It made the Walkman look like an iPod

(Via Vintage Ads.)

Kurt’s Guitar Hero avatar: Cardigan skank or ‘Adonis’?

Rolling Stone has a piece today on the story behind Kurt Cobain’s character in Guitar Hero 5. Getting Nirvana’s music in the game seems to have taken some wrangling with Courtney Love and Universal Publishing, but also apparently with Dave Grohl, the magazine reports.

Not surprisingly, though, it sounds as if Courtney was a particularly difficult negotiation. An Activision executive explains some of her requests, particularly on how buff the digital Kurt would be:

Naturally, Love did have some concerns. Namely, Cobain’s physique, [exec Tim] Riley reveals. “Courtney supplied us with photos and videos and knew exactly what she wanted Kurt to look like,” he says. “She picked the wardrobe and hair style, which turned out to be the ‘Teen Spirit’ look, then we went back and forth over changes — some subtle, some not so subtle.” In column B? Love’s reference to the Greek God Adonis, whose youthful good looks made the male deity an object of desire. “She certainly had a physical image in mind,” says Riley. “She wanted him to have that sort of athletic definition but not overly so.”

Was it Courtney or Dave Grohl who got the Daniel Johnston shirt in there? And does Daniel get any licensing bread from this?

Rolling Stone also has a brief video of scenes from the game’s Nirvana songs, which are “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and a live version of “Lithium.” On this clip, at least, there’s virtually no screen time for any of the rest of the band, but curiously there is another guitarist on stage, and it looks vaguely like Pat Smear. Which might be a slight anachronism: Smear joined for the In Utero tour, when Cobain didn’t look like this anymore.

Vanishing music posts

Jeff Weiss wrote an interesting piece in L.A. Weekly last week about the phenomenon of music blogs on Blogger mysteriously losing their content, as happened to me two months ago when my year-end list vanished without a trace. Weiss sees an RIAA-Google conspiracy gone haywire:

Blogger chat rooms buzzed with speculation about the mysterious force behind the surge in disappeared posts. Open e-mails to the Recording Industry Association of America began popping up at such a rapid rate that you’d think they contained new Justice mp3s.

Eventually, though, a consensus emerged: Each post takedown occurred on a blog hosted by the Google-owned Blogger platform, the publishing system used by the majority of mp3 sites ... Google, the bloggers believe, has quietly changed the methods by which it enforces its user agreement. Whereas in the past, a blog owner would receive a warning before a post’s removal, Google is now simply hitting the delete button.

It certainly makes sense that labels want to protect their copyrights, particularly when it comes to pre-release leaks that can destroy legit sales; the RIAA and Google basically admit to this in Weiss’s article. But that doesn’t explain the disappearance of posts with harmless old audio files or (in my case) posts with no downloadable files at all.

Are Google’s blog-scouring robots too zealous and indiscriminate in sniffing out copyright violators? Weiss doesn’t address that point directly, and I’d be curious to hear more stories from us schmucks who did nothing wrong but apparently fit the profile.

The story received many detailed comments. One is from a blogger who had written about the issue several months ago, and links to a Google page about DMCA removals, including instructions about filing a counter notification — in other words, how to defend yourself if one of your posts has been chucked down the memory hole. It includes a phone number and an email address. I've bookmarked it just in case this post goes AWOL.

1960s computer ads

“Burroughs B-220 Computer

This was a vacuum-tube computer with 10,000 44-bit words of core, each containing 10 decimal digits. Core memory was a new technology, replacing drum memory with magnetic cores. This was called Random-Access Memory (RAM) because you could access any word of memory in the same time as any other word.” (Link)

And don’t forget the Burroughs B-205!


(Via Vintage Ads.)

Oblique Strategies for iPhone

A company called Far Out Labs has developed an iPhone app for Oblique Strategies, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s wonderful oracle in a deck of cards. (This is separate from the Dashboard widget.) You tap the screen, and another “worthwhile dilemma” pops up to unlock your mind. Complaint: the screenshots above are misleading since the design is inexplicably in landscape orientation. 

