- John from Baroness posted a really great journal entry/message to fans on the band’s website this week. It talks about his rehabilitation after their harrowing bus accident in Europe, and his absolute need to make music again:
“i’ve tried to fill my weekly routine with as much physical therapy as possible but the truth is, PT is not fun, and its benefits come with a great deal of mental/physical/spiritual pain and struggle. furthermore, i believe am getting a touch of Stockholm syndrome when it comes to my doctors and therapists (the highlight of my week should NOT involve a clinic). music might be the best therapy i have right now. perhaps it’s both the cause and the cure (the thought has crossed my mind); but i feel lost without it. Pete and i have just spent a long week surveying our musical wreckage and, surprisingly, we are quite well and intact. sure, there’s some substantial obstacles to overcome before we write, record or perform any time soon; but we still have everything we need to get “back in” that particular “saddle again”.
- WHY AM I JUST NOW DISCOVERING BARNABY WARD?!? Holy holy:
- “Raise the Black Lantern”… The label I’m on — Black Lantern Music — has just released a 50 track compilation album from it’s first slew of releases. It’s wonderful. There’s so much good music and artists, I’m just glad I’m involved. GO HERE to get the album. Donations welcome. This is the cover:
I’m taking a holiday break. See you — anyone who reads this — soonish.
- I’ve been getting really into a remix project lately, and will likely come very close to finishing on my days off work this week. Seems like lately I keep having the same crisis: during instrumental breaks do I go batshit crazy with a guitar or with a turntable. Obviously this depends on the song, but it’s still hard to be clairvoyant and know which one will work better. So typically I will just record both and compare and contrast. First World Producer Problems.
- I think I’ve posted Ulises Farinas’ art here before, but it’s well worth a second mention:
The past three decades of wanton patent-granting have created a disastrous environment for innovation. Today it’s practically impossible to build anything without violating a patent of some kind—and risking a multimillion-dollar lawsuit for your troubles. Once intended to protect lone inventors, patents now form a kind of shadow tech industry, in which billions of dollars are spent on amassing huge portfolios. (A recent New York Times article noted that Apple and Google, companies that define themselves by innovation, now invest more in patent acquisition and defense than in research and development.)
Why are companies spending so much money on patents? First, as protection. “Patents are like bullets,” law professor Chien says. “They’re cheap to acquire but can cause a lot of damage.” But if you have your own bullets, would-be assassins are less likely to target you. That’s the thinking behind RPX (Rational Patent Exchange), whose clients include Google, Microsoft, and IBM. RPX amasses patents, it says, to keep them out of the hands of lawsuit-happy competitors, and it vows not to sue anyone over them.
- I’m a massive proponent for not going to war with Iran. The problem with my viewpoint is we kinda already are at war with Iran. It’s just a sophisticated war, a secret war.
The dramatic spike in suspected Iranian cyber attacks this year also has some in the U.S. distinctly worried. While direct denial of service attacks on U.S. banks – widely seen as retaliation for US sanctions and attempts to freeze Iran from the international financial system – were seen relatively simplistic, attacks on US allies in the Gulf were more complex.
The most worrying, experts say, were those on Saudi oil firm Aramco and Qatari gas export facilities. Last month, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta described the Saudi attack as the most sophisticated yet launched on a private company, effectively destroying tens of thousands of computers – although he stopped short of blaming Tehran directly.
“This week I finished making a radio documentary about the 50-year reign of Welles’s masterpiece – and heard how it might all soon be over, thanks to a change in constituency boundaries. The last time the survey was conducted, 145 mainly anglophone critics were polled. This time an 1,800-strong body of writers, curators and directors have been asked, a group representing the film cultures of most countries in the world. An electorate as broad as that might not feel the critical anxiety of influence that has kept Kane on its pedestal. Tellingly, the longlist, at 2,000 titles, is already much longer than its predecessors.”
