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My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-12-6)

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 22:37:43 -0500

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-12-6):

The Mysterious Letters Aftermath

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:43:25 -0500

One of my favorite Kickstarter stories so far. Please read!

And then there’s Mysterious Letters, a Kickstarter project from two artists — Michael and Lenka — to mail everyone in the world a personal letter. It began in April with a small village named Cushendall in Northern Ireland, where the letters caused quite a stir (their project video is the BBC news broadcast about it). Then came their successfully funded Kickstarter project and — last week — the article snipped above.

For this second round, Michael (who lives in London) and Lenka (who lives in Pittsburgh) choose Postal Hill, a neighborhood of about 600 in Pittsburgh. They first unveiled the location in a Q&A with us here on the blog:

“The second batch (the ones we’re writing in November) will be written from an old Barber’s shop in Pittsburgh. I am in the middle of sweeping it out and fixing it up at the moment.”

They announced that the mailing had gone out in a project update, and within a week of that, one of the recipients of a letter commented on the Kickstarter blog post. It was the first connection anyone had made between Kickstarter and the letters.

Here’s what he described in his comment:

“Yesterday, Tuesday, November 24, 2009, I got 2 packages in the mail
with no return address. I’m always happy to get something that isn’t
junk mail or bills so I eagerly opened one of these: a 9X12” envelope.
There was 6¢ postage due on this. Inside was a collage made from
6 pieces of paper of various sizes glued overtop each other
(in gradually decreasing dimensions) onto a 7th piece of paper.
On top of all that was a sortof address label with a
seemingly personal handwritten note:

“michael,
love from michael +
lenka”

I opened the 2nd package, a smaller padded envelope, & found a small saucer
(of the type a teacup might be placed on) which had handwritten on the top:

“CONGRATULATIONS
To
[my given name]
for
Everything You’ve
Achieved
so far.”

& on the back:

“WELL DONE !
Michael
+
Lenka
11/16/09”

The commenter, named tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, then goes onto beautifully detail the story of how he came to find the blog and the origin of the letters themselves. He also explains, as you might expect, that some people — particularly the elderly — were frightened by the letters.

That fear was the focus of the AP wire story that went out about the project, and even got picked up by the New York Times. “Pittsburgh mystery letters revealed as art project,” reads the headline (I like how “revealed” implies people had been waiting blue-faced for this revelation).

The piece includes this amazing anecdote:

Anna Misiaszek, who runs Alfred’s Deli Plus with her husband, said the letter that arrived at their shop seemed silly. It read: “Next time someone tries to bamboozle you with the cup and ball trick (on holiday in Turkey, at a city bus station …) choose the cup on the right.”

“This is something crazy. I treat this like a joke,” she said Tuesday.

She initially tore up the letter and tossed it in the trash, but later retrieved it when she was told it was an art project.

They also got sneered at for their silliness by a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review columnist:

Clayton, who recently moved to Pittsburgh, and Crowe apparently don’t have day jobs.

If they did, they probably wouldn’t have found the time to painstakingly craft the 467 unsolicited letters they sent in April to residents of Cushendail, a small village in Ireland, to kick off the project.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s story by Diana Nelson Jones is actually pretty fantastic. One part:

At Tai + Lee Architects on Brereton Street, architect William Hopkins received an envelope at his home up the street. The address is written in rounded, no-frills British handwriting; Polish Hill is not capitalized. Inside was a strip of a letter. The paper and the envelope look grayish and well-handled, like artifacts from an attic trunk. On the back of the strip instructions are written around and inside round stickers like the kind used to price yard sale items. “You have part 2,” it reads. Two nearby neighbors have parts one and three. Who has part four?

…

“I don’t know, there are things about it that seem a little …” Ms. Clague waved her hand back and forth to indicate mixed feelings. “If you are fearful, it doesn’t take much” to inspire fear.

“It’s a psychological test. To me, it’s interesting on that level,” she said.

On their blog, Michael and Lenka have been posting all 620 letters that they’ve sent, including this gem:

Love it.

We’ve written a lot about this project — something definitely struck us about it from the get-go. And as a backer, I read the articles above with proud delight. Though I didn’t write a letter or contribute in that way, I felt like this project was mine. Every backer is a part of this story. That’s the beauty of it.

