Reggae royalty Jimmy Cliff kicked off the 34th annual Celebrate Brooklyn performance arts festival on June 5 with a 90-minute performance at the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood. Photos by Ryan Muir.
Showing posts with label NPR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NPR. Show all posts
Friday, June 15, 2012
Jimmy Cliff, Live From The Celebrate Brooklyn Festival
If you're a reggae fan, NPR has a nice treat for you . . .
Friday, May 6, 2011
Monday, April 18, 2011
Just Listen: NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour
Last week I started my feeble attempt at spreading the word about various podcasts that I love with, the Judge John Hodgman podcast. This week I'd like to tell you about NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour. It's a weekly podcast that is typically recorded and made available on Fridays.
One thing I love about the podcast is that the group has tremendous chemistry and the fact that they are always good for a laugh and turning you onto something that you haven't heard of. They have a great and unique take on damn near everything pop culture related. The only negative is that it's uber white bread. Sometimes they go a little overboard with show-tunes references, but things like Hip-Hop and the passing of Dwayne McDuffie (Yes, I know he was mentioned on their blog, but why not the podcast?) get little or no attention.
One thing I love about the podcast is that the group has tremendous chemistry and the fact that they are always good for a laugh and turning you onto something that you haven't heard of. They have a great and unique take on damn near everything pop culture related. The only negative is that it's uber white bread. Sometimes they go a little overboard with show-tunes references, but things like Hip-Hop and the passing of Dwayne McDuffie (Yes, I know he was mentioned on their blog, but why not the podcast?) get little or no attention.
Monday, March 21, 2011
How Best To Support Your Favorite Artist
I download tons of free music, most of which is given away by the artists in an effort to promote, but when it comes to artists that I love I go out of my way to support them. Sometimes I do that through attending a show, but most often its by buying their music. A lot of times that's through Amazon's MP3 store, although every now and again you can get the physical CDs for less than the download for some older albums. I also like to support my local music shop and you should too. There's nothing wrong with helping a local business keep the lights on if he or she is running a cool establishment. The following is an excerpt from an NPR article and their show All Things Considered on the best way to get the highest percentage of your consumer dollar to the artist you support.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
The Legacy Of The CD: Innovation That Ate Itself
by Joel Rose for NPR's The Record
2010 was another lousy year for the music industry – and in particular, the CD. Sales of compact discs dropped last year by nearly 20% percent, according to Billboard. For a while, those shiny plastic discs lifted the fortunes of the recording industry to new heights. But the CD also contained the seeds of the industry's collapse — a collapse that's rattling more than Manhattan boardroom windows.
A Sony factory in Pittman, New Jersey, will see its last CD roll out off the assembly line at the end of this month. At its height, the plant employed 1300 people.
"The overtime, you had it whenever you wanted it," says Jim Jones, who's been driving a forklift at the factory since 1982, when the plant still made LPs. "10 hour days if you wanted it. Saturdays, Sundays — you could get it. That's how busy we were. A lot of times it was mandatory. You had to work, that was it."
Jones met his wife, Cindy, at the plant in the 1990s, when they worked in the warehouse together, rushing out the latest hits. "It's been so long since there was a big hit," she says. "It's just," she pauses, "slow."
Sony will still make CDs at its factory in Indiana. But the closure of the New Jersey plant is telling. Sales of compact discs have fallen 50 percent over the past decade. It's a long way from the early 1980s, when breathless ads and over-the-top hyperbole touted "sound like you've never heard it before."
The CD was invented by hardware manufacturers Sony and Philips. At first, executives at the major record labels didn't like the new format. But they started to come around — thanks in large part to Jac Holzman, the founder of Elektra Records who will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame next week. Holzman was a big advocate for the CD when he was at Warner Music Group.
"The CD was sexy. And it would bring higher prices — from about 8 dollars for cassettes or LPs at the end of the '70s, to about $15 in the early '80s," Holzman says. "You could resell your best catalogue again. CDs were lighter and cheaper to ship, which is a big consideration."
All of that meant giant profits for the music industry in the 1980s and '90s. "The CD sold so well. And it created this gigantic boom in the industry," says Steve Knopper, the author of Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age. "And everybody got rich. And people just got incredibly accustomed to this. To the point where in the late '90s, the only way that you could get the one song that you liked was to buy the 15 to 18 dollar CD at the Tower Records."
2010 was another lousy year for the music industry – and in particular, the CD. Sales of compact discs dropped last year by nearly 20% percent, according to Billboard. For a while, those shiny plastic discs lifted the fortunes of the recording industry to new heights. But the CD also contained the seeds of the industry's collapse — a collapse that's rattling more than Manhattan boardroom windows.
A Sony factory in Pittman, New Jersey, will see its last CD roll out off the assembly line at the end of this month. At its height, the plant employed 1300 people.
"The overtime, you had it whenever you wanted it," says Jim Jones, who's been driving a forklift at the factory since 1982, when the plant still made LPs. "10 hour days if you wanted it. Saturdays, Sundays — you could get it. That's how busy we were. A lot of times it was mandatory. You had to work, that was it."
