Category Archives: Music

Death of a Party

24 Hour Party PeopleOh yeah, so two days ago I saw “24 Hour Party People,” Michael Winterbottom’s chronicle of Manchester impressario Tony Wilson and his Factory Records empire.The trailer was half wildly promising and half very worrisome, but I’m happy to say that the former part won out, thankfully. “24 Hour Party People” is consistently hilarious and restlessly inventive, engagingly manic and deeply comic. I had a great time watching it. And if director Michael Winterbottom fawns a little too much over the Ian Curtis character, the movie is still loaded with far fewer pretensions than the average pop history movie.

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Out Box

Tigerbeat6 RecordsMiscellaneous links: Get your fill of Kid 606 and plenty other beeps’n’blips artists at Tigerbeat6 Records, whose site is an oddly charming mix of DIY and Web design savvy. Marcus Ericsson has a notably elegant portfolio at Subdisc.com, which is a rare case of an overbearing visual metaphor that doesn’t veer into the obnoxious. The much-anticipated, massively multiplayer video game “Star Wars Galaxies” looks amazing and beautifully rendered, judging from this hand-shot demo footage. It could be the video game that makes me buy a video game.

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Bridget Cross

I knew Bridget Cross briefly in the early nineties, when I was living in D.C. She’s run across some terrible luck: while camping in Alaska with her boyfriend, they were roughed up by some local racists and wound up in jail with what could turn out to be US$100,000 in legal fees. This Web site tells all about it, and there’s a link for donations too.

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Save It

SaveInternetRadio.org: “America’s fledgling Internet radio industry could be effectively killed on May 21st if the Librarian of Congress (1) accepts the recommendations of its recent Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (“CARP”) concerning Internet radio royalty rates and (2) sets impossibly-complex recordkeeping requirements.”

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Code

EnigmaIn a world in which security now means electronic privacy and 128-plus-bit encryption technologies as much as it means a deadbolt on the door of your suburban home, Hollywood has re-imagined historical matters of national security as the province of seminal geeks, crytographers and math geniuses. Witness the probably overrated “A Beautiful Mind” which looks too awful for me to bring myself to see, or the upcoming “Windtalkers,” directed by John Woo, which tells the tale of Native American human code bearers in World War II. Last weekend I saw “Enigma,” the British version of this same conceit — which features a highly qualified cast but unfortunately amounts to little.

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Gazing Backwards

Magnet MagazineThe cover story from the latest issue of Magnet Magazine, which unfortunately does not post its editorial content on its rather thin Web site, tells the tale of that nearly-forgotten, early-nineties musical fad sometimes known as shoegazing. It’s very well-written but also bizarre to read as an historical account, having lived through that time period, having bought those records as they were released, having trekked to the clubs to see those pale, undynamic English people perform that music in the flesh before the mid-nineties swept them away. Most of those records seem insignificant now, or at least too self-conscious and non-committal, but it does make me sentimental to think of a very brief time when the formula was: the weirder the music, the greater the chance for success.

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