Author: colter

Don’t Microwave Lettuce

I got a sandwich from Quizno’s and it seemed strangely cold, as though the toasting process had been completely skipped. So I decided to microwave it for a few seconds just to give it some heat. This was something of a mistake, as lettuce does not respond well to microwaving. It gets limp and chewy. Bleah. I share this with you in hopes that you might avoid my fate.

In other news, I’ve discovered that I may have to re-watch all the movies in my collection, as my new Surround Sound system and widescreen TV make watching movies a completely new experience. I’m seeing new things in the background, seeing more details up close, and hearing more layers of dialogue. I watched Almost Famous last night (technically, Untitled, The Bootleg Cut) and found so much more in the film. My favorite piece of newly discovered dialogue was towards the ends where Jason Lee says “I sound like a dick!” and Mark Kozelek mutters “you are a dick.”

And speaking of the buyer’s market on eBay a couple posts back, I found an original theatrical poster for Kicking and Screaming for just $10.

Typography and Punctuation

I’m really enjoying reading about the histories of punctuation and typography, like the ampersand:

“Ampersand” is short for “and per se and.” I did not know this.

A fun thought is the fact that, without all these little trifling thingys like # and &, we wouldn’t have the Internet or computer programming languages. Because all programming is built on the characters that won’t get compiled as letters. The little scrappy losers of written language, the guys whose names no one remembers (“honey what’s the thingy on the phone dial – is that the asterix[1] or is the hash sign?”) are the guys who built the technology revolution. They’re the Bad News Bears of Language, the Little Engines That Could of Semiotics, the nerds and outcasts who changed the world…much like their programmers.

1.) The use of the word “asterix” or any other erroneous variants of “asterisk” is almost as maddening to me as the use of “expresso.” Or “right justified” when people mean “aligned to the right”.

Thoughts on Garage Sales

I have a lot of stuff. It’s dangerous enough being the kind of person who hangs on to random items because of an emotional attachment, but I’m also the sort of person who constantly wonders about what an item’s future value might be. Consequently I have a lot of baseball cards, toys, comic books and obscure CDs.

In a post-eBay world, what really becomes collectible and valuable anymore? It seems to me that, since the mid-80’s at least, Americans are more keenly aware than ever that the little things with which we decorate our world will have monetary value to others in the future. For example, the baseball card industry exploded in the late 1980’s as more people started to discover that big money was being paid for cards from the 50’s and 60’s – but the thing that made those cards valuable was their scarcity, and they were scarce because few people thought they were worth saving. These days, however, fewer people are throwing anything out. So what’s rare anymore? What toy, card, or comic could ever become the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card?

The temptation to keep an item simply because it might be worth something to someone else is a maddening game. I have rare CD singles by completely obscure acts…maybe there’s an obsessive fan out there somewhere who’d pay money for it?

Fortunately, eBay helps connect me with that potential obsessive fan, but what eBay giveth, it also taketh away, as there is now such a glut of stuff in their database that everything tends to get devalued. Back in the day, I could have sold a Mark Grace rookie card at a local shop for a price based on my buyer’s demand (a buyer could only travel so far and visit so many shops) but with eBay, there are dozens of Mark Grace rookie cards to choose from, so the price drops. Ebay doesn’t increase a supply, but it does facilitate a greater degree of supply fluidity. Add to that a public giving increasing scrutiny to every little potentially collectible knickknack, and you’ve got a recipe for a buyer’s market. Good luck profiting from your massive stash of stuff when it turns out everyone else stashed theirs, too.

Free Music – Jamie Myerson

My hero Jamie Myerson (ambient drum n’ bass producer/ singer-songwriter) is giving away several of his albums for free. I’m not sure what prompted this; maybe I’m on to something with this New Economy business. Maybe in the future, musicians will be able to make profit secondary to their personal satisfaction. Recording costs will drop and distribution will become free and easy. Maybe gigs and merch will become the primary income source for musicians.

Anyway, here’s the link to all the free Jamie Myerson music. Here are some highlights:

Sky City – Ambient drum n’ bass/electronica
Merge and JM Jamie Myerson – Songs w/ vocals a la Depeche Mode
Remixes – Check out David Poe’s “Apartment”
Covers – Great acoustic stuff

Jamie is sickeningly talented and everything he does is gorgeous. Not many people can go from being an electronic music producer to singer-songwriter.

“Ha” Is All You Need, All You Need Is “Ha”

As abbreviations and l33t-speak dominate conversations on the Internet, words tend to get shorter. “Be right back” becomes, “brb,” for example. What is so peculiar and somewhat bothersome to me is how “laugh out loud” was chosen to be abbreviated as “LOL” while the far superior and shorter “ha” is not as popular.

