A Slight Delay

Mother Nature rained on the Yankees’ parade today. Their opener versus Toronto, which starts the regular season, and also their last in Yankee Stadium, was postponed on account of the weather.

Regardless of the end result, there’ll be mixed feelings for the team and their fans this season (as it will be for their cross-town rivals at Shea, playing their last season in the soon-to-be demolished Shea stadium). By this time next year, 85 years’ worth of baseball history will be well on its way to demolition, in favor of a new ballpark just across the street.

Both Shea and the House that Ruth Built join a long line of classic ballparks consigned to the dust heap of history: Veterans Stadium, Busch, Three Rivers Stadium, Riverfront Stadium, and the Kingdome. Both fields’ “replacements” will carry over architectural elements from the older parks, and, as Derek Jeter alluded to in one interview, the ghosts of seasons past. (more…)

A couple of years ago, when I picked up White Limousine by Duncan Sheik, I was surprised to find that it came with a DVD packed with .WAV files, and Ableton Lite. Anyone who wanted to could remix any of the album’s songs, leaving aside for the moment the fact that when one hears the word “remix,” Mr. Sheik’s name isn’t usually the first that leaps to mind.

But I digress. Many artists put up isolated tracks from their tunes in order that fans can do what they please with them. 808 State comes to mind, as do the tracks David Byrne and Brian Eno put on a dedicated site around the time that “My Life In The Bush of Ghosts” was re-released. Other artists, such as Bill Laswell, David Torn and Martin Atkins, have released sample sets for Cakewalk, ACID, and other DAWs. This was the first time, though, that I’d seen someone put up the whole kit n’ kaboodle, with the disc, and at a reasonable price.

A few years on, we have a followup. Trent Reznor has offered the backing tracks from his music before, but with Y34RZ3R0R3MIX3D / [CD/DVD Combo] he’s put out an LP’s worth of remixes, and the individual backing tracks for each. Not only are the remixes themselves of a much higher quality than he’s done in some time, the samples (and the entirety of his new album, Ghosts I-IV) have been released under a Creative Commons license, which should go some way toward encouraging some creative responses to his music. Here’s hoping that other artists follow suit.

If you’re looking for an interesting new website, or just looking to kill time at work, you could do worse than randomwebsite.com. The site offers no more or less than what its name suggests; click on a link, and you’ll be taken to a totally random website. There are roughly as many hits on Dutch and German-language websites as English ones, but that’s a relatively minor quibble. Also, while they try to vet the sites that are submitted, sites and domains do change hands, so from time to time you’ll either come across a dead link, or something that’s NSFW. Proceed with caution.

An  essay worth reading in this week’s New York Times Book Review by Rachel Donadio. In brief, she writes about how people’s literary tastes can be a deal-breaker when it comes to romance. She writes:

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. 

It reminded me of something I’d read a long time ago in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity: A Novel (okay, not that long ago… I read the book about once a year. It’s just one of those things). Rob Fleming, the book’s main character, says at one point: “[T]he truth was that these things matter, and it’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.” (more…)

Those who think that Sam Walton’s spawn needs to be taken down a peg or two will no doubt be heartened by the news of a recent court ruling stating that Georgia native Charles Smith should be allowed to continue selling his Wal-Qaeda and Walocaust T-shirts. Rather than arguing on good taste, Smith had the sense to argue his case on First Amendment grounds; luckily for him, the judge agreed. The irony here is that Smith—whose sales at the time the ruling was handed down had barely broken 60 shirts—has gone, in a couple days time, from relative nobody to minor celebrity. Had Wal-Mart ignored him, it’s likely he would have remained in obscurity. As it is, they’ve given him his fifteen minutes of fame while simultaneously reinforcing a reputation for heavy-handedness.

Not that they needed Smith’s help, mind you. The company is also taking a beating in the news and the blogosphere this week over its countersuit against Deborah Shank (the backstory, if you’re not already familiar, is available here and here). While I will grant that the company technically had a contract, and the law, on its side, I’d also assert that just because something is legal doesn’t make it right. (more…)

When Gary Numan sang, “Here in my car, I feel safest of all,” he probably wasn’t singing about the smartCar. This reeeeeeeeeeeeealy tiny jalopy has been available for years in Europe, and it’s finally getting a full roll-out on these shores.

