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Nick Hornby discusses pop music in this NY Times essay: "Maybe this split is inevitable in any medium where there is real money to be made: it has certainly happened in film, for example, and even literature was a form of pop culture, once upon a time. It takes big business a couple of decades to work out how best to exploit a cultural form; once that has happened, 'that high-low fork in the road' is unavoidable, and the middle way begins to look impossibly daunting. It now requires more bravery than one would ever have thought necessary to try and march straight on, to choose neither the high road nor the low. Who has the nerve to pick up where Dickens or John Ford left off? In other words, who wants to make art that is committed and authentic and intelligent, but that sets out to include, rather than exclude? To do so would run the risk of seeming not only sincere and uncool - a stranger to all notions of postmodernism - but arrogant and vaultingly ambitious as well."
comment posted at 10:48 AM on May-26-04

All That Jazz
comment posted at 9:39 AM on May-26-04

Ginsberg's Celestial Homework is the reading list Ginsberg handed out on the first day at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics as "suggestions for a quick check-out & taste of ancient scriveners whose works were reflected in Beat literary style..." Founded in 1974, Ginsberg taught at the school until his death in 1997.
comment posted at 1:40 PM on May-21-04

Thomas Wright Waller would have been one hundred today! The web is filled with brief profiles, even Ken Burns has got in on the act and laid his deathly touch on him. Luckily there are some sites with a little more meat, a nice article from The Atlantic, streaming audio so you can hear some of his music, pictures, an explanation of stride piano (.au) by Billy Taylor, and a nice piece from Weekend Edition. Happy birthday Fats!
comment posted at 1:53 PM on May-21-04

The Leeching Never Stopped! Archive.org is adding the complete live catalog of the Grateful Dead. There are still a few gaps, but they already offer over 1,300 shows for download. Get early favorties, all-time classics, famous guests, the last show, and nearly everything in between, in lossless and mp3 formats.
comment posted at 12:56 PM on May-20-04

Virtual tour of the new Seattle Central Library. Built from a critically acclaimed design by Rem Koolhaas, this library opens Sunday. The design makes me want to paint my staircase bright yellow, or maybe move to Seattle.
comment posted at 2:00 PM on May-20-04

I'm done with The Onion. I trusted The Onion and read their comedy for free for years -- but after hundreds of issues of unbelievable comedy The Onion is now a "pay site" that charges $30 a year for earlier access to each week's issue, plus awesome-sounding online news radio and special election coverage! I'm mad! Oh yeah!!!
comment posted at 9:19 AM on May-19-04

Tonight (or tomorrow night, ymmv) marks the 2nd Annual Ride of Silence, a solemn testament to those that have been injured or killed while biking on the roads. Begun last year in Dallas in tribute to local ultramarathoner Larry Schwartz, it began as a one-time tribute. Apparently, there was enough National interest to make this an annual event, and this year more than 50 cities in the U.S. and Canada are participating.
comment posted at 9:40 AM on May-19-04

Peitho's Web: Classic Rhetoric and Persuasion.
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Scientists know that being fat reduces your lifespan, making you more susceptible to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and a host of other bad things. However they are only beginning to understand why. "Fat tissue is now recognized to be the body's biggest endocrine organ," producing 25 known signaling compounds and a variety of proteins.
comment posted at 7:19 AM on May-13-04

Florida town changes MLK street name What's in a name, asked Shakespeare. Everything, it seems.
comment posted at 10:31 AM on May-12-04

Bobby Fuller was a Texas based rock and roll singer best known for the immortal rebel anthem "I Fought The Law,". Considered by many to be the heir to Buddy Holly as the king of Texas Rock, he built on Holly's style with songs like the aforementioned "...Law," "Jenny Lee," "Love's Made A Fool Of You," and the 2 1/2 minute masterpiece "Let Her Dance." And then it ended, at age 22, in very weird circumstances. Over the years, interest in Fuller and his work has ebbed and flowed, and plenty of archival material surfaced, but the mystery of his death remains unsolved, although many have speculated. Ann odd end for a footnote character in rick history, but who was bound for more
comment posted at 3:32 PM on May-8-04

