Thats my bike..
Elvis 1958
calling elvis
Town Hall
Town Hall USA
The State of the Music Business
Head over to Huffington post to read the full article:
John Mellencamp: On My Mind: The State of the Music Business.
Over the last few years, we have all witnessed the decline of the music business, highlighted by finger-pointing and blame directed against record companies, artists, internet file sharing and any other theories for which a case could be made. We’ve read and heard about the “good old days” and how things used to be. People remember when music existed as an art that motivated social movements. Artists and their music flourished in back alleys, taverns and barns until, in some cases, a popular groundswell propelled it far and wide. These days, that possibility no longer seems to exist. After 35 years as an artist in the recording business, I feel somehow compelled, not inspired, to stand up for our fellow artists and tell that side of the story as I perceive it. Had the industry not been decimated by a lack of vision caused by corporate bean counters obsessed with the bottom line, musicians would have been able to stick with creating music rather than trying to market it as well.
Goodbye Dubai | Smashing Telly
Short of opening a Radio Shack in an Amish town, Dubai is the world’s worst business idea, and there isn’t even any oil. Imagine proposing to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an anathema. This is effectively the proposition that created Dubai – it was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is dangerous.
Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the worst of both the West and the Middle-East and a dangerous totem for those who would mistakenly interpret this as the de facto product of a secular driven culture.
The opening shot of this clip shows 200 skyscrapers that were built in the last 5 years. It looks like Manhattan except that it isn’t the place that made Mingus or Van Allen or Kerouac or Wolfe or Warhol or Reed or Bernstein or any one of the 1001 other cultural icons from Bob Dylan to Dylan Thomas that form the core spirit of what is needed, in the absence of extreme toleration of vice, to infuse such edifices with purpose and create a self-sustaining culture that will prevent them crumbling into the empty desert that surrounds them.
via Goodbye Dubai | Smashing Telly – A hand picked TV channel.
Population: The elephant in the room
Fundamentally, we need to ask what is the greater threat to human welfare: the possibility that humane efforts to address population growth might be abused, or our ongoing failure to act to prevent hundreds of millions, even billions, dying as a result of global ecological collapse?
via BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Population: The elephant in the room.
There are some people – at the top of the economic pyrimid – who benifit greatly by being able to sell their products to huge populations. We wont hear the Gates foundation proposing population control for instance. Of course these same people can afford to puchase large swathes of real estate for their own use.
Michael Seitzman: Sarah Palin Naked
Stop voting for people you want to have a beer with. Stop voting for folksy. Stop voting for people who remind you of your neighbor. Stop voting for the ideologically intransigent, the staggeringly ignorant, and the blazingly incompetent.
Vote for someone smarter than you. Vote for someone who inspires you. Vote for someone who has not only traveled the world but who has also shown a deep understanding and compassion for it. The stakes are real and they’re terrifyingly high. This election matters. It matters. It really matters. Let me say that one more time. This. Really. Matters.
Someone’s watching you
Until recently, the concept of private life was basic to civilisation. Its value could be measured by the thoroughness with which totalitarian states and religions always did their best to stamp it out. But now we have to face the possibility that the latest stage of civilisation might also be trying to stamp it out.
John Cleese’s “Letter to America”
In view of your failure to elect a competent President and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately.
Her Sovereign Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories (except Kansas, which she does not fancy), as from Monday next
Pakistan’s flawed and feudal princess
Pakistan’s flawed and feudal princess | Comment | The Observer
Benazir Bhutto was a courageous, secular and liberal woman. But sadness at the demise of this courageous fighter should not mask the fact that as a pro-Western feudal leader who did little for the poor, she was as much a central part of Pakistan’s problems as the solution to them.
eye of the beholder
I remember arriving on a beach in Martinique with a group of Americans I worked for. The males, on seeing the almost naked french girls on the beach, attired in only string thongs, thought, based on past experience, that they were about to have sex. Perhaps not on the beach, but very soon.
Of course nothing could be further from the truth. There is nothing less approachable than naked french girls on a Martinique beach, attired in little more than red nail polish. But Americans at the time were not accustomed to being around real live naked girls unless they were about to get laid. My boss promptly checked into the hotel and spent the next few days fruitlessly strutting his stuff.
French television and billboard advertising will often use female breasts in a variety of formats, right in front of the poor impressionable kids during prime time television. No-one bats an eyelid, or pays much attention for that matter, including the kids.
Benazir Bhutto
I remember watching the BBC’s Newsnight a few years ago when Benazir Bhutto, the rather pretty Muslim ex prime minister of Pakistan was being interviewed about some serious political and religious matters. I forget what they were. During a long – perhaps 20 minute debate, her head scarf was slowly slipping backwards off her head. Was she permitted to appear in public without a head scarf? I didn’t know. Nor did she realize that her scarf was slipping off. The tension was incredible, was it going to slip off? A few times it was tugged back into position, but finally her head and hair were uncovered.
It was very sexy show. I can understand that some might find this level of titillation unacceptable, but had she appeared without her head scarf, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought, and might have paid attention to the arguments she was doubtless expressing with great skill.
If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers!
Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.
Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don’t have nearly enough insulation in them).
