Tag Archives: music

Caffeinated Links: Literary Dating Profiles, Needle Free Vaccines, Radio Play

this & that January 20, 2014 Leave a comment

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Ever-awesome Buzzfeed has a genuinely hilarious post on if famous literary icons had dating profiles. Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, J.K. Rowling and more. RT 

The Shiznit redid all the year’s top movie posters with increased accuracy. 12 Years a Slave is now White Guilt: The Movie. RT

This seems very much needed -a needle-free vaccine patch that’s safer and way cheaper, as explained by a TED video RT

Radio stations are apparently phasing out new music altogether in a bid to stay alive, and it’s impacting artists –

“Veteran radio promoter Richard Palmese said he tells programmers they should spin a new song at least 150 times during peak listening hours—basically rush hours—before they draw any conclusions about whether fans like it or not, since many songs take time to grow on people.

But that can be a hard sell. When Mr. Palmese first asked Top-40 stations to play The Lumineers’ acoustic-guitar-driven single “Ho Hey” in 2012, for example, many responded incredulously, making jokes along the lines of: “What are you giving me, a Peter, Paul and Mary record?” RT 

The Civil Wars

this & that January 11, 2014 1 Comment

on-the-verge-the-civil-wars-taylor-swift-adele-AT5BNSP-x-large The Civil Wars…one of my favorite bands, the creators behind the ethereal, heartbreaking Poison and Wine, one of the most tender, gorgeous love songs I’ve ever heard…and the group that made their title a sort of living reality, heading suddenly and with what appears to be some finality into an ending.

The push-and-pull, closeness yet distance required between two people who clearly had some level of personal chemistry and an oceanload of creative chemistry, who toured together, crafted and performed love songs together, yet were not together romantically (Williams’ husband is their manager) – finally destructed.

And while I do not believe that it was personal differences, but largely creative, that severed an intense connection, it is hard not to see an undercurrent of longing, however stifled, in some of their earlier work. Regardless, here’s a look back at earlier, better times, and oddly, these photos capture well the simultaneous closeness and distance between two people, a man and a woman, locked in a creative twosome.

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Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings – Retreat

creativity, this & that January 2, 2014 Leave a comment

Gorgeous animated video teaser for Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings‘ upcoming album. Smooth, quirky, bold – just what I’d expect from this powerhouse group.

New album “Give The People What They Want” out January 2014 on Daptone Records.

Most Like the Human Voice

books poetry lit December 21, 2013 Leave a comment

the cello. I’ve heard voices, women’s voices,
men’s, deep, almost suntanned, the bow drawn
trembling across the past, finding the line
somebody else drew, before, ago, far, ages,
the long lasting, the note held in glass, the rim
muscled fingers, strong arms, the woman’s shape,
knees grasping, the unaccompanied suite.
Bach, his mind, moral-scaffolded, tune climbing coil,
fakir’s spiral, above, above.  He holds us, bears
us.  Math music.  Twenty something, David,
whatever holds us, holds us aloft, keeps,
hopes.  The woman, the cellist, going to buy the dress,
the black dress, the woman sitting there, spreading
her legs, embracing imagination, sawing the bow
back and forth, saying. “I don’t think this dress,”
and the saleswoman snatching the dress,  “No,
not for what you want a dress for.”

at the funeral, the dead man not religious,
played Bach.  How few nights later, the boy,
boy he was, David, will be, went where he should not,
to what he couldn’t live with, without, white
heat, argument, wanting more, playing less, lead,
the only way to settle fire, habit, what lifted him
when Bach didn’t.  The dropped bow, the voice,
so like ours, if it were reasonable, still, every note
the dead hear, the rest of us twist the knob for,
never completely clearing static about the score.

