heard that sound

playlist

Ever wonder what would happen if the Carpenters joined up with the Partridge Family...and moved to Sweden? Check out the Acid House Kings.

concert

Bad Religion
Empire Ballroom, Las Vegas

New venue on the strip. I wasn't too enthusiastic about it at first -- it's decorated like the dining room from the ship in the Poseidon Adventure. But they scored big on two points: The house staff didn't break up the mosh pit. And they didn't herd us out into the alley the second the show was over. (I'm talking to you, House of Blues.) The show, of course, was great.

Blog of the month: Anonymous Lawyer

"I took a new first-year associate to lunch yesterday. His table manners are terrible. First, he used the wrong fork for the salad, which is just about grounds for termination, although I was in a generous mood so I chose to ignore it. We ordered some pasta that we shared, and when he reached to take some pasta and put it on his plate, he somehow carelessly dropped a pile of spaghetti on the tablecloth, in between the bowl and his plate. Of course, he instantly recognized the inappropriateness, and attempted to divert my attention and place a napkin over the offending spill. But my attention is not easily diverted, and I refused to look away. I just stared at the pasta, and stared at him, and stared back at the pasta, and stared back at him, and stared back at the pasta, and stared back at him, until he was sufficiently shamed and couldn't bring himself to engage in any real conversation for the rest of the meal. I think he also swallowed a bone in the fish to avoid having to deal with finding a delicate way to remove it from his mouth and place it securely in his napkin. He won back some points with that."

http://anonymouslawyer.blogspot.com/

The economics of the Long Tail

I'm obsessed by finding new stuff. And I'm fascinated by all the websites, automated recommendations, and search algorithms that help me find these new songs, movies and books. I don't mean to get all Internet-giddy on you here, but we're not living in a world anymore where you're stuck with whatever Blockbuster (typical store inventory: 3,000 DVDs) or Barnes & Noble (typical store inventory: 130,000 books) serves up. Amazon has 2.3 million books. Netflix carries 50,000 titles.

Retail shelf space is expensive, so it only makes sense that they'd stock the most popular, mainstream titles. But what happens when the web makes it possible to stock everything? When the stuff that nobody found it worthwhile to sell in the past all the sudden becomes as lucrative as the mainstream stuff? Wonderful things. Wired editor Chris Anderson does a fantastic job looking at the economics of it in "The Long Tail."  http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

Overheard in New York

Queer #1: We are going to the Kelly Clarkson concert in two weeks, you should come.
Queer #2: I have to go home that weekend. They are having a memorial for my grandpa who died. Maybe I can get out of it.
Queer #1: Seriously. I mean people die all the time, but Kelly Clarkson only comes to New York like twice a year.

--Splash, W. 17th Street

http://www.overheardinnewyork.com

Your own personal DJ

There are countless Internet radio stations and music services that will make recommendations based on the music you like. But they all seem to take a pretty blunt approach. ("Oh, I see that you played Pennywise. Perhaps you'd like to hear some MxPx or Bad Religion?"). Then I stumbled onto Pandora. And this one's smart. You seed it with a few groups or artists that you like, and it does the rest. The results are frighteningly accurate, and no matter how much of a music nut you are, it will find some truly obscure artists that you're bound to like.

I've been trying to expand my chill-out music library (I need something to play when I try to recreate some of Shag's scenes in my living room), so I told Pandora I already own some Massive Attack and Thievery Corporation. It dutifully cued up a nice loung-y remix "Channel Zero" by Eric Pierre. There's a menu item next to each song that begs to be clicked -- "Why is this song playing?" Like everything else about this site, it answered unobtrusively and matter-of-factly: "We're palying this track because it features a laid back female vocal, abmiguous lyrics, the heavy use of chordal patterning and use of electric pianos." Fair enough.

Turns out the recommendations are driven by the Music Genome Project, in which "a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever." They "ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or 'genes' into a very large Music Genome...everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of coursre the rich world of singing and volcal harmony."

And I thought I was being obsessive when I finally alphebetized by CD collection.

http://www.pandora.com