Finally, someone understood how to successfully release music online - and under a Creative Commons license, no less. For some reason if feels way more natural than Radiohead’s first try. It might be because Reznor produced Saul Williams’ latest album, which was released in the exact same way (albeit with less options). Mark - always the devil’s advocate, but most often than not right [argh] - pointed that the decision is easy for a multi-platinum artist, but i can see how this would also work for smaller bands too. Thoughts?

me: Saw the NIN? If you buy the deluxe package you get an LP signed by Trent - awesome. It’s way more clever than radiohead to give people options like that - also it’s released on a CC license. Love Trent.

mark: Yeah, but it’s all stupid… It’s all well and good if you’re a multi platinum selling rockstar who is already a millionaire, but it hardly helps new bands.

me: Well, duh - but his job is not to help new bands. Also, saul williams is not massive, and he did the same.

mark: It was with trent reznor though!

me: Yeah but even so - it’s not the entire cd - The new NIN is 9 free tracks only. Small bands can use this model: release an LP of 5 free songs, have people download the rest for 5 quid, they’d still earn more than with a contract.

Photo via.

In an ideal world, this is where I’d be on April 18-20. Absolutely fascinating. I would love to go, anyone willing to come along?

Well, if you ask me she may sound like a nutter novelist, but her remarks are fair enough:

I don’t mind paying my tax, I want hospitals and schools, and police and firemen, and street lighting and rubbish collection, but I minded funding the Iraq war, and I mind funding fiscal incompetence. We are getting to the point where we can’t afford the things we need – like schools and hospitals and social care, because all our money is being spent on buying bombs and bailing out banks,
That’s masculinity gone mad – get the girls in as fast as possible.

Lord help me – I have reverted to capital letters and BOLD. A sure sign of the nutter at the typewriter.

A while ago Jeanette Winterson wrote a good editorial for the Guardian food - defending organic products, local farming, etc. More interestingly, she not only talked about quality, but proximity: little shops are a pleasure to shop at, a trip to while Tesco is not really stepping in smiles-and-friendship land. Winterson owns a deli in Spitalfields -near my own neighbourhood- and I still have yet to go there. Maybe that will be my week-end plan.

Joanna Newsom’s music has been played incessantly in my flat for the last couple of weeks and as much as her voice can irk me at times, I have been enjoying listenning to her 20-minutes songs a lot.

M. claims she’s a brilliant lyricist but alas, Newsom is one of those singers I can’t seem to understand at all. I guess the explanation lies in the fact that she streches her words along with her melody, which is a damn shame for a french person struggling to comprehend the words behind her tales-sounding efforts.

I have wondered many times about her looks, as I was imagining her as a fairy: long blonde hair and dramatic eyes, pouty lips and pink cheeks reminiscing of a 19th century beauty (or an Emily Bronte’s character). So I googled her this morning and by god, she’s exactly how I picture her to be. Beautiful, and I love her folkish jacket (it might have to do with the fact that I recently became interested in quilt and patchwork art, but that’s another post).

Note - I am very pleased to say that after having written this entry I checked a 2006 Guardian interview of Newsom in which the journalist mentions this:

“Shared secrets and experiences are suggested but never spelt out. Heartbreak is alluded to, and the drift into lovesickness. ‘You came and laid a cold compress on the mess I’m in,’ she whispers. ‘Threw the window wide and cried, amen, amen, amen.’ I can’t help but think of the Brontes here, as the child sisters gaze out their window at ‘mountains kneeling, felten and grey’.”

I will have to file this under “things I would have never thought to be possible a few months ago”.

I’ve always had a bit of a struggle with wanting to be a tech/blog grrl vs. the mandatory use of video games.

See, I began blogging in 2001. So that makes me “cool” by the blogosphere standards. But I didn’t know the first single thing about HTML until a couple of weeks ago. Which makes me uncool. I know a respectable amount about social networking, and wrote my dissertation about Blogs and the Generation Y. Cool. But my blog never had more than an average of 80 visitors a day. Not cool. I think that more and more I’d like to fancy myself as some kind of geek girl, but never really come around knowing a lot about it. It would probably involve knowing a lot of Php, sQL and Java, which is not going to happen anytime soon (unless someone volunteers to give me lessons?).

Now, knowing my bias and crushes for technology savvy female figures (I am a big fan of GenderIT), you’d think that I would be the kind of person to enjoy playing both online and video games. Truth is I always secretly despised game players, and frankly never made any fierce attempt to understand the appeal of the gaming culture. Too many of game enthusiasts seemed to be glued to their screens 24-7, eating flat Kraft dinners passed through their bedroom doors my worried parents anxious that their son or daughter might die from malnutrition (Microserfs, anyone?).

