and Chang Chen as lovers, in 1966, 1911, and 2005. Though the overall movie is uneven (the second segment was a bit inert), the first segment, "A Time For Love," is romantic, gorgeous, and unforgettable. The movie's trailer is here (Quicktime). You can get a flavor of Hou's tranquil lyricism from his commercial for Air France also (click "Voir les films TV" and then "Le Ponton"), a commercial I saw more than a few times while traveling through E. Europe.

A glitzy annual benefit to sponsor breast cancer research is titled What A Pair! We may not have found the cure yet, but there's no shortage of cringe-inducing puns.

Cat Power at Town Hall (June 9, 2006)

I took friends to see Cat Power last Friday night at Town Hall. I'd seen her once before, a long time ago, opening for Liz Phair, and I braced my friends for the worst. Cat Power, real name Chan (pronounced Shawn) Marshall, is notorious for her sometimes jumbled concerts and jittery onstage persona. When her Memphis Rhythm Band appeared on stage and began playing, the microphone standing there alone at the center of the stage, I tensed. Maybe Marshall had decided not to come onstage? Maybe, like Eminem in 8 Mile, she was throwing up in a backstage bathroom, overcome with stage fright?

The band consisted of two guitars, a bass, two violins, a cello, drums, two backup vocalists, a piano, saxophone, and trumpet/coronet(?). I may even be leaving someone out. After an overture or two from the band, they jumped into the opening bars of "The Greatest." Still no Cat.

And then she appeared from stage right, barefoot, dressed in a sleeveless black top and black capri-like pants, dancing around like the crazy alternative girl you see on the dance floor grooving, doing her own thing, the one you think might be crazy but who is also unsettlingly alluring. She jumped into "The Greatest," flashing a smile and flexing her biceps after the opening line: "Once, I wanted to be the greatest." We had a perfect view from our seats in the sixth row, center Orchestra.

That voice. It seems to carry a built-in reverb, a raw purr that, like its owner, seems sexy, wistful, and fragile all at once. Having heard her mostly on CD up until now, it was clear during this concert that her voice is best appreciated live, in performance, when its warm density gives it a texture that seems palpable. On a cold night you could wrap it around yourself like a blanket of smoke.

For most of the concert, she seemed happy and at ease on stage, prowling back and forth on the stage, standing on her tiptoes, gesturing with her arms like Q’Orianka Kilcher's Pocahontas in The New World. Whispered speculations and the requisite drug use jokes could be heard from time to time in the seats nearby us, but I think she was much more at ease on stage than I remembered her being the last time I saw her. Her band and her fans seemed to be encouraging her, cushioning her, trying to blanket her with their love like they would a newborn infant.

Mid-concert, she disappeared midway through the ballad "Where Is My Love," leaving the band to carry the tune for an extended series of reprises. Finally, after everyone in the band had done their turn, a few members of the band could be seen peering towards stage right. "Where is my love?" sang one of the backup vocalists, and she shrugged as the audience realized that even the band had no idea where Marshall had disappeared to.

When she finally reappeared, I almost didn't recognize her. She had changed into a white strapless dress, and she'd pulled her hair back, allowing her attractive face to come out from behind her bangs. I was aware of a new train of thought disrupting my focus on the music. Cat Power was hot.

It's like revisiting an old high school buddy years later and discovering that his little sister has grown up to become a knockout. Perhaps the bangs are a security blanket, or a defense mechanism, but with her hair pulled back, Marshall was like a gangly but lovely swan. She sang the refrain one last time and brought the song to a close, and then the band left her alone on stage. She proceeded to sing a few songs alone, on guitar or the keyboard, and for the first time the fidgety Cat Power returned.

She started one song, and while strumming the guitar just ended it abruptly, saying, "Anyway." She started another tune, stopped and asked someone to remove a rolling snare, started the song again, then stopped to complain about a buzzing monitor. She fiddled with her guitar strap. Later, the keyboardist Rick Steff(?) gave her a smooch on her lips, and when he had his back to her, she wiped her lips as if grossed out (Steff, or whoever it was, seemed very touchy-feely with Cat Power, adding a creepy subtext to their interplay).

But Marshall never seemed at risk of falling over the edge. At one point, after moving her cup of water back and forth a few times like someone with OCD, she joked about herself, "Whatever keeps you sane!" At another point, she smiled between songs and proclaimed, "Sober!" From time to time she'd wave at friends in the crowd, and that voice. She covered The Animals "House of the Rising Sun" by herself, just a guitar to accompany her voice. It was lovely. Her voice needs little adornment, and using it she not only covers songs but makes them all her own.

She came back onstage for one encore, and then she was gone. As I filed out, I felt relaxed, all the tension having drained out of me. Our little baby had grown up.

Cover up

A list of exceptional cover songs, complete with MP3 downloads of the originals and the covers, so you can judge for yourself.

If, like me, you love seafood, especially fish, you'll find this updated list of guilt-free fish a handy reference. All these types of seafood are low in contaminants and not overfished. Here's an accompanying article. Put your fork down, your hands up, and back away from the Chilean sea bass.

If you go to the Nacho Libre website and navigate to the Nacho Libre Confessional, you can watch video clips from the set, starring Jack Black. Some of the episode titles of this video podcast include "Prelude to a waxing" and "Montezuma's Revenge." Just seeing Jack Black in costume, with the mustache, acts as sort of a comedic colonic.

Samples of the 6 new Microsoft typefaces.

A super score returns

SoundtrackNet reviews the new Superman Returns soundtrack by John Ottoman and offers sample clips from each track. I don't have high expectations for the movie as a whole, but two aspects of it really excite me. One is that 20 minutes of the movie, mostly action sequences, will be shown in IMAX 3D. The other is hearing some of John Williams' classic Superman cues revived for the big screen.

Use Javascript to add sidenotes to your web page. Awesome. I'll have to implement this since I'm so parenthetical happy.

It's not always better to buy than rent. Chris offers this rule of thumb: For every $100 you spend in rent a month, you�d be better off buying up to $12,500 in property instead. Tim Harford discussed the rent vs. buy decision recently and noted that renting has many hidden benefits.

8 special edition new flavors of M&M's, all with cutesy puns for names like Eat, Drink, & Be Cherry or Orange-U-Glad. I'm a sucker for limited edition candies, but $49.99 for a tin?

The folks behind the book The Wages of Wins: Taking Measure of the Many Myths in Modern Sport apply their metrics to Michael Jordan and confirm the popular opinion: he was the best ever.

"The West Wing" and some other TV notes

[SPOILER WARNING: If you didn't watch last Sunday's ep of "The West Wing" and don't know who won the election, then don't read ahead]

Just caught up on the last episode of "The West Wing." I was surprised to read that the ending was changed after John Spencer's death. I'd always assumed Santos would win. If Spencer hadn't passed away, I would have been wrong.

I've never tried to rank my favorite TV shows of all time, but if I did, "The West Wing" would be in the top five, no doubt. In its first two seasons, it was the best show on television. Everything I wrote about the show in my review of the first season DVD boxset for Amazon.com still stands. Not many shows can break the half-hour-sitcom/one-hour-police-medical-legal-drama stranglehold and create a dozen or more distinct and memorable characters. The show even restored American faith in politicians, albeit fictional ones (do a Google search for "The West Wing" and the actual real-life West Wing won't appear until the third page of results). Though it lost its footing for a season or two after Sorkin left, it found a compelling new overarching story arc when it transitioned from focusing on the old administration to centering on the election. Old characters found new roles, and the show won me back. Not too many shows jump the shark and then claw their way back.

When NBC announced that they weren't going to pick up another season, it freed the show to wrap up some loose ends. One of those, of course, was Josh and Donna's seasons' long flirtation. It's a measure of how dear the characters of the show are to me that their hookup (at long last!) made me happier than any culmination of a long-thwarted romance in my TV history (David and Maddie, Fox and Dana, and others that now escape my mind). A tenet of TV writing says that you shouldn't allow a romance to bloom between two of your main television characters lest you pop the bubble of sexual tension keeping your show flying high. But that tactic itself has become so widespread and predictable as to be moldy.

