Something Requisitely Witty and Urbane

Facebook

I guess I was feeling a bit insulated lately, so I did a bit of virtual reaching out. I capitulated and started a Facebook page.

Sigh.

Anyway, if you wanna be my friend (I officially feel lame) let me know.

If I was dressing up for Halloween...

... this is what I'd go as.

OiNK

You've probably heard the news that OiNK, one of the largest and most popular online music piracy sites, was raided and shut down today.

Not a lot to say about it (exercising my 5th amendment right or some such), but I thought this post from DJ Rupture, a musician who both admired and feared Oink has an interesting take on the whole thing:

In many cases, I believe that downloading an album from Oink would be both faster (more on this in a bit) and give you more information about the CD than sites like iTunes.

Think about that… a free website, which gives fast downloads of music at equivalent or higher quality than the paid music sites. And this free site has an incredibly deep collection of both new and old releases, usually in a variety of file formats and bit-rates. It’s overwhelming! First thought: wow, Oink is an amazing library. Second thought: wow, I really need to start selling DJ Rupture t-shirts, CD sales will only continue to drop & I gotta make money somehow!

And then this:

For fans, consideration of the music comes before questions of money and ownership - this is how it should be. Any system that doesn’t take that into account as a central fact is going to generate a lot of friction. When I say ’system’, I mean everything from Sony to iTunes to white-label 12″s that cost 8-pounds ($16.38!) in London shops and only have 2 songs on them. (I bought a bunch of these last week, and it hurt).

Oink didn’t offer solutions; it highlighted the problems of over-priced, over-controlled music elsewhere. Oink was an online paradise for music fans. The only people who could truly be mad at it were the ones directly profiting from the sale of digital or physical music. (Like myself! F%5k!)

Oink had everything by certain artists. Literally, everything. I searched for ‘DJ Rupture’ and found every release I’d ever done, from an obscure 7″ on a Swedish label to 320kpbs rips of my first 12″, self-released back in 1999. It was shocking. And reassuring. The big labels want music to equal money, but as much as anything else, music is memory, as priceless and worthless as memory…

About a week after I shipped out orders of the first live CD-r Andy Moor & I did, it appeared on Oink. Someone who had purchased it directly from me turned around and posted it online, for free. I wasn’t mad, I was just more stunned by the reach… and usefulness of the site.

If sharing copywritten music without paying for it were legal, than Oink was the best music website in the world.

I think this gets to the heart of the whole piracy/file sharing conundrum better than a lot of things I've read. Yeah, artists should be able to make money (because if they don't make money, then they can't support themselves, and then they have to get day jobs instead of, you know, making art and then there's no music for us to steal), but we've all sort've entered into this culture-wide collective agreement that we'll do it... not that it's ok, but that we'll do it anyway.

And yeah, that's not right... it's true, it's stealing. But I got to thinking about it: I've spent tons of money on music in the past year whether I may or may not have passed that dollar across a counter directly for music.

I won't buy from iTunes anymore because of the DRM. iTunes won't take the DRM off their music (unless I pay more, which I still think is the most ridiculous thing I can think of) because if they do someone will steal the music. We're no closer to a solution now than we were when Napster first showed up.

But everyone's got to agree that the system's broken and "crackdowns" aren't going to fix anything.

UPDATE: Of course, as soon as I write this, I read that Apple announced today that it will provide DRM-less songs for the same $.99 price as their other downloads. I guess they are trying to move in the right direction, but now the right PR move would be to allow us to trade out our already purchased music from iTunes for the non-DRM files. I would be completely back on board the iTunes train if they did that.

"... point us in the diretion of some kind of political enlightenment and psychic relief."

I can't recommend this column enough.

I am surrounded by people my age who each seem to be on an individual quest to personally define "ennui." There is virtually no one in my life who is ambitious or driven in any way.

Sure, some of us have careers and some of us don't. Some of us have goals and some of us don't. Some of us have "success" and some of us don't. Whatever end of the spectrum we find ourselves on, there doesn't seem to be much purpose or hope these days... just day after day that comes to a close with us figuring out how to make rent, dodge bill collectors, finish school despite the fact that doing so seems like it will leave us worse off than we already are.

Unlike the author of the column, my friends aren't all activists. But many of my friends are smart, are thoughtful and have real and distinct opinions on important issues.

We just don't have any real feeling that we'll be able to do anything about them. The real world is just too big and too fucked up for that.