It’s a remarkable privilege to watch an idea’s conception, execution, and conclusion in a single, unbroken context. I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced it before. Michael and Lenka presented their idea. They were funded in two weeks. The announce that letters are being sent. Two days later, a recipient traces the completely unmarked letter to the page where it originated.

Such an amazing conclusion to a story that’s far from over.

themattsmith: thegrasshopperunit: herooftheproletariat: Colton...

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:46:49 -0500

themattsmith:

thegrasshopperunit:

herooftheproletariat:

Colton Harris-Moore, the barefoot boy bandit, outfoxes sheriffs

In the forests and remote islands around Seattle, police are setting traps for a barefoot teenage outlaw who has eluded them for nearly two years.

Police say 18-year-old Colton Harris-Moore, whose escapades are turning him into a folk legend, is a one-man crime wave, responsible for 50 burglaries as well as stealing light aircraft, which he taught himself to fly from video games, and several speedboats.

He lives in the woods, shuns shoes and catches his own food. His only technological aid is a pair of thermal-imaging goggles to hunt at night and his weakness is pizzas, which he asks to be delivered at the edge of the woods.

For some Harris-Moore is a modern Butch Cassidy: a surprisingly agile 6ft 5in cat burglar who thanks his victims by leaving them notes and cheeky photographs of himself, which have sold for £300 on eBay.

Thousands subscribe to his Facebook page and his image appears on T-shirts with the logo “Fly, Colton, Fly!”. Local rock groups have penned songs about him.

Hollywood producers have lodged lucrative film deals with his family and offered to pay for lawyers if he gives himself up.

Raised in a caravan on Camano Island, an isolated community in the Puget Sound, Harris-Moore started living wild at the age of seven. He would break into holiday homes, steal blankets and food and vanish into the woods for days.

In April 2008, after being sent to a juvenile detention centre, he complained that the beds were too short for his lanky frame and went on the run.

Police believe he fled to Canada and then, a few weeks ago, came back across the border to Idaho where he stole a Cessna 182 and flew to Seattle. He crash-landed in a forest clearing and walked away with cuts and bruises.

Since then he has been accused of stealing other planes for hops around the islands in the Puget Sound, including another Cessna belonging to a disc jockey who vented his frustration on radio, saying: “He still doesn’t know how to land a plane in one piece.”

He evaded a police pursuit by crashing a Mercedes-Benz into a roadside gas storage tank, using the explosion as a diversion to escape back into the woods where, he says, he feels like a Native American.

This was followed by the largest manhunt in recent memory. Three dozen sheriffs, aided by specialist armed units and an FBI helicopter, fanned out across Camano Island but failed to capture him. “We saw him, we think, but it’s like he disappeared in front of our eyes,” said one sheriff.

His luck may be about to run out. During a recent sweep a rifle shot was fired at police, raising his status to “armed and dangerous”. His mother, Pamela Kohler, now fears that even if he did not fire the shot he will be held responsible.

Kohler said she was proud her son had stolen the aircraft because he had never had a flying lesson in his life. “I was going to send him to flight school, but I guess I don’t have to,” she said. “I’d tell him the next time he took a plane: wear a parachute and practise your landing.

“If he shot that gun, it was really stupid. I don’t expect him to come out of the woods alive.”

[via]

WOW

Photo

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:43:21 -0500

Josh from Animal Collective has a Kickstarter project, and it's awesome

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 10:26:03 -0500

Josh from Animal Collective has a Kickstarter project, and it's awesome

The French Secretary of State tweeted about Kickstarter today

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 10:58:10 -0500

The French Secretary of State tweeted about Kickstarter today

whitneymcn: Faraquet - Yo-Yo I’ve been in a Dischord kind of...

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 09:31:39 -0500

whitneymcn:

Faraquet - Yo-Yo

I’ve been in a Dischord kind of place recently and as the tentacles of the obsession spread they ended up reaching back to Faraquet’s Anthology 1997-98.

I guess I can understand why, but it still makes me a little sad to check their entries on Wikipedia or Allmusic and see the word “influential” rather than “popular” appear every time.

Oh man. Love Faraquet so much.

The Inevitable Minefield of Music Subscription

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 09:29:30 -0500

fascinated:

Playing around with the new mog.com subscription offering (via a free 1 month trial, kindly given by David Hyman) reminded me of the problem that time and again turns me (and I’d bet a ton of other people) off from music subscription services.