It makes sense to end the show now, as the Bartlet administration wraps up its second term, and yet I'll be more than a bit sad when I hear the theme song (MP3) for the last time (the last episode airs May 14; I hope they put the West Wingers in their finest formal wear for one last swanky affair before season's end). When they air Leo's funeral next week, I'll be wearing black. When old familiar faces like Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) and Amy Gardner (Mary-Louise Parker) pop back in for a visit, I'll feel like I'm reuniting with old friends.

Once the screen goes dark on The West Wing for the last time, and the credit appear, I'll miss them, in part because it doesn't feel like people like that exist in the real Washington, D.C.

***

Everyone could sense Vito was headed for a fall. But holy Bada Bing, I never saw that coming. Truly a moment for the TV scrapbook.

***

I've only seen the first two episodes of Big Love. When the show was announced, the premise didn't really hook me, but HBO as a brand name gets the benefit of the doubt with their one hour dramas, so I let my DVR file it away for later review. After two eps, I'm not ready to make any sweeping judgments, but the acting is exceptional.

Tim Harford wrote recently in Slate about the economics behind polygamy, or more specifically in the case of Big Love, polygyny.

Boot Camp

Mac Boot Camp Beta, a preview of the software in Leopard that will allow you to run Windows XP on an Intel-based Mac.

That strange falling sensation when you sleep? It's a hypnagogic myoclonic twitch.

A NYTimes Magazine profile of The Wiggles, my nephew's favorite band.

JPod

JPod is Douglas Coupland's update of his novel Microserfs for the Google age. Since Microserfs is one of my favorite books, I'm going to be handing over some dough for this update. You can pre-order JPod from Amazon.com, or read more, including an excerpt, at the book's website. Bloomsbury offers a special edition which comes with a limited edition JPod figure from The Cubes, which makes hip little toys to decorate your cubicle.

Among the content at the book's website is the Pod playlist:
"High Art, Local News" by The New Pornographers
"I Am Not Surprised" by The Organ
"586 (BBC Peel Session)" by New Order
"Music is Math" by Boards of Canada
"Happy Cycling" by Boards of Canada
"Douglas Coupland" by The Beekeepers
"Dazzle Ships" by OMD
"Can You Do That Dance" by The Pink Mountaintops
"Voodoo Child" by Rogue Traders
"I Die You Die" by The Magnetic Fields
"Ready Steady Go" by Paul Oakenfold
"Homosapien" by Pete Shelley
"Time Zones" by OMD
"Sixtyten" by Boards of Canada
"The Temples of Syrinx" by Rush
"Girl" by Beck
"The Battle of Evermore" by Led Zeppelin
"In the Year of 2025" by Zager and Evans
"You Spin Me Round" by Dope
"1969" by Boards of Canada
"I Used to Love Her" by Guns ‘N’ Roses
"International" by OMD
"Poets" by The Tragically Hip
"Time Zones" by Negativland
"Canada Geese" by Gordon Downie

Yeah Yeah Yeah, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Heat Vision and Jack...oh yeah

Tomorrow (well, I guess it's today now), the Flaming Lips will release the video for the "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" on their website. It's the first track of their new album At War With the Mystics. It's a damn infectious song, and you can stream it off of their site by navigating to the Music tab.

UPDATE: Actually, the video is up at Yahoo. It didn't play for me; maybe that's why I've never heard of Yahoo Music.

You can also stream the Yeah Yeah Yeahs new album Show Your Bones in NME's media player (you may have to register and navigate to it, but that helps to select the true believers). Their last album Fever To Tell had some gems, and they were even better in concert when I saw them in Seattle in, oh, I think it was 2003, when they opened for The White Stripes. Fugly venue (Seattle Convention Center), incredible show. Karen O and her mates make music that bring out the happy rock star in all of us, and whenever my iPod tees up one of their tunes, my toe starts tapping. Oddly, Amazon only carries the import right now and shows a release date of April 4, which is really odd (I pinged some of my old mates to see what's up). The album came out yesterday--you can find it most anywhere, and you will, if you know what's good for you.

UPDATE: Okay, Amazon does carry Show Your Bones, and for only $9.96. It had dropped out of the search index for some reason, but it's there.

The pilot episode of the canceled 90's show "Heat Vision and Jack" is online at YouTube. Ben Stiller produced, Jack Black starred as an ex-astronaut named Jack Austin whose last mission had transformed him into a genius, and Owen Wilson voiced the talking motorcycle Heat Vision (actually inhabited by the soul of Jack's old roommate Doug). What cracks me up is the temp music snaked from Craig Armstrong.

Good things come in threes, so this fourth news item is the downer. Mitch Hurwitz has given up on Arrested Development, so as far as anyone's concerned, the show has officially been pronounced brain dead.

Money

Out of 5, which was out of bandwidth, is out of hibernation...money.

As always, while Hollywood studios hem and haw and dip thier toes in the HD-DVD pool, their less timid counterparts in the video industry have already dived in, sans swimwear.

Chef sleeps with the fishes. I really expect that sometime in the next few years, Trey Parker and Matt Stone will die within a few hours of each other, under mysterious circumstances. At that same moment, Tom Cruise and/or Mel Gibson will be at their child's baptism.

61 Chinese children were adopted by Americans in 1991. By last year, that number had grown to 7,906.

I was hoping for something like the BMWFilms, but the Pirelli Film "The Call"? Eh, not so much.

Download four MP3s from new It band Band of Horses.

Deep Note

These past few months, I've been staring at a computer screen for so many hours that my vision is starting to go. I find myself wearing my glasses more and more often, and though they are so mild as to be almost cosmetic, it still feels like a defeat. The default font size in Final Cut Pro is tiny, but thus far, I've refused to give in and blow it up. A few times during the day, I go and stare out the window and try to focus on something far off in the distance. Inevitably, my visual target remains blurry, much the way some childhood memories become with each passing year.

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I try to refrain from political ranting here, but it does amaze me how much our Prez seems to get away with. Even when he's caught in bald-faced lies, even when he's wiretapping us, even when the iconic image of the Iraq war the world over is of a prisoner being tortured, the next day it always seems to be back to normal (V for Vendetta, which I saw last Thursday night at the Lincoln Square IMAX, is more than a bit absurd, but that any of it even has any resonance with the current administration is outrageous). Perhaps there's some sort of political equilibrium point, such that a constant onslaught of negative news tends to diminish each in significance, the way that most people in the world rate themselves as roughly equal in happiness, despite the wide disparity in living conditions.

Well, "incompetent" is at least a start.

***

An alcohol concentration of 60% or higher seems to be the magic number for off-the-shelf hand sanitizers.

***

I know kung fu. Not quite. But sort of.

***

Wake-up calls from Maria Sharapova? Did anyone else try these or was I the only doofus? This supplied some of the motivation I needed on my voyage back from graveyard shift hours to normal hours. Unfortunately these seem to have been discontinued.

***

Tonight I went to the premiere of Lucky Number Slevin at the Ziegfeld Theater. I hadn't seen a movie at the Ziegfeld before; it's gorgeous. The screen isn't as massive as that of Cinerama, but the seats and interior are much more cozy and plush, with a classy old school styling, and the sound system is first rate. Definitely the nicest theater I've visited in NYC, though the Lincoln Square IMAX is impressive as well, more for its technical specifications.

Back to the movie. I saw it at Sundance in January, but what I'd forgotten is that the soundtrack is by J. Ralph, his first effort for the silver screen. He's most well-known from his song "One Million Miles Away," featured in the famous Volkswagen Jetta commercial "Big Day" (Quicktime). You can hear "One Million Miles Away" and other J. Ralph tunes at his website (which allows you to stream most of his tunes) or on his MySpace page (which only streams four of his songs).

His Lucky Number Slevin soundtrack is ear-catching. For some reason, he appears to have something against Amazon.com as the soundtrack is an exclusive to Barnes and Noble. It releases next Tuesday.

As I was seated and waiting for the movie to start, my phone rang. I thought it was Scott, who'd promised to call when he'd made it into the theater, so I immediately picked up and said, "I'm in row F, seat 12."

