Been a little busy and a little distracted the last week or so, barely able to keep up with topics raised by other bloggers, forums, sites, what have you. Here's a few quick hits:
- I've been complaining to my brilliant wife for months now--unfortunately for her, she's the only one around to hear me whine--about all the stupid concert pics that clog my rss reader every damned day. A nice pic or two from a show, fine, but enough already with posting entire rolls of film! If it were as simple as just scrolling past, I wouldn't complain, but these bloggers insist on loading so many mediocre shots into their posts that scrolling takes forever. I scroll so fast my reader starts to feel like a flip book. I swear I've seen M.I.A.'s entire tour in real time, via all the fucking photos. So it was with some glee that I saw Distorte and Idolator and (most interestingly) Marathonpacks jump on the topic last week. Somewhere in the middle of reading it all, I had an epiphany: why do I read Brooklyn Vegan every day? BV is easily the worst offender when it comes to overwhelming (and overwhelmingly mundane) concert pics. And then of course they also don't provide any unique content (other than, I guess, stand-up comedy tour dates?). Anything of note they might post is usually up on some other blog literally seconds before or seconds after. So I unsubscribed about a week ago and suddenly reading all my subscriptions has become much more pleasurable. Now if only we could convince Pitchfork that concert pics are not "news."
- Reviews are starting to come in on the reissue of Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue. My reaction to the album was a lot closer to GloNo than to the AV Club, personally. Opening track "River Song" is pretty brilliant, but the rest of the album is spotty; occasionally great and mostly mediocre. As reviews continue to come in, I anticipate the ratio of fawning love to perplexed disappointment will be all out of whack. This is one album I strongly recommend you try before you buy; Largehearted Boy points to a full album stream of the album.
- Setting the Woods on Fire has just done a rundown of the 50 greatest country singers, as voted on by STWOF's readers. Lots of great mp3s to check out. While I'm at it, I'll remind you that I also blog, along with Paul of STWOF and ten other swell contributors, at Star Maker Machine. The theme changes from week to week and the content from us dozen contributors has been varied and largely pretty great, if I may say. I've discovered a ton of great new-to-me stuff in the last month or two. This week's theme is shoes, which unfortunately means I don't have many songs to contribute--just Black Sabbath and the Pernice Brothers (neither of which I've actually posted yet, but will by week's end).
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hey, like i told you when you were whining last time... my opinion is that the problem lies in the ease of the medium. now that taking a digital photograph is so fast and easy, every knucklehead thinks they're an expert photographer. if that were true, those pictures documenting so little might actually be compelling. but they're not, because they aren't.
it reminds me of virginia heffernan's hilariously self-effacing and totally true article in the NYT magazine a few weeks back regarding graphic design dilettantes, herself included. BV, let's leave it to the professionals, please. Or maybe they are professionals; how about getting some professionals that try a little harder, then?
Posted by: the allegedly brilliant wife | June 17, 2008 at 09:15 PM