I have searched and hoped for some sort of a fresh and real social or political movement to hitch my wagon to. But everything that comes along with any sort of promise just ends up proving itself to be a lie at worst and impotent at best.

So, we do one of two things: We delve into the minutiae of it all -- divide and conquer, become an expert at one part of something -- or we give up. There seems to be a lot more giving up.

I love this paragraph:

We are painstakingly composing our Facebook profiles because we did our daily round of news sites, and it left us feeling powerless and unsafe, like the only place to put our energies was inward. We are studying abroad because it feels like the only obvious way to interact with the world we care so deeply about. We are dancing at house parties on Friday nights because we talked about your op-ed, the war in Iraq, rape in Congo, but in the end, we just felt overeducated and underutilized.

That's the thing about my my my generation... we all want to do something: It just seems increasingly unreasonable to think that we can affect anything. I don't know what the answers are... and I know that this seems like an incredibly dark post... I really don't intend it to be... That column just seemed to really define a feeling that I think many of my peers will identify with. That seems like it's important to get down on paper.

UPDATE: I have to quote this paragraph too:

My generation tries to create lives that seem to match our values, but beyond that it's hard to locate a place to put our outrage. We aren't satisfied with point-and-click activism, as Friedman suggests, but we don't see other options. Many of us have protested, but we -- by and large -- felt like we were imitating an earlier generation, playing dress-up in our parents' old hippie clothes. I marched against the war and my president called it a focus group. The worst part was that I did feel inert while doing it. In the 21st century, a bunch of people marching down the street, complimenting one another on their original slogans and pretty protest signs, feels like self-flagellation, not real and true social change.

That sums up far more eloquently than I was able to do what I felt when I went down to Crawford when Cindy Sheehan was there. There were real people with a real sense of outrage down there and they were there because they wanted to do something, but it all felt like we were putting on a pageant.

Musical Orgasmia

So, it's a completely unoriginal statement to mention the similarities between much of The Arcade Fire's Neon Bible and some of the Nebraska-era Boss. Most of the time, people would mention "Keep the Car Running" off the newest album was remeniscent of Atlantic City (and it is).

But I got goosebumps when I saw this video. And I simultaneously said "Holy shit" along with the guy in the video.

Win... Regine... and Bruce singing Keep the Car Running... live. Holy shit.

Bruce Stringsteen and Arcade Fire - Keep the car running
Uploaded by trendwhore

Dumbledore is gay...

So, I'm sure everyone's heard the announcement that JK Rowlings said that she always saw Dumbledore as being gay.

It all makes sense now!

Hogwarts is a place for people who are "different" to go and learn how to better use their "powers" (with a special emphasis on "wands.")

The whole thing is an allegory! But now I want to know what a few things represent:

Quidditch (which features positions like "Beaters" and "Seekers" and "Chasers")
The Sorcerer's Stone
The Tri-Wizard Tourney (of course, this would have been better if it was the Bi-Wizard Tourney, but you can't be too obvious).
Hogwarts (which, trust me, you DON'T want to catch)
Hufflepuff (no explanation needed)
Hedwig (one of the most famous drag queens in all of Christendom)
Slytherin (Alright you guys... get your minds out of the gutter. Sometimes a snake is just a snake)
Bubotuber - A creature which emits puss that, when it touches someone, causes boils - (Actually, this sounds like most of the women I've dated in my life)
Centaurs (Half man and half horse? This just SCREAMS Bi-curious!)
Mandrake (defined as "a plant that makes a noise which is fatal to humans... Does Andy Dick's voice come to mind for anyone else?)
Yew (Described as a thirteen inch wand - I rest my case, your honor)

I've seen some crazy outbreaks on live TV in my life...

... but this... is... AWESOME!

Congratulations!

A big congrats goes out to long time friend of SRWU (friend of mine), Veronica, on the birth of she and her husband Jeoff's baby boy, Vaughn. Go check out her post, as she writes about it in a very Veronica-esque way.

The internet is a sordid place..

... and this article tells a tale that would be difficult to believe if it weren't so damn believable. It's a long story, but worth every word.

SS2k

I came to Weezer pretty late. One day in about '03 or '04 I finally put on The Blue Album and it just blew me away (Like I'm sure it did to everyone else like a decade earlier).

I ran across some interesting info about some unreleased songs that were played live by the band between Pinkerton and the Green Album. They played them while they toured in 2000. A few of these songs (Dope Nose, Hash Pipe) ended up on the Green Album, but most were unreleased.

