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Monday, July 21st, 2008
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2:39 pm - Stuffed & Starved
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Globally, 1 billion overweight people coexist with 800 million starving people.
That’s one of many perverse facts in Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System (Melville House, April 2008, U.S. release), author Raj Patel’s searing indictment of the forces that shape what and how we eat.
[…]
Source: Jeremy Gantz article for In These Times
current mood:  ditzy
current music: I Love UFO - Like In The Movies / Wish
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| Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
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11:44 am - Stupidity is a sin
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One of the most obdurate forms of stupidity is the frozen idea. We all suffer from this. What I mean is the following: we develop some idea about life. This could come from things we read and hear in the media, or from our own experiences. These ideas freeze into an opinion about something. As time goes on, this opinion of ours tends to lose touch with reality. Sometimes we hold on to such opinions because to admit they were wrong or irrelevant causes us emotional turmoil and anxiety; out of vanity and laziness we don't ever want to admit we were mistaken. Listen to people in their 60s or 70s; almost every idea they express is some kind of hardened cliché formed in their youth.
Source: An Experiment in Counter-Stupidity by Robert Greene
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| Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
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8:25 pm - Add your voice to the campaign
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The fate of The Light, is going to be decided in 2008, please act quickly by letting Hackney council know your views on the Bishop Place. The Bishop Place development forms part of the Hammerson City Fringe Masterplan.
Save The Light
What Is Happening?
Ken Livingstone in his ‘London Plan’ has decided that this area should be taken over by a forest of towers comprising nearly two million sq ft of new City offices.
He has now handed control of 13 acres of land to private developers Hammerson and Ballymore.
There has been no public involvement in an overall plan for the area produced by either the GLA or Hackney and Tower Hamlets councils.
Shoreditch and Brick Lane under threat act NOW!
current music: Seofon - Immanence
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| Thursday, March 13th, 2008
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8:52 pm - Ten Years Into The Digital Revolution: A Continuing Disaster in Sound
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Once the inventors of CD-Sony and Philips got the "perfect sound forever" digital hype going- and believe me they did a masterful job with a well oiled public relations organization called "The Compact Disc Group", there was no stopping it. Even the executives at the quality record labels (I wish I could name names) who at first resisted CD, hearing it for the sonic joke that it was, finally rolled over when they realized that consumers were willing to shell out $16.00 for teeth rattlingly bright, metallic sounding discs because the music was "read" by a laser beam.
When the promoters of this early sonic hell began getting complaints, they had the chutzpah to blame the awful sound on the analogue source material! "Its 'headbump' ", "its the rising high end of the microphones"- there was an excuse for every problem with early digital, except the real cause: early digital! Every technology has a learning curve, except of course digital sound, which was a gift from God, who is of course, digital.
The early DDD discs sounded even worse (still do). What digital maniacs who pronounced those "pure" digital discs "perfection" didn't know was that since there were no digital mixing boards in the early days, the digital recording had to be converted to analogue for mixing, before going back to digital, and then sometimes once more back to analogue before final mastering. Each digital to analogue conversion took its toll on the music, but don't tell that to the CD nerds who only bought DDD discs in the early days and complained (and still do!) about the sound of discs that had "A"s in them!
[…
Source: Music Angle
current music: Spacetime Continuum - Fluresence EP
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| Monday, March 10th, 2008
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2:34 pm - Space-saving exercise
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"Jeff Schwartz biography implies that the BBC executives were so shocked by Ayler's music that they ordered the immediate destruction of the tapes. It is true that `jazz experts` were consulted and they advised the BBC not to broadcast the programme, but the tapes were destroyed as part of a general space-saving exercise which resulted in the loss of a number of classic drama and comedy programmes as well as the odd concert. As far as I know all the tapes of the "Jazz Goes To College" series, which included performances by Sonny Rollins and Max Roach, were wiped after they'd been shown. However, to give the BBC their due, they did manage to conserve every TV recording of the annual "Trooping The Colour" ceremony - a pointless 2 hour ritual where the Queen sits on a horse and salutes a load of men in silly hats."
Source: Ayler Org
current mood: Better
current music: Albert Ayler - The First Recordings
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| Friday, March 7th, 2008
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12:17 pm - Violent Wendy
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In 2007, the band Violent Femmes surprised many long-time fans by selling their classic, "Blister in the Sun" to Wendy's Hamburgers for use in their advertising.
Ritchie responded to the use of the song in the commercial by saying :
"For the fans who rightfully are complaining about the Wendy's burger advertisement featuring Blister in the Sun, Gordon Gano is the publisher of the song and Warners is the record company. When they agree to use it there's nothing the rest of the band can do about it, because we don't own the song or the recording. That's showbiz. Therefore when you see dubious or in this case disgusting uses of our music you can thank the greed, insensitivity and poor taste of Gordon Gano, it is his karma that he lost his songwriting ability many years ago, probably due to his own lack of self-respect as his willingness to prostitute our songs demonstrates. Neither Gordon (vegetarian) nor me (gourmet) eat garbage like Wendy's burgers. I can't endorse them because I disagree with corporate food on culinary, political, health, economic and environmental grounds. However I see my life's work trivialized at the hands of my business partner over and over again, although I have raised my objections numerous times. As disgusted as you are I am more so." [1]
Ritchie filed a lawsuit against Gano in August 2007, seeking half ownership of the Femmes' music and access to royalty accounting.
