Two things

1) New Rule – take a shot everytime Governor Palin says “Maverick.” You’ll be blackout drunk in minutes.

2) WHO THE HELL SCHEDULES A TEST OF THE EMERGENCY BROADCAST SYSTEM DURING A DEBATE!!!!

Life, Universe and Everything

This could easily be considered a “poor me” post, so keep that in mind should you continue to read. In fact, I wouldn’t continue to read. I would go elsewhere. This is going to be mindlessly dull.

 

Gone yet? Nope? Ok, I’ll wait.

 

Still there? You asked for it.

It’s no big surprise that the country is going to hell in a handbasket. The greedy folks in charge of financial companies of our country have run us into the ground. The job market is non-existant. A potential VP thinks that sharing a border with Canada and airspace with Russia makes her qualified to help run the damn country. Worst of all – our president is one of those greedy f***ers, and who desperately needs a new speech writer. Jon Stewart noticed it. Can you?

 

All I know is, I’m terrified. I’ve worked in the radio industry in either promotions or sales for nearly 5 years and looking at all of the jobs available, I don’t feel I’m qualified for any of them. I have relatives my age or a little older that appear doing just fine with the same or less education. What did I do wrong? At what point did I vear off the path? I wanted to work in the music industry and I wanted to work promotions. Now I’d kill to work for an interactive media company or for someone in the gaming community. It’d be nice to finally feel like I belong somewhere. A place where a working knowledge of comics, music, video games, and movies was more of an asset than odd quirk. And now, with the market seemingly in shabbles, I don’t know what to do. I thought more education would help, but I don’t have the experience necessary to get a challenging position. What if I go through racking up all this debt, moved away from all my friends and family, sacrificed time, energy and time with my girlfriend for nothing. All of this could be for nothing. That thought alone chills me. Add the fact that I may not be able to better my life after all this, I feel like my chest will cave in.

Plus, I keep having a Spaceballs kind of day. You know, “I knew it, I’m surrounded by assholes!”

So if you made it this far, I’d like to point out this is no pity party. This is real life. Our world is falling apart and the people who can afford to fix it are the ones doing all the damage.

I’ve been working on a Watchmen post, and another on the current RIAA situation, so we’ll get back to our regularly scheduled programming soon. Just felt the channel Lewis Black and say “HOLY FUCK!!! WE’RE FUCKED!!” I’m going for my spoon. Package or no package, I recommend you find one of your own.

This isn’t (remotely) a drill

Deep breaths everyone – the Hadron Collider hasn’t gotten us yet.

Don’t believe me? Just see for yourself.

PSA (more important than DON’T DO DRUGS)

It’s = it is.

Its = a reference to a noun or pronoun.