Similarly, the variants ROTFL (“rolling on the floor laughing”), ROTFLMAO (“rolling on the floor laughing my a** off”) are also annoyingly long. Why not just “hahahahaha”?

My message to Internet users everywhere: STOP USING “LOL,” “ROTFL,” “ROTFLMAO” and any other abbreviation that conveys laughter. “Ha” is accurate, short, and has thousands of years of history behind it.

SPECIAL NOTE TO EMILY, AUSTIN AND RYANN: tell your friends! “Ha” is all you need! “LOL” must DIE!!!

Oy Vey, These Kids Today and Their Series of Tubes

Can you handle the meta? I’ll be commenting on Mark Morford’s comments on a piece in New York Magazine about these kids today and their internets. Here’s Mark’s ever-eloquent, ever-snarky summary:

“If you believe the media skew, if you see it all through a lens of fear or lack of nimble perspective, suddenly it’s all drooling MySpace sexual predators and binge-drinking frat-boy idiots and millions of lost brain-rotted teens snorting ketamine off each other’s stolen iPods and then shooting each other in the face after playing 6 million hours of Grand Theft Auto, one giant violent sexed-up gum-snapping body-pierced eating-disorder STD-ready freak show ready to implode at the drop of a hat or the shave of a Britney.

And it’s also one big dumb, overblown lie. Well, most of it.”

The message to parents: calm down. Raising kids today isn’t weirder or more dangerous than it used to be, it’s just differently weird and differently dangerous. In the 50’s, conventional wisdom was that rock and roll was dangerous, and now people pay upwards of $100 to see crusty dope fiends like the Rolling Stones play at their local arena. Yes the Internet allows kids to put more of themselves online, but the threat of online predators is about as valid as that of muggers in Manhattan: real but rare.

For everything you gain, you lose something. What kids gain with the social Internet (MySpace/LiveJournal/Flickr/Facebook/et al) is a way to express themselves, a platform for communicating more easily with their friends, and an archive of their adolescence that they can refer to throughout their lives. What they lose is perhaps some measure of safety/privacy, the ability to escape past mistakes/embarrassments, and maybe some fresh air.

There’s a real temptation for a parent who grew up in front of a TV watching cartoons to feel disconnected and paranoid about their kids growing up in front of the Internet, because it’s a different world from the one they grew up in; but isn’t that always the case? Personally I’m more afraid of kids growing up eating so much fast food and/or microwaved crap as fewer parents seem to cook these days.

And for heaven’s sake, if the sight of your kid glued to a laptop all day bugs you, take them outside! I had my nieces and nephew over Monday night, and when I saw each of them playing online games, I immediately suggested we go play frisbee. Fortunately they have not lost their zeal for real world activities.

Tears for Fears Tour Journal

Curt Smith, one half of Tears for Fears, has been keeping a tour blog. Here are some good thoughts from a man who’s seen everything in the music business:

“If you’re of the opinion that wealth will bring you happiness, dream on. You’re either happy/content by nature (or work) or not – money won’t change that. At the richest I’ve ever been I was the least happiest, consequently I chose to leave TFF and my homeland in search of better things, I’m “grateful” everyday that I found them. I live in Los Angeles, “I see rich people” every day, I can’t say the majority of them are happy. They seem to spend inordinate amounts of time talking about their earnings/position and how much they spend. Most of them are medicated in some way, be it through alcohol or the antidepressant du jour. Not only are they not happy, they’re dull to boot. To sum up – it’s my experience that the same percentage of rich people are happy/unhappy as poor people, status doesn’t change anything.”

Basic Music Math

Artist with major label contract sells 100,000 albums @ $15, gets $1 per disc* = $100,000
Independent Artist sells 10,000 albums @ $15, gets $10 per disc = $100,000

Granted it takes a lot of touring and sweat and word of mouth for an independent artist to sell 10,000 albums, but if you are truly an excellent, original act that electrifies people at every show, you can do it. For a generic band with a big marketing push from a major label, 100,000 copies isn’t all that hard to do, and even then it’s unlikely you control your publishing (royalties), and the $100,000 you made still has to go back to the label to recoup your advance and your recording costs (subtract $50,000 and do not pass go).

Fortunately, ProTools allows any musician the ability to produce a decent-sounding album. Which is ironic, given that ProTools also allows people like Ashlee Simpson to have their pitchy vocals corrected. For everything you gain, you lose something.

* Best case scenario, given standard industry rates.

The Decentralization of the Music Industry

For the last few years I’ve been wondering about the Internet’s impact on the music industry, specifically what will happen to cash-cow national acts when the Internet empowers more independent and regional artists. If more people are using MySpace and iTunes to check out music based on word of mouth and their own ears, rather than the tastemaking churn of radio/MTV/magazines, then those tastemakers will be at a loss for words. How can they generate a buzz nationally about the latest hip new band when they can’t get everyone to listen to it?

