It’s time for your iPhone to do something beautiful. Synthtopia calls is an “eyegasm”. Glenn Marshall is a visual genius who can make computers and music do beautiful things together. I first mentioned this back in early September, and now the patience has paid off.
Everybody’s got an opinion on how all this social networking stuff works. You mess with it long enough, and you start to see trends or patterns. I can’t help but wonder what it means and how it fits into the ongoing narrative of human civilization. Do all these fancy toys and technological innovations change anything? I’m thinking Ms. Boyd may not have all the answers, but she’s got insane credentials and she’s working hard in this field. So, I’m in.
Added @zephoria to my Twitter feed and apophenia to my RSS feed. It’s dense, but it looks red hot.
Back to the whole music/social networking thing. Before the current incarnation of iTunes was released (that would be version 9), there were rumors that part of the update would include a social networking element that would allow iTunes users to post music to FaceBook, Twitter, etc. Well, that never happened, and the current version of iTunes is pretty similar to the previous version.
But social networking and music is still a fertile area for development. Last.fm has been around for a while and features a clunky, Facebook style interface. The best part of Last.fm is that it can, if you wish, track everything you listen to on your computer by means of proprietary technology called Scrobbling. That’s great fun for seeing what tunes you and all your friends are listening to. There are also discussion forums and lots of news and gadgets to keep you interested. The one thing that’s really missing from Last.fm is music. The social part is there, but the users have to supply their own tunes.
Blip.fm does it best, as far as the social aspect is concerned. Users select music from the Blip database (which is really just a feed into Youtube and Imeem. But for each selection, other users with similar tastes are suggested. The genius is with Blip’s ‘props’ system. You give props to other users/DJs and get props back. This means there is a currency that you exchange with other users in order to tell them that you like what they play. You try to accumulate more props and also ‘listeners’ (friends) as you go forward on your musical exploration. It is a great way to get connected with people who like similar music.
The other thing that Blip does extremely well is interface with existing social networks. The actual Blip interface itself looks just like Twitter and even uses “@” and “#” in similar ways. Also, you can tell Blip to broadcast your selections to your Twitter feed or Facebook page, thus allowing you to share music with other, even if they are not in your Blip social network.
The only problem with Blip is that there is not very much music, and a good portion of it is amateur video from Youtube. Songs are incomplete, of inferior quality or different versions. And it’s basically impossible to know which version is going to start playing when you blip it.
Along comes Lala.com. This is the most extensive collection of music I have seen on the internet and it’s delivered to you in a cloud-based interface that is identical to what you are used to looking at with iTunes. Lala succeeded in a lot of ways. Firstly, if you could be bothered to take the time, you could upload your whole music collection and listen to it anywhere you could get online with a computer. You could broadcast your selections easily to Twitter or Facebook. And there was even a social networking aspect that allowed you to “influence” other users and share selections. While the architecture of this social networking fature seems pretty slick, users just didn’t seem that interested, which I though was a shame. The culture at Blip was that you would almost always ‘follow-back’. At Lala, it seems like no one cares.
Another nice aspect to Lala was that it offered something to sell, thus negating the need to have tons of ads, like we see at Blip. At Lala, you could pay ten cents for a ‘web’ song meaning that you could listen to it online as many times as you wanted. Or you could buy a song for $.79 ($7.99 for most albums) and have the mp3 DRM- free to do whatever you want.
So now, Apple has purchased Lala, at a discount rate, and no one seems to know what will happen next. Of all the music/social/media/networking applications in the cloud, this was the one I liked the best, so I am hopeful that Apple doesn’t just stick it in the trash.
Disney's 1979 film - The Black Hole
It is shaping up to be a monstrously busy week. So far, Monday and Tuesday have been crisis management. Each day featured an unanticipated issue that came up and had to be dealt with immediately. As a result, very little other work has been completed, and tomorrow I will be in scenic lower Bucks County for depositions that will almost certainly take all day. There are four witnesses scheduled. That takes us to Thursday, which is a heavy Court day, which means that the work will continue to pile up. And then, somehow, Friday is clear. For now. Even if that stays true, I will still have to spend time in the office over the weekend. Right now my space looks like a bomb hit it and I can’t find my desk.
So, here’s a quick look at what I’ve been thinking about in my non-work moments:
There is, of course, a lot of other stuff to get into, especially the Prisoner remake, but the hour is getting a bit late for me and there is a sleepy Basset Hound who needs to go walkies.
Children’s stories, the narratives of youth, or rather for youth. The holidays are choked with such offerings, usually intended to inspire the spending of bad money after good. We may enjoy, with our younger family members, a silly and innocent story and we may happily pay for it at the bookstore or the cinema. But, when ‘synergy’ takes over and gives the young ones a ‘complete entertainment experience’ with action figures, happy meals and subscription cell phone service, then at such a moment the silliness and innocence are lost.
