apple juice

“What interesting and unusual music are you listening to these days?” my Uncle asked me during Sunday dinner of bar-b-que and beans.

Good question.

I may be falling into that mid-30s rut where your musical tastes are locked into the bands you loved in college and shortly thereafter (or just straight through college, depending on how long it took you) Following in that thread, The Arcade Fire just released a new album entitled, appropriately for our current situation The Suburbs.

I don’t own it yet, I’m having a quick internal debate about whether I should buy the MP3s on Amazon for $3.99 or if I should order the Vinyl + Digital Download direct from Merge Records.

Anyway, say what you will about Pitchfork, they just nailed me into a corner with this observation in their review of The Suburbs:

This is another 2010 example of a Boss-indebted band (see also: the National and Titus Andronicus) making epic outpourings of modern disillusionment and disappointment for people who can commiserate and return to fretting about their jobs and bank accounts once the house lights go up. But just because the concerns of The Suburbs are at times mundane, that makes them no less real. And that Arcade Fire can make such powerful art out of recognizing these moments makes our own existences feel worthy of documentation. By dropping Neon Bible’s accusatory standpoint, The Suburbs delivers a life-affirming message similar to Funeral’s: We’re all in this together.

I love the National! And who is this Titus Andronicus?

Guilty as charged.

Update: I’ve purchased the MP3s. Instant gratification. Merge’s store appears to be down at the moment and I didn’t want to wait to find out how much the vinyl is.

“An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. ‘When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,’ he said.”

(Via Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle.)

Three things:

1. How hard would it have been for Amazon to email the customers in advance of the deletion? (BTW, I’m a big Amazon fan, but they totally screwed up here)
2. What do “U.S.” rights and “Australian” rights mean in today’s world? It doesn’t make sense. Movies that are released in one market but not another, books that are released on different dates in different countries, CDs that are released as “imports” with different tracks. Stupid.
3. How long is copyright anyway? I thought that 1984 was in the public domain? (I know I read it online, perhaps “illegally”)

The problem is… who owns it and what is it worth?

“This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.”

(Via Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others – Pogue’s Posts Blog – NYTimes.com)

The traditional media industry will be totally remade in the next ten years. Every major creative industry (music, movies and tv, words) is going to have to come to grips with what it is that they are really selling (or what it is that people are really interested in buying.)

In fact, it’s not only the traditional media companies that are being put through the blender, but also all of the pipe providers: comcast, Mark Cuban, Qwest, Verizon, AT&T, etc are going to have to come to grips with what they are really selling: Bits.

What is Amazon selling? Bits.

What are newspapers, magazines, albums, movies, sitcoms and books? Bits.

Does the value of the bits change depending on what they can be decoded in to?

What is the revenue to be made from making 1 more digital copy of something?

What is the incentive for people to create something that can be copied, if they aren’t compensated for every copy?

This is a big swirling topic, but I find it incredibly interesting. I’m confronted with this on a daily basis when it comes to student work, teacher use of copyrighted material, and my own media-consuming habits.

The two (copyrighted) books I purchased:

Free
by Chris Anderson (“In the digital marketplace, the most effective price is no price at all, argues Anderson”) and Remix
by Lawerence Lessig (“He frames the problem as a war between an old read-only culture, in which media megaliths sell copyrighted music and movies to passive consumers, and a dawning digital read-write culture, in which audiovisual products are freely downloaded and manipulated in an explosion of democratized creativity.”)

According to sources in the White House, President Barack Obama has been uncharacteristically distant and withdrawn ever since last months two-hour series finale of Battlestar Galactica.

via Obama Depressed, Distant Since Battlestar Galactica Series Finale | The Onion – Americas Finest News Source.

Classic!

I’m just listening to the latest U2 album. I like U2, but…

I’ve just determined my least favorite rock song structure.

The Bridge.

Show me a good bridge, and I’ll show you ten others that leave you groaning.

Why? Why? Why?

Who’s thinking that it is a good idea?

“Our vision is every book, ever printed, in any language , all available in less than 60 seconds.”

-Jeff Bezos

Wrap your mind around that for a second…

My stack of books keeps growing. Like my Netflix queue, but with more taunt. (As the pile of books sits, physically, by my bedside, whereas the Netflix queue is a bit more ethereal.)

I just finished reading Feed by M.T. Anderson. It’s in the pile of books known as “work books”, aka books tangentially related to my job. (I’m not sure if What Went Wrong by Bernard Lewis counts… I checked it out from the school’s library)

I very much enjoy books and movies set in some dystopian future where people are reliant on, or slave to, some sort of “web” of information, and Feed fit the bill perfectly. It’s billed as a “Young adult” novel, but I think it would be appropriate for anyone who has ever walked around in public with a bluetooth earphone in their ear… while not actually speaking with anyone.

The basic premise of the book is that the internet is in your brain, and society has devolved significantly. Idiocracy meets Minority Report.

It’s a good read. I’d highly recommend it if you’re feeling just a bit too connected these days…