I thought it was absolutely awesome to hear that two of Michael Haneke’s films were close to making the list: Cache and The White Ribbon. I have not seen Cache, but have wanted to for some time. It’s hard to find, and I don’t much enjoy watching movies on my computer screen. If you’ve never seen any of his movies, Haneke makes some truly disturbing images and themes come to life. Not that he does horror (Cache is the closest thing to horror; or maybe Funny Games in that it goes out of its way to essentially torture the audience), he just knows how to pick out the little details. The terrible, terrible little details. The guy is a true artist.
- Akai posted this on their Facebook today with the caption, “Save this. Trust us. You’re going to need it someday.”:
I know they’re probably starting to get outdated — especially the 2000XL series — but I’ve gotten a ton of mileage out of my Akai MPC thus far. And I’ve only had it for a couple years. It’s a great piece of hardware. I’ve got the blue one they released around 2001, I think:
According to one of our sources, “the word ‘contempt’ was bandied about by Apple’s lawyer.” So Quinn’s personal frustration may be at least somewhat understandable.
It seems like the main thrust of the declaration is that everything from the release was “previously in the public record.” He explains that everything was “specifically addressed in open court with the media in attendance.”
Quinn also directly addressed accusations that Samsung’s legal team was trying to intentionally mislead jurors. He made the (fairly obvious, in my humble opinion) observation that jurors had already been instructed not to read any form of media relating to the case.
- I’m giving the new Aesop Rock my first listen. Will probably give it a full post tomorrow. So far AM DIGGING.
- Videogame Industry expert Michael Pachter is claiming that the biggest threat to the industry is multiplayer gaming. Anyone who spends time figuring out how to get more money out of people I’m not really a fan of (“Pachter also blasted free-to-play business models and Nintendo, and praised “ripping gamers off”), but the guy is completely spot on. People get addicted to those games, they spend about 10 times more hours on Call Of Duty than they do on Arkham City. That’s not my statistic. Which is great if you’re Activision… but not if you’re a different publisher pouring more money and time and work into your product, and trying to sell that to someone addicted to an Activision game that never ends.
- Last night Charlie Rose had Brian Greene and Michael Tuts — both from Columbia — on his program to discuss the discovery of Higgs Boson and to talk about the the future of physics research. It was super, super interesting. Even if a lot of it goes over your head, I suggest giving it a try. Here’s THE LINK.
House of Earth is Guthrie’s only “fully realised” novel, they said, influenced by his experiences in America’s Dust Bowl, as well as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Tracing the story of Tike and Ella May Hamlin, “hardscrabble farmers” in Texas, it is a “searing portrait of the Panhandle and its marginalised Great Depression residents”. Despite a slightly esoteric focus on the importance of adobe housing, House of Earth also includes graphic sex, including “a scorching lovemaking scene on a hay bale”.
- New Brother Ali song off the forthcoming “Mourning In America, Dreaming In Color”. I really like the combination of Jake One and Ali, they fit together very well. This gets super, super personal. When I saw Ali with his new band (who are awesome by the way, check them out if you get the chance this year) about a month ago he talked about how there was a point in his life a couple years ago that was transcendent, it changed everything. His father died, Eyedea died, and this was during his pilgrimage to Mecca. He talks about that in this track. Just like the title of the album, this song seems to be equal parts despair and hope:
- A piece on the Falun Gong movement of China. A sort of spiritual movement banned in China and “avoided by the American media”:
“Chances are you have noticed followers of Falun Gong practicing their faith even if what they were doing doesn’t look much like prayer. Whether it is an elderly woman keeping vigil in front of the Chinese embassy, or a group of ten or twelve of all ages arranged in neat rows behind the Air and Space Museum, the most distinctive feature of their practice is its apparent lack of motion. Shifting through five meditative stances at a glacial pace, the practitioners sometimes look as if they are holding hula hoops over their heads, other times as if they are making shadow puppets of swans. They hold each of these poses for periods of twenty minutes or more, which makes them, in the words of the movement’s founder, people who “practice stillness.””