"Um, I'm looking for Eugene Wei?"

"Yep, I'm in row F, seat 12, I just stood up. You see me waving?"

"Uh, no. Actually, I'm calling from ___, and I wanted to chat with you about your application. I'm a professor there."

"Oh. Oops. Oh my gosh. I'm so sorry."

We went on to have an over-the-phone interview in the theater, while throngs of people milled about socializing and looking for their seats. Thankfully these things never start on time, and everyone was absorbed with scanning the theater for any of the many stars in the movie. My mind was racing and the environment was distracting. Maybe I should have postponed the call. Too late now; I'll be second-guessing myself for a few weeks.

He seemed like a really friendly guy. His specialty was sound, and he'd done lots of work for THX. I told him my favorite THX trailer, other than the original Deep Note (WMV), was the one featuring The Simpsons, the one that ends with Grampa Simpson standing up and shouting, "Turn it up! Turn it up!". I've never been able to find that on DVD, though he said it was out there somewhere. The THX Deep Note is one of my ten favorite sounds in the world. When I hear it, I just stand up and raise my arms in joy, always embarrassing for whoever is with me at the movie theater.

Someday, at the symphony, I'd love it if the orchestra, just before beginning the concert, all joined in to play the THX Deep Note, maybe before playing something like Shostakovich's 5th.

A for Antony, C for Cat

Preview clips from the new soundtrack to V for Vendetta, with score by Dario Marianelli (fresh off an Oscar nom for his score to Pride and Prejudice). Also on the soundtrack are tracks by Cat Power (her cover of The Velvet Underground's "I Found A Reason" from The Covers Record) and Antony & The Johnsons ("Bird Gerhl").

Looking forward to catching the flick in IMAX. Nat P with the shaved head..."damn, Natalie, you a crazy chick!" That's hot.

Stroked

Wednesday night I went to the Strokes' first concert of their 2006 tour at the Hammerstein Ballroom. Great show, and I don't have anything to add to Stereogum's summary of the concert (and setlist). The last time I saw The Strokes was in 2003 in Seattle at the Exhibition Center, just an awful place to see a concert.

The Strokes came complete with their own fly girl, Lucy Liu, dancing up a storm in the lower stage left box with uber-Strokes-celeb-groupie Drew Barrymore, who was content to tilt her head back and mouth the lyrics towards the ceiling with a stoned grin while squeezing a cigarette between her fingers.

I left the show with just the right amount of deafness in my ears and blood racing through my head. I want to be Julian.

Hoth 2014

The Chappelle Theory: "He knew that at the same time he was signing his record-setting deal, there was a secret cabal of powerful African-American leaders from the business, political, and entertainment industries working together to ensure that the third season of Chappelle's Show would never happen."

It's not too early to start campaigning for the Winter Olympics. Ice planet of Hoth, 2014!

FoxiPod uses Greasemonkey with Firefox to allow you to download MP3s directly into iTunes, something I'd been wishing I could do in Firefox for a long time. Safari dumps MP3s into iTunes already, but when doing so it initiates playback right away which can be disruptive.

Curling audio clip mash-up (MP3). Sure seemed like curling got a love of media love, even if in jest, this year.

Judith Harris first came to prominence for her groundbreaking book The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, which argued that a children's peers were far more influential on their personality development than their parents. Now Harris has written a new book, No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality, which updates and builds on her earlier work. I look forward to reading it.

Whatever People Say I Am Thats What I Am Not

Google Pages is a free, online web page creation tool.

Whatever People Say I Am Thats What I Am Not, the mega-hyped new album from maybe the most hyped new band of the last year, released yesterday. The good news is the album is a whole lot of damn fun, and the hype is forgivable because the band allowed MP3s of their tunes to float around the Internet for a long time before they released their work. That helped to build the buzz and a fan base. Even before their CD released, they sold out a few concerts in NYC before most people could hit redial on their phone. It helps to be good, yes, but it also helps to realize how to feed the machine that is the Web hype monster with some choice cuts. Cheap, efficient marketing.

NYTimes food critic Frank Bruni reviews NYC's midtown Hooters in his new blog. "They may wear skimpy attire, but they have big hearts."

The Manhattan Trader Joe's could be opening in mid-March, ahead of schedule. Some localization will occur: Two-buck Chuck will be three-buck Chuck due to Manhattan inflation.

Tiger Woods annihilates his first opponent in The Accenture Match Play Championship, 9 & 8 (basically, Tiger won every hole of the match, nine in a row, with 7 birdies and 2 pars). Even I, with my terrible game, might have been able to eek out a tie on one hole on the front 9. Before the match, Ames had made a comment about Tiger's driving to the press, saying, "Anything can happen, especially where he's hitting the ball." After the match, when asked if he had any response to Ames' comments, Tiger responded, "9 & 8." Just this once, it would have been great if trash talking was allowed in golf. Every time Tiger sank a birdie putt, he could've turned to Ames and said, "How do you like where I hit that ball, you $*@#!?" Everyone knows if trash talking were allowed, Tiger would be even more dominant than he is. He'd be like Jordan, just cruel and relentless.

I forgot to point out yesterday that Sports Guy's latest column, summarizing his NBA All-Star Weekend trip, was awesome.

236 phrases/keywords censored by a Chinese blogging service. Among them:

• Set fires to force people to relocate
• Hire a killer to murder one's wife
• Fetus soup

A word from our sponsors

I stuck a few Adsense text links in the right column. I tried to keep ads off of this page, but in the past half year I've been hit with a lot of traffic overage fees, about $5 a month, and I've always wanted to run this site wallet-neutral. In the past my Amazon associates rev has covered enough of my hosting fees that I didn't bother with ads. I have two suspicions about the Adsense text links. One is that they'll need to be more prominent than they are now to generate much revenue, if any, and the second is that my blog content may not be topically constrained enough to generate many relevant Adsense links (Google offers tools to test the latter, and a few trials haven't turned out much). But for the time being, I'll keep them subtle and minimal, and if one strikes your fancy, do click through and help a brother out. At any rate, when I finally get around to the site redesign I keep putting on the back burner, I'll figure out what to do with them.

Even bobsledders use steroids. That strikes me as really odd. If you're one of the guys in back, isn't your primary skill to sit?

NBC is not covering the Olympics live, and that's a problem in this day and age. A quick peek at ESPN or any major news site online or on TV and you can't help but find out who all the winners are going to be later that evening. I have no idea why they aren't doing live broadcasts on NBC. On the East Coast, NBC replays its primetime coverage from something like 12:30am to 5:00am, for no apparent reason. Why not a live broadcast and then a primetime replay? Even NBCOlympics.com's online video clips are delayed in order to not ruin things for the network. The tail's wagging the dog.

I had a friend in town on Sunday, and at dinner she said that I'd never guess what her favorite new TV show was. I said Grey's Anatomy. I was right. It wasn't difficult since every girl I know watches that show. It's the new Sex in the City, complete with Ellen Pompeo providing Carrie-esque voiceovers. Their big push to grab onto the coattails of the Super Bowl worked, though, as many guys who had the game on were forced to watch the show with the ladies afterwards (like me). An artillery shell in the gut? Are you kidding me? What a McGuffin.

Two movie soundtracks I enjoyed recently: Syriana and Mysterious Skin.

Throttled?

Though Netflix was sued for throttling the releases to super heavy customers, I still think they practice some form of damage control from their "best" customers. The original settlement was a month of allowing all customers to rent 4 DVDs per month at the 3 DVD per month rate, but if they failed to cancel after a month, they'd be charged for the 4 DVD per month rate. It was a terrible settlement for customers, and the last I heard, some judge called them on it and reopened the case.

Usually, if I mail back a movie, it takes a day to get to Netflix, and then a day for the next movie to come back to me, so if I mail a movie back on Monday, I receive a new one Wednesday. Last week I mailed back one movie on Tuesday and two movies on Thursday, and I still haven't received any in return. To add insult to injury, Netflix mailed me a survey asking me on Feb 4 asking if I'd received the movie on Feb 6 or Feb 7.

