The View from the Spaghetti Factory (proper redesign coming soon!)

Any Tom Waits fans reading this? Browsing in Waterstones the other day, I noticed this new biography…

The Many Lives of Tom Waits

A book of collected interviews has been around for a while, but even the thought of reading several interviews in succession bores me to tears. However, this new book immediately attracted my attention, not least because it’s by Patrick Humphries, whose biography of Nick Drake impressed me a couple of years back.

It’s still in hardback at the moment, so I shall be waiting for a while (too expensive, too much shelf space, too bulky for train journeys). One for the “books to read” list, though…

… is the fact that Stephen Fry, the thoroughly splendid fellow, now has a blog. Everyone buy a cake to celebrate!

http://www.stephenfry.com/blog/

Are you familiar with Audioscrobbler? It’s a little tool that works with your computer’s media player (iTunes, Winamp, etc) and uploads your listening habits to a central website. That way, you can marvel at the number of times you’ve listened to “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep”, while also browsing other people’s playlists and finding new things to listen to. I’ve been using it for years, and it’s lots of fun.

Anyway, the people who designed Audioscrobbler expanded their operation a couple of years ago, creating Last.FM, a cuddly Web 2.0 social networking site combining the Audioscrobbler technology with Facebook-style profile pages, messageboards, personalised streaming radio feeds and the potential to run your own little online record label.

Oh, and then music industry giants CBS bought the company.

Yep, another corporate takeover, and this one cost 280 million US dollars, to be precise. And while Flickr, Myspace and Youtube don’t seem to have been affected too badly by their corporate takeovers, I think I’ll be keeping Last.FM at arm’s length. Via Robert Fripp, here’s an extract from the contract you must agree to if you upload any of your music to Last.FM…

Now, I’d be naive to think that I was going to get rich by uploading any of my tracks to Last.FM, but that’s not the point. There’s an underground music revolution going on out there… or perhaps not.

Ingmar Bergman 1918-2007

“Vem är du?”… “Jag är döden”

Just…

WOW

!!!!

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of optimism, but Gordon seems to be living in a fantasy world. Screaming from every tabloid headline and TV news programme today was the shocking news that… I can barely find the words to describe such horror… deep breath now…

A young member of the Royal Family has split up with the girl he was going out with.

Not surprisingly, media commentators and vox-popping members of the public have blamed the aggressive and intrusive press for making newly slebbified Kate Middleton’s life a misery and causing the eventual split. That’s rather disingenuous… we (and I’m using the broadest sense of “we”) get the media we deserve. The tabloids hound the Royals because we pay them to do so.

Granted, it’s not entirely one-way traffic… the media have played their part in whipping up the celeb frenzy. However, they’re simply exploiting their market. The fascination with celebrities began long before the Princess Diana hysteria, long before even the first movie stars of the 1920s. What’s different now, though, is the slack-jawed obsession with the trivial lives of people whose only achievement is to be given enough airtime to proclaim themselves “celebrities”. That doesn’t look like changing for a while, whatever Gordon Brown may think.

… has died in New York.

One of the most important writers of the twentieth century and a rare example of a cult figure who was also a serious and profound artist. Vonnegut also stands out for me as one of very few people (along with J.G. Ballard and Neal Stephenson) who have tempted me to read science fiction. It’s years since I read any of his books, but this news has inspired me (as such things so often do) to go back an re-read the whole lot in chronological order.

Matthew Sweet mourns the decline of challenging film presentations on terrestrial TV in yesterday’s Guardian…

Where did all the great movies go?

I don’t think it’s *quite* as bad as he suggests… there’s a trickle of decent films on BBC4, ITV3 and 4, More4 and five, just as long as you have access to Freeview. Even so, it’d be easy to come to the conclusion that an increase in the number of channels leads to a reduction in choice. Sweet mentions the retrospective seasons they used to run just after a director or actor had died… this is part of the rather patronising, paternalistic approach to TV that seems to be all but gone, and I MISS IT, DAMMIT!

In a recent discussion on Comment is Free, someone called me an elitist snob for suggesting that the disadvantage of commercial TV is that everything is dictated by the will of the masses (via the advertisers). He was wrong, though… I was including myself in “the masses”. I want experts and boffins to take me by the hand and guide me through stuff I don’t know. In this case, I want a real Film Expert to show me films I’ve never seen before and explain why they’re important.

In reality, I’m more likely to be given a list of Top Movie Moments by a collection of one-hit wonders, footballers’ girlfriends and graveyard shift cable presenters. These people have killed all the experts and boffins and taken charge. Where did they come from? Who employed them? Are they members of a secret society, headed by their great role model, That Welsh Woman Who Couldn’t Learn To Drive?

Please send them away. I want the boffins back. I want to be patronised and paternalised.

Remember I was moaning about Universal Music and their blinkered, litigious greed? Well, how about we move up a level through the music industry hierarchy to that noble umbrella organisation, the Recording Industry Association of America…

RIAA Petitions Judges to Lower Artist Royalties (IGN News)

Basically, the record companies (who are, according to the RIAA, truly wonderful because they “drive revenue”) aren’t earning enough money from modern music delivery technologies such as ringtones and downloads. And here’s the shining, crystalline reason for why the RIAA is called the RIAA and not the “Wonderful World of Lovely Music For All” (or something)… they decide to claw back some revenue by paying their artists less. Yep, the people who make the music, without whom there wouldn’t be a music industry.

I give you Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music. For a CEO of a major producer of electronic media, Doug doesn’t seem to be too comfortable with the modern world. First of all, he knows exactly what we’re all doing with our iPods…

It’s not just the little plastic boxes we carry around in our pockets, either. Poor Doug is feeling a bit confused by pretty much everything that young people do these days. So what does he do? He sues MySpace…

The Wired article mentions damages of up to $150,000 *per song*. I had no idea all those MySpace teenagers were doing so much damage to the world Emo economy…