Jim Romenesko Poynter had an intereresting blog post yesterday quickly reviewing coverage of Kurt Cobain’s death on April 5, 1994.
And it reminded me, I am not a huge Nirvana fan, but I really, really love their MTV Unplugged performance of Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World.”. It’s one of the better covers out there, and as art tends to be, infinitely more interesting after the artist’s untimely death.
Enjoy:
From my other blog, Yes/No/Undecided.
Something bouncing around the journalism blogosphere today has struck a nerve with me. (my B, I don’t remember where I read it first. It may have been Poynter.)
The Center for Public Integrity reported (note, this article changed from the version I read initially. See paragraph below) that an unnamed senior journalist at ABC News in the 1990s served as an informant for the FBI. Specifically, this “mole” passed along information in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995.
Even more specifically, Gawker reported pretty quickly afterward the mole/FBI was Christopher Isham, who is now a vice president with CBS and its Washington bureau chief. The Gawker article The CPI covered its ass and quickly updated its story to include this information, and Isham’s denial.
Click here for more (takes you to my other blog)
(I thought I’d share a sample conversation between Enchantment Under The Sea’s two masterminds concerning Rebecca Black, just to give you a taste of the kinds of conversations that led us to start this blog in the first place.
This conversation started with the Found Footage Festival (Andy Toby’s review here), which is basically a collection of terrible VHS footage from the 80s and 90s repackaged as a humorous film piece. But that led to a discussion about exactly what kind of enjoyment this sort of art was providing.) (more…)
I usually save the viral internet videos for my other blogging endeavors, but I had to share this gem. It’s from a website called Videogum, a site that covers, recaps and makes fun of everything that happens in video, including internet video memes. This compilation is of the best viral videos of the year, and it’s filled with a lot of great stuff. The post itself has a list of all of the included items.
This video also demonstrates what I love about memetics on the internet. It’s all very quick and ephemeral, and nothing lasts very long. But that means that truly creative, truly surprising mash-ups of ideas and memes can have a very immediate effect. I think there’s a lot to be discussed about how the juxtaposition of memes creates humor and how the things we find funny create culture, but for now, this is presented just for everyone to enjoy. Happy holidays!
I’ll make this one short and sweet. The Lorain Morning-Journal’s reports of Bob Feller’s death on Dec. 9 are greatly exaggerated, according to this correction.
UPDATE: The Morning Journal has taken the link down, or moved it. Here’s the text, thanks to Google’s cache.
A report posted overnight that said Cleveland Indians great Bob Feller had died was posted prematurely. Bob Feller has not died.
I can understand how this could happen. Someone wrote the story in preparation for Feller’s inevitable death (somewhat morbid, but a practical thing journalists do all the time), and someone else, probably a sleep-deprived web editor, accidently published it. Still…
Well, here it is! It’s the first episode of the Enchantment Under the Sea podcast, “Hold On To Your Butts.” We’re trying this whole thing out, and this was actually only a test episode, so things will probably change dramatically between this episode and our next one. Stay tuned! And, feel free to email us with any feedback. (CAUTION: there are some swears in this.)
(NOTE: You can subscribe to our podcast using this feed, but we’ll hopefully have an iTunes page for the podcast soon or SUBSCRIBE THROUGH ITUNES!)
Relevant links (most of which are sweary and, as a result, NSFW):
LISTEN BELOW:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
By way of setting the scene, I should probably mention the turkey burgers. I was out to dinner at a local place called Barleys with my friends Al and Colleen. When we ordered dinner, by some miracle of taste convergence (or maybe just social psychology), we each independently decided to order the turkey burger. The three of us did share a lot of common tastes, so, as often happens when we get together, each of us was talking about the music we’d been listening to recently. I predictably started blathering about the new Superchunk record,1 which I had become obsessed with in the preceding weeks. But during that conversation, Al said something that turned out to be as important as it was surprising. He told me he’d been listening to the new Kesha album. (more…)
I hate to start my review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, a pretty cool movie, on a really down note, but I have to ask: what was the point of this movie?
One answer might be that it’s supposed to just be a fun action story. Another might be that it’s necessary set-up for the bigger events unfolding in later films. Either way, the film doesn’t quite get there, instead being too big to be pure fun, and too pointless to be epic. (more…)
I’ve always been a fan of traditional Indian music. I used to search Limewire for long live recordings of ragas and tabla solos. The best recordings combined severe technical proficiency with a fun, improvisational feeling. The rhythms and melodies were complex, but there was something very satisfying and whole about the compositions, no matter how fractured they could appear if you thought too much about what time signature they were using.
Recently, that interest led me to a new style of music. I’ve been exploring the golden age of Bollywood cinema, the music produced for Indian popular cinema in the 50s and 60s. (more…)
