Music

Mr. Hasselhoff, Tear Down That Wall

ABC News: [David] Hasselhoff enjoys cult status across Europe. This is most marked in Germany, where his 1989 album, Looking for Freedom, topped the charts for three months. Two years ago, Hasselhoff expressed disappointment that he was not recognized as having helped end the Cold War through his music. ... (read more)

2006/07/06

Writer Tells Wikipedia He Got a Divorce

I fleshed out a placeholder entry on Wikipedia this morning, giving the Richardson, Texas, high school where "Jeremy spoke in class today" enough substance to inspire future editors to work on it. I've made around 150 edits to Wikipedia in the past year, most extensively on new bios and the unspeakably hideous "alcopop" drink Zima. Starting new subjects is a lot more fun than defending existing ones from vandalism. My Drudge Retort coconspirator Jonathan Bourne and I worked on the Zima entry as ... (read more)

2006/05/04

Jason Shellen, Jake Savin Join RSS Advisory Board

The RSS Advisory Board has two new members: Jason Shellen, the product manager of Google Reader and a former strategist for the company that created Blogger, and Jake Savin, the lead developer at UserLand Software. Jason Shellen has spent three years at Google since the company acquired Blogger developer Pyra Labs. First launched in October 2005, Google Reader is a free web-based aggregator that reads Really Simple Syndication and all of the other syndication formats, supporting item sharing, ... (read more)

2006/04/24

Adam Curry Caught in Sticky Wiki

Former MTV veejay and podcasting entrepreneur Adam Curry appears to have been caught anonymously editing the podcasting entry on Wikipedia to remove credit from other people and inflate his role in its creation. When someone edits Wikipedia without logging in to a user account, the IP address is recorded to guard against abuse. Four times this year, an IP address controlled by Curry, 82.108.78.107, has made revisions involving the early history of podcasting. On Feb. 5, someone at Curry's ... (read more)

2005/12/01

In a World Where People Watch Movies

The Guardian has a great piece on how all movie trailers look alike, sound alike, begin with the words "in a world" and have the same guy doing the voiceover: ... by far the oddest practices in the world of trailers concern the music that accompanies them. Film scores tend to be completed so late in the production process that most trailer editors can't use the correct music even if they want to; normally, however, they don't. Deploying the music from a successful older film to advertise a new ... (read more)

2005/06/13

Sixth Singer Joins Podcasting Choir

Mark Pursey has become the sixth member of the Creative Commons Choir, the asynchronous podcasting singing group that's now one-sixtieth as large as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I'm disappointed that the music press has yet to take note of our new genre, which takes MIDI orchestral accompaniment of Dixie to a place no one could have imagined. When our choir stops growing, I will go the Jandek route and self-release this song commercially, putting all choir members one step closer to membership ... (read more)

2005/05/29

Even Further Down South

Rex Hammock has become the fifth member of the Creative Commons Choir, adding his voice to the singalong podcast of "Dixie." My vocals were receding deeper into the background with each version, so I'm pleasantly surprised to hear more of myself in Rex's edit. I also like the shotgun blast sound he makes at the end, which I interpret as a metaphorical attempt to put a sick dog out of its misery. He'd love to hear an asynchronous podcasting choir that had the sense to exclude the five of us: ... ... (read more)

2005/05/22

Symphony in Eight Bits

A funny video is making the rounds of a school choir performing Nintendo themes: This next song needs a little bit of introduction. Keeping with the experimental nature of Redefined we decided that we would now do what some might consider an art piece. It's a little older than some of the music we've already sung today, and it's all original work from Japan. So I hope that you can all listen with open minds, and if you'll give me one second I need to boot it up. The choir does a really nice ... (read more)

2005/05/03

All-Podcast, All-the-Time Radio

A San Francisco radio station is going to start airing nothing but user-submitted podcasts beginning on May 16. The station, which calls itself KYOU Open Source Radio, will broadcast on 1550-AM/San Francisco and the Internet. Submitted podcasts must be 60 megabytes or less in size and can be in any format. The categories on the submission form demonstrate how strange this is likely to be -- traditional fare like news, sports and politics is mixed with over-the-road trucking, sex and wiffleball. ... (read more)

2005/04/28

Charlie White's Evil Puppet

The music video for Interpol's "Evil" features a troubled puppet with just enough realistic human features -- eyes, teeth, hair, and furrowed brow -- to scare the bejeezus out of people. Fans have taken to calling him Norman. "Evil" is the first video by Charlie White, an artist who builds photorealistic images that combine real people, digital effects, and disturbing puppets. I bought Interpol's CD Antics this week, and it all sounds like "Evil" -- a bunch of lush, gloomy songs that remind me ... (read more)

2005/03/12

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