If Netflix is still throttling its heaviest renting customers, then I'd be really disappointed. That's such a short-sighted business move. The loss of goodwill from the customers that most appreciate your service is bound to cost them more than the cost of fulfilling a few extra DVDs a month.

***

Even the Chinese (or maybe especially the Chinese) are not happy with the decision to cast Chinese actresses as Japanese geishas in Memoirs of a Geisha. So the Chinese government simply canceled the movie's release. Of course, this matters little since everyone in the country will watch it on $1 bootleg DVDs anyway.

***

It's high time someone on the Internet came up with this: build your own Oscar pool. Or you can join mine.

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Stream the new Beth Orton CD, Comfort of Strangers, if you can. On my Mac, only Safari among my browsers could digest the AOL player.

***

Cat Power and concert tours, they just haven't proved to be a good match. The streak continues.

Modafinil

Finally, the Nike swift suit tech has trickled down to the cycling masses, though it will cost you dearly to don the aerodynamic suit worn by Lance Armstrong and his mates in Tours past. It's winter now, so what I really need is the swift suit parka, so I can shave time from my three block commute to the subway.

Now I know what Jack Bauer is on.

Stream the new album by The Editors, The Back Room

Raconteurs

Chuck Klosterman blogs the Super Bowl week for ESPN.

Jack White and Brendan Benson are The Raconteurs (via Stereogum).

A new Malcolm Gladwell article, this one on police profiling. It's been a while since he's published.

The Greatest

New Cat Power album The Greatest out this week (yes, endorsement implied).

By the numbers

Just for giggles and kicks, and out of curiosity, I asked Alex Ross, one of the New Yorker's music critics, for his favorite symphonies by number. So for each number from 1 through 9, which composer's symphony of that number was his favorite? He responded with the following:

No. 1: Nielsen [1]
No. 2: Stravinsky (Symphony of Psalms)
No. 3: Beethoven (Lutoslawski close runner-up)
No. 4: Shostakovich
No. 5: Sibelius
No. 6: Vaughan Williams
No. 7: Mahler
No. 8: Dvorak
No. 9: Schubert [2]

That's a great list that includes five symphonies I have yet to hear. If I have time later this week I'll try and link to some great recordings of each.

Ross has a great weblog for music fans, especially classical music buffs, called The Rest Is Noise. Here's Ross's best of the year in music lists. Here's another Best of 2005 list, courtesy of Ross's fellow New Yorker music critic Sasha Frère-Jønes. And, while I'm at it, Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums of 2005.

[1] Bruckner wrote a Symphony No. 0, the "Nullte". It was published posthumously and was likely actually the second symphony Bruckner wrote, though he shelved it.
[2] Beyond No. 9, only a few composers are left in the running (Shostakovich through No. 15, and Mozart and Haydn beyond that).

WhatTheFont?

I haven't tested this, but it sounds cool. Upload an image of some text to identify the font.

Artists and poets do it better. Or at least more. Yes, confusions of causality and whatnot. I suspect actors like Colin Farrell and Waren Beatty were classified as artists, skewing the data set.

Some new Google Extensions for Firefox: Google Safe Browsing (phish repellent), and Blogger Web Comments.

Sneak listen to John Williams score for Munich. As a fan of the oboe, I fancy #8, "Avner and Daphna."

This American Life downloads via a Greasemonkey script.

The Chronic of Narnia Rap from SNL (takes a long time to load, but worth it, and the fact that you have to vouch for an SNL clip link is itself a comment on the sad state of affairs over there).

The Word

James Surowiecki calls a foul on the U.S. patent system. Also in this week's New Yorker, a short story by Nabokov: "The Word".

Time magazine's Persons of the Year: Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono.

SwarmSketch: collective art on the web.

Beck's video for "Hell Yes" features all four working Sony QRIO robots performing a fan dance (see the video by going to Beck.com > Videos > "Hell Yes"). Domo arigato, mister robotos. Since Beck loves performing the robot when he performs, I thought the robots might accompany him in that. Robots performing the robot...guess I'll have to wait until I have a QRIO of my own to pull that off.

ITSM

All the cool kids (web dorks) will be cranking out iTunes signatures today, thanks to Jason Freeman. iTSM cranks out a representative montage of song clips from your iTunes library based on criteria you select, like play count or rating. C'est chouette, hein? Makes a great "name as many tunes in this as possible" contest clip generator.

Background on the relationship between J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and how Tolkien convinced Lewis to switch to only using initials for his first name. Wait--I meant how Tolkien was instrumental in converting Lewis to Christianity, their friendship, and their eventual falling out. Sounds like fodder for a movie, with Anthony Hopkins reprising his role as Lewis and Ian McKellen as Tolkien.

The trailer for Sofia Coppola's Mario-Antoinette is out. Set to "Age of Consent," from the best New Order album, Power, Corruption, & Lies. The musical choice feels SCoppola-esque, non? When Sarah Flack came to speak to our class, she mentioned that she was in the midst of editing it, and we all thought, "I wish I was Sarah Flack." And I added, "I bet she has health insurance."

One of my favorite music videos of all time is Gondry's video for "Like a Rolling Stone" by the Stones. This short article discusses the making-of, and the video is part of the awesome DVD Director's Series, Vol. 3 - The Work of Director Michel Gondry. There's still controversy over who invented the image-warping virtual cinematography effect, but anecdotally it's most often referred to in reference to The Matrix effect or the Gap swing dancing ad (Quicktime). Nowadays, the effect is used in lots of ads--the Really Bend it Like Beckham title sequence is cool (one of the lower links on that page). Someday maybe they'll release a version of this interpolation software for use on your computer at home, and then the world will be flooded with hundreds of frozen time snowboard jump Quicktime movies.

Girls on Aslan! Kong with Ann Bust! SFW.

Error message from my most recent Google Search:

We're sorry...

... but we can't process your request right now. A computer virus or spyware application is sending us automated requests, and it appears that your computer or network has been infected.

We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your computer is free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we'll see you again on Google

What that's all about?

Superman reruns, or returns, and so does Johnny Cash, sort of

Hipster shirts for your dog, including a Von Bitch T.

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The teaser trailer for Superman Returns came out last Thursday evening, attached to the latest Harry Potter movie. The few glimpses imply a remake of the Richard Donner Superman--we have the John Williams score, the same Jor-El voice, the same uniform and hairstyle, the same improbably penthouse apt. for Lois Lane on a journalist's salary, the same unknown actor donning the red underwear--but then I clicked on story and realized it really is supposed to be a return of sorts. Where did he go? The trailer didn't excite me enough to care.

How is it that Jor-El can continue to speak to Superman about present events. Is he like Obi-Wan Kenobi, part of the Force in some way? If that is so, and I were Clark, I'd definitely have him record my answering machine message. Marlon Brando as Jor-El: "Whom do you seek? [long pause] I jest. My one and only son, Kal-El, whom you know as Clark, is not present. But I have sent him to you, because you are a people of promise, a people who need merely a light to guide you, and so, if you should deign to leave your name and whereabouts, I shall send him to you, my one and only son, my [beep]"

***

Perhaps this is the real reason for the war in Iraq: to capture a new market for Fox's The Simpsons, or Al Shamshoon as it's translated in the Middle East. Homer is now Omar, and in deference to the Koran, forbidden items such as Duff's beer and bacon have been replaced. [Thx Arya]

***

The Movies101 selection last Wednesday was Walk the Line. When the title was announced, the woman behind me squealed with delight and kicked me in the back of my head. I was less than sanguine, not because of the sharp blow from her pointed heels, but because biopics, let alone those about musical luminaries, are not my cup of tea.

Prof. Brown prefaced the movie with a long disclaimer absolving the filmmakers of any blame for any liberties they took with Cash's life. He believes that in condensing a life into two hours, it's not only acceptable but necessary to abbreviate and remix a person's life so that it tells a good story (his primary requirement for a movie).