Eno himself has helped create an app called Bloom, which allows you to make patterns of sounds — some might call that music, some might just call it patterns of sounds — by tapping on the screen.

Maybe it’s time for me to finally figure out how to do a web version of my parody, Obtuse Strategies, which I designed and printed privately at not inconsiderable expense.

(Thanks to Rob for the tip.)

Open letter to Google about Blogger problems

Dear Google,

A post to this blog on Jan. 2 called "Best of 2008" has disappeared. I am a music journalist and this post was an extensive list of my favorite releases of 2008, with images and YouTube clips. I spent a ridiculous amount of time working on it. It received comments from readers. The post does not appear in the cache for the blog, nor does it turn up when I search for phrases that I remember being in there. Other posts from around the same time, however, are still up.

I have looked through Blogger Help but haven't found any answer to my problem, nor have I found any way to contact someone at Google/Blogger who could help me. "Contacting support" does not actually have a way to contact support, but instead leads a user to your help forums, which tell me: "You cannot post messages because only members can post, and you are not currently a member." Besides the fact that I believe I am a member -- I have a Google account and also have this blog -- I don't think that thousands of miscellaneous posts from other people having problems exactly constitutes technical support.

This is especially frustrating since another post on a similar topic vanished from my blog months ago. In late June or early July I published a list called "Six-month report," which gave my favorite music of the first half of 2008. That disappeared somewhat quickly; a few weeks, I think.

Could you please help me in retrieving these posts? And if there are particular bugs in your programming that allow posts to disappear like this, could you please fix them?

Thank you,
Ben Sisario

’Tis the season to download the WPIX Yule Log for iPod

Alessandra Stanley’s column today about video yule logs reminded me to remind the world that the great WPIX Yule Log — the original — is available as a download for your iPod.

Which means that while you’re waiting on line at the airport or being shoved in the face by someone’s luggage on an Amtrak train, you can find comfort in 240 by 180 crackling pixels on a 6 minute 3 second loop.

And although classic WPIX remains the greatest television station ever — two words: Phil Rizzuto — I learned this year that even we New York chauvinists can reach to our friends across the country in Yule Log solidarity. It was filmed in a house in California on a hot August day in 1970.

Something to chat about over your wassail games this year.

My Best Got ’08

From GQ:

Click here for the indispensable Edirol R-09, and here for that interview with the guy from the New York Times.

Metallica, the font

It’s called Pastor of Muppets, and if you download it (for Windows/Mac TrueType and Mac PostScript), it also includes Pastor of Muppets Flipped, so you can do both ends of LUNCH or FLUFFY or MOM or whatever.

Found via a comment on Brand New, which has a very interesting look at the new version Metallica’s classic logo. Along with a bunch of other Metallica merch, it was designed by the company that also did the latest Coke cans and all sorts of other designs for famous commodity brands.

(Via The Daily Swarm.)

Caverns of Mars

Radiohead’s 64-laser video

The video for Radiohead’s “House of Cards” was made with no cameras but rather a spinning device that contains 64 lasers:

There are articles about it in Creativity and the Guardian. (Which has probably the worst lede you could ever imagine in a Guardian article: “Cameras? Radiohead don’t need your stinkin’ cameras.”) Google Code, something I had never heard of, has an amazing feature that allows you to play with the 3-D data:

And here is a making-of-the-video video:

(Via TDS, BB.)

iPhone screens Flickr pool

Headline hall of fame: Mmm, monkey brains...