Working with music on the web I absolutely love them and want them to be the future. Even services like the now-defunct MTV Urge, which had incredible editorial but was imprisoned in Windows Media Player, offered something to love. The new mog.com is a decent service, Spotify’s amazing app fully blows my mind daily. Of course, most people don’t work with music on the web and don’t care this much. That’s healthy.

So instead they end up in a minefield, whenever they try one of these services out. This minefield experience is present in every single music subscription service to date and comes from the simple impossibility of licensing all available recorded music. We all know why that’s so difficult, but this issue continuously eats away at the real, mainstream viability of these services regardless. Your users don’t care that it’s hard to license music.

Companies announce the services with massive libraries containing millions of tracks ambitiously promising to be the complete solution to an individual’s music consumption. What they miss, however, is that their services are only as good as the % of tracks a single person finds on their service. That individual doesn’t care about the other 4,999,990 if an album they love is unplayable. They feel especially frustrated because they were promised everything, but are denied access with seeming randomness (they don’t know that The Beatles hate digital music, for instance, so it seems random). A brutal consumer barrier.

The minefield works this:

1. Look up some artist you like, say Linkin Park.
2. Get excited, listen to lots of tracks by the artist.
3. Try listening to another artist, like, Scout Niblett.
4. Listen to some tracks, suddenly notice that the list of songs is strangely incomplete. Some records have all, some just have a few playable tracks.
5. Forget and move onto a different artist, say, Radiohead. Discover that some whole albums are unavailable, and those are some you really wanted to hear!
6. Explore further to find some albums with tracks that are unplayable but purchasable in “Full album only” mode. That seems unfair, surely if I am already paying for the service…
7. Repeat 1-6 until it becomes clear that the only music you truly have access to is that which you downloaded in mp3 format and firmly sits on your iPod. Keep hope alive that one day, such a service in the cloud will come along, but until then, keep the files! Lets not even talk about regional restrictions.
8. The minefield experience culminates with full destruction when the subscription services go out of business, and you lose your preferences or can no longer play your downloaded DRMd media [src], but that’s simply tough luck, right?

One notable exception to this pattern is Lala, which allows you to scan your music library and the access all the same songs from their service on the web in addition to the songs you awkwardly purchase from them for web-only streaming for $0.10. Not sure how well the process works or how they handle The Beatles, but at least this is a smart stab at the problem.

Until the minefield is cleaned up and people get a perception of being *really* able to access all the music they want (whatever that means to them), we will continue to see the marginal consumer successes that we have today. Jeremy has more on the other challenges of this model.

Or you can build services based on some other idea and charge people for that too, “all the music ever, on-demand” can’t be the only answer out there. This, I can’t wait for.

It goes even farther, because these companies are in an arms race for catalogue size and — increasingly — social functionality when consumers simply don’t care. A consumer has a very short list of things that they care about:

1) Does it have music that I like?

2) Is it easy to find music that I don’t know but will like?

3) Is it easy for me to listen to that music everywhere?

I’ve also spent time with all of the streaming services, and I personally think they all suck to some degree.

Mog is cumbersome and the UI needs a lot of work (Do you want to work as a pop-out player, or do you want me to browse using your site? You have to choose one or the other.).

Spotify’s product isn’t much better, the catalogue is very thin outside of EU chart stuff, and the discovery features are non-existent.

Lala is better solely because of the digital locker (first created by MP3.com and MyPlay a decade ago, so yay for that big new feature), but their site still overcomplicates things. I don’t care about influencing people or my social wall — that’s what the real world is for.

And Rhapsody has an awful UI.

That’s not even mentioning that all of these services tether you to a machine at all times. (Unless you have an iPhone and one of their apps. But will those play music in the background, or only when the app is open?)

The real long and short of this is that no one outside of the 100 people left in the music industry cares. The public’s attitude is that they’ve been told the Best New Thing was on the horizon over and over (SpiralFrog, Urge, Q-Trax, etc) and that at this point, who gives a fuck? There’s no better music source than your best friend’s iPod.

One final point to where we are with digital music: the other night my girlfriend and I were listening to music, and she tried to play something from her iPod that she had purchased from iTunes. Because of Apple’s machine authorization rules, iTunes forbade us to play the track.

After ten minutes we finally just went and Google’d the album name + .rar so we could actually listen to the song. Keep in mind we legally paid for it and had the files on hand, but it was still easier to just Google and steal. This is a common occurrence, and when people think of the music industry now, these are the kinds of personal anecdotes that they remember. Wake me up when someone fixes that.

