The Rambler

Here’s odd. While I think they make your blog look clunky and a little crass, I can appreciate why people might stick up some Google ads in their sidebar to make a little bit of pocket money on the side. But I’m surprised that Warner Brothers Records feel this short of cash (especially when there’s every chance the ads will be for their competitors). Maybe the record industry is in worse shape than feared…

I’ve been slightly lax about doing this admittedly, but I want to take a moment to announce that after marrying, milady and I are democratically changing both our names – so if you see comments etc. from ‘Tim Rutherford-Johnson’ from now on, that’s me.

Ta.

The Democrat Convention notwithstanding, this, over at Arts Journal is for me the most interesting thing happening on the net at the moment. By way of explanation, here’s their own spiel:

There was a time when great cities had multiple newspapers and culture was hashed out daily in the press, strongly-held opinions battling for the hearts and minds of readers. Today it’s rare for a city to have more than one or two outlets where culture can be publicly discussed, let alone prodded and pulled and challenged…

Our culture is the lesser for it, as critical opinions about art, music, theatre, and dance get squeezed, and public debates about culture in the print media grow fainter. That doesn’t mean there isn’t great writing about culture still to be found in print (there’s evidence of it every day in ArtsJournal). But the writing is one-way, and rarely do we see a good back-and-forth debate bubble up.

Now comes the internet, where a lively mob of voices has taken up discussions of culture, politics, and just about anything else you can think of. Daily, thousands of bloggers fire up their computers to register opinions, and one of the things that makes the best of them interesting is their willingness to engage in dialogues with their readers.

So what if we gathered up some of the best print critics and asked them to engage one another over an issue in a blog? Their opinions could be challenged, their ideas explained, and a lively debate might ensue.

That’s what we hope will happen over the next ten days in this “topic blog” exploring the future of Big Ideas in classical music. We’ve invited a dozen of the best American classical music critics:

Charles Ward of the Houston Chronicle
Scott Cantrell of the Dallas Morning News
Kyle Gann of the  Village Voice
Justin Davidson of Newsday
John Rockwell of The New York Times
Andrew Druckenbrod of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Greg Sandow of The Wall Street Journal
Wynne Delacoma of the Chicago Sun-Times
John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune
Kyle MacMillan of the Denver Post
Alex Ross of The New Yorker
Joshua Kosman of the  San Francisco Chronicle

and asked them to discuss:

THE NEXT BIG IDEA?
If the history of music is the recorded conversation of ideas, then where do we find ourselves in that conversation at the start of the 21st Century? In the past, musical ideas have been fought over, affirmed then challenged again, with each generation adding something new. Ultimately consensus was achieved around an idea, and that idea gained traction with a critical mass of composers.
Now we are in a period when no particular musical idea seems to represent our age, and it appears that for the moment – at least on the surface – that there is no obvious direction music is going. So the question is: what is the next chapter in the historical conversation of musical ideas, and where are the seeds of those ideas planted?
Or: Is it possible that, with traditional cultural structures fragmenting, and the ways people are getting and using culture fundamentally changing, that it is no longer possible for a unifying style to emerge? Is it still possible for a Big Idea to attain the kind of traction needed to energize and acquire a critical mass of composers and performers?

RIAA destroy a legit record shop, simply for selling mixtapes. So that’s a fat chunk of records no longer being sold in Indianapolis, a whole bunch of artists no longer getting promoted, and a record company-endorsed practice for breaking new artists outlawed. Mission accomplished then? Well done guys.

Jeff of The Architectural Dance Society has just posted info on his contribution to the ever-growing struggle to make spam into something useful. He figured that some of the spam his friend was getting could have been penned – in an alternate universe – by Mark E. Smith. There’s more explanation here (including lyrics), and he even went the extra mile to put together an MP3 (here, 5.56Mb MP3 file), which is pretty convincing at times. Like it centurion!

The internet really has come up trumps today. Thanks to a diligent del.icio.us poster, I was directed towards this old UC Berkeley page buried in the Internet Archive. And what do you find there? Nothing less than a downloadable recording of Reich’s triumphant UCB concert of 7 November 1970, with full performances of Piano Phase, Four Organs, My Name Is and Phase Patterns. This is tremendous stuff, and a classic recording. A word of caution though – this is not for the faint of bandwidth: the zip file I saved broke the 700Mb barrier!

Thanks to Disquiet for the pointer – I am greatly enjoying the two-part Jazzy Jeff mix available here at Club Six – a surprisingly unsettled, jumpy collection of loose grooves and pop licks. A darn sight more interesting than his acting on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air ever was anyway.

Speaking of which, for those who – like me – are easily amused by these things, there’s a great little flash-DJ game on that FPoBA site which lets you DJ while Philip, Geoffrey, Vivian, Carlton et al boogie under the disco lights. One to save for a slow Friday afternoon.

Maybe a really slow Friday afternoon…

You’ve probably heard it before, but I’m absolutely loving this cover of ‘Common People’ [1 Mb Quicktime file] by Joe Jackson and a brilliantly bitter and sneering William Shatner. Yes, that’s William Shatner, and he out Jarvises Jarvis on this one.

Feeling low at the end of another drab UK summer week? Inject some sunshine into your day with the Low IQ 01 track featured here. Ever wondered how a Japanese punk band, who may have recently been listening to some chirpy Stereolab albums, would cover ‘Anarchy in the UK’? Thought so – well this is your chance. I love this track – right down to the flute solo, the little vocal twiddles on ‘I want to be-e-e anarchy’, the bolted-on reggae intro, the works.

What with the Wilco backlash doing good rounds at the moment (see also Carl Wilson recently), I was rather surprised to see Wilco on the cover of the new Wire magazine flopping through my door just now. Could be some interesting reading in there, à la Radiohead a couple of years back I reckon.