The great studio drummer Steve Gadd is of the most important musicians of the 1970's. Gadd brought bassist Tony Levin (Buddy Rich, Paul Simon, John Lennon, Peter Gabriel, King Crimson) into the business in New York 30 years ago, and that alone is enough to secure a place in history. You may remember his unforgettable groove on "50 Ways To Leave Your Lover", one of many brilliant contributions Gadd made to classics of the 70's pop charts
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Joe Bussard is the self-proclaimed king of record collectors (pre-war 78s, of course). He'll even make you a tape. According to Bussard, jazz died in 1933. Were the '20s America's golden age? Great art, architecture, movies, and even coins.
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Blender Magazine lists the 50 worst songs of all time. Wait. Before you click the link know the the geniuses over at Blender only post songs 50 (Celline Dion's "My Heart Will Go On") through 41 (Color Me Badd's “I Wanna Sex You Up.” Yeah, I'm going to go buy a copy just for this article, aren't you? Fortunately, MSN spares us the torment of not knowing what the worst song of all time might be. Ready? Starship's "We Built This City." Now recognizing that it's the job of critics to make choices, and this is an impossible one, surely we can do better than that, no? [via danieldrezner.com]
comment posted at 1:53 PM on Apr-23-04
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Remember the woman arrested for allowing her kids to be sunburned at a county fair? What's she doing now? Sadly one of her children has died and it has been ruled a homicide.
comment posted at 1:01 PM on Apr-23-04

"Why don't you reverse the rotation of the Earth, go back in time and read the directions?" Jerry Seinfeld, Superman and a stolen DVD player. Yeah, it's part of an American Express promotion, but it's cleverly done.
comment posted at 7:53 AM on Mar-31-04

Those towering Dutchmen The height of the average American is roughly the same as it was during the Revolutionary war. The heights of many northwestern Europeans continue to shoot up. Is this simply genetics at work, or could Bush and the Republicans possibly be at fault here?
comment posted at 11:35 AM on Mar-30-04

CarpoolCheats.org If you don't want your picture taken while you're doing something illegal, don't do it in public!. I'm not sure about the ethics (or legality) of putting pictures of license plates online, but the thrust of the site is pretty cool.
comment posted at 9:55 AM on Mar-30-04
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Things fall apart Stressed societies move in strange directions. In Angola, shattered by a decades-long civil war, children and even infants are accused of being witches. Burkina Faso is also having a witchcraft epidemic. Are there parallels with conditions in Salem and Early Modern Europe?
comment posted at 12:23 PM on Mar-29-04

The Kaceesque story of a woman in prison for faking her daughter's leukemia to gain thousands of dollars in donations, now says she concocted the scheme to keep her husband from leaving. Teresa Milbrandt said she regrets what she did, which included shaving her daughter Hannah's head and giving her sleeping pills to make it look like she was undergoing chemotherapy. The husband went to Prison As Well.
Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy is a parenting disorder where parents, usually the mother, fabricate symptoms in their children, thus subjecting the child to unnecessary medical tests and/or surgical procedures, though It is a highly controversial condition, which some doubt even exists.
comment posted at 8:59 AM on Mar-29-04

Life on Mars? Methane has been found in the Martian atmosphere which scientists say could be a sign of present-day life on Mars. It was detected by telescopes on Earth and has recently been confirmed by instruments onboard the European Space Agency's orbiting Mars Express craft. Methane lives for a short time in the Martian atmosphere so it must be being constantly replenished. There are two possible ways to do this. Either active volcanoes, but none have yet been found on Mars, or microbes. The Independent has it as Methane find on Mars may be sign of life. The second group to detect signals of methane in the Martian atmosphere is led by Michael Mumma of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, who used powerful spectroscopic telescopes based on Earth. This team is even believed to have detected variations in the concentrations of methane, with a peak coming from the ancient Martian seabed of Meridiani Planum, which is being explored by a Nasa rover. This could indicate a subterranean source of methane which is pumping out the gas, either due to some residual geological activity or because of the presence of living organisms producing it as a waste gas. Asked whether the continual production of methane is strong evidence of a biological origin of the gas, Dr Mumma said: "I think it is, myself personally." As to how...
comment posted at 6:30 AM on Mar-29-04
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California's Tsunami Risk. " In the open ocean, tsunami waves travel at speeds of up to 600 miles per hour... As the waves enter shallow water, they may rise rapidly. Typical peak wave heights from large tsunamis in the Pacific Ocean over the last 80 years have been between 21 and 45 feet at the shoreline... If a large earthquake displaces the sea floor near the coast, the first waves may reach the shore minutes after the ground stops shaking. There is no time for authorities to issue a warning." 40 years ago this weekend the Alaskan Prince William Sound earthquake and its ensuing tsunami killed over 120 people -- 12 as far South as California. Nothing compared to the thousands hit in the 1998 Papua New Guinea tsunami disaster, but still it's worth keeping an eye on California's tsunami risks. Or the entire West Coast's activity.
comment posted at 10:02 AM on Mar-29-04