Yr gonna have to do a little better than 11 days and 16 hours,...

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 10:00:00 -0500

Yr gonna have to do a little better than 11 days and 16 hours, Lala.

"Morgan Freeman was born to play Nelson Mandela"

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 16:56:42 -0500

“Morgan Freeman was born to play Nelson Mandela”

- Quoting the Invictus trailer. What a weird thing to say.

Spent the past six hours reviewing Pavement’s Brighten the Corners and Terror Twilight,...

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:46:56 -0500

Spent the past six hours reviewing Pavement’s Brighten the Corners and Terror Twilight, Malkmus’ Malkmus and Pig Lib, and Preston School of Industry’s All This Sounds Gas. May I never ever listen to late-period Pavement again please.

I love studio songs with ambient noise. In the background of...

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:00:00 -0500

I love studio songs with ambient noise. In the background of Low’s “Be There” there’s the cry of an ambulance, the creak of old wood, muffled coughs. It’s tough to pick a favorite Low song, but this is probably mine.

"The 49-year-old once thought to be a serious contender for governor went right back to shaking hands..."

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:15:47 -0500

“The 49-year-old once thought to be a serious contender for governor went right back to shaking hands at chicken-and-grits fundraisers after trying to kill himself.”

- Stay classy, AP!

"I remember once in Australia [Morrissey] was ill. This is the illest man ever! But he was terribly..."

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:38:44 -0500

“I remember once in Australia [Morrissey] was ill. This is the illest man ever! But he was terribly ill in bed and eventually struggled out onto the roof of the hotel. [So] Morrissey was sitting there, swathed in scarves, drinking hot chocolate, and he suddenly said in a really plaintive voice, “There’s a wasp drowning in the swimming-pool.” And I swear to God he made me fish it out! And it sat there cleaning its wings off. Then he was happy.”

- Jo Slee, former personal assistant to Morrissey (via sixstepsback) (via desnoise) (via bespectacled)

flamgirlant: Rattail - “Go Green” Sometimes the most perfect...

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:40:26 -0500

flamgirlant:

Rattail - “Go Green”

Sometimes the most perfect moment of my day is when I fall in love with a song at first listen.

Wait til you hear the record. Rattail are gonna be big.

Five records I put out in the past year, and their Pitchfork reviews. I’m thrilled by...

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:39:32 -0500

Five records I put out in the past year, and their Pitchfork reviews. I’m thrilled by Julianna’s 8.2 today — she’s amazing!

Julianna Barwick, Florine — 8.2

Rural Alberta Advantage, Hometowns — 8.0

Various Artists, Selected + Collected — 7.8

High Places, 03/07 - 09/07 — 8.3

Crystal Stilts, Crystal Stilts — 8.3

flamgirlant: Best Coast - “Over the Ocean” Last year Blackblack...

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:54:52 -0500

flamgirlant:

Best Coast - “Over the Ocean”

Last year Blackblack had the album that stole my heart, this year Bethany Cosentino of Blackblack has an EP called Make You Mine out under another moniker: Best Coast. Shambling, lo-fi pop with classic girl group aesthetics never sounded so good.

Without eMusic Selects, I’d never have known Blackblack or Best Coast. I <3 you, eMusic.

Amen. Best Coast = the best and Blackblack still haven’t gotten their due.

considering it

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:53:20 -0500

considering it

Times Destroys the Clarence Clemmons Memoir

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:23:31 -0500

“Big Man” has been hijacked, to a degree that’s unusual even for a celebrity memoir, by its co-author, a television producer and friend of Mr. Clemons’s named Don Reo. Big chunks of the book are related in Mr. Reo’s voice, and it’s a voice that elbows its way onto the page like Kanye West during Taylor Swift’s Video Music Awards acceptance speech.

When Mr. Clemons gets a word in edgewise, it’s often to say nice things about Mr. Reo. “You’re an unusual white man,” Mr. Clemons remarks to him. He also writes, “Don Reo has some of the best show-business stories I’ve ever heard in my life.” Hear me now and believe me later: Don Reo does not have some of the best show business stories you’ve ever heard in your life.

By Dwight Garner. So good.

Shadrack Chameleon — “Don’t Let It Get You...

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 10:46:46 -0500

Shadrack Chameleon — “Don’t Let It Get You Down”