Shelter From the Storm Edition

Todays links of interest:

• Smartest drug story of the year: Rolling Stone on the war on drugs
  Right, but if we had actually had a smart, sane, non-hypocritical drug policy all of these years, we wouldn’t have had "The Wire," one of the greatest TV shows ever. So, see, on balance it all works out! Sure, on one hand, zillions of dollars wasted and millions of lives ruined, but on the other hand: "The Wire!" (jc)
• Iconic daredevil Evel Knievel dies at 69
  And so we lose yet another ‘loper icon.
• EMI May Cut RIAA Funding
  Interesting. Very interesting.

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People often stop me on the street, and ask me this question: “Jim,” they ask me, “what is it like to be a Replacements fan?” Well, let me tell you . . .

In the most recent of Rolling Stone magazine’s forty zillion 40th Anniversary Editions, they had a section called “The Indie Rock Universe: An Illustrated Guide.”

This so-called “Guide” was essentially a gussied-up list of Indie Rock bands, broken into incredibly arbitrary distinctions surrounding the “Universe” theme. One of the sections was called “Ancestral Planets” — the pioneers of Indie Rock if you will — and it listed a bunch of worthies and honorables: Nirvana, Pixies, The Smiths, Hüsker Dü etc. These are some of my all-time favorites, and certainly worthy of inclusion on any list of great rock of any stripe.

Conspicuous by their absence: The Replacements. Whether it was an oversight or on purpose, it almost immediately jumped out at me, and ironically, this was a few pages away from where Billie Joe Armstrong was talking about how much he was influenced by “Answering Machine.”

This is what it’s like to be a Replacements fan.

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Tangled Up in Baby Blue Edition

Todays links of interest:

• Sleater-Kinney’s guitarist tests out Rock Band
  Carrie Brownstein deconstructs the experience of playing Rock Band in the same awesome way that her band deconstructed the experience of playing rock and roll.
• Entire Blogosphere Stunned By Blogger’s Special Weekend Post
  It takes a very special event indeed to stun the entire Blogosphere these days.
• Feds lose bid for Amazon.com customer records
  Good! I swear to god, the Bush Justice Department just loves to try and trample all over privacy rights at any and all opportunities.

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Ghosts of Electricity Edition

Todays links of interest:

• Wake-Up Call: Consumers Want Content on Their Terms
  At this point, we should be beyond wake-up call and into serious accommodation.
• Strike, Shmike: Carson Daly Gets Back to Work
  Well, it wasn’t like his show had a lot of bits anyway. But still, bad onya Carson. We just won’t watch, even if you have somebody we like on.
• NBC’s TiVo Deal Part of Effort to Introduce New Formats
  NBC realizes that time-shifting viewers need information too.

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I’ve just finished a big project: I recently bought a 1TB network-attached hard drive and put nearly every single song I own on it. I even finally finished ripping all of my CDs.

I set the hard drive up so that it automatically backs itself up, and so it’s the third thing I grab in case of a fire: Rox, my laptop, and that hard drive. Of course, maybe Rox can grab both laptops while I get the hard drive, but I’m guessing she might have other priorities.

In any event, the current count is approximately 68,000 songs on 4700 albums by 950 artists. This crazy-ass number reflects 30 years of being, well, a big dumb rock ‘n’ roll guy. It’s what I do, it’s who I am.

And between eMusic, iTunes, Amazon, Amoeba and the life-long friends whom I’ve been trading music for two decades, I have a pretty steady pipeline of new stuff that I’m looking forward to, older stuff that is reissued, new stuff that is suddenly huge super buzz, and older stuff that I missed in the past.

It. Just. Keeps. Coming. World without end, amen.

Stop yer complaining, you’re saying: this is not the worst problem for a music geek to have. As a matter of fact, it’s probably the best problem for a music geek to have. So shut up and stop whinging, already!