- Is Scorsese for real doing a Raging Bull 2?? Oh, okay… Scorsese isn’t directing. I figured he would have more sense than that. A disturbing trend in all sorts of media (books, movies, even video games), the prequel/sequel movements are getting far beyond out of control. And if it ain’t one or the other it’s a “reboot”. I’m not against either for being what they are… but can’t we please have some limits??
“Apple has waged an international patent war since spring 2010, part of its attempt to either limit the growth of Google’s Android or to restrict the number of iPhone-like features that it offers. So far it has had little effect; Android has gone in that time from around 100,000 phones being activated every day to more than 900,000 a day, and from less than 8m devices in use worldwide to more than 390m. Opponents of Apple, meanwhile, say it is using patents too aggressively in its bid to stamp out competition.”
- We’re Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction. Stephen Hawking wrote about this a little bit last year; how we’ve only had the ability to completely destroy the world for about half a century and it’s already almost happened at least once (that we know of).
Unthinkable as it may be, humanity, every last person, could someday be wiped from the face of the Earth. We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves.
Bostrom, who directs Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by society. Some of these existential risks are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are obscure or even exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of existential risks that arise from human technology, a subset that he expects to grow in number and potency over the next century.
- How To Make Ethical Robots. Somebody should’ve sent this to the company that created Ash in the Alien universe. Not to mention HAL from 2001 and a whole slew of other androids.
The big question, according to the researchers, is how we can ensure that future robotic technology preserves our humanity and our societies’ values. They explain that, while there is no simple answer, a few techniques could be useful for enforcing ethical behavior in robots.
One method involves an “ethical governor,” a name inspired by the mechanical governor for the steam engine, which ensured that the powerful engines behaved safely and within predefined bounds of performance. Similarly, an ethical governor would ensure that robot behavior would stay within predefined ethical bounds. For example, for autonomous military robots, these bounds would include principles derived from the Geneva Conventions and other rules of engagement that humans use. Civilian robots would have different sets of bounds specific to their purposes.
Apple’s clout is coming under scrutiny as the U.S. Justice Department considers filing a lawsuit against the company and five U.S. publishers on allegations they orchestrated a price-fixing scheme on electronic books.
The involved parties are trying to avoid a high-profile court battle by negotiating a settlement, according to The Wall Street Journal. The newspaper broke the news last week about the government’s plans to allege that Apple Inc. and the publishers tried to thwart e-book discounts offered by Amazon.com Inc. and drive up prices since the 2010 release of the iPad.
“I think this might be a bit of a wake-up call for Apple,” says Ted Henneberry, an antitrust attorney for the Orrick law firm in Washington.
- More trouble for Apple? Last year a company called Proview won a case in a Chinese mainland court against Apple alleging ownership of the name “iPad”; it has been appealed by Apple. In the meantime, Proview is asking customs to block all iPad exports and imports to and from China. Apparently a huge portion of iPads are built in China.
“Local media reports said that several dozen iPads were taken from shelves in the city of Shijiazhuang just south of Beijing. In a statement Apple said: “We bought Proview’s worldwide rights to the iPad trademark in 10 different countries several years ago. Proview refuses to honour their agreement with Apple in China and a Hong Kong court has sided with Apple in this matter. Our case is still pending in mainland China.”
While this dispute continues, it is widely anticipated that Apple will announce the launch of the next version of the iPad in March. The speculation has not been confirmed by Apple. The company is notoriously close-lipped about future releases.”
“The LHC’s excellent performance in 2010 and 2011 has brought tantalising hints of new physics, notably narrowing the range of masses available to the Higgs particle to a window of just 16 GeV. Within this window, both the ATLAS and CMS experiments have seen hints that a Higgs might exist in the mass range 124-126 GeV. However, to turn those hints into a discovery, or to rule out the Standard Model Higgs particle altogether, requires one more year’s worth of data. The LHC is scheduled to enter a long technical stop at the end of this year to prepare for running at its full design energy of around 7 TeV per beam.”
