Archive for the ‘Tech & Leisure’ Category
Posted by s woods on January 3, 2012
Lost my way with this site again recently, for a whole host of reasons, but activity will pick up somewhat in 2012. There are two, possibly three, imminent podcast interviews in the works, and hopefully a few others as the year progresses. Beyond that, it’s hard to say. I’m having the same internal arguments I had the previous two Januarys regarding the viability of continuing to spend money (not much, granted) on this domain — at some point the plug will be pulled, it’s inevitable, the question is whether it happens in 2012, 2014, 2112 (a.k.a. “the Geddy Lee option”), or whenever.
I’m open to ideas, contributions (intellectual contributions, I mean), suggestions, criticisms, witticisms, etc. This site has always been boring when it’s been only about me, so — what say you?
Posted in Blabbin', Tech & Leisure | 6 Comments »
Posted by s woods on October 7, 2011
Posted in Tech & Leisure | 1 Comment »
Posted by s woods on October 6, 2011
Billboard, Nov. 3, 2001
Posted in Archival, Obits, Tech & Leisure | 1 Comment »
Posted by s woods on October 3, 2011
A couple months back, I noted that rockcritics.com, according to the website Alexa, ranked 9,190,864th in the world. As of this second (it could change by the time you click through), our stats ranking is 6,904,770, a not entirely insignificant jump of two million two hundred and eighty seven thousand. To which I say …
Posted in Tech & Leisure | 1 Comment »
Posted by s woods on August 11, 2011
Jack M Silverstein at Chicago Now says YouTube and smart phones are the music journalist’s new best friends:
…you don’t have to be a pro with a pro set-up to leave your mark in the music journalism game. I don’t know if evilmonkey679 is a rock journalist or just a music lover, but who cares? The Evil Monkey’s channel is FILLED with great you-are-there concert footage. Whatever the intent of evilmonkey679, she or he is now, with the help of a smart phone, a music journalist. Certainly there is more to good journalism than just point and shoot — backstage access, a larger outlet than social media, and the ability to interview and write are still essential tools — but at for base-level reporting, someone like evilmonkey679 is invaluable: on the scene, collecting footage, and distributing quickly.
Posted in Tech & Leisure | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on August 4, 2011
Complex magazine compiles a list of 25 Must-Follow Music Writers on Twitter. It’d be nice if they indicated with a little more specificity what makes any of these people good in this particular medium, but anyway… it’s a list, there you go.
Posted in Tech & Leisure | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on July 15, 2011
Brian Joseph Davis’s Consumed Guide is described as “seven-thousand negative words assembled from 13,090 reviews by Robert Christgau.” Available on PDF, also with a Twitter feed.
Posted in Tech & Leisure, Tweets, Xgau | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on June 23, 2011
The Cloud That Ate Your Music
Jon Pareles on the coming of the cloud (sounds scary, doesn’t it?), and some of the ways it will/might affect listening to (and critiquing) music.
Posted in Tech & Leisure | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on June 17, 2011
Can pop music survive?: The function of pop has shifted — from all-encompassing lucky dip to a training level for music fans. And the web makes it obvious. (Tom Ewing, The Guardian)
Posted in Links, Tech & Leisure | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on June 17, 2011
What’s on your ipod?: Thirteen-year-old kids from St. Joseph’s of the Sacred Heart in Atherton were rocking out to Pink Floyd and the Cure. Perry Como made an appearance on the ipod of a 20 year old Stanford student. (Cy Ashley Webb, Stark Insider)
Posted in Links, Tech & Leisure, Weekend Reads | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on February 20, 2011
Future of this site is very much up in the air at the moment — plans are underway to soon start moving anything substantial here on the main page over to the archives, with the intention of not renewing the main site in 2012. I may make use of this space in the meantime, not yet sure.
However, at least for the time being, I’m going to try to disable further comments. It’s mostly just spam at this point, and I’m deleting a few a day. If there ends up being new content, I’ll reconsider.
Posted in Tech & Leisure | 3 Comments »
Posted by s woods on August 13, 2008
Decided to do something a little different with my latest “muxtape” – posted some interviews and spoken word stuff, including a two-parter with Lester Bangs. Listen to it here. [Note: I'm not sure muxtape appreciates the length of all these... previewing some of them at work, I noticed that they cut off early.]
