This sucks. I guess it's for real, though there's really no indication on the Arthur Website. Maybe they like the freak-folk a little too much for their own or anyone else's good, but it was still a damn interesting publication. The "Arthur Against Empire!" issue was fantastic. The guys who did the music reviews were really funny. And of course there was always great life advice from T-Model Ford ("Aint no woman gonna keep my buggy from rollin"). I guess I noticed it slacking a little over the past couple of issues, but I was still always happy to see the new one out. Oh, well.
of Montreal -- Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse
I was already hooked on this song -- but now an awesome video, too?! It's a lot like if Wes Anderson redirected bits of The Big Lebowski. While high on PCP. And wearing lots of glitter.
About Jobs, his speech, and what probably constitutes the spectrum of my peers' reactions:
1) Duh, Jobs is looking out for Apple, but he's sandwiched between the "Big Four" and the consumers in such a way that his concerns and the consumer's concerns tend to merge.
2)Taking DRM off of digital downloads isn't going to save the majors, but it also won't hurt them; it might even help. They've all gotten their feet wet in this "internet" thing but they're still acting like the water is hot lava. How about getting some of your artists to put out short, cheap digital-only EPs and singles? Remix collections? Some sort of in-house mixtape?
3) Jobs failed to mention the Sony rootkit debacle.
4) I'm not so ready to call the iPod a superior product -- or at least not so ready to give its design and specs complete credit for (what is obviously) the iPod's domination of the market. Mostly they were just there first, made the smart move (eventually) to offer a subtle but significant array of products, and (most importantly) marketed the hell out of it. I would not own an iPod right now if none of them cost less than a hundred bucks. (I might have paid more eventually -- and I might still -- but I have a shuffle on right this second because they're eighty bucks. Plus the clippy thing.) Also I know plenty of people who have had lots of problems with theirs (hi, Jane!).
5) Someone pointed out that he could probably offer DRM-free music from minor labels (or whomever) alongside his current cripples. This occurred to me, too, but there are probably either contractual obligations to consider or (maybe) technical obstacles.
BONUS RANT:
How to improve my Shuffle (aka The Plan for the Shuffle+).
Make it hold a little to a lot more (but only if it makes it a little bigger and not too much more expensive). Research in solid state tech is going to continue to miniaturize the flash drives. If my Shuffle was 50% larger, stored twice or so as much (2+ gig), and only cost an extra, say, $20? Awesome! I'll leave the actual research (and fact-finding) to the professionals, but I'm pretty sure this is doable (just take a quick look at the relative sizes and costs of different jump drives).
Add a "trash" or "flag" button. The first thing I do when I get new music is decide what to take off of my Shuffle in order to put the new stuff on. Now, while actually listening to it I always find myself skipping over familiar-sounding songs and even sometimes wondering who the hell it is I'm listening to, and/or why the hell are they taking up space? Then it occurred to me that it would be great to have a button that would automatically drop something out of the playlist on the fly, and then delete it once it was hooked back up to my computer. Instant space! On the other hand, a more ambiguous "flag" button that would just pop a list out to me might be more useful. That way I could also see what songs I like, or just what songs I want to know who sings, or whatever. A time stamp might also be useful in figuring out just what I was thinking when, and adding a small external clock might be good for the joggers and whomever. I guess at this point it's getting pretty cluttered, though, so maybe nix the clock. I would probably never use it, anyway.
You might be thinking that all of this would be easier if you just added a screen, but I think a screen would be a bad idea. The cheapest Nano is only twice as big as a Shuffle but costs nearly twice as much; I can only assume it's largely because of the screen. If I want a portable HDD with a mini-monitor, it's going to need to be a lot bigger than 8 gig, anyway (that's the biggest Nano size). Plus you have its elegant design and rugged lifestyle to conserve. Lifestyle is not the best word, but you probably know what I mean. For like people who exercise and whatever.
So, Apple, whenever you would like to hire me for product design, or even just run some beta-testing my way, you'll know where to find me. That's right: in the Comments Box.
The New Yorker has published a new David Foster Wallace short story, available online here. It deserves a response I'm not sure I'm prepared to articulate yet -- which is to say that it's sensitive and compelling and, you know, good.
Mr. Wallace's fiction keeps getting better and better while his nonfiction has kind of stagnated. Don't get me wrong -- Consider The Lobster was worth every penny I eked out for the cloth-bound, but it almost all seemed like things he could have written years ago; in a few cases they actually were things he'd written years ago, kind of like b-sides from his A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again sessions, which I guess makes CTL an Amnesiac to ASFTINDA's Kid A.
Compare that to the title story from Oblivion, which to date remains the most haunting, affecting thing I've ever put in my brain; a story so freaking good I'm a little afraid of the fact that I've read it and it's had such an impact on me; a story that more or less defines the potentials for psychological horror in contemporary American life in a way that only the best fiction writing will ever be able to conjure.
I originally stumbled across Clap Clap via the Blueberry Boat forum. Blueberry Boat is (or was, as the FF's official forum has taken over the focus) an unofficial Fiery Furnaces fansite, and someone linked to Clap Clap's very ambitious and almost completely thorough analysis of Blueberry Boat, arguably the FF's best album. So I dropped in on his site occasionally and found he had a lot of interesting things to say, many of which are indexed here. The new Clap Clap just launched, and in a bit of serendipity his first real post covers something I mentioned earlier: the weird cultural polarity between the deaths of President Ford and James Brown. He goes into much more detail about it, and despite the post's title never ties Saddam Hussein's execution into it (which I mention because I kind of did, here).
There's actually this tangled web of relations between his circle of friends and their blogs and me, a sort of whole nebulous cloud of serendipity which I would like to get into sometime, although I guess the point would just be to show how the web has made these sorts of anonymous connections possible -- which is old news at this point. Plus it makes me feel a little creepy sometimes when I think about it. I am a blog stalker.