One of these days I’ll learn the difference or type slower.

~~~

This was brought to you by the letter “Q“

Memory Lane

I’m up in PA right now visiting my girlfriend’s folks and celebrating her brother’s 23rd birthday, so that plus the dial-up connection I’m using will require that this be short.

Since last December I’ve jumped on the Guitar Hero bandwagon and last weekend picked up Rock Band. As an audiophile, I love everything that music is and can be. A book I read Spring semester 08 discussed the history of the phonograph and the impact it had on our culture and county. For instance, women sold records for two reasons: 1) women were the caretakers of the home at the time the phonograph was released and 2) women were less likely to invite male strangers into their home, so companies hired women to sell the records and the players. Women were able to work their way up from seller to executive in the recording industry because of their involvement and quite possibly helped the woman’s movement because of it. The book also discusses how music can develop collective memory with a group of people – enabling you to hear a song which takes you back to a specific moment in time, almost allowing you to relive the experience.

Anyway, driving up to PA yesterday we listed to a recently compiled playlist of songs used in the Guitar Hero and Rock Band series that we ourselves own. One of my favorite on Rock Band was the DLC track Zero by The Smashing Pumpkins. I’m not a huge fan of them, and didn’t get to see them when they came to Baltimore for Virgin Fest nor during their short, small venue tour but something about their music always takes me back.

Last night, driving down I-78, belting Disarm at the top of my lungs, I remembered a party held by my friend Jamie back in middle/high school. I can’t remember if we were friends then, but later became quite close until I moved. From my doorstep, I could hear the songs of The Smashing Pumpkins wafting through the trees from her backyard where a live band, made up of our classmates, played. I mostly remember hearing Today sung by…Emily?…I think, but my other friend Damien was on guitar at the time. He was another close friend in school that I’ve lost touch with. He introduced me to The Smashing Pumpkins, and I can remember vividly driving down the road in his Volvo listening to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Damien later played Siamese Dream for me where I heard Today, Cherub Rock, and Disarm (which would become my favorite track). Damien opened my ears to a lot of music (Future Sounds of London, Orbital, Garbage, The Prodigy – to name a few) and he was a great friend. For a while, and maybe it had to due with the close proximity of our houses, but Damien, Jamie, and I spent a lot of time together – especially the summer Jamie was under parental house arrest for someone else’s mistake. We had a lot of good times hanging out, watching tv, eating chinese, and listening to music. I can’t remember why I never went to that party – maybe we weren’t friends then, maybe i wasn’t invited, maybe I was just to damn awkward for my own good – but I’ll always have the memory of the music.

Anyway, that’s my little random trip down memory lane. I’ll add links when I get back to broadband, assuming of course that the hurricanes haven’t flooded our apartment. (Updated 9/8/08 – with sights AND sounds) Enjoy your weekend, everyone, and if you can – put on some old records. See where those take you.

Later!

A Word From Our Sponsor

Afternoon everyone,

Before I get to my original topic for the day, I just wanted to let you all know that the Fall semester starts tomorrow, so many of my posts for the next few months may be school directed. I am going to try to keep posting and updating with topics on technology, comics, film, and music, as always, but my education comes first. Shame, I know. To make it easier, I’m going to work out some kind of signal so that at first glance you’ll know if it’s regular posting or school posting, so you can decide easier if you want to skip it or not.

In the realm of school news, I’m taking Public Relations in the Digital Age of Influence, and it sounds really interesting. Here’s the official course description:

Marketing and communications are changing. The levers that we have pulled for years to sell products and services, change behaviors, advocate for causes no longer work the way they did. As trust in media and marketing plummets, trust in our peers, friends, family, and colleagues rises. Today the public does most of the relating and we recognize new influencers in the people sitting next to us. Now, creating a conversation is just as important as driving media, forming partnerships and crafting messages. Call it influencer marketing. Call it brand stewardship in the network age. It’s all public relations. This class will cover how to create comprehensive digital influence strategy and ultimately how to be effective public relations professional in this new digital age.

 
I’m hoping we really look into the impact of social media – viral, ARG, digital distribution – since more and more communication marketing seems to be headed that way.

Anyway, just wanted you all to know. I’m still hoping to get Tomblin back for the non-school posts, but we’ll just have to wait and see. If any of you out there have heard from him, poke him and tell him to call me.

MP3 Culture

Since I decided to share my paper examing the meaning of images and their relation, and use, in a digital medium, I figured what the hell – I’ll share with ya’ll my paper from my MP3 Culture course.

Rebirth of Aura: Communal Recording in the Digital Age