-Starkey Flythe in Inkwell

Caffeinated Links: Catching Fire Book Cover, T.S. Eliot, Inside Llewyn Davis Music

art & illustration, books poetry lit, this & that December 2, 2013 Leave a comment

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Julian Peters’ illustrations of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock are among the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. RT

This “book covers come to life” – animated book covers – series is not just breathtaking, but also the way of the future – one day very soon we’ll walk into bookstores and the book covers will be animated. RT

Millenials in American aren’t the only ones desperate for jobs – it’s the same in Europe, according the New York Times writing about a generation “Young and Educated in Europe, but Desperate for Jobs”

100 Notable Books from 2013, RT

Ruth Engel reviews the Inside Llewyn Davis soundtrack – “The album itself is lovely – Oscar Isaac’s voice is so compelling that I’m sure his performance in the movie will be beyond reproach even if he doesn’t act at all. It includes a number of instantly recognizable folk standards, including one of my all-time favorites,” 500 Miles.” Marcus Mumford collaborates on an aching version of “Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song)” that contains no frenetic banjo strumming, and Chris Thile and the Punch Brothers bring warmth and a fiddle into the mix.” RT

Gap Back to Blue: Alexa Ray Joel

this & that September 19, 2013 Comments: 6

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Gap in the same way I do about every luxury retail brand (as in, is it really necessary to make or sell clothes that cost over $100? What body image are you selling? Are you contributing to the same desperate frenetic cycle of “more is better” and there is one right way to live that 99% of the companies in the U.S. seem to be marketing?)

Regardless, Gap’s latest TV commercials are lovely – this one features Alexa Ray Joel sings her version of father Billy Joel’s classic, “Just the Way You Are.”

Jana Kramer – I Hope It Rains (Official Music Video)

this & that August 5, 2013 Leave a comment

Playful.

Caffeinated Links: James Rhodes, Tim Tebow, Saeed Abedini, The State of Music 2013

this & that April 29, 2013 Leave a comment

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James Rhodes: Find What You Love and Let it Kill You. What if, rather than paying £70 a month for a gym membership that delights in making you feel fat, guilty and a world away from the man your wife married you bought a few blank canvases and some paints and spent time each day painting your version of “I love you” until you realized that any woman worth keeping would jump you then and there just for that, despite your lack of a six-pack?” (RT The Guardian)

Noisy Courtship, Quiet Breakup: Jets Dump Tebow. “Tebow, to a degree, is not exempt from culpability. It was he, after all, who chose to accept the trade to the Jets rather than play for Jacksonville, where he was reared. But Tebow could not have predicted what awaited him in New York. The former special-teams coordinator Mike Westhoff, in a memorable radio interview after the season, called the Jets’ mishandling of Tebow “a mess, it was an absolute mess.” (RT NYT)

Update on Save Saeed: Letter Says Iran Release Depends on Abedini Renouncing Faith.”In a letter obtained by the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), Abedini—a U.S. citizen of Iranian descent—wrote that he was told by Iranian prison officials, “Deny your faith in Jesus Christ and return to Islam or else you will not be released from prison. We will make sure you are kept here even after your 8 year sentence is finished” (RT Christianity Today)

The State of Music 2013. “Everything is getting so niche-market and pulling us apart. You don’t have to listen to what everybody else listens to. You can find your own thing. If your thing is tribal beats, you can listen to tribal beats all the time, and it doesn’t matter whether or not the radio plays it.” (RT Relevant)

Caffeinated Links:

this & that April 10, 2013 Leave a comment

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15 Amazing Book-Filled Bars Where We’d Like to Drink (Flavorwire)

Bon Iver performs at Austin City Limits (PBS)

Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Nature- “However, none of these explanations can fully account for the existence of genocide and mass killing. The most realistic conclusion is that reached by leading genocide scholar James Waller in his book Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, which concludes that all people share a human nature that includes the capacity for both extraordinary good and extraordinary evil under the right circumstances.” (The Resurgence)

Five Times We Tend to Overspend and How to Stop – “There’s psychological research to back up this approach: After 48 hours, the fog of dopamine, the reward chemical in your brain that goads you to hit “purchase,” wears off. (Lifehacker)

FUN. – Carry On – Official Music Video Cover by Stripped Radio

this & that March 20, 2013 Leave a comment

I don’t usually go for bands who do mostly covers, but this is really quite stunning.