Life Without Keys

Here are some mp3 recordings of the Zday Lectures in London on March 13th.

ZDay 2010 Introduction

Futurists, Technology and Cultural Lag

This post will be expanded with editorial, video and the slide-shows as the media becomes available.

Industrial engineer, inventor and generally uber-impressive renaissance man Jacque Fresco held two lectures in the Oliver Thompson lecture hall in the Tait Building, University of London on October 3rd. He was joined by Roxaxnne Meadows to discuss the Venus Project, societal values, human progress and the like.

This is a high fidelity audio recording of the first lecture, which took place at 1pm. Fresco and Meadows then held a 1 hour Q&A which is also available below as a download.

Left click to play on the site, right click to download.

Lecture Audio

Q&A Audio with Jacque Fresco and Roxanne Meadows

A few hours ago the heroes return that is the new Alice in Chains Album leaked, an impressively low 11 days before “official” release.

We have already covered the general quality of the album, an extraordinary return to form for the grunge behemoths of Seattle. Despite missing the Layen Staley jigsaw piece, the band has managed to complete the puzzle anyway with new lead singer DuVall.

Not quite a sound-alike, and not really a “lead” singer as far as Terry Date’s mixing of the album has judged him, DuVall’s power and raw awesomeness he gets from years of singing in a hardcore bank stands him in such good stead when harmonied with Cantrell’s half-folk, half-metal backup singing, that even old Alice fans, surely the hardest of all to win over, have pretty much accepted him as a worthy replacement.

The first track alone, All Secrets Known, will convince you that the fans are right – a staggering track of ethereal bent harmonies and snarling “Frogs” style riff will make you wonder if Staley did in fact “do an Elvis” and was at the recording session. Suddenly we remember how much we missed these boys, and how much we still miss Staley.

It’s a testament to how long it’s been since an Alice release when you consider this is the first of their albums that has had the opportunity to leak this way. In 1995 the internet was a little young for mass-availability of a new album ahead of schedule.Similarly, this album is the first to feature the marketing tools of a free download (A Looking in View) and a paid download single (Check my Brain) – and Velvet Hammer, the band’s present management, have done a damn fine job in collateralising the band’s release with In the Studio videos, an Electronic Press Kit that hit yesterday, video interviews, competitions and more.

While our pre-order of the album has been on the books for aty least a fortnight now, we might well have to accidentally hit “download” to hear it in the meantime.

Welcome to the 21st Century, Alice.

DOWNLOAD THE 2009 DOUG STANHOPE BOOTLEG HERE!

After what seems like an age, but is in fact only a year, Doug Stanhope graced the Leicester Square Theatre in London in the first week of September 2009. It was a welcome return after Stanhope decided to skip the usual financial H-Bomb referred to in some circles as the “Edinburgh Fringe”.

After a shaky start to the set, something that permeates most of his shows these days, Stanhope launched into three or four particularly strong ‘bits’ that will no doubt find their place in the new CD, and DVD offering.

Look out for venom against the modern perpetual habit of videoing everything on your mobile, an extended dark poetic riff on what sex with Doug Stanhope must be like these days, sniper sex, and the (literally) climactic “Blort” routine, destined, we suspect, for the ending of the new CD. A clever bit on George W Bush and the Queen, most likely destined for UK shores only, offers some new and counterintuitive but correct thinking on throwing stones whilst abiding in a glass house, and look out for the thinly disguised attack on Britain’s Got Talent too.

Whilst looking much older than in 2002 (compare his babyfaced energy in Word of Mouth, a mere 7 years ago), coughing like a madman and clearly unnecessarily down on himself after two rough sounding shows at Reading and Leeds Music festivals (with Jamie Kilstein, an up-and-comer who was Stanhope’s support act in the 2005 Austin Incident video Bootleg and an acerbic New York wit in his own right) Stanhope is nevertheless still a billion miles ahead of most stand-up comedy. If pressed, we can only name his equal in Louis CK, whose show in November in London we will also be covering (and hopefully someone will bootleg it for us again.) Apart from that, there is, as Bill Hicks would say, a “real big fucking drop-off” after those two.

A fan recording of the 3rd September exists and is available at this location for free download – the 68 minute set has been named (by Stanhope himself in the recording) “Doug Stanhope – Before Turning the Gun on Himself”. We will upload the raw .wav file as well in due course, in case anyone else can adjust the levels better than our resident “sound-idiot” – and naturally there will be a torrent with tracks divided up.

Enjoy the hate.

Podcasting has opened up a whole pile of free content ever since it became ubiquitous on the internet. Vast swathes of radio shows, lectures, talk radio shows, audiobooks, film trailers, video sketches, news media and other audio-visual media can now be downloaded automatically to your computer or audio devices through any one of hundreds of applications, making the acquisition of a vast galaxy of sound and video both easy and gigantic.

There are a few problems with this, of course. The first is choice; since there are literally thousands of outlets for free content, choosing what is good is very difficult. The second issue that us culture hounds have is the storage of such a massive pile of content, which can rapidly get out of control. So, in addition to some listening behaviours and thinning down techniques we find useful, we’ll first look at a few iTunes settings that can keep your stash in check without you missing out on too much, whilst not being overwhelmed either.