Jones met his wife, Cindy, at the plant in the 1990s, when they worked in the warehouse together, rushing out the latest hits. "It's been so long since there was a big hit," she says. "It's just," she pauses, "slow."
Sony will still make CDs at its factory in Indiana. But the closure of the New Jersey plant is telling. Sales of compact discs have fallen 50 percent over the past decade. It's a long way from the early 1980s, when breathless ads and over-the-top hyperbole touted "sound like you've never heard it before."
The CD was invented by hardware manufacturers Sony and Philips. At first, executives at the major record labels didn't like the new format. But they started to come around — thanks in large part to Jac Holzman, the founder of Elektra Records who will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame next week. Holzman was a big advocate for the CD when he was at Warner Music Group.
"The CD was sexy. And it would bring higher prices — from about 8 dollars for cassettes or LPs at the end of the '70s, to about $15 in the early '80s," Holzman says. "You could resell your best catalogue again. CDs were lighter and cheaper to ship, which is a big consideration."
All of that meant giant profits for the music industry in the 1980s and '90s. "The CD sold so well. And it created this gigantic boom in the industry," says Steve Knopper, the author of Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age. "And everybody got rich. And people just got incredibly accustomed to this. To the point where in the late '90s, the only way that you could get the one song that you liked was to buy the 15 to 18 dollar CD at the Tower Records."
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Dwayne McDuffie, RIP: Championed Diversity Among Champions
by Glen Weldon
Dwayne McDuffie was a guy who made a living writing for comics and TV. If you don't know his name, your friends who read comics do. If your kids have watched cartoons in the last decade, they've more than likely seen some of his work.
Yesterday we learned that McDuffie passed away suddenly at the age of 49. The website Comic Book Resources reports that he died from complications following surgery, but details are still coming in.
His individual contributions as a writer and producer, which I'll get to in a bit, remain impressive. But McDuffie was more than a writer, he was a voice — a passionate proponent for change in a genre (superhero comics) that reflexively resists it. And it's that voice that will be most acutely missed.
He started out in the '80s as an editor at Marvel before leaving to do freelance writing for DC, Marvel and Archie. In 1993 he co-founded Milestone, a company dedicated to "expanding the role of minorities both on the [comics] page and off..."
There, he launched several new characters, most notably Static, an electromagnetically-powered black teenage hero. (The character went on to star in the Saturday morning series Static Shock, which ran from 2000-2004.)
He wrote for the Cartoon Network series Justice League, and when that series underwent a change in format to become Justice League Unlimited, with a new focus on the deep bench of DC heroes and villains, McDuffie became a story editor. In recent years, he continued to write for comics like Firestorm, Fantastic Four and Justice League of America (where he beefed up the roles of black heroes in the JLA roster).
Most recently, he scripted the just-released, direct-to-DVD adaptation of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's definitive, 12-issue All-Star Superman series. And he did a fantastic job, capturing the whiz-bang, idea-a-minute tone of Morrison's story while finding and delineating its emotional through-line.
Of all the encomiums that rolled in yesterday, the one that resonated most strongly with me came from Kevin Church, a webcomic writer and comics blogger who has criticized McDuffie's work in the past - especially his JLA run. (To be fair, McDuffie himself spoke — bluntly — of the challenges of writing a flagship book like JLA, which is uniquely subject to corporate/editorial edicts.)
In a brief blog post, Church neatly deconstructs and dismisses the "Dwayne wrote about characters first, race second" meme that started making the rounds immediately after McDuffie's death.
"[McDuffie] brought the experience he had as a black kid growing up in Detroit in the 70s and 80s to every project he got his hands on by choosing directly not to emulate what he'd seen in the comic books he read, but by creating what he wished he had read," Church writes.
I wasn't reading comics in the '90s, so I'll leave it to others to speak to the specifics of the Milestone books.
But I'm of the generation who got turned on to superheroes in particular and comics in general by television. If it hadn't been for reruns of the '60s Batman show and Spider-Man cartoon, I might never have taken a second look at the spinner rack of the West Goshen Book and Card Store, back in 1973. And sealed my fate.
Which is why McDuffie's work on shows like Justice League
, and especially Static Shock
, has a special importance, and it's what I'll remember. His characters had personalities, not outsize personality disorders. They were heroic because they chose to be, not because it was their job. Race was dealt with matter-of-factly, but it was dealt with.
A new generation of kids who watched McDuffie's work saw worlds full of heroes — worlds that looked a lot like their own, and heroes that looked a lot like them.
Did McDuffie's pugnaciousness on matters of diversity (read the very funny memo he wrote when, as a Marvel editor, he detected a surfeit of skateboardin' black superheroes) change superhero comics forever?
As we've talked about before, superhero comics tend to reach for the RESET button every few years, and that means certain advancements get pushed back. Temporarily.
But McDuffie was a passionate writer and advocate, and here's the great thing about the kind of passion he embodied, which is born of a sense of justice and the desire to be heard:
It's catching.
Glenn Weldon writes for NPR's Monkey See Blog.
Dwayne McDuffie was a guy who made a living writing for comics and TV. If you don't know his name, your friends who read comics do. If your kids have watched cartoons in the last decade, they've more than likely seen some of his work.
