old dog, same old tricks

I upgraded Windows Explorer at work this morning to version 8…and all three times I’ve opened it so far, it’s crashed.

I do not like you, ampersand…

I’m not sure why, but in the last few years I’ve come to dislike ampersands in most situations. This is odd, considering that I used to be somewhat fond of them. I suppose my change of mind here has something to do with two large database projects involving my music collection (first, entering them into [...]

reap

Because nearly everyone else on the web will be posting links to songs performed by Michael Jackson in the next few days, I thought I’d post three songs about Michael Jackson (nominally, at least) instead:
Rheostatics “Fan Letter to Michael Jackson” (Introducing Happiness, 1995)
Negativland “Michael Jackson” (Escape from Noise, 1987)
Minutemen “Political Song for Michael Jackson to [...]

attention booksellers and librarians!

Do not put these two books anywhere near one another: despite the similar titles, they have dramatically different subjects!

WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE! AAARGHH!!

The latest wonderful moral panic is over the phenomenon cringe-worthily known as “sexting.” Horror of horrors: teenagers are horny and want to see one another unclothed.
What’s curious to me about this is that, as far as I can tell, the way child-pornography laws are written, the school officials who’ve discovered these images are, in fact, [...]

party like it’s 1699

I recently ran across this recording from the Harlem Sessions recording by A Camp. (Incidentally, Nina Persson’s spoken intro answers the question I’d had concerning the proper pronunciation of the band’s name: like the usual phrase, or as in “A-Team” – it’s the first one.) And my god, if you’d told me this was a [...]

a destiny averted!

Some of you may know the name Josh Modell from his work as writer and editor at such esteemed publications as The Onion’s A.V. Club, Spin, and Furry Monthly, but way back when, when he ran a Milwaukee-based music zine called Milk, he had even greater ambitions: he wanted to be a gangsta rapper. Travel [...]

Comparing anything to something cool makes it cooler by association!

Apparently there’s this new cool thing called “Book of the Face” or something, and anyone who’s anyone is “on” it.
At least, the level of cluelessness exhibited by the previous sentence seems to be about right for whoever wrote a current ad slogan for Summerfest – “It’s like Facebook only everything’s real” (or similar phrasing – [...]

Peeve Rout!

So let’s say you’re a publicist sending out promotional mp3s to music bloggers. The idea is, presumably, to get those bloggers to promote your band and its music.
This is pretty damned hard to do if the mp3 file lacks ID3 tags so we don’t know which song it is or who the band is. It’s [...]

why rage? that light’s going to last a whole long time before it dies…

A curious divergent motion: while the ever-increasing rapidity of information flow means that trends cycle more rapidly than ever, in music the typical release schedule has (perhaps until recently, with the decay of the full-length album as primary mode of presentation) been getting longer and longer. Look at any band’s discography from the 1960s, and [...]