It’s an examination of cultural theorist Walter Benjamin’s belief in the destruction of the aura of art through mechanical reproduction. The concept being that all art is a representation of an object so what you see or hear is not the object itself, but the artist’s rendering of that artist. Even photography is merely a representation of the viewpoint of the photographer on the object being photographed.

My assuration is in an age of digital distribution, the aura of music may not only be preserved, but revived. Artists such as Fort Minor and Nine Inch Nails have allowed, at one time or another, fans access to multi-tracks of their respective songs allowing new creations, or new renderings of the artists work. So in this case, the art (music) isn’t losing its aura, so much as its identity is being recreated.

I’m hoping to take the concepts within and expand them into my thesis, so any thoughts would be appreciated.

Enjoy!

End of the Summer

Morning All,

It’s been a long time since I last posted, possibly April, and a lot has happened.

First, sorry for dropping off the face of the world. I figured I’d take a month off between Spring and Summer sessions and then be back in the saddle ready to go. Well, I did rest, but as soon as Summer session hit – I was off to the races! The problem was, I was in last place the whole time. Now enough with the horse metaphors and on to the real deal.

Summer session is over and with my one week off before the Fall session starts, I want to do a little sharing and see if I can’t get my butt in gear and keep this up. I’ve tried a few times to get in touch with Tomblin since our last podcast with little luck and I shall try again – see if I can get him to join in on future discussions. For now though – what’s been going on?

Over the summer I took a course on Digital Promotions that examined digital communication technology from a philosophical, physical, and analytical perspective. The result is a paper reviewing the power of imagery through the digital promotion for The Dark Knight.
For anyone who’d like to read the paper, here it is: Foucault and The Dark Knight

I discussed and examined the viral campaign executed by 42 Entertainment and Warner Bros. Studios in my Digital Literacy course, but this time I really got to delve into the imagery and discuss it. Love to hear what any of you might think.

Anyway, there is more to come. I have come up with my Thesis topic and it’s based on a different paper I wrote for my MP3 Culture course on the mechanical reproduction of music and digital distribution. I’ll share that next time.

Anyway, take care all and sorry for the absence. I’ll try not to make it so long next time.

Podcast the Third – New Media Music Distribution

Podcast the Third – 4.28.08

Tomblin and I had batted around a number of topics for discussion – possible election fraud, China/Tibet relations, Chinese control of the internet over its citizens, even Bjork – but we thought, in light of the recent activity on the musical front and this being our last formal podcast, we’d discuss the future of the music distribution and promotion.

From the seemingly newly converted(Metallica) to the always been there(Hot Bitch Arsenal), music is growing on the internet. It is an easy way to get your work to the largest number of people at very little cost with the potential for a lot of gain(see Nine Inch Nails).

It’s been fun the last few weeks, and I hope you’ll come back and see us in a few weeks after my semester ends and I learn to breathe again.

It’s a shame that our round table experiment didn’t work because in a discussion on the distribution of music via the internet, a round table would have been fun. In any case, take care and enjoy the show!

Digital Music & Subculture: Sharing Files, Sharing Styles by Sean Ebare (ARTICLE)

Recording Industry Association of American
riaa-2007-year-end-statistics (2006 data unavailable for upload currently)
Lower CD shipments, Digital revenue up – Digital Media Wire Article
The next two following links contain photos NOT SUITABLE FOR WORK
Hot Bitch Arsenal Blog
OFFICIAL WEBSITE for HBA
The HBA Skypecast on thesixtyone

Nine Inch Nails
Remix.NIN

Metallica
Live Metallica – The Vault
Rolling Stone interview with Lars Ulrich
Metallica embraces file-sharing? – Zeropaid article

Coldplay
Coldplay offers new single for free – Yahoo!

Coheed & Cambria
The Second Stage Turbine Blade(album)/The Second Stage Turbine Blade(comic)
In Keeping Secret Of Silent Earth:3
Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Vol 1: From Fear Through The Eyes of Madness
Vignettes 1-6

Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Vol 2: No World For Tomorrow
Viral Videos
The Willing Well – Part 1

The Willing Well – Part 2

The Willing Well – Part 3

The Willing Well – Part 4

The Willing Well – Part 5


Characters from both the albums and as seen in Good Apollo, Vol 1 – courtest of Evil Ink Comics

Attribution:
The music in the intro and exit of the show was Leader of the Flea World provided by Hot Bitch Arsenal, under a Creative Commons license.

Wanna be on the radio?

Tomblin and I would like to invite our audience to participate in a round table discussion on New Media Music Distribution. This program is about discussing all things media, including but not limited too, how technology impacts our lives and helps us to tell stories.

If you have Skype, and want to play along, call me (Sprzzatura) and join in.

Hope to hear from you soon….otherwise, egg on our face.

~~
Please keep in mind that we will be using your voice, thoughts, and ideas for our own personal gain and you relinquish all rights to your identity(face), uniqueness, and by extension, soul, by participating.

Actual soul removal not included.