Wired Minds

Andrew Anker

Did they put up an old building? I don't remember that being there before the construction began.                         

                                            

            

               

Market and 3rd

via http://aa.vox.com/

            

           

   

Jeff Burchell

And the music (writers) never stopped?

(We know you've been waiting, and we promise, sometime soon, we'll tell you dear readers about the two weeks we spent driving all over the north island (and a few days on the north end of the south island) with Jen and Jim. Days were spent sampling wine in several regions, hiking nearly 18km across volcanoes, kayaking 15+km along shorelines, floating on innertubes through caves, jumping off of waterfalls, and enjoying all the things that New Zealand has to offer outside of Auckland. Denise has been updating the photos over on flickr, so you can see some of what we did.)

But this post is about two musical resources that you probably don't already know about. 

First is an absolutely awesome station out of Spindale, NC (near Asheville -- where I spent several summers): WNCW.  They've got a great-sounding 128kb/sec stream (which is rare for a station of their size, and speaks volumes about them). I put Local Color, their local music show, on underheard.org a few months ago, but have recently been spending more and more time listening to their live stream (especially in their overnight hours) -- usually with a smile on my face. If you're looking for an alternative to KCRW, that's a little more eclectic and somewhat less urban, check them out.

Second is that I recently discovered that Bob Lefsetz is posting The Lefsetz Letter as a blog now (actually, he has been for some time, it's just that I recently rediscovered him). Bob's been a music industry insider since before I purchased my first LP (for the record: Blondie's Autoamerican -- which easily dates me as being from the Atari half of Generation X), and he's been publishing The Letter for more than 20 years. We used to get a copy of it (on paper) at KZSC, but it's been nearly 15 years since I last read Bob's writing. It's still as good as I remember it (he pulls no punches, and he stays current; check out what he has to say about DRM and why the music industry doesn't get it.) But Bob... go back to the black T-shirt or fold your collar. You're old enough to remember how stupid that looked in the 80s, and you're only embarrassing yourself by repeating that fashion tragedy.

via http://innerslacker.com/p/b

David Weir

Saturday, May 05, 2007
To Capture the Dust

The other day I found a penny. It was dated 1976. My first real job was as a writer-editor at Rolling Stone in 1975. My salary was $16,000 a year. That was more than my Dad had earned in any year of his long career. It also was more than a rookie Major League Baseball player then earned. They got about $14,000 a year at that time. Yes, times have changed. Baseball stars now make multiple millions each year, and the Boston Red Sox paid over $50 million this year simply to meet a top prospect before signing him. Then, they threw in another $50 million or so to get him on their roster. Meanwhile, the per-word rate for freelance writers has hardly budged, and still hovers around $1 or less at many outlets. Editors are somewhat better compensated, but they don't get signing bonuses, long-term contracts or the super-lucrative product endorsement deals that elevate athletes from simply rich people into the super-rich. But none of this was what went through my mind when I squinted out the number "1976" on that random penny. The most important thing about that year for me was that my first child was born on Memorial Day weekend. She was tiny, only a few ounces over five pounds, and emerged into this world as perfect as any baby I've ever seen. Nurses and other parents gathered around her incubator to admire her beauty through the window (in that era, at UCSF, they displayed the newborns side by side so that fathers and other family and friends could see what their wives, sisters, mothers, lovers, or friends had produced.)

***

Every time I find a penny I scrutinize its minting date, and start wondering what story that coin could tell, if only it had a voice. How many human hands has it touched, and how widely has it traveled? Thirty-one years is a long time in the life of a coin. So much so that, in the case of this penny, it has almost completely lost its former sense of status. Today, pennies are throwaways, literally. Most storekeepers don't bother giving you change in pennies -- they round the total up or down and discard pennies like meaningless recyclable tidbits into an ashtray or some similar vessel for customers to use at their will.

via http://hotweir.blogspot.com/