- To win “Best New Artist” at the Grammys, shouldn’t the album you’re winning for have to be your debut album? Also, what the fuck? Kanye won “Best Rap Album” for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy?? That shit came out November 22nd, 2010. Unless I’m reading this Forbes list of 2012 Grammy winners wrong? It’s not even about how they pick terrible music… it’s about the fact that they can’t even get simple things like what a “new” artist is or when a goddamn album actually came out. Why does anyone care about the Grammys?
- Relatedly, two people I’m incredibly sick of: Adele and Jeremy Lin.
“What is growth? Is it a temporary process to arrive at a state that we will then want to maintain? Or is growth a process which is itself desirable and is supposed to go on forever? Right now nobody defines a state of sufficiency. For example, in a recent growth report financed by the World Bank, experts took great hope from the fact that several countries had managed to grow at 7 percent for 25 years. Their goal—7 percent growth for another 25 years—will lead to a quintupling of the global economy and all that flows into it. And come 2033, will we be satisfied, or will the goalposts move once again? The idea of steady-state economics is that growth really should be a temporary process to arrive at some level of sufficiency.”
- Samsung Can Continue Selling Galaxy Tabs In Germany.Apple has lost another lawsuit, this time in a German Appeals Court in Duesseldorf. The ruling marks the third attempt and loss by Apple taking legal action against competitors citing infringement of patent rights.
“Furthermore, “following the design changes undertaken by Samsung, the sale of the Galaxy Tab 10.1N does not contravene competition law. Apple’s iPad computers and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1N are rival products of equal value,” the court said in a statement. Earlier this month, two other courts in Germany — in Munich and Mannheim — also quashed Apple’s request to impose a preliminary ban on sales of its Galaxy Tab 10.1N and Nexus smartphone.
The two technology giants are engaged in a legal battle involving dozens of cases worldwide as they struggle for leadership in the hugely lucrative smartphone and tablet computer market.
Apple launched legal action in April last year, accusing Samsung of “slavishly” copying its iPhone and iPad designs. Samsung has focused its own lawsuits on technology patents rather than design. The South Korean giant received two legal boosts in December. A court in San Jose, California, denied Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction that would have banned the sale of three Samsung smartphones and a tablet computer. Australia’s High Court cleared the way for Samsung to sell its Galaxy 10.1 tablet in the country in time for Christmas, dismissing Apple’s bid to have a ban extended.”
The iPad 3 will come out in March I guess. It will purportedly have faster processing power and a better graphics engine.
- Why did everyone hate on Iron Man 2so much? Yes, there is little action but if you want 2 hours of almost non-stop robot on robot brawling I’d recommend any of the Transformers movies. The fights are quick; much quicker than the end of the first movie, which went on way too long. The story of Tony Stark’s self-made artificial heart slowly poisoning his bloodstream (and subsequently synthesizing a new, man-made element) is a good one, and would be a fascinating run in the pages Invincible Iron Man; but I always need to remind myself, “how many people who like the Iron Man movies have read an Iron Man comic?”
It’s too bad that Favreau isn’t doing the third movie, because he’s been slowly building towards the man behind the curtain, pulling the strings, since the beginning: The Mandarin. Who, as the first movie insinuates, has been funding extremists. “The Cave of the Ten Rings”. And I’m pretty sure Shane Black is on record as saying he isn’t going to use him because he sees the character as a racist stereotype.
- TubeGnosis has almost one hundred, free, mind-expanding documentaries to watch. I’m warning you, some of them are batshit crazy. But interesting nonetheless. I’m a massive William S. Burroughs fan (I think he’s one of the best American writers of all time) — as you may know if you’re reading this — and the doc they have on him is very insightful for fans of his, and probably non-fans alike. I have not yet watched the Charlie Mingus doc but I’m sure I would dig that too.