Yesterday we learned that McDuffie passed away suddenly at the age of 49. The website Comic Book Resources reports that he died from complications following surgery, but details are still coming in.
His individual contributions as a writer and producer, which I'll get to in a bit, remain impressive. But McDuffie was more than a writer, he was a voice — a passionate proponent for change in a genre (superhero comics) that reflexively resists it. And it's that voice that will be most acutely missed.
He started out in the '80s as an editor at Marvel before leaving to do freelance writing for DC, Marvel and Archie. In 1993 he co-founded Milestone, a company dedicated to "expanding the role of minorities both on the [comics] page and off..."
There, he launched several new characters, most notably Static, an electromagnetically-powered black teenage hero. (The character went on to star in the Saturday morning series Static Shock, which ran from 2000-2004.)
He wrote for the Cartoon Network series Justice League, and when that series underwent a change in format to become Justice League Unlimited, with a new focus on the deep bench of DC heroes and villains, McDuffie became a story editor. In recent years, he continued to write for comics like Firestorm, Fantastic Four and Justice League of America (where he beefed up the roles of black heroes in the JLA roster).
Most recently, he scripted the just-released, direct-to-DVD adaptation of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's definitive, 12-issue All-Star Superman series. And he did a fantastic job, capturing the whiz-bang, idea-a-minute tone of Morrison's story while finding and delineating its emotional through-line.
Of all the encomiums that rolled in yesterday, the one that resonated most strongly with me came from Kevin Church, a webcomic writer and comics blogger who has criticized McDuffie's work in the past - especially his JLA run. (To be fair, McDuffie himself spoke — bluntly — of the challenges of writing a flagship book like JLA, which is uniquely subject to corporate/editorial edicts.)
In a brief blog post, Church neatly deconstructs and dismisses the "Dwayne wrote about characters first, race second" meme that started making the rounds immediately after McDuffie's death.
"[McDuffie] brought the experience he had as a black kid growing up in Detroit in the 70s and 80s to every project he got his hands on by choosing directly not to emulate what he'd seen in the comic books he read, but by creating what he wished he had read," Church writes.
I wasn't reading comics in the '90s, so I'll leave it to others to speak to the specifics of the Milestone books.
But I'm of the generation who got turned on to superheroes in particular and comics in general by television. If it hadn't been for reruns of the '60s Batman show and Spider-Man cartoon, I might never have taken a second look at the spinner rack of the West Goshen Book and Card Store, back in 1973. And sealed my fate.
Which is why McDuffie's work on shows like Justice League
, and especially Static Shock, has a special importance, and it's what I'll remember. His characters had personalities, not outsize personality disorders. They were heroic because they chose to be, not because it was their job. Race was dealt with matter-of-factly, but it was dealt with.A new generation of kids who watched McDuffie's work saw worlds full of heroes — worlds that looked a lot like their own, and heroes that looked a lot like them.
Did McDuffie's pugnaciousness on matters of diversity (read the very funny memo he wrote when, as a Marvel editor, he detected a surfeit of skateboardin' black superheroes) change superhero comics forever?
As we've talked about before, superhero comics tend to reach for the RESET button every few years, and that means certain advancements get pushed back. Temporarily.
But McDuffie was a passionate writer and advocate, and here's the great thing about the kind of passion he embodied, which is born of a sense of justice and the desire to be heard:
It's catching.
Glenn Weldon writes for NPR's Monkey See Blog.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Deep Thoughts (Rambling Man)
If Stevie Wonder were a white woman, he'd be Carly Simon . . . I wish zShare would get their shit together and enable embedding of content. I like the way the windows player is embedded in their site . . . Will a younger NAACP leader improve the image of the organization with younger people, like yourself? Yeah, I said it YOU, that is if anyone is actually reading this . . . Where's my Oprah? Where's the Oprah for Black men? Seems like she always giving stuff out or doing things for women. I could use a free car or something . . . Yesterday while on my lunch break I saw 4 guys all on Segways. I've decided that I want to start a Segway gang. Something similar to a motorcycle gang, but with Segways. We would have cool leather jackets with our nicknames on them . . . I'm tired of Olivia Munn on AOTS. She's not funny and she clearly is just another Ron Burgandy:
I wish they would get someone who actually did know something about games and gadgets, instead of someone who is just trying to act. Her schtick is getting tired . . . Does Jay-Z need to have a passenger in the car when he's in the HOV lane?
I wish they would get someone who actually did know something about games and gadgets, instead of someone who is just trying to act. Her schtick is getting tired . . . Does Jay-Z need to have a passenger in the car when he's in the HOV lane?
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
The Genesis
Ever since Zune Marketplace has added podcasts, I have been listening to NPR's News & Notes religiously. I love Farai Chideya, but I especially love her bloggers roundtable. I always feel that it's way too short. I typically fast forward to it in the podcast and go back and listen to the rest of the podcast later, on my way home from work. Basically that show was the inspiration for this blog to a degree. I wanted to promote some of the people and blogs that I like. Some of the blogs I have listed I found through other sites, some of them I found directly or indirectly through Farai's bloggers roundtable.
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