Some recordings of America’s “Top 100 Speeches of the 20th Century.” What surprises me is that with the exception of Lou Gehrig’s farewell (mp3) and very few others, almost all of the speeches are from politicians or activists. But what worries me is that I can’t really think of others that could make the list. It’s kind of sad that oratory is so tightly associated with politics.
Category: audio
What happens when you put an iPod into a blender? Spoiler: you get a fine powder of metal and plastic. They don’t sell those blenders at the local drug store.
Alex Ross links to a set of trumpet bloopers. They’re not so much funny but awkward in a way you have to empathize. I’m sure any musician can relate to the desperate attempt to nail some wild fingering, lip-burning extreme note, or in my case, some geometrically/ anatomically impossible mallet pattern on the marimba. Sometimes you just bomb.
The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness (review: 3.5/5)
Stephen Levy’s very readable story of the obscenely popular iPod came just after I bought my new computer, and served a welcome distraction as I imported all my music. As an interesting publishing twist on the ‘shuffle’ idea, various editions of this book have the self-contained chapters (with titles like “Cool” and “Apple” and “Personal”) re-arranged in different orders, sandwiched between the intro and the coda. Kind of cool.
Luckily, this book is more biography than love letter. There’s a lot of industry history, delving into early portable music hits like Sony’s Walkman, a bit of the sordid history of the music publishing industry in the midst of the mp3 revolution, insider perspectives on Apple’s development process, whether or not shuffle mode is really random, and so on.
And of course, there’s a lot about infatuation with the iPod itself. Levy cites Virginia Postrel’s book on industrial design:
Having spent a century or more focused primarily on other goals–solving manufacturing problems, lowering costs, making goods and services widely available, saving energy–we are increasingly engaged in making our world special. More people in more aspects of life are drawing pleasure and meaning from he way their persons, places, and things look and feel.
Thank you, Capitalism. Of course, recognizing that progress is one of the reasons the iPod is so successful amid products with better specs. “More” isn’t always more. It’s just a beautifully designed object that’s a joy to use, in the way we choose. As Levy says:
shuffle turns out to be the techna franca of the digital era–not just a feature on a gadget but an entire way of viewing the world, representing the power that comes from aggregating content from a variety of sources and playing it back in an order that render irrelevant the intended ordering by those who produced or first distributed the content.
Yes, we like control. More, please.
Why music critics need to (re)read the work of Lester Bangs… and Pope John Paull II. “Despite the beauty and power of much popular music, the critics have become a cross between Holden Caulfield and a taxidermist.”
Greg Sandow highlights some interesting ideas to bring young audiences to classical music performances.
You don’t need to shorten, sugarcoat, or simplify the classical pieces. The people hear them just as easily as they hear the pop stuff. And, maybe best of all, it takes classical music off its pedestal, and makes it nothing more (but also nothing less) than something terrific to listen to.
Alex Ross has a great piece on Steve Reich in the New Yorker, as well as a nice little pile of Reich-related links on his blog.
David Pogue offers a fairly ‘blah’ review of the Zune, Microsoft’s rival for the iPod. Am I the only person that thinks the brown one is really hot?
A time lapse (music) video of a drive from Los Angeles to New York. I’d prefer a full, uncut version, but it’s still really cool. [via digg]
Opening Night at the Atlanta Ballet
I stopped by for the season opener at the Atlanta Ballet tonight. Their performance of Giselle was just wonderful. The costumes were really amazing.
A couple downers: the lady on my left who had a persistent, throaty cough. Thank goodness another audience member had some spare cough drops! The Fox was only about 1/3 full, which explains why there’s no live music anymore. Various musicians and supporters were outside the Fox picketing, as announced in the Atlanta Composers Blog. The recorded music was fine (fine as in “functional”), but it just doesn’t feel as warm and fuzzy and human as it did when the orchestra was there. And there’s a certain sense of spectacle that’s missing. It’s a little awkward to walk into a show when someone gives you the earnest plea, “You deserve to hear live music.” Good luck to them. Let’s hope that each side will come to their senses, and that fellow Atlantans will remember what a treasure they’ve got.
Here’s a comprehensive, though not unbiased, guide to electronic music. It touches on the early cerebral, experimental works from guys like Iannis Xenakis, to James Brown and the early days of house, to today’s niches like downtempo, trance, Europop, and speedcore. Cool.
Music video for Bjork’s tune, Bachelorette. Great song, great video. Directed by Michael Gondry, who was in charge of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I enjoyed very much this weekend. [via waxy]
The Rest is Noise reminds us that Steve Reich turned 70 this year. Do yourself a favor and read up on Reich. The wikipedia entry gives a good start. For your listening pleasure, I’d recommend that you find, and subsequently purchase/ download/ rip/ obtain his works Electric Counterpoint, Clapping Music, Proverb, and Six Marimbas as an appetizer.
Shaun Inman points to As Slow as Possible, John Cage’s composition which is now the longest musical work ever in the history of concept art. It’s still going on right now, and will for proceed for, oh, 600 years.
Uninnovate links to a 60-second video that gives the layman’s low-down on why DRM is a bad, bad thing.
A new Madonna music video (people still make these?) featuring some Parkour-style urban freerunning in Tokyo. [via coudal]
The Music Animation Machine MIDI Player creates cool, simple, colorful visualizations for MIDI audio files. For examples of the output, see Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and or check out Debussy’s Clair de Lune.
One-minute vacations are short sound recordings of various places on the planet. Some 240+ recordings in the back catalog.
The Mises blog points to another “victory” in patent warfare. Creative has successfully gotten a $100 million settlement from Apple to end a suite of lawsuits, including one patent dispute about “automatic hierarchical categorization of music by metadata”.
Mark Larson 