general

Simon Reynolds has an omnibus post on RIFFS, worth checking out - especially for the live Devo and the "Polish Cream."

Some more examples could be added, all by Chrome, from 1978-82 (on YouTube, of course--the world's jukebox):

Innervacume (that's the spelling on the vinyl release, not "Inner Vacume"; YT commenter describes this as "neu+t.rex or early prince" - all true but had never thought of any of those comparisons before)

Nova Feedback (the RIFF starts about a minute in).

3rd from the Sun

Posted mp3s of all these Chrome songs 6 years ago and out of politeness took them down, ha.

My choice for the Stranglers would be Dagenham Dave.

Lauren Weinstein, Steve Jobs Posts Unconvincing Manifesto Against Adobe Flash:

Adobe was willing to do essentially all of the development work for Flash support, and Apple needed basically only to have permitted it onto the associated platforms. If users didn't want to use Flash (say, because they wanted a better touch interface or longer battery life -- two issues Steve discussed) nobody would put a gun to users' heads forcing them to use Flash anyway. An option to disable Flash could have been easily made available.

Yeah, USER CHOICE!

Clearly, the real problem that Steve Jobs has with Flash is that someone other than Apple has control over it. And the guiding principle of the iPhone/iPod/iPad ecosystem is Apple Controls All.

Sorry Steve. Nice try. Well written. But it just doesn't fly.

The silly rhetoric we keep hearing about Apple leaving the past behind (by, say, restoring books to 19th Century levels of uncopyability?) comes from Jobs himself. The fish rots from the head.

Update: Just received a complaint that this is a defense of Flash. There are probably as many gripes about Adobe on this blog (and its predecessor) as there are jabs at Apple. Suggesting that Sauron should give Saruman's followers a break is not the same as saying you love Saruman.

My friends who are Apple fans scoff when I suggest that the company is "evil." Everyone knows it is basically benign, they say, and on balance its forward-thinking plans for the next generation of computing outweigh whatever aggressive business tactics it might have to employ on the way up.

As for Steve Jobs using a private police force to break down doors of people who leak his trade secrets--well, that might seem evil in the short run, they say, but whatever it takes to get computing out of cumbersome desktops and into devices we can carry around. That's what's important.

We've had some pretty heated debates about Jobs' plans to use the private cops to kill people and take their organs. He's not going to live forever, the Apple fans say, and since we need his magic to carry us to the next level of computing, fresh body parts for the next 40 years or so are not such a tall order.

What's a few lives against a system of file distribution and sales that even Grandma can understand?

Was trying to think of something to send Travis for his tumblr playlist and remembered this home cassette taping of Margaret Leng Tan performing Philip Glass' "Modern Love Waltz" on toy pianos. This led to looking for other versions of the song, which might also affectionately be called the "OCD Tango." Found two on YouTube, which are not as good Leng Tan's.
Leng Tan adapted the tune for two toy pianos, played with brittle relentlessness. The YouTubes are conservatory-ish piano solos, played with attempts at expression and emotion. Wrong, wrong. Of the two, Amy Briggs' is better for being more robotic. Branka Parlic's version recalls Liberace, only boring.

The Atlantic's Megan McArdle has a point:

When the printing press was invented, many monks mourned the decline of vellum and the loss of the illuminator’s art. They were right, of course—but they were even more wrong. Maybe something better is coming, even as the transition racks the nerves of writers and artists. As the old joke goes, we may be losing something on every unit—but perhaps we’ll make it up in volume.

Except that's her last paragraph, not her lead. What precedes it is an annoying rant about 20-something "freeloaders" destroying what she calls the music industry. Apparently no one told her the music industry gave us Britney Spears and snorted the rest of the profits up its nose.

Disquiet has a sensible response to McArdle: "Vinyl LP or MP3, McArdle sees music as something sold as a fixed cultural object. Little context is given in the article for music licensing as a revenue stream. No consideration is given to sales of music gear, including instruments and software, nor to the growing realm of music-related experience in which the role between audience and performer is blurred through interactivity. Despite which absence from the article, that is all part of the music industry."

In fairness to McArdle, she does raise the possibility that music could be something other than the overpriced CDs the suits ripped us off for for 20 years. In a tossed off comment in the very last paragraph of her article. The radical transition of the masses from advertising-blitzed consumers to famous-for-fifteen-people-but-that's-cool producers is apparently happening beneath McArdle's radar, while she complains about the demise of the past's evil model.