And while on the topic of old interviews, Pacifica Radio Archives, in a tribute to 1968, recently posted a discussion with Pauline Kael (among a bunch of other interesting clips), which you can download or stream here.
Posted in Interviews, Links, Tech & Leisure | 5 Comments »
Posted by A.C. Rhodes on August 7, 2008
We’ve all heard the declarations before; Internet websites are killing print media and print outclasses the net by being the most traditional, convenient and often better quality form of news. It’s like the cable versus major network argument, except with more public participation. All these forms of information sharing and interaction, yet one big communication breakdown. So, what are readers, and especially writers, to do?
Jason Gross, Perfect Sound Forever editor and freelance writer, offers his considered assessment along with some imaginative solutions in his guide, “Surviving the Net Crunch: A Practical Guide for Print Publications in a Digital World,” at PopMatters. One-quarter good hearted “stop sniveling” and three-parts solution focused, there is great for thought, practice and interaction, as respondents have already replied to the article. Both bring up the possibility of symbiosis; how the two media forms may not only coexist, but become a beneficial compliment, playing off the other for innovative content and readership ideas. Why not discuss amongst yourselves here, or there?
Posted in News, Tech & Leisure | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on February 8, 2008
So, a couple days ago I went into BMV books in Toronto on my lunch hour and treated myself to a marked-down copy of this: every issue of Rolling Stone, front to back, on DVD, from 1967 to May 2007. I’m slowly making my way through it all — I certainly have no intention of reading every issue, though I do intend to at least browse through every page of the first ten years or so — and it’s fascinating stuff. I love all the old ads, the letters, the pics, and yeah, sure, what the hell, there’s even an article or two I’ve come across that’s okay.
I was hesitant about buying it, not because I don’t think it’s a good deal (it is), not because I don’t think it’s pretty cool to have at-your-fingertips access to all this stuff, but because I hadn’t read anything about the package itself, i.e., how well-designed it is, how easy it is to navigate through it, etc. As someone who spends an inordinate amount of time computing (both at work and at home), I pretty much have zero patience for non-intuitive PC gadgetry, and the last thing I wanted was some behemoth of a document that would be a pain to sift through.
With that in mind, a few early thoughts on the package. (There’s no point me discussing the contents; everything is scanned directly from the magazine.)
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Tech & Leisure, Zines | 1 Comment »
Posted by s woods on December 12, 2007
Steven Rubio has an interesting post up about the Rhapsody music service, its association with Robert Christgau, and the venom (four pages of it) spewed by Rhapsody-subscribing assholes readers about Christgau, and about music criticism in general.
“As you read through the messages, it becomes clear that it’s not just Xgau that the writers hate. They hate the very idea of criticism. Note the problem described above: what gets the writer’s ire is that Christgau dares to give bad reviews to albums the writer liked. Apparently, the sole function of a music writer should be to list the tracks on the album and then get out of the way.
“I think this relates to the growth of artificial intelligence software that predicts our taste preferences. These programs don’t exist to help you appreciate art … they exist to help you find the stuff that already agrees with your tastes. They assume that the listener doesn’t want to be challenged. The rhetoric suggests otherwise, of course … they always claim that their method is the best way to discover ‘new’ music. But by ‘new’ they mean ‘things that are like all the other stuff you already like, only you haven’t heard it yet.’”
I think there’s some truth to all that, but my question is, has it ever really worked differently? Are we talking about a fundamental difference in the reasons people choose to listen to the music they do, or are we simply talking about the means by which they do so? Hasn’t radio been courting like-minded listeners for eons? (And haven’t listeners, in turn, long gravitated to the stations which filled their particular niche?) Ditto music magazines? Ditto live circuits and “scenes”? Have there been more than a handful–if that–of music magazines over the years which have seriously ever challenged their audience’s core assumptions and tastes? I don’t mean these as rhetorical questions–not entirely.
Posted in Blogwatch, Tech & Leisure, Xgau | 11 Comments »