“Monkeys Control a Robot Arm With Their Thoughts”

Future headlines in the Planet of the Apes Is Here Gazette:

Monkeys Use Robotic Arms
To Sign Names on Casts
Of Other Monkeys’ Robotic Arms

❧

MONKEYS SCRATCH BUTTS WITH NEW PRECISION

❧

Primates Skim ‘InStyle’
Using Robotic Arms

Dozens electrocuted licking fingers to turn pages

❧

Simians’ Robotic Arms Become Self-Aware

MARSHMALLOW-GRABBING SOFTWARE DESIGNED

‘Grodd’ named leader — calls for Batman’s ‘puny man-head’

❧

CYBER-PRIMATES DECLARE WAR ON HUMANITY

Still miffed over ‘brains’ scene in ‘Temple of Doom’

❧

Ultimatum From Anthropoids

‘Surrender bananas and Coke cans or poop will be thrown at you at supersonic speeds’

❧

Scientists Confirm Deadly Force of Projectile Poop

❧

Poop-Defense Shield Proposed

But Democrats won’t fucking sign it

❧

PRESERVED HEAD OF ‘APE LOVER’ SCHUMER STOLEN, POOPED ON

❧

Ape Dissenters Build Cybernetic Kubrick

‘DR. STRANGEPOOP’

Absurdist comedy reflects darkening primate culture

❧

REVIEW: APE FILM ALL PEEL, NO BANANA

❧

Editorial: ‘You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you all to hell!’

The Tape of the Stars

(Via Vintage Ads.)

Pixies on Rock Band

I hadn’t seen this over the weekend, but it was announced that the video game Rock Band will now be selling complete albums, and that among the first to go on sale will be the Pixies’ “Doolittle,” in June. Even better, I have to say, is that the very first offering will be Judas Priest’s “Screaming for Vengeance,” coming this week. (For those who were not in the fourth grade in 1982, it’s the one with “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’.”) Albums will cost $14.99, and individual songs $2. “Wave of Mutilation” is already on the game, as the “100% expert” drummer video below testifies. “Interactive” or not, the price sounds a bit high to me. But at least this is better news than “Saints of Los Angeles.”

The original lo-fi

Decades before Edison. Hats off to Jody Rosen for an incredible story.

Fidelity in 1860 wasn’t so high, though. (Clip.)

Vintage ads: Modems are sexy!

Nothing sells 4800 bauds like leggy Avengers chic!

This is from 1971. More great old computer ads at 2Spare.

‘The Heavenly Jukebox’

Thanks to Coolfer Glenn for pointing out that this fascinating article by Charles C. Mann on the future of the music business, published in The Atlantic Monthly in 2000, is now available online. (The Atlantic no longer restricts access to its archives.) Glenn calls it “a very prescient examination of the issues surrounding the industry’s reaction to file-sharing and digital distribution.”

Some excerpts:

• “Technophiles claim that the major labels, profitable concerns today, will rapidly cease to exist, because the Internet makes copying and distributing recorded music so fast, cheap, and easy that charging for it will effectively become impossible... Through their trade association, the Recording Industry Association of America, the labels are fighting back with every available weapon: litigation, lobbying, public relations, and, behind the trenches, jiggery-pokery with technical standards.”


• “Compared with writers and filmmakers, musicians are both more imperiled by the Internet and better able to slip past the threat. The music industry seems to have less room to maneuver. In consequence, it has been pushing for decisive judicial and legislative action. The Internet will become a principal arena for the clash of ideas that the Founders believed necessary for democracy. Allowing the travails of a single industry — no matter how legitimate its concerns — to decide the architecture of that arena would be a folly that could take a long time to undo.”


• “For better or worse, the star-maker machinery behind the popular song, as Joni Mitchell called it, is the aspect of the music industry that would be most imperiled by the effective loss of copyright to the Net. If the majors can’t reap the benefits of their marketing muscle, says Hal Varian, an economist and the dean of the School of Information Management and Systems, at Berkeley, ‘their current business model won’t survive.’ The impact on their profits could be devastating. Musicians have much less to lose, and much less to fear.”

One of the four parts of the article was included in the Da Capo Best Music Writing 2001 anthology.

Mann is a first-rate reporter of the old-school new-journalism type, the type that do a lot of research and know the art of storytelling. He’s also the author of one of my favorite recent nonfiction books, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.

WPIX Yule Log for iPod

The historic WPIX Yule Log, that is. Download here.