The what's-next-on-your-party-shuffle-playlist? post

...or the I'm-too-lazy-to-type-tonight post.

Better than average editing

Youtube has no shortage of old movie clips mashed with Queen's "We Will Rock You", but this one really works, the ape make-up makes it easy to match up the lyrics. I especially like the single shot of Dr. Zaius -- a grumpy old orangutan perturbed by all the rockin'.

I'm still in beta

... needing to move all my free read links over to this page, as well as some other stuff. And I keep tweaking the font size daily.

Currently reading Guitar Manby Will Hodgkinson, a memoir of a thirty-five-year-old journalist in London who decides to take up the guitar for the first time with the goal of being able to play in front of an audience within six months. Pretty soon he realizes that's not a well-thought out goal.

Some decent self-deprecating humor in the vein of current light memoirs like, say,Candy Freakor Word Freak. It weaves personal anecdotes with some history of the subject and encounters with whichever contemporary musicians the author can score an interview with. A enjoyable read, and jibes really well with my own attempts to play.

Technorati Tags: books, memoirs, guitar

Edison and content providers

BoingBoing's Frauenfelder has a post about the seminal days of the commercial recording industry in an excerpt from the Edison biography "The Wizard of Menlo Park" in today's New York Times. Besides the points made about how nothing has changed much in the music industry concerning attempts to keep formats and content proprietary I thought some of the information about Edison's attitudes toward musicians are interesting.

According to the article, Edison had very specific musical tastes and was loathe to sell music outside that arena, even though his business suffered for it. And then there is this:

A sales manual from this time laid out the company’s defense, which directed the public’s attention to “the great Wizard” who personally tested voice samples using techniques of his own devising and selected “those voices which are most worthy of re-creation by his new art.” Only the voice, not the reputation, mattered to the Wizard.

So determined was Edison to strip artists of their vanity and unreasonable demands that he refused to print the name of the recording artist on the record label.

Edison probably didn't feel all attribution was vanity. Otherwise he might have reconsidered naming his invention "The Edison Disc Phonograph."

Technorati Tags: edison, boingboing, drm