Chris, while you’re in Houston…
… please pick up a pie. Love, Tamara & Jacob…
April 2001
Bob Kerrey feels just awful about killing so many Vietnamese civilians back when he was a kid
Former Senator Bob Kerrey (now president of the prestigious New School University) recently admitted to feeling “anguish and guilt” over a 1969 mission in which he and his Navy SEAL team slaughtered a village full of civilians, a mission for which he was awarded a Bronze Star. The 20+ dead civilians in question had the misfortune to live in an area that had been designated a free-fire zone. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has no plans to investigate the regrettable incident (it occurs to me that maybe they already did). Oh well.WASHINGTON…
Lately it all sounds the same to me
Sad news. Pop genius Joey Ramone died today of lymphoma. Read about it here. Already, cnn.com is getting it all wrong with blurbs like this: Their “do-it-yourself,” garage-rock influence still echoes today in bands such as Green Day and the Offspring. No no no….
that picture of jonathan richman looks like a clown corpse
anyway, now that i’ve got that out of my system, here’s the indie-pop perspective on the digital music personalization service jacob was talking about: it’s pretty good. it fails utterly on the goth/dreampop front though. this shouldn’t be taken as criticism… it’s a really cool service, and when i wasn’t purposely slanting my responses towards specific genres i like, it gave me pretty impressive results. jacob didn’t come across twee (perhaps there is some correlation between this fact and the fact that he did come across “power violence?”), but…
the modern dance
Salon is running an article today about various new internet services such as Media Unbound that attempt to intelligently suggest unfamiliar music selections to users based on what they already like. You’re probably thinking that this is not altogether unlike what Amazon does, but whereas Amazon’s recommendation data is based upon other users’ preferences and purchases as well as record/book company kickbacks, Media Unbound’s data is based on more finely grained relationships between sound, style, genre, etc. plus the crucial input of music critics, or “domain experts,” as we…