[Source]
current music: Violent Femmes - Violent Femmes
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| Thursday, March 6th, 2008
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9:09 am - On The Tube
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"Looking back on my bubbled-permed self of a quarter of a century ago I’m transported to another time and place, when the dance music scene was still very much a specialist domain, existing away from the mainstream glare, and with the black kids, so much marginalised in British society back then, right at the cutting-edge. ‘The Tube’ was a big deal because it highlighted our scene in a way that rarely happened outside the black music media, giving it acknowledgement and respect, even if it didn’t fully understand the nuances of what it was about. The fact that Jools Holland asked me to point out what a turntable was, because some of their viewers might not know"
Source: Greg Wilson at Electro-Funk Roots
current music: Greg Wilson - Credit To The Edit
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| Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
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11:42 pm - Going ape with the Evo diet
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What if humans cast aside processed foods and saturated fats in favour of the sort of diet our ape-like ancestors once ate? Nine volunteers gave it a go...
and were glad they did so..
Source: BBC News
current music: Chosen Few - Positivity
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| Monday, March 3rd, 2008
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11:05 pm - On the deterioration of sound, mastering and music itself
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We live in a world of technology - exponentially increasing breakthroughs in all things scientific. So fast that we can't even keep up with it. So why is it that the audio quality of music is degenerating? Music 'sounds' worse. We have stopped listening, we don't have time. We only have time to be smacked in the face by the loudest, most attention-grabbing blast of souped-up noise imaginable until ear fatigue sets in and the desire to 'change the record' takes over. Why are the adverts on TV twice the volume of the regular broadcasts?
Alan Wilder (Depeche Mode / Recoil) tells you
No, it’s not you – records do all sound the same these days. Desperate to get their music on the radio at all costs, record labels are employing a new and powerful software to artificially sweeten it, polish it, make it “louder”… and squeeze out the last drops of its individuality. Tom Whitwell reports on what’s wrong with the sound of music
Source:
Side-Line article, Alan Wilder - "Music For The Masses - I think not."
and
The Word article, Why records DO all sound the same By Tom Whitwell
Additional articles:
Loudness War - Wikipedia
Why Music Really Is Getting Louder - Adam Sherwin, Times Online
How CDs Are Remastering The Art Of Noise - Tim Anderson, Guardian Unlimited
Brickwall Limiting - J.J. Blair, EQ Magazine
The Big Squeeze: Mastering Engineers Debate Music's Loudness Wars - Sarah Jones, Mix Magazine
Everything Louder Than Everything Else - Have The Loudness Wars Reached Their Final Battle? - Joe Gross, Austin360.com
Why New Music Doesn't Sound As Good As It Did - Yahoo! Tech
The Loudness War - Mark Donahue, Performer Magazine
The Death Of Dynamic Range - Mike Richter
Imperfect Sound Forever - Nick Southall, Stylus Magazine
Declaring An End To The Loudness Wars - Barry Diament
Tearing Down The Wall Of Noise - Suhas Sreedhar (Multimedia)
Tearing Down The Wall Of Noise - Suhas Sreedhar (Text)
Radio Ready: The Truth - Bob Orban & Frank Foti, with introduction and comments by Bob Katz (from Katz's book "Mastering Audio: The Art And The Science.")
Official, Rock Music Is Too Loud - Thomas Whitaker, The Sun
What Happened To Dynamic Range? - Bob Speer
Pump Up The Volume - Rip Rowan, WIRED Magazine
Over The Limit - Rip Rowan, ProRec.com
Music Gets Louder - Adrian Larkin, BBC Radio
It's Confirmed: Music Is Really Getting Louder - Duncan Robertson, Daily Mail
Experts: Music Is Getting 'Too Loud' - Dave West, Digital Spy
Distorted, Loud Rock Music Is Making Listeners 'Sick' - Adam Sherwin, Independent News
Masters On Mastering - JJ Jenkins, Electronic Musician
Current Trends in Recording: Is Louder Better? - Dan Banquer, Audioholics Magazine
Loudness - Chicago Mastering Service
Whatever Happened To Dynamic Range On Compact Discs? - George Graham
Hot CD Disease - John Vestman
Music Into Noise: The Destructive Use Of Dynamic Range Compression - Wes Lindstrom
Loudness Race Discussed - Bob Katz
How To Make Better Recordings - Integrated Metering, Monitoring, and Leveling Practices - Bob Katz
current music: Recoil - Unsound Methods
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| Friday, February 29th, 2008
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5:56 am - The reluctant anthropologist
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"My view hasn't changed. What has happened is that development people, for example those involved in Madagascar in nature conservation, basically try to control these countries and take them over in terms of their ideology. And they fail in development. What most of the Malagassy people understand by "development" is "getting richer". They fail because they know very little about the place in which they work. They are usually ignorant. I'm often struck by the fact that you get development experts trying to teach people things that they already know perfectly well and which they've tried themselves and have seen haven't worked. They greatly underestimate people in Madagascar. These experts know nothing about the country and therefore don't understand what the problems are. One could say that they need an anthropologist who could tell them about those people, so that they could work hand in hand.
