Nick Harcourt was officially crowned a kingmaker of alternative music in an article this weekend in the New York Times Magazine. Harcourt is the music director of KCRW and host of Morning Becomes Eclectic.
Harcourt, whose show is broadcast daily from 9 a.m. to noon, has a knack for finding interesting new music ahead of everyone else: he was the first in America to play Norah Jones and Coldplay on the radio; like Jesca Hoop, the platinum-sellers Dido and David Gray were unsigned artists whose demos Harcourt originally spotlighted on his show; and more idiosyncratic unsigned acts like Damien Rice, Sigur Ros and Jem have all also become the object of record-company bidding wars as a result of Harcourt’s championing.
the amazingly appractive brunette in a rather short skirt reading Freakonomics while waiting for the bus on 2nd Ave between 56th and 57th…I went directly to Borders to pick up a copy so I might have something to initiate the conversation next time I see you…
However, if this is just Julia Bannon doing more sneaky-smart marketing I may have to disavow my professed faith in the honest to goodness of humanity.
OK, so ‘gansta chanteusse’ is just silly, but I couldn’t think of anything better after hearing Nina Gordon cover NWA’s “NWA Straight Outta Compton.” So it turns out the former vocalist from Veruca Salt isn’t just spending her solo career covering gangsta-rap oldies but goodies, but this is a pretty good use of downtime in the studio.
Since I got my Tivo-esque PVR, I had sort of forgotten that every once and a while there’s actually a commercial worth watching. Spike Jonze did a fantastic vid for the new Adidas 1 self-adapting shoe, which I found trying to track down the music with Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Squeak E. Clean.
A gaggle of designers name their ‘desert island fonts,’ as in the fonts you would want if you were stuck on a desert island (and presumably had a computer, and interestingly enough needed to put your text in the appropriate typeface more urgently than you wanted to get of the island…. ok, so the discussion is much better than the metaphor…) Read it here on Andy Budd’s Site Round One, Two, Three…
Filmmaker and photographer David Lachapelle appeared on Charlie Rose a few days ago to discuss Rize, his new film on krumping (or clown dancing), with dancers Tommy Johnson (Tommy the Clown) and Christopher Toler (Lil’ C). Lachapelle outlines the appeal the movement had for him beyond the artistic expression:
Well hip hop has now finally been considered a true american art form and this is the next generation, what they’re doing right now is the next generation… every generation of artists will buck the establishment and want to go and do something completely different. What they’re doing is they’re rejecting the establishment of hip hop which is a commercial, bling bling, buy a big house, all of that stuff. They’re the opposite they don’t buy into any of that. Not only in the style and the dance and all that stuff but idealistically in their whole way of thinking is completely different. So it wasn’t just, the dance, yes, it blew my mind. I had never seen anything like it. The dance will blow your mind, but when you get into the story and find out about their lives, it becomes much more profound.
John Heileman’s at it again with a breathtaking new piece for New York Magazine. Heileman profiles Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor and one of the top intellectual property minds, on Hardwicke v. Boychoir, in which Lessig was both appellate lawyer and participant.
Lessig has told me that he too was abused at the Boychoir School, and by the same music director that Hardwicke claims was one of his abusers. Lessig is by nature a shy, intensely private person. The fact of his abuse is known to almost no one: not the reporters covering the case, not the supreme-court justices. The fact of his abuse isn’t even known to Larry Lessig’s parents.
In taking this case, however, Lessig has cast aside his caution about a secret that haunts him still. And while his passion about his client’s cause is real and visceral, Hardwicke isn’t the only plaintiff here. Lessig is also litigating on behalf of the child he once was.
Students in the state of New York are like most people, I think, in that 80 percent of them think organ donation is a good idea, but only 11 percent have done anything about it, according to a recent study. The authors’ solution is to propose, predictably, I think, a somewhat amorphous ‘information campaign’.
It immediately brought to mind an anecdote from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point in which he describes Howard Levanthal’s ‘fear experiments’ at Yale in the 60’s. Levanthal wanted to see if more students got free tetanus shots depending on whether or not they received one of three progressively scary booklet explaining the dangers of tetanus. What Levanthal found was that while those receiving the scarier booklets were more convinced of the dangers, the number of students getting the shot remained the same. It wasn’t until Levanthal added included the hours of availablity and a map to the location that he was able to push the vaccination rate from 3% to 28%. I can’t help but wonder if there’s a similar dynamic in organ donation.
I am no longer last to be picked for kickball. The powers that be have seen fit to finally approve an upgrade to Photoshop CS2 (still working on the rest of the creative suite). So far the most stunning improvement (and I haven’t heard anyone mention it) is the expanded dual-screen functionality. Previously only one screen was really operational at any given time, though you could keep toolbars and the like on the other screen, freeing up some space. Now you can use all the real estate on both screens. Wicked.
So I’m really getting into this AudioScrobbler thingamajig as I get a little less self-conscious about my musical tastes and confront my predeliction for yodeling pop-bunnies. I predict that “to scrobble” will be entering the english lexicon at some point in the not-to-distant future, at least among the technorati, much as “googling” has.
So here’s how it works - first you sign up with scrobbler (the best things in life are free), install a plug-in for whatever music player you use, and listen to stuff and watch as it posts your tracks to your scrobbler profile page. It gets real six-degrees-y after you listen to 100 songs and scrobbler starts assigning musical neighbors to your network. This is where you confront the terrifying reality that you may or may not be as cool as your musical tastes had lead you to believe. It also leads you in some interestingly serendipidous directions when you click on an artist to see who else listens to them. Noam Weinstein’s got a small but growing following with seemingly nothing in common.
Guest writer Adrian Shaughnessy uses the album to discuss the state of album art in general, the status of which has been gradually eroded with the succession of LPs to tape, to CD to faceless mp3s that obviate the need for album art altogether.
Finally got around to re-doing the Graphic Design section of the site, and added coverage of the Houston Chronicle re-design that turns 1 year old tomorrow and still looks just as fresh. Now maybe they can turn their attention to the Chronicle web page….
I’ve been going through withdrawal ever since KPFT was overrun by tonedeaf pinkos and dropped their syndication of David Dye’s World Cafe from WXPN in Philadelphia. Lately I’ve been able to catch the webcast of the show from the WXPN website. Check out the WXPN schedule for that show and others.
You know you’ve made the big time when you find an entry for yourself in the Internet Movie Database. That’s Luke Gilman, world-famous-grip, extraordinaire. If you don’t know what a grip is, it’s pretty self-explanatory, and every bit as glamorous as you might guess. The entry comes from “Rinsed” aka “Brief Encounter,” the first student film I worked on at Emerson College, which was directed by Doug Martin, a good director and a pretty damn nice guy if memory serves. Doug voodooed a laughable budget from Frames per Second, the student-film society at Emerson to into glorious 35mm, albeit B&W. Definitely one of the better films FPS did while I was there. If I get a chance, I’ll post a few pix of myself freezing on top of a Penske truck holding a flag.
Following up on “Bless Me, Blog, for I’ve Sinned” (NY Times), I’ve been reading the PostSecret Blog for the last half hour. So the idea is that you create your own 4-by-6-inch postcards out of any mailable material which confesses some sort of secret which is (1) true and (2) hasn’t been shared with anyone before, and send it to PostSecret at an address in Maryland. Some of them make great use of graphics…
This one is hilariously pretentious…
I can’t help thinking these are suspiciously well designed. Do graphic designers have more to confess than normal people?
, and see my previous posts, 
