Van Morrison about the Biz...

Sam Sutherland: At a time when the "record business," as it existed when you were forging your career, is crumbling and conventional wisdom forecasts the end of physical records and the decline of the album, what's your sense of the future? You've continued to sell albums despite those gloomy prophesies. And your catalog is built on albums that would appear to draw strength from strong thematic and musical pillars.

Well, that is a loaded question. The music business is not the music business. They do not care about music, never will. The days of [executives such as Atlantic Records co-founder] Ahmet Ertegun are gone and there is no one there to take his place. ... They try to brainwash people into digital. The younger kids are fine with downloads, but there is ... a world of people out there who know the value of a CD. It's the very best value for money entertainment there is.

The record companies are too lazy to manufacture CDs. That is their problem. And they have signed too many people who cannot sing and do not understand music in the least and this is the way record companies have caused their own demise.

To the young people: Be your own boss, be your own agent and be your own manager. This way you cannot lose. Oh, and be your own producer lest you fall for the fad of a big-shot producer who could change your song according to his vision, not yours. How could they possibly know what your intuitive vision is?


for more on from this interview, or more Van period,
check out: http://vanmorrisonnews.blogspot.com/2009/03/msn-interview-out-on-slipstream.html

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Taking It to the Streets

I didn't know about the audio technician's one year old.


I swear.






God, I feel awful.








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Time Among the Pirates

Introduction



I don't remember the first time I had sushi, which is strange because as food goes, it's a long way from the solid Anglo fare I grew up with and yet now, years later, that vinegared rice under the right pieces of raw fish still rocks- or soothes- my world like none other...

I don't remember the first time I found myself at a site where there was music one could download either, and yet for someone of my aural sensibilities, it would prove to be a turning point of similar magnitude. When it comes to the sound of the world, the princess and the pea has got nothing on me.

I'm not sure where this sensitivity has come from, but I do know it's become more acute with every passing year. Perhaps it's the years of earning my daily bread as a professional listener, programming and presenting musicians. Perhaps it was trying to learn live sound engineering. Maybe it's a legacy of a life truly blessed in terms of the live performances I've been a part of or maybe it's part of what comes with being BiPolar 2.




Writing this tonight, beside a lake in Muskoka, I'm surrounded by the sounds of wind in the leaves of the birches and maples, the soft lap of little waves on the sandy shore while a couple of miles away an occasional car roars down the two lane highway. Further away, but much larger and basso profundo, a big train is moving through the night, maybe loaded with ore. A chorus of crickets drones on while out on the lake, two loons are calling... once in a while a duck wakes up and relocates and every once a while, a single mysterious sizable sploosh comes off the water.

In a place like this, listening can transfix me, stop me in my tracks, in space and time. Listening becomes sensual, a pleasure, delicious and soothing, almost erotic as the filters so vital for walking through more urban space slip away for a while...it is, I'm sure, why I can seem nocturnal to some. I like the balance between the visual and aural that comes with the night - here, a bonus round of pleasure; in the city, a neccessity.

Neccessary because sometimes sound makes me physical ill, rattle my nervous system like a rock in a tin can and make it all but impossible to think or act on anything except the wish to escape.




The thunking of an electric clock of the cheap clank of one of those wind-up alarms. I reference it against my heartbeat, and then both against my respiration rate. There's a slide show from all the many boneyards I wander in different places around the world. I consider myself as soil, and how sooner or later that change is coming...


The humming of the ballasts and tubes of that cheap flourescent light that illuminates contemporary office life sets off a discourse somewhere in the centre of my skull, like the tip of a Black and Decker drill heading south.

Music that doesn't agree with me is maybe the worst... live, it's something like being strapped into an electric chair during a brown-out. At the supermarket, airports, elevators, dentist offices, it does what music always does. It possesses me.

This sensitivity to sound is one of those double-edged blades, sometimes a gift and sometimes an affliction. One develops coping skills and strategies. Lives with it. Sucks up the snide remarks of "morning people", who never feel quite as close to god as when they're looking down on someone else.

If I sound a little snippy, write it off to decades of listening to the pious platitudes of people who confuse conformity with virtue. These days, my days and nights are my own again. Music no longer helps me earn my daily bread and while life is different when there's no paycheck month to month, there's something to be said for music being a pleasure and a blessing and a source of wonder again, and nothing more.







Given this feeling for sound, and the rebirth of an old love for music, even I find it odd that I don't remember the day I first fell down the rabbit hole and landed in a sonic wonderland... out among the pirates, on the frontiers of the Great Global Audio Archive.

- to be continued -

What it is...

-30-

Pablo Casals on originality...

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Creativity - Don't Need It!

Silence - We Own It

Cooler Than Hell

... kind of says it....

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Be Mine... Forever

Copyright law was originally designed to give some protection to the original creator of a work. Tom Bell, a law professor at Chapman University in California, created this graph to illustrate how copyright terms in the United States have evolved....

"The first federal copyright legislation, the 1790 Copyright Act,
set the maximum term at 14 years plus a renewal term of 14 years.



The 1831 Copyright Act doubled the initial term
and retained the conditional renewal term,
allowing a total of up to 42 years of protection.

Lawmakers doubled the renewal term in 1909,
letting copyrights run for up to 56 years.

The interim renewal acts of 1962 through 1974
ensured that the copyright in any work
in its second term as of September 19, 1962,
would not expire before Dec. 31, 1976.

The 1976 Copyright Act changed the measure of the default copyright term
to life of the author plus fifty years.

Recent amendments to the Copyright Act expanded the term yet again, letting it run for the life of the author plus seventy years.

All but the first of these statutes extended copyright terms retroactively.
The chart includes data relating to the 1962-74 interim renewal acts and shows the retroactive effect of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act to reach back to 1923.


http://www.tomwbell.com/writings/(C)_Term.html


Wow.

Did you know how much government
and industry cared about writers
and musicians and all the other artists?

I had no idea.



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Police and Thieves

Think this is a little extreme?

How about this recent news?

Student ordered to pay $675,000 US in downloading case: "A federal jury has ordered a Boston University graduate student who admitted illegally downloading and sharing music online to pay $675,000 to four record labels.

Joel Tenenbaum, of Providence, R.I., admitted in court that he downloaded and distributed 30 songs."

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