Truth Like The Dark

I’d move there. Seriously, she is a artistic genius, so beautiful inside and out. And look, she was beautiful even before she was Joni Mitchell:

Over on StrangeMaps, there’s this image of The Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World, a map of secularity versus self expression values. Wonder how hard it is to learn Swedish?

Just finished Daniel J. Levitin’s This is Your Brain On Music. Strongly recommended for both music lovers and scientists (and particularly those interested in brains and AI). There are lots of things in the book I disagreed with, and I think it could have had a better ending, but the writing is great, and it’s pitched at a good level for a general audience. The frequent use of music references from many genres were particularly good. As the book articulated neurally: music is evocative, and tying these ideas to tunes you know really gives them impact.

I just stepped into Wolfgang’s Vault. It’s the truly amazing collection of rock poster’s, t-shirts, other art items, and most importantly, concert recordings, collected by the legendary Bill Graham productions of San Francisco. My god.

I heard about this on NPR, but here’s a Wall Street Journal article on how the new owner of this material bought the collection for a relative song ($5 million) from those mega-assholes Clear Channel, before either of them realized it contains what might be the most important audio archive of popular music history in existence.

Now Wolfgang’s Vault is on the web, and you can download the concert material. And as a bonus, the new owner is providing much better royalties to the original artists than their record companies give them. Makes up (a little) for how these artists were generally screwed by the music industry over the years.

Rock On, Wolfgang!

In a slightly less serious musical friend vein, check this:

I was consulted on the design of the vacuum cleaner based robot in said video. In the sense that Steve Aruni (whose real last name I know) called me and asked “how do I build a music playing robot”, and I told him “fuck if I know”.

Steve Aruni performs in London’s Tubular Transport venues with said robot. I like the boys new stuff. Check out “I never knew…” (NSFW) on his site.

James A. Floyd (the younger, largely-non-psychopathic one) is my oldest friend and former songwriting partner (listen to our marginal work of yesterday with Crop Circles). He’s re-used the name of one of our most ancient bands together for a fine new musical adventure.

The Billy Sunday Band (named for the baseball hero cum fire-and-brimstone preacher) has a new song “To Be Strong” that has appeared on old Neil Young’s Living With War Today website.

Give it a listen, especially if you fancy the sort of stuff I often post here.

This is the UK Hallmark Channel page for this week’s episode of Jericho, a rather lame Post-Lost TV show that involves a small American town after a mysterious nuclear attack cripples the USA.

Despite my opinion of the show, I’m sure there are lots of Britons watching, rapt and addicted, waiting for the answers to the show’s mysteries to play out.

Hallmark continues to promote this mystery show, having not told their viewers that the show has been dead-end canceled in America. Fans there are understandably frustrated at the lack of closure. They’ve adopted the banner “nuts for Jericho”, and sent tons of nuts to the shows producers.. But it’s very unlikely the show will ever get ending episodes. More likely, the producers will “announce” how the unsuccessful show would have ended.

One can hate CBS for this. But think of the hate in store for Hallmark UK. They know the show is a dead end, yet they continue to promote it, giving no sign to the viewers that their investing in something that will never pay out.