funny the way it is

Interesting piece from CBS News covering the upcoming (and long-awaited) release of Big Whiskey... by Dave Matthews Band. The DMB are funny proposition, certainly on this side of the pond: you love them, you hate them, or (the majority) you've never heard of them. Yet, as the piece points out, they've grossed nearly half a billion dollars on the road.

[Edit: took down the embedded video because the auto-start couldn't be disabled: cheers, CBS. You can watch the great report by clicking here.]

I've been a devotee for about ten years are so, but still have never seen the whole group live, although I was lucky enough to catch dave and Tim Reynolds doing the acoustic stuff a couple of years ago. One of my personal connections with the music is that each record brings a canon of songs self-contained, as if theme and techniques change each time Dave sits down to write; like the Beatles for my generation, each album sounds completely new.

The whole of Big Whiskey and the Groogrux King is streaming already, as it has been for the last week or so, on Pandora: click here to listen. The poignancy of the death of founding member LeRoi Moore last year (see Into The Great Light", August 20th 2008) only adds to how brilliant his opening solo is - worth the effort. Lead single, Funny The Way It Is is also a bit of a barnstormer. The rest of the album is a grower for sure, but after three or four times through already, I'm hooked and can't wait until I can get the physical release (by import, most likely.)

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Smyth 2010

It's been a while since I last messed around with cults - haven't been to a Presbyterian service in simply ages* - but one in particular has captured my imagination. Some mysterious source** has started up a brand new Graeme Smyth Page on Facebook. For anyone who has ever encountered the man himself, they will already know the man was born to lead. And so the push is on to get the big man to stand. For something. Anything from traffic warden up, really. The nation needs to hear him speak.

Pledge your allegiance on the Facebook page, and the campaign have set targets for rewards. Already, a few different sets of 'propaganda' have appeared, and apparently a video message from the man himself may appear later in the week. GSmythFTW!

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* This is a joke.
** Me.

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bat fight

The main joke in Will Ferrell's latest Funny or Die outing takes a while to really kick in, but the pay off is absolutely worth it. Of course, watch from the start to get all the subtleties and maximum laugh-age.

BAT FIGHT with Will Ferrell from Will Ferrell

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post-pig parlimentary overselling

I do like the BBC, but I like it even better whenever someone goes on it and has a good old rant about something. This week's headache is over MP's expenses. Someone claimed for biscuits for their constituency office or something.

I suppose, since it turned out that the swine flu/pig flu/Mexican Flu/North-American Flu/H1N1-Alpha-Positive isn't going to wipe us all out (a small victory I shall claim for my twitter #hugahog campaign a couple of weeks ago) we'd better get back to the normal routine of sleaze-and-retribution or something.

Thankfully, national hero, teller of quite interesting things and twitter overlord (let's face it, he'd be king - well, President probably - if the middle classes could get away with it) Stephen Fry has pointed out the obvious here.

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days with my father

Again discovered via @icedcoffee, Days With My Father is a photostory, of sorts, by American photographer Phillip Toledano - google him, he has published quite a few and they're all stunning. I'd briefly encountered it a while ago, but during some mind-numbing frustration over a presentation this evening I took the time to read and digest it properly. And it really is worth the look.

I really appreciate photographers who don't just snap and print, but take time to build narrative and explain what their images mean to them. I remember a few years ago viewing a Jeff Wall retrospective at the Tate Modern. I'd studied him a bit at uni as part of our photography modules, but seeing the images in full projection was amazing; and, more significantly here, being able to read the artist's own narration of each work was the dealbreaker.

The digital age may have heralded the exponential and regrettable proliferation of (pardon me) mass crap photography; but Toledano clearly demonstrates that the web can also be used for some awesome presentation, which rather than dominating, serves the images whilst allowing him complete control over how his narration is put across.

And he appears to have used Century Gothic to do it! Which brings me back to my presentation... eek.

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peek-a-boo!

Just the thing to make me cackle on a stressful morning...


I know I shouldn't be blogging this kind of stuff but it was a decision by management to allow for some lighter content... or something.

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that's how you let the beat build

Discovered via @icedcoffee. Absolutely brilliant - and demands to be viewed in HD, of course.

Nyle "Let The Beat Build" from Nyle on Vimeo.

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ah, americans...

Here's an interesting soundbite provided by @Glinner, in which the legendary Alan Moore pinpoints a huge problem with comic/graphic novel writing. He simultaneously therefore alludes to why his own continuous toying with anti-hero characters has cast him as the greatest of writers, certainly within my lifetime. (Bob Kane, I never knew thee; Frank Miller, apologies; Stan Lee - too many cameos.)



I do still only dabble in graphic novels; aside from a lifelong Batman fascination, it is short series of original characters, in which Moore specialises, that I find the most interest. Long may he continue to create unfilmable wonders.

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crime and punishment?

Some music moguls have deemed some of my lesser YouTube content to be annoying. Two have had audio stripped; one, the visuals (even though the complaint is about another music track.) Fear not, however - fans of John & Paul's Sponsored Fun Run who are lucky enough to live in Western Samoa, among others, will still be able to view it without restriction...

I'll probably be pulling these few videos in the next while anyway (DailyMotion, here we come? Vimeo's too pretty for this kind of drivel) but it saddens me that they couldn't just stick a banner ad at the side, as they do with many infringement issues. The videos are rubbish, don't get me wrong - but it's the principle of the thing. I wasn't making any kind of profit, I wasn't offending anyone, and in the only one that was any good, the music was actually incidental. But i guess the law is the law, after all.

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