I agree that movies that have to condense a lot of material--biopics, adaptions of long novels--have to convey the spirit of a person without rehashing their entire lives. But to me that's not an excuse for gross simplification or omission. Many people watching biopics become so tied up in the illusion that they believe that what's depicted on screen is how that person actually was; that's a lot of responsibility. Most often, biopics seem to cross the boundaries of acceptable artistic license by cleaning up the protagonist and by sullying the antagonist. Hollywood believes we want our heros to sport a core of decency below any cinematic soot our enemies unambiguously dark, with black hat and sinister mustache translated into the appropriate time period.

I'm actually not an expert on Johnny Cash's life, so I can't comment on this movie's accuracy in depicting his life, or his spirit. Contrary to what many are saying, Joaquin Phoenix does not sound like Johnny Cash (who does, really?), but he channels the spirit of the music, sending his voice down into the earth, and that's what matters. Reese Witherspoon sparkles. I know nothing of June Carter, but if Witherspoon isn't channeling her spirit, then whoever she's playing is still fascinating. Both Phoenix and Witherspoon are shoo-ins for Best Actor/Actress Oscar nominations: these are the right types of roles, the right types of performances.

I'm less gung-ho about the movie itself. It still has the fairy-tale quality of a biopic, even if it covers some dark territory (though nothing dark enough to match the grit of Cash's music itself). If anyone ever does a biography of my life, I hope it's Hollywood, because then I know that I'll come off well.

***

When I was growing up, my mother used bajiao (eight feet), or the star anise, to make beef stew. I never could appreciate the flavor, only because every time I bit into one of those eight-legged stars while eating my mouth would be assaulted by that bitter licorice taste.

So it's a bit ironic to me that star anise is now one of the most coveted spices in the world because it provides the shikimic acid at the heart of Tamiflu.

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The most popular recommendation I received for my cold (and thank you all for the unsolicited plugs for your favorite remedies) was Airborne. It's a preventative measure, to be taken as soon as you feel a cold coming on. It's a pill that combines lots of popular cold cures, from zinc and echinacea to vitamins C, E, and A. It's an aggregation strategy product, like putting lotion in Kleenex, or combining teeth whitening and tartar control substances in toothpaste.

I've never taken anything that's helped me to stave off a cold. If I feel the symptoms developing, the cold always follows. Some medications have helped me to combat the symptoms of a cold. Still, I'm willing to give anything a try, so I've added some Airborne to my medicine cabinet for a test next time.

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I decided to shelve the turducken idea for Thanksgiving. In the end, it just sounded too gimmicky. Here's another aggregation product, but in the end the idea of combining the flavors of those three meats just didn't sound intriguing enough to drop $100.

A different product has caught my eye: the 72 oz. steak. As illustrated in an episode of The Simpsons and in John Candy's The Great Outdoors, attempting to devour an enormous slab of red meat in one sitting is a time-honored American tradition. Among the interesting trivia of this long-standing contest:

Frank Pastore, a professional pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds, ate the complete steak dinner in a record that still stands today of just 9½ minutes back in May of 1987.

He failed to make the team in Spring Training and was out of baseball that same year.

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Stream the new Ryan Adams album, 29.

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Sometimes when I listen to Bush and his Administration speaking about the war in Iraq, I'm reminded of the concluding scenes of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, when some of Aguirre's companions sit on the raft, driven mad by illness and hunger. Meanwhile, one by one they succumb to the arrows from near invisible enemy, Indians hiding in the forest to either side. An arrow pierces a man's leg.

"That is not an arrow," he says.

He sees the carcass of a ship, sitting high up in a tree.

"There is no ship," he says.

It's a beautiful sequence, because Herzog does not show most of the attacks. Aguirre simply finds one body after another, a poisonous arrow in the neck. Aguirre holds his daughter, and then the camera tilts down, and we see an arrow in her chest.

tick tock tick tock

I'm puzzled, really, at how I could have caught this stubborn cold when my human contact in the past week has been so minimal. My nose is so raw it hurts to breathe. I'm fairly certain that the truth behind Rudolph's red nose was that he caught a cold up at the North Pole. That or he was a coke addict.

When people say, oh, yeah, that cold has been going around, it sounds as if we're all sharing the same cold. How likely is that? Maybe we all caught it from Kevin Bacon? Paris Hilton? How many different colds are going around in one city? Which one is popular among Eastern European models right now? If I'm going to be sick, at least let me be sick in the most stylish way.

I'm torn. On the one hand, if it's the same cold everyone has been catching, then at least I know it's not fatal. A cold I can live with. Any flu associated with an animal--bad news. On the other hand, everyone feels a little possessive of their illnesses in a Larry David narcissistic kind of way.

On a positive note, I've been sampling the 2004 vintage of Vicks 44D. Very full-bodied, with a strong cherry bouquet leading into a musky finish. Tastes like port and goes wonderfully with leftover Halloween candy.

***

A lot of the hooks in Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor sounded really familiar, like the ticking clock at the start of "Hung Up". Turns out her producer was Jacques Lu Cont, the British DJ behind some popular remixes of songs like Gwen Stefani's "What You Waiting For" (where I first heard that ticking clock) and The Killers' "Mr. Brightside."

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Today Microsoft released its backward compatibility list for the XBox 360. The list includes about 200 games right now. To play them you'll need to install a software emulator from XBox Live, by burning a CD-ROM of files from xbox.com, or by paying to have a CD shipped to you. Original Xbox game will be upscaled to 720p and 1080i.

It all seems like a hassle for the casual gamer--this Q&A with an XBox VP on this topic stretches on for nearly 4 pages. Not ideal as a marketing message.

***

The first chapter of Nicole Richie's new book, whose title is irrelevant. It's as awful as you'd imagine, some of the most laughable fiction ever committed to print, but what I'm curious about is whether generations past have had to endure the same celeb-lit piffle. Did Plato lament when youngsters bypassed The Republic in favor of Confessions of a Teenage Eunuch by Anorexales?

Every book finds its audience, though, and Nicole has hers. When asked if the character of Simone Westlake was based on Paris Hilton ("Simone was leggy and tall, though no one knows exactly how tall because she'd never been seen out of pumps since puberty ... not even in her night-vision skin flicks, filmed strictly for private use, of course.") Nicole responded: ""It's not her. I've come across many people in my life that are like that."

Haven't we all.

***

James Surowiecki writes about the at times symbiotic relationship between the government and the tobacco industry in this week's New Yorker. This quote intrigued me:

The industry now spends more than half a billion dollars a year in legal fees, and billions of dollars a year in settlements. In strict monetary terms, the settlement with the states might seem like a bad deal for the tobacco companies. Research by W. Kip Viscusi, a Harvard economist (and frequent pro-tobacco witness), suggests that if you take into account tobacco taxes and the higher mortality rates of smokers, which reduce the government’s Social Security and Medicare payments, smoking actually saves the public money.

***

Our family is preparing a traditional Thanksgiving dinner this year, but I'd like to supplement it with an alternative main course. I've yet to try a fried turkey, a turducken, or a quaducant. The preparation of a fried turkey sounds downright intimidating. It involves several gallons of peanut oil, a hot tub, and a flamethrower wielded by ninjas. I doubt we'll be having that unless someone prepares it for us off-site. Preparing a turducken yourself also sounds like a chore--lots of deboning, preparing, assembling, sewing. Substitute people for fowl and you'd have Thanksgiving at Buffalo Bill's from Silence of the Lambs.

"It rubs the gravy on its skin."

"Please, why can't we have turkey like every other family?"

"Put the effing gravy on your skin!"

You can purchase a pre-assembled turducken, but they're not cheap. Those of you who've tried one: does the integration of the chicken, duck, and turkey actually lead to a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts? Would I get all the same benefits if I prepared a chicken, duck, and turkey separately, then had a relative spotting me so that I could shove one forkful of each meat into my mouth simultaneously?

***

Google Analytics, a free tool to help websites to optimize their traffic. Not surprisingly, it integrates tightly with AdWords.

Kairo

A little of this and that as I lie here on my deathbed, hacking and wheezing from what I really hope is not avian flu...

New Michel Gondry music video for The White Stripes "Denial Twist" (Quicktime), featuring Conan O'Brien? If you believe music videos are primarily a conceptual art form, then Gondry is the reigning master. To get your own Director's Label DVD from here on out, you really need to direct a White Stripes and/or Bjork music video.