As the first potential proof for this suspicion, I give you this terrifically lost and confused MTV roundtable discussion on SXSW at MTV.com. All the writers involved seem genuinely saddened at the lack of any individual “It Band” at SXSW.

Plink, plink…do you hear that? That’s the sound of the world’s tiniest violin. Cry me a f*cking river, MTV.

Here’s hoping that 2007 gave us a bellwether SXSW and the days of the “It Band” are numbered. Maybe music fans will start listening to what they like because it’s what they like, not because some pretentious weasel at MTV or Spin or Clear Channel decided to orchestrate a “buzz” campaign.

By far the best comment was from writer James Montgomery:

“I’m struck by how all these points we’re making about the festival are also completely interchangeable for the music industry. I was struck by how it’s like a microcosm of all the problems the industry is facing now: It’s too big, there’s too much to see out there, you have no idea what’s going to be big, it’s too splintered, there are too many ways of consuming music.”

Buddy, if too much music is your idea of a problem, start looking for a new career. The music scene should be big and splintered and not easily digestible. This will make it easier to weed out the generic bands that the industry chooses to foist upon us. I guess it might be difficult for casual listeners to choose, but I’m sure they’ll be OK with whatever comes their way. Lord knows they are entirely too contented with the crap they’re listening to now.

SXSW 2007

Finally have some free time to catch up after a long 5 days in Austin for my annual birthday trip to South by Southwest, the massive music shindig. Here’s the run down:

Tuesday: I discovered that my Wednesday flight was in fact NOT for 7pm but 7AM. How I made this error I have no idea, but my boss was kind enough to let me take an extra day off, so I hurried around to get everything taken care of and tried to sleep.

Wednesday: Meredith got up at 5:30AM to take me to the airport, bless her. I made it into Austin around 10AM and slept until 1PM. Tara and I went to End of an Ear music, where I bought a bunch of CDs. After that we stopped by South Austin Music, the one guitar store I had not visited in previous trips. This may have been a mistake. As I opened the door, there it was. An Ernie Ball Music Man Steve Morse model guitar. Dammit. Price tag: $999. I said $800, and it was done. It had to be done. I’ve been looking for that guitar for a long time. Afterward we wandered around downtown, checking out Architecture in Helsinki, Jefferson Starship, Lily Allen, and my all-time favorites, The Soft Lightes.

Thursday: We saw an in-store performance by Sparklehorse, then over to Antone’s for Blonde Redhead. After that…Pete Townshend. He was playing acoustic guitar at the “Attic Jam,” a gathering of random singer-songwriters. He did a few of his own tunes and played along with the others. As someone more accustomed to playing stadiums, he was clearly enjoying the chance to play to an intimate audience. We wrapped up the night at 1AM with a show by the gorgeous sights and sounds of The Bird and the Bee.

Friday: We just happened to be passing by the Yep Roc Records party where Little Rock’s own American Princes were playing. They opened the show, with John Doe following them. We ran down the street to catch the infectious sounds of The High Strung. After that I caught up with Rob McCorkindale of The Broken West. We’re not directly related, but we’re most likely distant cousins, given the dearth of McCorkindales on the planet. We have very similar eyes. Talking with Rob behind the stage, I saw Hüsker Dü’s Bob Mould signing autographs and comedian Zach Galifianakis being generally hilarious. After that we went to the other side of the river to see Ozomatli, X Clan, and….Public Enemy. PE incited the crowd to chant “F*ck George Bush, F*ck Dick Cheney, F*ck Tony Blair, F*ck Condoleezza Rice.” The only thing more amazing than getting a crowd containing families with young children to do this, is that apparently there was no community uproar afterward. That’s Austin for you. After that we checked out Perry Farrell’s Satellite Party featuring guitar hero Nuno Bettencourt. It made me so happy to see a guitar solo being played in front of a large audience. Apparently the embargo is being lifted. Or maybe Perry just exists in his own world. After that, Badly Drawn Boy and the amazing, the earthshaking…The Good, the Bad, and the Queen.

Saturday: Dirty Projectors. We saw them last year at the same venue, but this time the crowd was twice the size. Good to see. Later that night: Kings of Leon, Spoon, and Iggy Pop. Not a bad birthday.

Sunday: Slept in! Ate breakfast burritos, stopped by Cheapo Discs and bought a couple more parting CDs before hopping on the plane back to Little Rock. By the way, fly Southwest. They have a sense of humor and free donuts, coffee, and juice at their gates.