That was until a cold day of December which found Mark and I walking along an E2 road in East London. Passing by a shop selling video games, he mentioned wanting the Nintendo DS game Yoshi’s planet.

‘Yoshi’s planet?’, I shrugged. ‘Never heard of it’.

I was not really interested.But a couple of weeks later (struck by winter season’s gifts-inspiration related anxiety), I decided to purchase the game for Christmas.

I’ve been hooked ever since. Mind you, nothing like Mark, who recently purchased this legal device which enables you to download every DS games in the world in one chip card (don’t ask). But in “Jessica standards”, I fell quite hard considering my absolute lack of gaming-infatuation pre-Yoshi.

Oh sure, we look like some kind of extreme nerds when playing a wireless Golf match in the underground, but this is really fun. Well, apart from when I start attacking him violently because he’s way better than I am (a decade of game-playing helps, one would suppose) and well, you know me:

I.cannot.stand.losing.

A couple of weeks ago Newsweek decided to perpetuate the cliche of the bad, bad youth too easily impressed by decadent rck stars by featuring Paris Hilton and Britney Spears on their front page. Followed an agonizingly ignorant, condescending and conservative-minded article seemingly written by a mother worried sick about her daughter’s admiration for teen-idol Lindsay Lohan.  Ugh.

After all, 2007 is the first year ever we hear about pop and rock stars’ substance abuse issues, isn’t it?

I can imagine Newsweek’s editorial meeting pretty clearly; in fact I picture it to be like those Orange advertisements featuring the infamous “Orange Film Funding board” - the ones the audience always sees in European theaters before any movie starts:

Marketing chief to Newsweek staff: We’re not doing so well these days. We need something to boost our sales, and can’t have G.W.Bush on our cover anymore.

Editorial staff: We can’t really beat the TIME’s “person of the year” idea though, they were too good on this one. Flattering one’s ego by making one believe he’s important, what a strike of genius!

Intern: Maybe we can scare our readers instead? They love to be frightenned: terrorism threats, pandemics, wars!

Editor in chief: That’s brilliant! We’ll assure every American family that their beloved children are about to become -gasp- sexually active adults! What’s more menacing than that! Putting to female teen idols on the cover will make this issue’s our best seller - young men can have sexual relationships if they want to, but women…

You get the idea.

(more…)

Rob is going to hate me for dissing Jack Bauer

Kanishk Tharoor and I were discussing the ‘merits’ of the TV series 24 he mentioned an interesting detail: Joel Surnow (who created and produces the show) is also the producer of the Fox News conservative news satire show “the 1/2 Hour News Hour“.The timing is perfect: 24 has recently been referenced for “inspiring” soldiers to torture detainees. According to Liberation (in french), an American governmental report published in 2004 notes that some officers use “methods they recall seeing in movies”. Add to this some fascinating statistics (102 scenes of torture shown on television from 1996 to 2001, compared to 624 from 2002 to 2006) and we are in for some frightening deductions.

Granted, the show is the perfect American drama: it is carefully crafted, full of suspense, explosions, patriotic heroism and romanticised violence. Yet, I found myself horrified at my immediate reaction when watching the 5th season on dvd: glued to the screen and holding my breath, I was silently encouraging Jack Bauer to demonstrate violence in order to obtain “crucial intelligence” which would enable him to complete his mission and save the day. And yes, that often involved torture.

The first five seasons of 24 gather sixty-seven torture scenes, all of them justified and portrayed as indispensable for the security and well-being of a country fighting its War Against Terror. Everything would be perfect in a fictional world if it all stick to merely being an unrealistic tv show. But as Andrew Sullivan points out:

What’s truly disturbing is how enthusiastic the Republican establishment is about this adoption of torture as the American way. The Heritage Foundation had a symposium celebrating the show (…) Michael Chertoff endorsed “24″, despite its endorsement of law-breaking by government officials. [ MORE TAG ] Then we discover this:

The same day as the Heritage Foundation event, a private luncheon was held in the Wardrobe Room of the White House for Surnow and several others from the show. (The event was not publicized.) Among the attendees were Karl Rove, the deputy chief of staff; Tony Snow, the White House spokesman; Mary Cheney, the Vice-President’s daughter; and Lynn Cheney, the Vice-President’s wife, who, Surnow said, is “an extreme ‘24′ fan.” After the meal, Surnow recalled, he and his colleagues spent more than an hour visiting with Rove in his office.

Now given the apparent sympathy which John Surnow seems to nurture for conservative politics, I am a little bit scared. American citizens wouldn’t want TV dictating the way their government treat their prisoners, would they?

Elsewhere: The Jack Bauer body count website helps you keeping track of the number of people the patriotic hero has executed.