Fun e-mail thread b/t Mark Cuban and The Sports Guy. Simmons got in a few jabs I'm sure everyone wanted to level against Cuban, but the Mavs owner largely resisted the bait. Would that more sports journalism exchanges were so candid (or any type of media interviews, for that matter).

In Movies101 tonight, they screened the new movie version of Pride and Prejudice starring Keira Knightley. It got me thinking that I should start growing out my mutton chops and working on my English accent now if I want to be Mr. Darcy for Halloween next year. The mutton chops was apparently to that period what the mullet was to the 80's. If Jason Priestley could do a British accent, he'd still be working now.

For someone who enjoys being surprised, the teaser trailer for Darren Aranofsky's The Fountain provides just the right amount of information. Which is to say very little. Even that web page is nothing but white sans serif text on black.

The trailer for Steven Spielberg's Munich, based on a screenplay by Tony Kushner based on a Vengeance : The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team, by George Jonas, is from a more traditional school of Hollywood marketing and gives away too much. Still, I couldn't resist watching it because Janusz Kaminski's cinematography is so damn beautiful.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse finally comes out in American theaters this Friday (well, at least in LA and NY), nearly half a decade after it first released in Japan. Miramax bought the rights, contemplated an American remake, and basically sat on the picture for years. Being a big fan of Kurosawa's movies, I rented a DVD copy from Scarecrow Video in Seattle in late 2001. The DVD's legality was suspect, as was its quality, but that added to the thrill, like finding some rare concert bootleg on cassette tape and having to rent a tape player just to listen to it. I watched it one night, home alone, and experienced several outbreaks of horripilation, which does not mean I soiled myself, though I almost did that, too. I enjoy a good cinematic scare, but somewhere along the line, monster/serial killer/slasher movies became formulaic and lost that ability to surprise, and thus to scare. Sure, if something hideous pops out on the screen to a percussive jolt, I'll startle, but I'll also bleed if you punch me in the nose. Pulse works at a subtler level and infuses the audience with visceral unease, a rare experience at the movies these days (If Pulse doesn't come to your town, plenty of DVD copies can be found on eBay).

Werner Herzog, now there's an always interesting filmmaker, whose Grizzly Man was one of the better movies I saw this past year. His next movie seems no less unique: The Wild Blue Yonder, a science-fiction fantasy.

The new Madonna album, Confessions on a Dance Floor, has leaked out onto the web. At last check, the Megaupload link was still active, though I'd be shocked if Warner Brothers wasn't busy cranking the winch on a giant cannon to line up the link in its sights. Thou shalt not steal, but if you've pre-ordered the album and can't wait for Tuesday, it's really damn catchy and danceable. [yay for Stereogum]

Hornets, Mechanical Turks, and swords, oh my

If you absolutely can't wait to see Tom Yum Goong in American theaters, you can pre-order the VCD. The quality will be terrible, though, so I recommend making the soup instead and waiting for the movie to arrive on the big screen.

How to defend against Teen Wolf.

Once a year, Popular Science publishes a list of the Worst Jobs in Science. This year's list included a link to this bizarre video clip (MPEG) of a ballerina dancing around a NASA robot which resembles a giant, umm, unmanned vehicle. Yeah.

Red square: keep away, if you can. [This and the next two links via Me-Fi]

A condensed jpeg of Ground Zero from straight overhead, a short while after 9/11. The not condensed version of the photo. Meanwhile, with scant media buzz, construction on the new World Trade Center began two days ago.

Sword swallowers actually do swallow swords, though the swords rarely reach the stomach. I saw a sword swallower in China put a long fluorescent light down his throat, and then they turned off the house lights and he turned on the lamp, and we could see the light through the skin of his throat. Now there's a great opener the next time you want to start a conversation with an attractive stranger at a bar.

One of the last projects I heard about when I left Amazon.com and its Web Services team looks to have launched, sort of: The Mechanical Turk. It allows software developers to add human intelligence to their programs, because there are still many things humans do better than computers. A devious use might be to have humans interpret captchas for your automated ticket hoarding program. A less nefarious use might be to help an AIBO interpret human facial expressions or tone of voice. What incentive do you have to help out a computer program with tasks like these? Cash. Reminds me a bit of that marketplace for human talents in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age.

Curbed's Eater publishes the complete list of 507 restaurants in the New York Michelin Guide.

Thrilling if gruesome video (Windows Media File) of a couple dozen giant hornets massacring a colony of some 30,000 honey bees in order to plunder the honey and larvae. By massacre I mean they just use their jaws to bite the bees in half, one after the other. Sheesh. I tried to trace the movie back to its original poster, but gave up after about ten or so hops, so I'll credit J-Walk, who published some great references on Microsoft Excel and who maintains a prolific weblog.

This week's Out of 5 is a good one: They Got It Right the First Time - Great Songs Better Known Via Inferior Covers

Silly Billy

Panasonic launched a blog called Def Perception to discuss its HDV 24p camcorder the AG-HVX200 and high def filmmaking in general. To request a free instructional DVD on the AG-HVX200 (for U.S. customers only), go here. B&H is pre-selling a kit with the AG-HVX200 and two 8GB P2 cards for $10K.

Wednesday is the day when Michelin releases its New York restaurant star ratings, with the release party that evening at the Guggenheim. Who will receive the coveted three-star ratings? Early favorites include Per Se and Alaine Ducasse. As a way of going long Per Se, I snagged a reservation for mid-November.

Yesterday, I attended a Halloween party with my nephew Ryan, looking as adorable as ever in his deluxe Thomas the Tank Engine costume. The parents association that sponsored the party hired a clown to perform, and I was so busy chasing Ryan with my camcorder that Anita had to point out that the clown was none other than David Friedman, from the Andrew Jarecki documentary Capturing the Friedmans. David was one of Jarecki's original subjects since the documentary began as one about birthday clowns. David seems to have shaken off any stigma from his father's pedophilia conviction and continues to work as the clown magician Silly Billy. Only in NY.

Ken reminded me that Cool Hunting linked to this collage of cassette tapes, many of which the two of us used to purchase by the dozens to dub our music. So many of these images still seem as vividly familiar as if they were sitting on my shelves now. Ah, those days when a metal cassette tape was like gold.

Apps for doing this on a Windows PC have long been available, but now Mac users can treat a GMail account as a hard drive using gDisk.

My old roommate Scott, in an aside, guessed that I'd heard of a movie titled Snakes on a Plane, starring Samuel L. Jackson. Well, I hadn't, so I looked up the plot summary: On board a flight over the Pacific Ocean, an assassin, bent on killing a passenger who's a witness in protective custody, let loose a crate full of deadly snakes. Well, a title doesn't get too much more literal than that, and though it's not due out until 2006, it's already inspired a long and often chuckle-worthy thread of over 100 proposed sequels.

A list of John Peel's most treasured 7-inch singles. The White Stripes are big winners, with an amazing 10 spots on the list.

James forwarded me this little easter egg video of Yoda breakdancing, from the Star Wars, Episode III - Revenge of the Sith DVD, releasing tomorrow.

U2

I caught the first of U2's seven shows at Madison Square Garden a couple Friday evenings back. When held up against the true U2 faithful, I'm a Gentile at best, but there are some rock concerts I'll attend because they're more than just concerts, they're Events. It was the day they were announcing the Nobel Peace Prize, so we almost saw a concert by a Nobel Peace Prize winner. That would have been a "Dear Diary" moment.

Keane opened for U2. I just can't get past the fact that Keane doesn't have a single guitarist; the fourth band member is a Mac laptop. I suspect their music won't age well, only because they do one type of heartfelt ballad well, and there's only so much of that you can do. The lead singer seems much too nice to be a rock star.

I've seen some interesting bands open for U2 over the years. The first concert I remember attending was a U2 Zoo TV concert in Illinois at the World Theatre(?). The two openers were Big Audio Dynamite and Public Enemy. You won't find a more docile and listless Public Enemy audience than the one that night, all sitting on their lawn blankets twiddling their thumbs trying to read Flavor Flav's chest clock to estimate how much longer before U2 came on stage.

