This is a live version of “Demain”, a tune by my favorite French R&B duo, Les Nubians.
Tag Archive for 'music'
This has been my new favorite song ever since I heard it on rotation at the store. I love all the music by Bitter:Sweet. Their sound is so slinky.
Byrnes on stage with the wedding band at the reception.
In 1997, the musician Momus released the song “The Age of Information”. The tune is eerie. Gentle, sustained tones accompany a hushed, dispassionate voice. Electronic sounds—bleeps and bloops—trickle faintly in the background. The tone is calm, soothing, even as the lyrics list warning after warning about online life. In 1997, the Internet as we know it was still young, but Momus describes an Internet we could readily recognise today. With lyrics like “Your reputation used to depend on / What you conceal / Now it depends on what you reveal“, the song still feels contemporary eleven years later.
And it’s amazing to see the things we would reveal.
Earlier this week, Emily Gould exposed herself in the New York Times Magazine. She revealed her experience with blogging, how fulling it was, and how it drove wedges in her relationships. Gould regularly exposed the lives of celebrities when she was an editor of the Internet gossip blog Gawker, where she gained both fans and critics. But when she blogged about people in her personal life—against their wishes—the gossip gun eventually turned on her. An ex-paramour did not take kindly to the exposure of their relationship, and submitted an article to the New York Post about the dangers of dating a blogger. Now a victim of Internet gossip, Gould understands the consequences of her actions.
Act as you wish to be seen to act / Or move to another star
Was she wrong? Did she reveal too much? Is she too self-absorbed? Many people think so, even at her old job and especially the commenters on the NYT Magazine article. The Internet provides many easy ways to expose our thoughts and our lives. Online, people more easily reveal their hopes, their fears, their relationships—even their medications. A curtain has been drawn back. On the Internet, we share things with perfect strangers that we wouldn’t share in person. We share more of our lives, and sometimes we overshare—revealing things that others don’t want to see or don’t want to be seen.
But these are different times, now the bottom line / Is that everyone should prepare to be known
Emily Gould definitely lowered her inhibitions online, and perhaps revealed too much. But she is not the only one guilty of a loose tongue. Take a look at those comments on the NYT website. They are just as spiteful as those you’d find on Gawker. Would these people confront her in person? Would they tell her—to her face—to get a life, to do something useful, to stop writing about herself? It’s just as easy to leave biting commentary online as it is to write oversharing blog entries. The Internet revealed Emily Gould as someone who loves to hear herself talk about her life. But in those comments, the Internet also revealed something else: petty, self-righteous people who love to hear themselves tear someone down.
My father is a composer, and I played the oboe all through my childhood and youth. In my family, we listened to music as the primary culture. In writing, I always have to have a sense of the way the piece sounds. Finding the voice initially is like a musician finds how her instrument sounds, through different chord changes.
I could sit down and go through ever essay I’ve written, and see how it would correlate to some kind of musical piece. I’m always aware of how many beats are in a sentence. I use a lot of short sentences—I like staccato. And after a long riff, I always have a short one after it, for readers to catch their breath. I see writing as very much about riffs—to the point where, after I’ve written something, I need to make sure it tracks logically. The first priority is how it sounds.
I tend to overdo adverbs, and that’s a musical thing. I always want to stick something in front of a verb, just for rhythm. I feel it needs a grace note.
– Meghan Daum, writer
- Lorry: I keep buying bloody pianos. Do you play the piano. Amber? Wait. You are Asian American. Of course you play the fucking piano.
- Fergie releases theme song to the movie Sex and the City. (Lyrics) Not only does it sound like the awful club music you find on Lansdowne Street, but the song sports lyrics like “Don’t cry. Buy a bag and then get over it”. I know that Sex and the City is all about sex and high-end consumerism, but this is a little bit much.
- Seasonal affective disorder explained. It’s a technical explanation but interesting for geeks like me.
- Not only can you get keyboard-face, but now you can get keyboard-pants. I’m serious. Your pants can double as a keyboard.
- Parents who denied medical care for their daughter and prayed for her recovery are now charged with second-degree reckless homicide. It was a completely treatable disease, too. Lesson: Faith healing doesn’t work.
- New legislation calls for government ownership of DNA. The government is setting up legislation that will allow them to take genetic samples of every newborn child without the parents’ consent. Why? To create a library.
- Congress votes to ban genetic discrimination. It is an amazing bipartisan proactive bill. I’m so glad that the government has done something right, especially now that genetics is finding its place in politics. Also with the genetic database, this is an amazing move to ensure that future citizens and residents are not treated unequally. By the way, Ron Paul, R-Texas, was the only one to vote against the bill.
- Comparing nicotine and cannabis withdrawal. Yes, you can get withdrawal symptoms from weed.
- Whiten your teeth with strawberries. Easy, natural way to whiten your teeth. (Let me know if this works.)
For the music geek in all of us:
You can also get the chromatic scale or the circle of fourths as watch faces.
The best part? The tagline: “No music exists without time.”