Bootlegs of the live recordings began circulating and then, later, Rivers Cuomo put out the demos of the songs. They are called by fans the Summer Songs of 2000, or SS2k. You can get them here.

Grand Ole Party

I also wanted to give a shoutout to one of the opening acts last night, Grand Ole Party. They are a trio with a really cool sound. The lead singer seemed to me it would have been like if you'd taken Janice Joplin's voice and put it in Joan Jett's body. It's a very kinetic, raw sound that I really, really liked. You can check out a couple of songs on their Myspace page.

(Edited to add: I've been trying since last night to figure out who they, especially lead singer Kristen Gundred, reminds me of, and it hit me just a few minutes ago: She's Grace Slick. In fact, there is kind of a Jefferson Airplane thing about them, except that the sounds is really stripped down and raw.)

Rilo Kiley at the Palladium Ballroom - 10-6

There's really only ever been two albums that I've listened too and pretty immediatly thought, "You know, I wanna take this album and make it into a movie," because the album told such a story that it just felt like it was begging to be told on the big screen. The first was Tori Amos' Boys for Pele and the second was Meatloaf's Bat out of Hell.

And before you ask, yes, I do realize that none of this makes me cool.

There is now a third to throw in the mix. Rilo Kiley's new album, Under the Blacklight, which has been out for about a month now, and the band is currently touring in support of. I caught them last night at the Palladium.

First of all, to make the most generic and obvious point along with anyone else who talks about the band these days: Jenny Lewis is a star. There's no doubt about it, she is the centerpoint of the stage... and that almost seems like a point that the band has willingly conceeded. She is growing bigger than the band is, but everyone sorta seems ok with that. The Fleetwood Mac comparisons don't seem to apply to Rilo Kiley, mostly because EVERYONE is doing their own stuff outside of the band.

Onto the show. There's an affectation about Rilo Kiley that could almost border on pretention, but that sorta works for the band. Jenny Lewis and lead guitarist and co-songwriter Blake Stennet were child actors (I remember Jenny from the late '80's Nintendo marketing movie with Fred Savage called The Wizard) and there are times when that history seems to show up in the stage show. It's almost as if, at one point in their lives, they said, "Sure... You want us to be cute... we'll be the cute."

So they have a faux-smarminess about their music that serves as counterpoint to some of their lyrics. Take, for instance, on of my favorite moments of the evening when Jenny lead the entire crowd to wave their hands back and forth to the skippy country tune, "15." She smiled and bounced while singing, "He was deep like a graveyard / She was ripe as a peach / And how could he have known / She was only fifteen."

Or the lyric from the song "Paint's Peeling" from their older (and my favorite) album, The Execution of All Things (which they played quite a few songs from, including leading the crowd in a sing-along to Arms Outstretched): " I’m not going back to the assholes that made me / And the perfect display of random acts of hopelessness / I wish I could stay here but I think we’re all ready / I think we’re all ready…."

Then there's Blake. They took moments in the show to highlight him on lead vocals, with the song off the new release Dreamworld or the old standard Ripchord (consisting of just Blake and a ukulele). I've always thought that Blake sounded a bit too Elliot Smith on the albums. That's fine, but he doesn't stand out.

He's an odd cat. Imagine if Crispin Glover had a band. His guitar is inventive, however, and is really what gives the band its indie credibility. While Jenny provides the star power, his guitar provides the raw and unproduced (at times almost punk) sound which serves as a great balancing act.

It was a really good set. I'm not going to say that Rilo Kiley rocked it (although there were moments), but mostly it was one of those shows that everyone felt really good when they left, they provided some real and original moments that you know another band couldn't have pulled off. It is pretty clear that this is a band who's arrow is pointing up, and are fixing to get much bigger. Well, at least Jenny is, and the rest of the band will come along for the ride.

You sort of get the feeling that they are ok with that.

Bad News

They're remaking The Karate Kid.

Hold on, it gets worse...

Will Smith's son Jaden is set to star in a remake of cult classic 'The Karate Kid'. Will's nine-year-old son is being lined up to play Daniel LaRusso in a new version of the popular 1984 film...

Wait... There's more...

...with Jackie Chan as his martial arts mentor Mr. Miyagi.

But, I'm not finished...

It is rumoured [Will Smith] is set to make his directorial debut and helm the movie.

I just... I don't... I can't... Why would they do this? Seriously? There's not a lot in my childhood I hold sacred, but certainly The Karate Kid falls into that catagory.

Why is Will Smith fucking with my childhood?