The most common criticism of U2 concerts nowadays is that they're all the same, a tour of the greatest hits. I'm a fan of the revolutionary and the spontaneous in musical concerts, but I forgive U2 their retrospective ways. For goodness sake, they've been selling out massive arenas since I was in grade school. It's a miracle they've maintained their looks, let alone their fame and relevance. The audience at Madison Square Garden skewed older than for, say, the Franz Ferdinand concert I saw a week and a half later, but the standard deviation on the age of the U2 audience was also much higher. They are true cross-generational icons.

This was my fourth U2 concert through the years, and they've never put on anything other than a grand spectacle. Their canon is so well-known that the audience can sing nearly every word; it felt as if I was at a non-demoninational gospel service, with the arena lit by the electric glow of thousands of cell phone LCD screens instead of candles.

Extrapolate into the future and the logical endpoint will be a U2 farewell concert tour in 2020 or so, one in which Bono and the boys come out in arenas around the world, and Bono just holds a microphone up while the audience sings every song themselves. Each concert would include a moment in which Bono would pull a woman out of her wheelchair and command her to walk, or touch a blind man on the eyes and order him to see, and she would, and he would, for the first time in their lives.

Footnote: If you don't think U2 has relevance to the youth of America, that may change with the release of the dvd Mother Goose Rocks! Top 20 Video Countdown, in which Bono, excuse me, Mono, offers a rendition of children's classic "Head, Shoulders, Knees & Toes." No joke--check it out for yourself. I look forward to many viewings with my nephews this holiday season, and we will chuckle again and again to Dubya's inability to distinguish his shoulders from his neck. [Thanks to What Do I Know for the link].

Exhale on the way up

I finally got the GRE out of the way last night. After you've been out in the real world for a while, standardized tests are even more of a pain in the ass than they were in high school or college. Thank goodness that's done. Now I have several hundred esoteric vocabulary words taking up room in my head, most of which will never see the light of print again.

Poking my head up above ground, I find a cold and rainy NY. Okay, back into the cave for another week or so of asceticism.

***

At long last, photo printing through Flickr, though only for folks in the U.S. for the time being.

The latest MP3 blog I'm digging: Out of 5. A different themed mix every week, 10 songs chosen by 10 different people. You can download each week's mix as a zip file, but there's no archive, so tune in weekly.

Jackie Chan's iTunes Music Store celebrity playlist reveals that Apple's music store offers more than a handful of Chinese tracks. Jackie on "Jia Xiang de Long Yan Shu": "A memorable song representing a noble mission saving sight." Huh?

The first and second seasons of The West Wing on DVD, for only $19.97 each, or 67% off. That's a pretty damn good deal for the two best seasons of what was, at the time, the best show on TV.

Among the top 10 forecasts from The Futurist in its Outlook 2005 was this strange one: "Worm shortage ahead. Increasing worldwide demand for fish is creating a shortage of worms to supply anglers and fish farmers." That's right, a worm shortage. You heard it there first.

The James Randi Educational Foundation offers a 1 million dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper conditions, evidence of paranormal or supernatural powers. No one has ever passed the preliminary tests. I can make one of every pair of my socks disappear gradually over time. I wonder if that qualifies. [from TMN]

Not on the bandwagon, or maybe I am

Jason Lee always seems to play a cantankerous sidekick in the movies, which is why his good-natured simpleton in My Name is Earl is such a pleasant surprise. Funny show.

I'm not one of those Cubs fans who wants the White Sox to lose. It's not a zero sum game fore baseball in Chicago, despite how many fans on both sides behave. I'd love to see Chicago with a national champion in its midst again. That's not to say a White Sox World Series victory will mean a fraction of what a Cubs World Series win would mean to me.

I love the version of the Jarhead trailer that is set to Kanye West's "Jesus Walks". It may be just a case of the music carrying the moving images, but when Jamie Foxx says "I...love...this...job" in cadence to the music, that's a beautiful thing. I've been editing army footage in class, and this trailer is driving me nuts because I'm overwhelmed by an inclination to set the footage to Kanye West.

Lincoln Burrows does escape from prison. I was walking back from class last week and he walked past me on the sidewalk. I couldn't place him except as the guy who had to escape from prison on that television show on Fox. How many degrees from fame are you when people recognize you from commercials for a show they've never seen because Fox blitzes all its programs with in-house promos?

Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3 is rearing its head again in NYC.

To absolutely no one's surprise, some of the first content available for the video iPod is adult.

I'm not even sure exactly what Apple's new software Aperture does, and it costs $499, but already I want it. Apple seems to release something I want every other week now. I surrender, just take my Visa.

Life's so hectic right now, and I'm exhausted, so this is all you get, just a few brief thoughts and rabbit droppings.

The new iPod plays video

Video playback capability in the iPod has been rumored for years, and now it's finally a reality. At the same price as the previous generation of iPods, the new models, available in black and white, arrive just a short while after the Nano so as to allow Nano enough time to sell a gazillion units. You can check it the latest iPod in its new television ad featuring U2. I can't imagine watching an entire television show on such a tiny screen, but music videos? Perhaps. If you put the iPod in the dock, you can control it via the new Apple remote control, and the dock allows you to output composite video and RCA audio to a television/receiver/monitor.

You can purchase television shows from iTunes to sync to your iPod, or you can use Quicktime 7 Pro to export your own video content to iTunes for transfer to the iPod. I can see carrying around some footage of my nephews.

More interesting to me was to see what the pricing for video content would be. iTunes is offering music videos and individual episodes of TV shows like Lost for $1.99. The Lost Season 1 DVD, which contains 24 episodes, costs $38.99 from Amazon.com, or about $1.60 an episode. So the Apple TV show pricing feels about right, with a slight premium to the volume pricing of the DVD. You can't burn the shows to DVD or CD. You have to watch them on your computer or an iPod.

The episodes of Lost being offered are the three most recent ones, and future episodes will appear in iTunes a day after they're aired. Is there a window after which these won't be for sale, or will they be available in perpetuity? Also, how much does ABC keep of every $1.99 sale?

Meanwhile, DVR manufacturers are talking about a day not so far in the future when hard drive space is so cheap that DVRs will just tape every hour of TV so you can watch any show on demand, without programming the device. Enterprising geeks already trade television shows through their computer using Bittorrent. Someday soon, all media, from music to movies to television shows, will be available on demand. If the networks and studios band together, they might be the ones collecting on this traffic, but as slow as they move, it seems unlikely. With just five television shows offered in this latest rev of iTunes (Desperate Housewives and Night Stalker are the other two ABC offerings), ABC/Disney is the only studio testing these waters, and they're just dipping their toes in with caution. This meager offering is most certainly the choice of the networks, not of Apple.

Item(s) of note

Finally, a New Order DVD compilation worth owning. Item collects all of their music videos (along with two never-before-released clips, one of which is a new video for "Temptation," I think) and the documentary New Order Story which came out in VHS in the 90's. As a bonus, the cover is designed by Peter Saville.

A python tries to swallow an alligator, and then its stomach explodes (thx Karen)

From this week's New Yorker, an article on the state of the graphic novel.

Merck announces that its experimental vaccine Gardasil is 100%, yes, that's right, 100% effective in preventing cervical cancer. Stunning.

15 unresolved claims of unverified animals, from the Loch Ness monster to the Yeti to giant octopuses. As listed by the International Society of Cryptozoology.

A teaser poster for King Kong from the United International Pictures website...

On the Marc Jacobs

On the Marc Jacobs homepage, you can click a link to watch the video of his 2006 Collection runway show, which opened with the Penn State Nittany Lions marching band playing "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Never have so many band dorks shared the stage with so many babes. Fashion shows are inherently ridiculous, so twists like this one or the nude runway show at the end of Altman's Ready to Wear are to be expected. Still, I'd leap at the chance to see a fashion show in person if I could score tickets. Who wouldn't?

***

Among the 25 new MacArthur Fellows receiving $500,000 genius grants this year is Edet Belzberg. We will be editing her newest project, which isn't even listed at IMDb yet, in the second half of our class. She's most known for her first feature-length documentary Children Underground, which is now at the top of my Netflix queue. So exciting!