But the problem is that what anthropologists usually have to say is terribly complicated. They say that these people have already thought of everything you could think of. And of course, development experts don't want to hear that, because they would lose their jobs if they took it to heart. And so honest anthropologists who work in areas that they know well find it terribly difficult to get on with development experts. Because of this, something very ironic happens. And I've seen that very often in Madagascar. When you get big development projects, the experts say that they want to work with an anthropologist because they need to understand the local people. But then they avoid those anthropologists who know about Madagascar, because if they really did bring in those anthropologists in, they would tell them things that were too complicated. The development experts just want to get on with it.
I think they really want anthropologists to tell them that the reason their policies are not working is because the local people have bizarre and exotic superstitions. You as anthropologists will be able to tell us that, they think, and therefore you the anthropologists will give us good excuses for the fact that nearly all development projects fail. But anthropologists who know the place are very unlikely to say such a thing. What they do then, for example, is get in an expert on Borneo for three weeks. If you are working in Madagascar, that's obviously ridiculous.
To that I would add one thing that I think is very important. That is that in Madagascar, the development experts are being replaced by conservationists who wield tremendous power. They are largely motivated by some general kind of ideologies about ecology in the world, about preserving forests or some species, which is obviously a good idea. But what they really want is to have large reserves in places like Madagascar. They want to turn the whole country into national park. Countries like Madagascar are hugely indebted. And European and North-American countries perform a kind of blackmail, which they call "swapping debt for nature". If you'll have natural parks then we'll drop the debt. And of course, the Malagassy government can't resist. The Malagassy elite are quite happy to have as many natural parks as the wealthy countries like, because the parks bring experts and the experts bring their money. But for the local people, it means that their land is just being taken away. They are not allowed to cultivate their land anymore. And they say, quite rightly, "the land has gone to the Americans". Villagers see their field on the other side of the fence; if they go to their field they will be fined or imprisoned, while they see American or European natural scientists wandering around on it. It's a terrible situation.
Those anthropologists who work there have denounced very strongly what is going on in ecology. But they find that because of the power and self-righteousness of the ecological discourse, it is difficult to get heard."
From an interview with Maurice Bloch
current music: The Bloodfire Possé - Are You Ready?
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| Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
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3:24 am - Ears for talents
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It is important to understand why Studio One is so venerated. The obvious common ingredient in all the classic songs that Studio One has released over the last forty-five years is Clement Dodd. From his earliest days as a producer, he understood the complexities of making a hit. Mr. Dodd valued good singing, good songwriting, good horn lines and fierce bass lines. Most important, however, were his ears. He knew how to listen. Most other producers hear something and wish to be part of it, to just recreate. They are afraid to listen to young artist or new ideas – if it isn’t already successful they don’t want to know about it. Nothing was ever done at Studio One without the express approval of Clement Dodd. When the band would balk at recording a new artist with an unorthodox style, Mr. Dodd would tell them to bear with him and try it. Suffice to say he was almost always right.
Source: Studio One Heartbeat
current music: Studio One Presents The Gladiators
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| Sunday, February 24th, 2008
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2:44 am - Scroogled
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"Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him."
—Cardinal Richelieu
"We don't know enough about you."
—Google CEO Eric Schmidt
Google controls your e-mail, your videos, your calendar, your searches…
What if it controlled your life?
What if Google were evil?
Source: Radar
There is nothing more perilous at a border crossing than a Google-happy border guard. Over the past year, two Canadians reported they were denied entry into the U.S. after a border guard Googled their names and decided, based on the search results, that they were undesirables.
Worth reading full article from The Montreal Mirror
current mood:  cold
current music: Laurence Rassel & Terre Thaemlitz - Useless Movement EP
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| Friday, February 15th, 2008
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12:33 pm - Suicide amoureux
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Il n'y a aujourd'hui qu'un pas du mariage au suicide amoureux...
Évidemment, beaucoup de couples se vantent des avantages fiscaux et autres petits bonus matériels acquis grâce à ces " liens sacrés ", et on les comprend : il faut bien qu'ils essaient de tirer quelque chose de positif de leur union. Tous ces grands romantiques pourraient bien avoir un argument supplémentaire de plus si on supprime les frais de divorce en créant un contrat de mariage à durée déterminée. En effet Gabriele Pauli, élue du parti conservateur au pouvoir dans la très catholique Bavière, a proposé que chaque mariage soit entériné pour une durée de 7 ans reconductible, ce qui économiserait les frais de justice nécessaires à la séparation.
Source: Vice
current mood:  amused
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