The $11k-plus car is the result of a partnership between Mercedes and Swatch (seriously). I guess that means that if you can’t find a parking space, you can take a band out of your glove compartment, attach it to the car, and just wear it on your wrist. While the design may be innovative and earth-friendly (both, no doubt, good things), it doesn’t strike me as the safest thing on the road; as was recently pointed out to me, it’s probably not the first thing you’d want to drive down the New Jersey Turnpike among the 18-wheelers. It makes the Mini Cooper look like an Abrams tank; the overall design scheme would seem to have been “coffin with a transmission.”

The dynamic duo are back. That would not, in this case, be Batman and Robin, but rather Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo Green (though I’m sure they’ve donned tights at one point or another).

The Odd Couple literally picks up where their last album, St. Elsewhere, left off, with the sound of a film projector. From there, it proceeds to build on the racket made on the first disc.

The title aside, this isn’t such an odd coupling. The results this time out are far more consistent, in part because both musicians seem to have settled into a groove, and also because they both stick to what they do best. Brian Burton (that’s Danger Mouse, to you) brings the same trickster sensibility that livened up “The Grey Album” and the Gorillaz (among others), giving a postmodern twist to some decidedly retro-sounding soul; sometimes it seems like shades of Stax, and at others a vaguely paranoid Paul Weller.

Cee-Lo Green (I get the feeling that only his mom called him Thomas Callaway), meantime, still can’t decide between dark and light, joy and pain, or sacred and profane, so it all goes into the pot. As with the best of his work (both solo and with Goodie Mob), his lyrics are more cryptic than cut-and-dried. Rather than setting up a series of easy dichotomies, he realizes that these “opposites,” often as not, are two sides of the same coin.

I won’t belabor the album track by track, nor will I try to pin down its genre. I’ll simply suggest that you listen to it, loudly and often. “Run” (the first single) and “Going On” will sound great on your car stereo or local dancefloor, while “Who Will Save My Soul” will give you goosebumps (think of a certain soul elder statesman that shares Cee-Lo’s last name). If you’re expecting the second coming of “St. Elsewhere,” you’ll probably be disappointed; if you approach it with ears and mind open, though, it’s one hell of an album.

And you thought the commercialization of the holidays was bad. Now we have more commercials for Mucinex… you know, the company with the Archie Bunker-esque glob of talking phlegm. We’ve also had talking stains (courtesy of Tide) and anthropomorphic toe cheese (thanks to the folks at Lamisil). What’s next? Overall-clad hernias? Hemorrhoids that sound like Dick Cheney? Enough already.

The US Department of Justice has approved, in principle, the merger of XM Sattelite Radio and Sirius. Full approval from the DOJ is expected to come in a few weeks’ time, at which point the matter will be taken up by the FCC.

For all intents and purposes, this means that the merger is a done deal. According to Bloomberg:

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said last week that his agency would “go forward quickly” after the Justice Department ruled. Mary Diamond, a spokeswoman for the FCC, said yesterday the commission “is looking at” the transaction.

The FCC has not, historically, bucked the judgment of Justice, and is even less likely to do so given its more recent history of approving media mergers of all stripes.

Whether the Department, or the Commission, should approve the merger is still open to debate, not that it’s likely to be debated. Stocks of both companies at first traded up since news of the DOJ approval, only to fall soon thereafter; they’ll likely trade better still once the inevitable wave of layoffs follows the merger. The hundreds of employees likely to be put out of work completely aside (and no, that wasn’t intended to be as callous as it sounded), there are other factors which would tend to make this a lousy idea. (more…)

Nicholson Baker’s latest offering, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization traces the devolution of humanity and human nature as weaponry and tactics evolve. War has never been civilized business, but Baker shows the dizzying speed at which it took on ever more barbaric aspects in the first half of the last century.

There is the same attention to detail in evidence that’s characterized such earlier works as Vox, A Box of Matches, and The Size of Thoughts. Individuals are captured at very specific moments in time, their words and actions rendered in miniature, the better to illuminate the larger picture. Just as important, Baker is not content to simply rehash the same arguments, or perpetuate the same myths, that now pass for received wisdom. Much of the book’s impact derives from the fact that it thrusts generally ignored or forgotten figures like Stefan Zweig or Henry Fosdick into the spotlight, while also not shirking the faults of the narrative’s traditional “heroes,” like FDR and Winston Churchill.

The protagonists and antagonists here are as likely to be ideas as people. Pacifism is presented, more or less unquestioningly, as an a priori good, as are its proponents, among them Zweig, Charles Lindbergh, A.J. Muste, Jeanette Rankin (who has the distinction of being the only person to cast a dissenting vote against both World Wars), Christopher Isherwood, Muriel Lester, and Gandhi. (more…)