***

Smashing Pumpkins lead singer Billy Corgan fielded questions about the Chicago Cubs in the Chicago Tribune Sports page. Being a creative type, he chose to ignore the Shift key.

I can't even talk or think about the Cubs anymore, this season has been such a disappointment. I haven't watched one of their games since I left for China.

***

Stream the new Elizabethtown soundtrack at MySpace. I've never once touched my MySpace page, but it's MySpace has carved out a nice little niche for themselves in the crowded social community software space with their music content.

***

As NYC waits to see which of its restaurants will be crowned with three stars in the first Michelin Guide in North America, or even which 500 will merit mention at all (pre-order the Michelin Guide to New York City 2006 from Amazon.com for 32% off; it ships on Nov 4, 2005), it's useful to review what three stars from Michelin mean. According to Michelin, three stars denote "exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey, where diners eat extremely well, sometimes superbly. The wine list features generally outstanding vintages, and the surroundings and service are part of this unique experience, which is priced accordingly."

I tried using a Michelin Guide once, but it wasn't nearly as useful as I'd hoped, in part because my French was rusty, but also because the guides don't actually provide much description of each listing. Fortunately, the web community will be sure to blog the 3-star winner(s) to death.

Michelin's inspectors have been paying anonymous visits to 1,200 NYC restaurants since February. During this time, I have been tempted, on more than one occasion, to stroll into some of NYC's finest restaurant with a Moleskine notebook and Mont Blanc pen, wearing some stylish metal frame glasses and sporting a French accent. I'd look all about me like a tourist entering a cathedral in Europe, and after the first bite or two of each dish, I'd jot notes in my notebook.

You laugh, but simply bringing my camera into a restaurant and snapping photos of my dishes before eating them has led to no shortage of free dishes, compliments of the kitchen, and face-to-face meetings with the head chef.

***

Epicurious lists ten restaurant trends they hate. Personally, the most exasperating thing about the NYC dining scene is the impossibility of getting a seat at any half-decent place. If you have to make a reservation weeks in advance, any meal starts to seem like an ordeal, placing undue pressure on the experience. One is bound to be disappointed in some way. It's less the scarcity of reservation slots as it is the dearth of walk-in availability that disappoints me.

I enjoy being able to stroll into a neighborhood joint to enjoy a spontaneous bite, to feel like I can run into a friend on the street and be enjoying an unplanned but delightful meal together just a few moments later.

***

Google WiFi service to launch shortly?

***

Which animal kills more people in the U.S. than any other?

Ripple and Roll

On the way to see Arcade Fire at Central Park Summerstage tonight, I strolled past Sean Connery. I was tempted to intone, in my best Gert Fröbe cackle, "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die." But Connery was looking wearied by age, and if he did pass away in the next week or so, how awful would I have felt?

Arcade Fire put on a great show. Their music is anthemic, hyper-infused with emotion, so seeing them with a choir of rabid fans is like attending a fire and brimstone sermon with some true believers. You can't help but hum, clap, wave, and head bop to their tunes. It helps that the band members look like they're having such a good time on stage. The drummers ran around in a frenzy, banging on everything with their drumsticks (one of them nearly ran through the back curtain and fell off the stage). The lead singer tried to punch a hole through the stage with his mic stand.

For their encore, Arcade Fire brought surprise guest David Bowie on stage. He was looking dapper in a white suit and matching fedora. They accompanied him on one of his old tunes, then he played guitar and sang a bit of "Wake Up". He participated in the same way earlier this week at a Fashion Week party (I linked to a recording of that yesterday), but seeing him live was still a bonus. There may have been a CD released in the past year to year and a half that I loved more than Funeral, but if there was, it's not top of mind.

On my way into the concert, a security guard told me my zoom lens was too long. No sexual innuendos, she was being literal. She gave me two choices, dump my zoom lens somewhere and pick it up after the concert, or hand over my digital camera battery. Since I had nowhere to stash my zoom lens, I neutered my SLR and handed over the battery, which she then proceeded to stick down her pants. I guess she ran out of pockets. So I wasn't able to snap any pics of Arcade Fire's stage antics, though I did end up with a very wary battery at the end of the concert.

I started my editing intensive class at The Edit Center this week. It has lived up to the "intensive" advanced billing, but I'm loving every hour. Along with improving my Final Cut Pro editing skills by leaps and bounds, I've gained a newfound appreciation for movie editors and how much impact they have on the final product you see on the big screen. Like book editors, their best work is largely transparent to audiences, most of the credit going to the director or actors, just as no all credit for books goes to the author. The only time you notice an editor is when they've missed something.

Our class field trips are mostly outings to see movies, and that's a type of field trip I can appreciate. We hit the Lower East Side to see Edge Codes.com, a movie that, like The Cutting Edge (not the D.B. Sweeney/Moira Kelley hockey/figure skating flick), does for movie editors what Visions of Light did for cinematographers. Andrew Mondshein (editor, The Sixth Sense) and Christopher Tellefsen (editor, Gummo, Kids), interviewed in the movie, attended the screening and fielded questions.

Mondshein spoke of how the first few times they screened The Sixth Sense for audiences, the theatre erupted in whispers and confusion when Bruce Willis's ring hit the floor at the end of the movie. So he added in the flashbacks, to Haley Joel Osment saying "They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead." To Willis's encounters with live people, like his wife at the restaurant. Mondshein threw in just enough so audiences could connect the dots, appreciate the "Aha!", and return to enjoying the movie's conclusion.

Tomorrow's technology today: fusion and nanotechnology, in consumable goods form

Banana Nutrament has an MP3 of David Bowie and Arcade Fire singing "Wake Up" together. Bowie vocals on one of my favorite songs of the last year...cool. I'm going to see Arcade Fire on Central Park Summerstage Thursday evening. It will be my first Central Park concert.

How efficient is the Red Cross? Is there a better charity to donate to when crises like Hurricane Katrina strike? It's the most linked to charity for donating to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort, but someone expressed reservations about how efficiently the Red Cross channeled those funds to aiding victims. I don't know the answer, but I found this evaluation in which the Red Cross online earned a four star rating (out of four). Not sure how objective or accurate this evaluation is, though I was hoping more knowledgeable folks had already done the legwork on this. The president and CEO, Marsha Evans, does indeed make a really generous salary ($450K a year, according to this site), though overall program expenses seem reasonable at around 5.6% of revenues.

The new iPod Nano is cool (the ROKR is not), most people agree, but while I love my iPod(s), I really hope the quality control on this new edition is better than that on previous editions. I don't know anyone who's purchased an iPod who hasn't had to bring it in for repairs at some point. Ironically, my most reliable is my first one, the first generation iPod. My other iPod, the Shuffle, is temperamental, like a crazy girlfriend.

Stream the new Sigur Ros CD Takk

Yet another Godfather novel on tap for next year. Sounds like this one weaves the Corleone saga with the Kennedy assassination.

Xbox 360 has a launch date: Nov. 22

Gillette unveils yet another razor, the successor to the Mach 3: Fusion. This baby has an enhanced indicator lubristrip, 5 blades, and a precision trimmer blade for side burns and shaping your goatee.

Heather Havrilesky rates the fall television comedies. Those that rate well on her scale are Ricky Gervais's HBO series "Extras," Chris Rock's UPN series "Everybody Hates Chris," and, to a lesser degree, NBC's "My Name is Earl" and Fox's "Kitchen Confidential." "Extras" premieres Sunday, Sept 25, at 10:30pm. That's the one I'll be tuning into for sure, along with every other fanatical devotee of "The Office."

Red Sox outfielder Gape Kapler ruptures his Achilles tendon running around second base after a teammate hit a home run

Canon jumps into the HDV camcorder fray this week with the XL H1. It will cost $8999 and ship in November. Cool looking camcorder, but surprisingly, Canon won't offer 24P or 720P recording, only 1080i in HDV mode. Whether or not they believe 24P is useful or not, it's clear many users do, and the user is king. Panasonic will offer that in their HVX200, and they'll take market share because of it.

Takk