1. Rate the items you’ve listened to.

If you’re using iTunes, make sure you add a star-based rating column in your podcast library (right click any column header and select “Rating”) – that way you can mark which episodes you want to keep when you listen on the go or at your computer, and which you’re happy to delete. We tend to rate either 5 Stars (keeper) or no stars for ones we’re binning.

Right clicking allows you to add columns

2. Stream instead of Download

If you’re at your computer, or have an iPod or iPhone with Wifi available, most podcasts can be streamed as well as downloaded. On your iPod/iPhone, click the title rather than the download button, and the episodes will play over your connection. Saves space, and retains the quality. See more here. And here.

3. Set time-sensitive episodes for auto-deletion after a certain time

iTunes lets you set auto-delete options after a certain time unplayed. If you have news or current affairs podcasts, let them expire after a week or two. iTunes has a setting for this, and the rule can be applied to specific podcasts or all podcasts by default.

4. Order your mp3 player’s menu to bring podcasts to the forefront

iPods have been customizable since the word go when it comes to menus. The Zune seems to be able to do this too (mostly through the use of building “quicklists”), although most of the Youtube videos on the subject are inscrutable on layout customization. If you’re a Zune owner, however, you probably know your shit on this subject anyway. If you don’t, Engadget’s Zune interface video seems the most comprehensive.

5. Conglomerate your podcasts with one application

If you have some podcasts in iTunes, some in Odeo, a few on BlogTalkRadio and maybe a batch of channels in iPodder (now called Juice, or Juice Receiver) chances are that, unless you’re massively disciplined, you’ll never sign into all those platforms. We tend to use iTunes, but, as long as there’s a “subscribe to feed” ability, any and all aggregators tend to be equal. Check out The Apple Blog for a roundup of apple-based aggregators, many of which (like Juice, which is cross-platform) are also available in some form for the PC.

I don’t care about celebrity culture. At all. In fact, if you gave me the choice of eating a shit sandwich and speaking the words “You are a valid human being because of your cultural contribution to society” to one of Girls Aloud, it’s a face full of bready turd every time.

And despite this I am of the opinion that Katie Price and Peter Andre’s hilariously awful A Whole New World CD is possibly the greatest record I’ll never have in my music collection. This stands in sharp contrast to my acerbic and largely justified jihad-style dislike of those two column-inch hungry Orangutan-coloured dullards.

I recently found myself on the UK Amazon page for the Price/Andre collaboration and whilst there I discovered no less than SEVENTY-ONE 5 Star reviews and a mere SEVEN one star reviews. Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s Facepalm time.

However, I soldiered on, deciding I must understand the logic of so many positive reviews of a CD that has even been ridiculed by any and all reviewers.

So before we decode the reason behind so many positive reviews, let’s have a run down of the negative ones first, where one would actually expect the humour to be. There are seven 1-star reviews, the most sincere of which begins with,

“I don’t understand any of the reviews for this. The album is rubbish from start to finish.”

While Mr William Nisbett, of Nottingham, UK is bang on the money, he has probably made the (albeit very understandable) mistake of not actually reading the positive reviews for this piece of metallic crap (and who would actually DO that anyway?)

I just really hope he didn’t buy the album after seeing 70+ 5 star ratings without checking the content…

Another review, from a man calling himself Aladdin, (“The Disney one (so, the definitive Aladdin for all you care)” he writes) proclaims anger that Price and Andre have hijacked the eponymous song which HE wrote to woo Jasmine, but accepts some responsibility, citing the “unquestioning” acceptance of royalty cheques he is clearly earning from these two “shills”.

The positive reviews are even funnier. Variously reviewers claim they have cried, shat and laughed all at the same time, achieve sexual climax from hearing the album, or have, as “a hard bitten, cynical private detective with a bitter outlook on life” been put in touch with their more sensitive side after hearing the album.

Reviewers variously claim the album has “cured their cancer”, given them the ability to breathe underwater, made otherwise hollow lives abundant with clarity, meaning, fulfillment and joy and even caused one professorial music lecturer to throw away Beethoven, Bach and all other past masters in favour of Katie Motherfucking Price and Peter “Orange Elvis” Andre (as one reviewer puts it.)

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s 71 pieces of comedy awesome. One reviewer expresses his desire to invade Poland to create a master race with Katie, another recommends to “put this at the top of you list of albums to die before you listen to.” I laughed so hard I re-gave myself a double hernia. Happy now, Katie and Peter?

I know I am.

Perhaps the largest irony beside the deliberate inversion of reviewer values is that thanks to the creation of the  Andre/Price work, we now have a large online collection of hilarity. This, ironically, makes A Whole New World more worthwhile than half my music collection. It was made me laugh harder than Bill Hicks, and has one-liners worthy of Hedberg and the others.

For this reason, I give A Whole New World 5 stars unironically. It’s just I’ll never buy or listen to the album…