Blues Animations - Robert Johnson & Leadbelly

>> Monday, March 2, 2009


A follow-up to yesterday's post about Poetry Animations. Both seem to respond to the actual sound waves, with the artist's lips moving in response to any volume shifts -- obviously it's a lot more effective with poetry readings, since Robert Johnson is "singing" all of his guitar stops (the blinking is a nice and very eerie touch, however). Here are some of the best:



From Jim Clark, aka Blues Animations on DailyMotion.com

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SeatKarma.com - Concert Seating Finder


Finally, democracy for concert seating! SeatKarma.com, where "no two tickets are the same," gives users the ability to view all available seats for a show.

"SeatKarma’s search engine covers 99% of tickets available for purchase online by retrieving live ticket information from a couple of hundred secondary market ticket brokers. The cost comparison is then augmented with venue mapping available for approximately 1600 venues. 1300 of these are “live maps” which place a marker on the section where the seat will be located. The remaining 300 are small venues such as bars where seat mapping doesn’t apply. The company claims it now has more live maps than any other comparison engine on the market." (from TechCrunch.com)
I just bought tickets for the Clapton / Winwood show in Philly and spent 20 minutes in an Internet queue wondering what (if any) seats were still available. Never again!


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Popular Penguins: Retro Penguin Books Styling

>> Sunday, March 1, 2009

I'm a sucker for punchy, to-the-point design, and old paperbacks from the early 60s are a great example. Penguin's division in Australia recently started re-issuing a collection of classic and modern books with the retro cover treatment, and sales have more than doubled their projections.

I love any story where books sell well -- take a look:
The series of 50 books - 25 fiction and 25 non-fiction were redesigned to recall Penguin's first paperbacks, published in the 30s. Then, the softcovers were colour coded - orange books were fiction, blue for non-fiction. The new retro Penguins all carry the same orange cover.

"If you're standing looking at those books you know
subconsciously or by implication that all of these books are going
to be OK," said Peter Blake, the company's Australian sales
director who conceived the idea of the series.

"Even if you've not heard of Geoffrey Robertson's Crimes
Against Humanity
you think, 'It's part of the collection, I
trust the brand and it's surrounded by all these other classics by
authors like Waugh or Fitzgerald so it must be OK.' "

To have a look at the entire series, visit Popular Penguins.

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Dead Poets Society, the Animated Series

Very cool stuff, and more than a little bit creepy - check out T.S. Eliot, Christina Rossetti and James Joyce below.

Poetry Animations is a YouTube channel put together by British videographer Jim Clarke. His project animated old images of famous to make it appear as if they are reading their poems. Some of the recordings are the poet's reading their works. Where archived readings were unavailable, they are voiced by other readers.

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TiVo Guilt, Opportunity Costs and more

>> Sunday, February 22, 2009

A brief explanation about 3 months without a blog post: dedicating this blog to music alone is just too limiting. Call it a byproduct of my job navigating the Internet, call it my background in Literature, call it my undying quest for fun-yet-useless facts and articles, but this blog needs to start thinking outside the box of "local music."

Part of my frustration in updating is below: TiVo guilt (or in my case Bookmarking and Google Reader guilt) is what happens when technology gives you seemingly unlimited content choices, but time and the need to sleep give you only so many hours in a day to absorb what you've collected.

I definitely suffer from this, but hopefully the content changes here will alleviate some of that. Does anyone else have this problem? Maybe you've bookmarked 30 sites about Garfield minus Garfield but you don't have time to keep up every day?
clipped from www.cnn.com

"Economists call this 'opportunity costs,' " explains Berens. "You're sitting there and you have to weigh, well, 'I have to watch this thing, because I promised myself when I told TiVo ... I want the whole season of that! Go get it! And go get things like it!' And so you've committed to this decision and it's a burden -- suddenly your relaxation has turned into more work."

"With infinite media, you have infinite choices, and therefore you have infinite opportunity costs," he says. "Your satisfaction index of the thing you actually choose can never be equivalent to the infinite opportunity costs, so we're in this position of being behind the cognitive eight-ball all the time."

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Devon Sproule Interview Pt II

>> Sunday, December 7, 2008


So I stand by my earlier statement: This blog is about musical discovery, not criticism, so I'll leave you with a bevy of Devon Sproule songs and links and let you figure things out for yourself.


Devon Sproule & Paul Curreri - "You Can Leave Your Hat On" -- Download now!



I will say that you'd be a fool not to already own Devon's Keep Your Silver Shined, seeing as its one of the best records I've picked up in the last two years. Confident, relaxed, accessible and terrifying in its execution once you realize how young Devon is and what a fantastic musical future she has ahead of her.

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Devon Sproule Interview Pt 1

>> Sunday, November 2, 2008


Since this blog is so much more about musical discovery than music criticism, do yourself a favor and discover (or learn more about) Devon Sproule below. This, ladies and gentlemen, is real folk music and what real folk music should be. More to come this week!




Devon Sproule Interview Pt 1 from Ian Messinger on Vimeo.




Devon Sproule - "1340 Chesapeake St" from Ian Messinger on Vimeo.


Related links:


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Monday Funday - Halloween edition

>> Tuesday, October 28, 2008


Okay, it's time to try a brand new, uber-engaging feature called "Monday Funday." I'll post a question or a list (hopefully) each week and take comments and submissions until Friday, at which point I'll post a "Friday Funday" follow-up with links to download everything. Complicated? Let's do a live one:

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday, and most of my memories of childhood revolve around this time of year. Whether I was dancing to "The Monster Mash" or watching The Halloween That Almost Wasn't (see below), this time of year was it for me. This week's entry will be the beginning of a Halloween hit list, starting with Bing Crosby's "The Headless Horseman" and Otis Redding's "Trick or Treat."

Bing Crosby - "The Headless Horseman"


Otis Redding - "Trick or Treat"


Please leave comments with your suggestions, and make sure to check back Friday for the potentially embarrassing lack of results. Huzzah!


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