Cynicism, speaking personally, tends to make me less inclined to have more than the most limited experience of children’s literature and movies; I suspect impure motives lurking just beneath the surface. As Em and I are currently without children, it is easy for me to maintain such a pompous and superior attitude. For there is (with the occasional exception) no one pleading for me to buy them Bionicles or other fictitious weapons of war.
But I am not without sentiment. And over the past several days, I have taken such delight in two works that were intended for a much younger audience.
The first of these is a no-brainer – The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Wes Anderson continues his exploration into the joy and melancholy of family, just in time for Thanksgiving. But, bound by the constraints of a ‘children’s story’ and delivered as a work of ‘animation’, the bitterness and pain are tamped down so that we can simply enjoy Anderson’s wonderful characters and story-telling without guilt or reservation. I gladly traded depth of the supporting cast (although Ash and Kristofferson are wonderful as two young, uniquely awkward and competitive cousins) for a visual smorgasbord that jumped off the screen with its low-tech magic. The film’s very high score on Metacritic is easy to understand.
The other bit of youth narrative I have enjoyed so much lately is Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan. This book retells the story of World War I from the point-of-view of Alek, teen son of murdered Archduke Ferdinand and Deryn, a 15 year old girl in the English air service, passing as a boy. But this is not any ordinary piece of ‘historical fiction’. This is the Darwinists, who breed their weapons in laboratories as monsters that fight in air, land and sea, versus the Clankers, whose steam powered machines are mechanical monsters of a different sort. The book is an absolute delight, featuring dry humor, cunning wit and heartfelt emotion. Although not a picture book, the novel does feature several extraordinary illustrations by Keith Thompson, many of which can be seen in the stunning trailer.
Does it feel like I am reading a book intended for a younger reader? Of course, but I understand a great many adults have enjoyed a book about a certain young, bespectacled wizard, whose story was also intended, primarily, for a younger reader. Leviathan is planned as the first of a trilogy and I, personally, can not wait for the next installment.
So there you have it – something a bit more innocent and nice, just as the holiday season gets underway in earnest. I would never have intentionally denied the child within, but I have, up til now, not celebrated it in quite this manner before. With the right book and movie, it is a wonderful feeling.
(The two sentences that make up the title of this post come from the works described. The first is the favorite expression of airman Deryn and the second is an example of how Mr. Fox swears.)
Every link at the music blog is now dead and the directory is missing… How the hell did that happen. This is not good.
Maybe… This is a test post to see if the plugin works.
Let’s start with the video that makes me like Tim Lincecum even more:
That gem comes courtesy the me via the good folks at Big League Stew.
Next is a beautiful Flickr gallery of the current incarnation of a Moog Taurus bass pedal. When used correctly, this instrument can take the paint off the walls, remove fillings and rearrange internal organs:
Click here for the droolworthy gallery. Via Sythtopia.
Steve Hackett will be playing NearFest next June. Other acts include Iona, The Enid, Three Friends (what is that, a Gentle Giant cover band), Astra and Pineapple Thief. Since I don’t know anything about the other acts, I have a lot of homework to do. Nearfest takes place in Bethlehem, PA. (Via Bill’s Prog Blog)
Zombi is coming to Johnny Brenda’s on December 19. Should be a pretty good prog show. So far, I like what I’ve heard from this Pittsburgh duo. Tickets are ten dollars and it is the best place to see music of any type in Philadelphia. Here’s a taste of Zombi:
via the @progscape twitter feed.
And a few fiction notes:
Hope everyone has had a nice weekend. It’s a beautiful Sunday here in Philadelphia, so we’re off to do some outdoor chores. Peace, live and music to you all!
I had been feeling that some kind of intelligent harmonizer was thpe next piece of the puzzle in my pedal line, so I began the exhaustive research. Did you know that there are almost no stand-alone floor units that offer “intelligent” pitch shifting? There is a $500 unit from Eventide that I would love, & then there is the $170 jobby from Boss, which I was afraid would really sound like crap.
So I started to explore the really low end multi-effects units in the same price range (and lower) as the Boss ‘Super Shifter’. In particular, I began to focus on a Zoom that had a harmonizer and an expression pedal, in addition to a lot junk I did not want, including amp modeling and other effects. Why not just turn all that junk off and use the multi-effects unit as a wammy and/or harmonizer? The real question was whether it would play nice with all the other floor-bound gadgetry I’ve collected over the years. One thing was certain: this multi effect unit was not designed for the use I had in mind. But for less than $100, I was maybe willing to take a chance. I did get a little skeptical when olive realized that the item in question claimed to do the work of the famous Digitech Wammy for less than half the price.
When I got to Guitar Center (a hateful place), something unexpected happened. They had the Boss harmonizer in the used bin for the same money I would have spent on the entry level all-in-one toy. I tried it and decided I could live with the mediocre sound quality, rather than risk getting something chincy. And I even splurged on my first compressor sustained. I got a Line 6 which was very cheap, even new, and really helps drive the signal through all those pedals.
After a long day at the office, I had the house to myself for about 1/2 hour and, it got loud.