“The Zetas control much of eastern Mexico, while the Sinaloa cartel has its stronghold in the west of the country. The authors also point out their differences in strategy. They say that the Zetas whose leadership is composed of ex-special operations soldiers, resort to extreme violence. The Sinaloa cartel, although also ruthless, prefers to bribe and corrupt people, as well as providing intelligence on rivals to the authorities.”
Of course, there’s one way to make cartels completely impotent and insignificant. I would hope we all know what that is.
- Apple sued the Galaxy Tab 10.1 (Samsung) in a Dutch court, claiming it infringed on the iPad design. Apple lost, like it did when it tried the same thing a year ago. German courts are reviewing the a similar case.
It explains that the Hague-based judges noted that the backs and sides of Samsung’s tablet differed from the iPad’s, and that the two firm’s models differed in thickness – allowing informed users to distinguish between the companies’ devices. It said Apple had sought a wide definition of its design rights, based in part on the idea that its model looked like a “mirror-smooth lake” onto which an image appeared.
“This ruling again demonstrates that Apple’s products simply do not warrant the intellectual property protections that it believes,” a spokeswoman said.”Samsung will continue to take all appropriate measures, including legal action, to ensure continued consumer access to our innovative products.”
Apple said it had nothing specific to say about the ruling.
Apple posted record quarterly profits in the 2011 holiday season, a massive 13 billion dollars. During a recession, mind you. This news coming behind news that when Steve Jobs sat down with Obama, he was grilled about how many non-American jobs Apple has, and how those can come back to the United States. Jobs’ response: “Those jobs aren’t coming back.” According to UC Irvine, the iPod created around 15,000 US jobs and about 30,000 overseas jobs. To date, Apple has about 60,000 American workers (10,000 bartending at the genius bar). In comparison, HP has 350,000 American jobs and Dell has 100,000.
Then there’s this article, explaining how the average cost of an iPad is about $250. Looking at Best Buy, I’m seeing that they range from about 5 to 8 hundred dollars. The laptop manufacturing costs vs sales costs are even greater.
Cheap, overseas jobs? Cheap production costs? Being able to charge essentially however much you want because your fans will never leave you? It’s no wonder Apple is competing with Exxon Mobile as the wealthiest company in the world.
Even if the experience is painful or negative, but concludes on a pleasant note, people will consider the event a more positive experience, says Ed O’Brien, a graduate student in the U-M Department of Psychology.
TV On The Radio‘s newest/next album is streaming right now on Rhapsody for free, it’s called “Nine Types of Light”. I’m really digging it so far. Their music is getting simpler with each subsequent release (on a superficial level), and David Sitek is becoming one of my favorite producers. I honestly think he could make an awesome living by producing other bands alone. The guy’s extremely talented. I’m very excited to see this band again, as they’re one of the best live bands to emerge from the 2000′s.
Also… getting the new Obitsright now in my Marketplace (I know, I know… I’m a jackass for not using iTunes). Obits is one of those bands we need right now. Analog, tube-amps, feedback, noise. Their 2009 debut was good, and I’m hoping this new one — “Moody, Standard, and Poor” — is as good. Rock and Roll, maaan.
My Blueprintpreorder came in last Saturday, while the album’s official release was yesterday I believe. “Adventures In Counter-Culture” might be more cohesive than I thought it would be; if you heard half the album, or even two or three songs, then heard a random one you hadn’t heard before you would know it was off the same album. It’s got a very specific sound, the instrumentation, the lyrical content, the singing, that is tweaked a little with each track… but as a whole weaves it’s way throughout. This is a good thing, in my opinion. It makes an album feel less like a B-Sides/Rarities or collection of ill-conceived singles.
Perhaps a full-on review to come?
Don’t know what to listen to next? Let theGHOST decide for you. Click that link… it’ll bring you to a machine with three fader-style knobs. One controls “mood”, the other Digital vs. Organic sounds, and the last tempo (“Faster or Slower”).