The Song Is You: and, as if that weren't enough, the melody lingers on! The Songwriters' Hall of Fame is a magnificent resource (look for the almost-complete song lists) and a reminder of how one single country (The U.S.A.) produced a hugely disproportionate quantity of the great popular songwriters. It could arguably be said: almost all of them. How many of the "Rock Era" composers, though, have written standards that will still be as widely sung worldwide, in every conceivable dive or circumstance, in 50 years' time as the songs of Arlen, Porter, Gershwin, Berlin, Kern, Rodgers, Carmichael, Youmans, Warren, Ellington, Loesser, Loewe, Coleman and so many others still are today?
comment posted at 6:57 AM on Mar-29-04

I thought this was an interesting review of this series from the New York Public Library. And here is some background information.
comment posted at 5:07 AM on Mar-27-04

Some Of Our Best Poets Are Fascists: An interesting article by Guy Davenport. My own theory is that an inordinate percentage of great (and minor) Modernist writers were, politically speaking, bonkers. Ezra Pound, Fernando Pessoa and T.S.Eliot were all distastefully authoritarian, anti-semitic and, in general, rancorous old farts. Why is this, if anyone still cares? [Via Arts and Letters Daily.]
comment posted at 6:45 AM on Mar-26-04
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You dangle in agony. You clutch your faith. You fight for breath. You surrender your spirit. Nineteen “witches” were hanged at Gallows Hill in 1692, and one defendant, Giles Cory, was tortured to death for refusing to enter a plea at his trial. Five others, including an infant, died in prison.
comment posted at 1:28 PM on Mar-25-04

E-paper to make its consumer debut. A little Cambridge, MA firm called E-Ink is teaming up with 2 global partners (Philips and Sony) to introduce next month "the world's first consumer application of an electronic paper display module." The size of a paperback book, it will allow storage of the equivalent of 500 books, and display of up to 10,000 pages on a single set of batteries. The display technology comes closer to the appearance of a printed page than any previous electronic display. The future of this technology: "'expressive surfaces'-intelligent displays that are built right into everyday products." At the research level it is already capable of displaying color video.
comment posted at 10:46 AM on Mar-24-04

Classic films being re-released aren't normally news. Except, of course, when you are referring to films that were controversial when they were initially released. As a counterpoint to Mel Gibson's box-office smash, The Passion of the Christ, Monty Python will re-release The Life of Brian on Good Friday. This is more fun than a box of Peeps any day. Don't like CNN? Try the BBC or CBC coverage
comment posted at 10:49 AM on Mar-24-04

Anonymous midlist author tells horror story (Salon: viewing of annoying ad required, but it's well worth it) "In the 10 years since I signed my first book contract, the publishing industry has changed in ways that are devastating [...] to midlist authors like me. [...] What once was about literature is now about return on investment. What once was hand-sold one by one by well-read, book-loving booksellers now moves by the pallet-load at Wal-Mart and Borders -- or doesn't move at all." (more inside)
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Noiseways. Listen to New York City and Portland Oregon. "The negative effects of noise—stress and the disruption of work, sleep, learning and other activities—are well established by scientific research. And of course it comes as no surprise that there is a lot of noise in New York City. The Noiseways Project intends to complement this knowledge by letting visitors to this Internet site experience the effects of noise through the use of pictures and sound recordings. Instead of presenting data, Noiseways engages the senses."
comment posted at 11:09 AM on Mar-19-04

Kisses, the sexy urinal. Virgin Airlines is on the cutting edge.
comment posted at 11:17 AM on Mar-19-04

This seems quite a positive thing. Weird what some people have to say about it though.
comment posted at 11:49 AM on Mar-18-04
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comment posted at 7:01 AM on Mar-19-04