No doubt, my 15-year-old self who rode his bike to Tower Records to buy Who’s next, my 25-year-old self who was resigning himself to getting the CD version of Who’s next and my 35-year-old self who was downloading Who’s next outtakes from dodgy websites are all looking at me agog.

But it’s still a problem. And the problem is me.

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I’m Not There, I’m Gone Daddy Gone Edition

Todays links of interest:

• I’m Not There and the Changing Face of Bob Dylan on Film
  Didn’t get a chance to see it this last weekend because of the holiday, but this is going to drag even the most theatre-phobic of your ‘Lopers out of his lair, because his life-long love of Dylan trumps his more recent dislike of going out to the movies.
• Windows XP Service Pack 3 Trounces Vista In Speed Tests
  Sigh. XP is so much nicer than Vista.
• Streaming video, the latest trend in online movie piracy
  Bit Torrent? So early 2007. So over. All of the kewl piratz are streaming their bootleg filmz now.

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Outside the bubble, awareness of the Writer’s Guild of America strike is less than you’d think. For those of us who are living and breathing the strike, it seems that everyone should be talking about what’s going on. It turns out that this is not so. As the two parties sit down today to again try to find common ground, the average American, exhausted from a weekend of shopping, is discovering that TiVo is delivering less in the way of new programming and more in the way of wacky recommendations.

(Side note: how about that TiVo love letter on ”’The Simpsons”’ last night? I’ve long maintained that bad things happen to people who watch commercials…I was right!)

This post isn’t about the strike, per se. It’s more about how Hollywood simply doesn’t get today’s consumer. Or rather, Hollywood doesn’t get how today’s consumer is rejecting the notion of appointment television. A common ‘loper mantra is that we want it when we want it. Seems simple enough to understand.
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Second Second Life Edition

Todays links of interest:

• Why Microsoft’s Zune is Still Failing
  My guess would be, because it’s still on the market.
• MYSTIC NIGHTS: The Making of Blonde on Blonde in Nashville.
  Do we really need to write anything else to make you wanna click this link? Didn’t think so.

Drunkard’s Dream Edition

Todays links of interest:

• Wipe Away a Tear For Mr. Whipple, And 2-Ply Times
  An eulogy for Mr. Whipple, Charmin perv. (jc)
• Dr. Adams Blames Malpractice on Bad Patients
  "Hi, evvverrrrbody!!!" "Hi, Dr. Jan" It’s a very DuroSport move, of course, to blame your customers. (jc)
• GM Readies Chevrolet Volt for 2010
  It looks like the electric car may have been given an infusion of Claire’s blood. (jc)

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Yeah, I’m Paramount’s bitch. Or would I be CBS’s bitch, since they own Star Trek now? Hell, I’d like to think that on some corporate DNA level I’m still Desilu’s bitch.

From the moment I saw it on startrek.com, I knew I was going to the big theatrical screening of the remastered version of the two-part Original Series episode “The Menagerie.” To the uninitiated, what’s unique about that particular episode is that much of it is a diegetic flashback to the original series pilot “The Cage,” which featured a different cast of characters except for Spock.

I was momentarily deterred by the fact that the closest showing was at the horrible googolplex in Emeryville. As I’ve expounded on in the past, I hate those places, and if I have to deal with one I’d prefer it at least be in town. But, no. Evidently the Evil Ex-Sony Metreon and the AMC 16 (originally called the AMC 1000 in reference to its location at 1000 Van Ness but renamed a few years back because people wondered where the other nine hundred and eighty-four screens were) didn’t want to lose out any valuable showings of Bee Movie, so I had no choice but to leave the City and County of San Francisco. No choice, you understand. This was something I simply had to do. The opportunity to see an episode of the original Star Trek projected, from the season when the cinematography mattered, to get a close look at details that would be lost otherwise? Oh my yes. I anticipated spending much of the time studying the backgrounds and corners of the screen, much like I’d done in the past with The Motion Picture.

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