Want Some Words…

A video for Andrea Dorfman’s song Art

My favorite X song:

Warren Ellis is posting music videos over on his blog today. Seemed like a great idea.
New Life from X. John looks his usual imperturbable self, and Exene is lookng kinda wild.

with, like, actual music, and everything. (see here)

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Henry Rollins reads “Twas the Night Before Cristmas”, complete with machine guns, helicopters, and explosions.

++ BALKAN BEAT BOX ++
New world music stuff, with a mid-east flavor from ex Gogol Bordello member Ori Kaplan, and others. Cool stuff. I’ve loved GB since I found out about them a few years ago. Balkan Beat Box is just as good, but not quite as punk, it seems. Check ‘em out.

(Via Lost at E Minor)

Music CD, I’m just not that into you

In the four years from 2001 to 2005, overall time spent on these pursuits rose to 3,482 hours per person from 3,356 hours, about a 4% increase. But that didn’t benefit all forms of entertainment equally. Here’s a table I’ve created from the MPAA report showing the change in hours per person spent by activity:

Cable and satellite TV +125
Consumer Internet +52
Home video +29
Broadcast and satellite radio +26
Wireless content +15
Video games +12

Consumer books 0

Movies (at the theater) -1
Consumer magazines -3
Daily newspapers -14
Recorded music -50
Broadcast TV -65

There’s more, but the idea is that, since we only have so much money, and/or time, we spend both on what gives us more pleasure per unit.
I’m glad to see that book reading hasn’t declined (although it would be nice if it had increased), which puts a lie to the idea that we are less literate the more we’re online.

So today on Wired I found out that there’s a biopic being made of Iggy Pop, and the early days of The Stooges.
How cool is that! Elijah Wood is playing Iggy, and, Kirsten Dunst plays Debbie Harry.
It has Iggy’s blessing, but he’s not participating in it.

Short Wikipedia article here

Here’s hoping it doesn’t suck.

Everybody else is doing top 10 lists, why not me.

10. wxPython
    Yep, cross platform, fairly easy to learn, more powerful than Tkinter (Python’s “official” GUI toolkit). It may have some faults, but it works well for me as a noob Python programmer.
9. Democracy TV
   The free and open source internet tv platform. There’s an opportunity to build a new, open mass medium of online television. We’re developing the Democracy internet TV platform so that watching internet video channels will be as easy as watching TV and broadcasting a channel will be open to everyone. Unlike traditional TV, everyone will have a voice. An alternative to mass media, and corporate controlled TV. Hundreds of “channels”. My favorite? Punkcast.com, of course.
8. Coffee By Design
   Coffee By Design’s mission is to educate people about specialty coffee and to provide them with the best quality coffee beans available at our Micro Roastery and Coffeehouses in Portland, Maine. We take pride in our reputation for offering the highest quality products at a fair price as well as providing extraordinary service. Our goal is 100% customer satisfaction. Damn good coffe. Fairly local to me, only 3hrs away. Great seveice, and good pricing. I recommend the Rebel Blend Dark Roasted coffee. Not only because it’s good but because a portion of sales goes to Rebel Blend Arts Fund, which gives grants to artists.
7. My cowon IAudio M5 Portable Digital Audio Player.
   Plays all formats. of audio files you can throw at it, holds 20GB worth of music(and just about any other kind of file, but you can only view text files, not pics, or anything else.) Works with Linux, since it’s basically just a porable hard drive with music playing software on it.
6. Download Punk
   See my post on this fine site.
5. Ghostland Observatory
   These guys actually beat out Exene Cervenka and Joan Jett (both of whom I love, and had new CDs out this year) because of their originality, and total coolness and independence. Try Piano Man from Paparazzi Lightning.
4. Musee Picasso in Barcelona
   From my 2 month working excursion. My favorite thing, a great collection. See this post for more things.
3. Someone Comes to Town Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow
   This fine book beat out a couple of others as my fave read this year, for it’s absolute strangeness, and great writing. On the short list:
   Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
   Driving with Shannon by S A Robinson
   I thought I did a review of this, but I didn’t. It’s a semi-autobiographical memoir of a couple of teen age punk rockers trip cross country in the early eighties, a good, but not great book.
2. Eternal Gaze
   A wonderful, animated short about the artist Alberto Giacometti
   It even beat out How to draw a Bunny, for me.
1. My wife
   Who continues towards her goal of being an RN, works a demanding job, and still loves me for who only knows what reason.

There’s really so much more like Cobh, Ireland, other bands, and download sites, my kids, my cats, my dad, ART books, not having internet for 2 months, Richard Dawkins, Keith Olberman, and many, many other things that I can’t think of, but, these are my top 10 cool things.