Clinamen

I have been reading some of Debbie's posts about leaving one home and starting a new one (though, for her, the new home is an old one too). I'll be leaving Austin soon, and I've been pre-missing (did I make that word up?) Austin for a while now. J and I have been working our way through a "bucket list" of sorts.

Part of my bucket list involves seeing as much live music as possible, and thanks to my good friend Doug I got to see Okkervil River's taping of Austin City Limits last night.

My good friend Doug Freeman at the Austin Chronicle has posted what I think is a dead on assessment of how print journalism (in this case, music journalism) is missing the boat:

"The continued waning of print publications’ resources and influence is undoubtedly due to the rise of the Internet, in much the same way the CD-based music business has been felled by online capabilities. This loss of influence is not due to the rise of blogs, however, but rather the inability of print publications to largely adjust to the Web, to transform either their content, style, or influence to a new medium, much to detriment of [music] criticism itself."

Weezer's new Red Album is out, and The Valve has something to say about it. I think I pretty much agree with this assessment. I hate "Heart Songs," but I kinda love "Everybody Get Dangerous" even if it is "forgettably adolescent."

This one is MUCH better than Make Believe even if it doesn't quite hit the level of Pinkerton or The Blue Album...but not much ever will. Plus, I'm 30 years old. If I was 18, I'm betting I'd love everything about the more recent Weezer efforts. People grow out of stuff.

I have been a Weezer fan since the first time I heard "Undone" in 1994. With the exception of their most recent album called Make Believe, I think Weezer's stuff still has something to offer. (Make Believe struck me as an attempt to reach a younger demographic. If so, then maybe it wasn't "bad." Maybe it just that it wasn't "my" Weezer.)

The new album will be self-titled but it will be called The Red Album (in the tradition of The Blue Album and The Green Album), and it will be released in June. The first single is called "Pork and Beans" and sounds promising. But in the meantime, front man Rivers Cuomo has been using YouTube to pull together his minions in a collaborative song-writing effort. I've included the video for steps 1 and 2 below, but you can watch all the steps of the compositional process at Rivers' YouTube page.

I got to see R.E.M. tape Austin City Limits today (the show will air on May 24.)





While, I'm not a diehard R.E.M fan, it was pretty awesome to be 10 feet from Michael Stipe during songs like "Man on the Moon" and "Fall on Me." Oh, and the new single - "Supernatural, Superserious" - is really good.

During a great SXSW day show sponsored by the Austinist, I spotted this piece of gold on the wall of the men's room:

Considering how many blackberries and side ponytails I've seen during the past couple of days, this nugget of wisdom is fairly accurate.

This piece in the Guardian breaks down Radiohead's possible profits from In Rainbows - an album that allowed fans to name their own price.

Some years ago, William Fisher of Stanford University published some interesting data on the cost structure of CDs. According to his figures, the retailer's slice of the CD is 38 per cent, while distributors take 8 per cent and marketing another 8 per cent.

The artist, in contrast, typically gets only 12 per cent and the music publisher 4 per cent. So the maximum Radiohead would get from a conventionally marketed CD priced at £8 is actually £1.28 - which, coincidentally, is almost exactly what Comscore thinks they got from their online experiment.

Rap meets Powerpoint (Link courtesy of Double A). See what happens when Ice Cube hits the boardroom:

I had an Ulmer moment this morning. In my computers and writing class, we're using Greg Ulmer's Internet Invention and creating mystories. Part of what Ulmer is trying to get students to do is recognize how certain forces and discourses shape us at the level of both the conscious and unconscious. To this end, he offers a number of different exercises that get students to recognize what Barthes calls the "sting" of the punctum. That is, how an image or sound or text stings the body prior to consciousness - prior to us making sense of it.

This morning, I parked my car next to this car:

There was clearly a sting of some sort. This picture affected me in some way because I took a picture. I snapped a couple of pictures and started walking toward campus. I had the Decemberists Castaways and Cutouts album playing on my ipod, but for some reason that wasn't doing it for me. So I scrolled a bit farther down in the D's and stopped on The Doors. My brother and I recently bought the re-issue of The Doors The Soft Parade album for my Dad (it has some new tracks on it). Dad and I talked recently about how great that album is and how under appreciated it was when it was released.

Slashdot reports that Radiohead did okay with their stunt to let customers set their own price for their In Rainbows album (quote from Comscore):

"During the first 29 days of October, 1.2 million people worldwide visited the 'In Rainbows' site, with a significant percentage of visitors ultimately downloading the album. The study showed that 38 percent of global downloaders of the album willingly paid to do so, with the remaining 62 percent choosing to pay nothing... Of those who were willing to pay, the largest percentage (17 percent) paid less than $4. However, a significant percentage (12 percent) were willing to pay between $8-$12, or approximately the cost to download a typical album via iTunes, and these consumers accounted for more than half (52 percent) of all sales in dollars."