Lisa Lindley Jones - Road To Nowhere | Single | Record Box

A very interesting approach to a classic song ... love it.

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This is the first thing i’ve heard from Lisa Lindley Jones so I don’t really have anything to compare this track to as far as knowing if this is her usual style or not. Road To Nowhere is another one of the Audi TT Remastered series that can be downloaded from the site.

It is comfortably one of the best tracks in the series, it’s got a breezy effortless cool to it, turned from the quirky pop of Talking Heads into this chilled out version. I’ve done a search online to try and find an album by her but alas no success. Shame as I do like her voice on this track, so i’ll be keeping an eye out for any future releases.

Official web site: http://www.lisalindleyjones.com/

Lisa Lindley Jones - Road To Nowhere Single Record Box

A VC: David Farber Says I Should Quit My Job

Must be nice to be perfect, Mr Farber ...

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David Farber Says I Should Quit My Job

The Washington Post ran a story about email bankruptcy yesterday and featured my post declaring bankruptcy at the top of the story. The writer Mike Musgrove ended the story by noting that I did not return calls or emails requesting a comment. That's true, but it's not because I didn't see the emails and phone calls. Email and voice communications for me is a triage. For every call and email that I return/reply, there are probably two or three that I don't. I had to make a decision about whether talking to Mike and his colleagues Sabrina Valle and Richard Drezen was more important than all the other incoming calls and emails. I didn't particularly want to be associated with this story and so I decided not to get back to them. I got into the story anyway.

And as a result, I got to see a guy named David Farber, who runs an email list called Interesting People, say in the same piece that if I can't manage my email load, I should "get out of the technology field."
That pisses me off. I am a hypercommunicator. I send and receive hundreds of emails a day, I blog incessantly, I instant message, text message, and twitter all the time, I do calls on my office phone, cell phone, and home phone all day and night. I bet I communicate at 10x the rate that David does. It's exhausting frankly.

My problem isn't that I don't spend the time it takes to reply to every email. My problem is my incessant emailing, blogging, texting, twittering, etc allows me to touch thousands of people every day. And many/most of them write back. And I do my best. Which is not good enough. At least for David Farber.

Guess what. I am not quitting. My job. Or my hypercommunicating.

A VC: David Farber Says I Should Quit My Job

Grayson Perry - Pottery - The Saatchi Gallery

November seems an awful long time away ...

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The Saatchi Gallery is moving to Chelsea, and will open again in November 2007. The Duke of York's HQ, Sloane Square, offers an ideal environment to view contemporary art, with very large well-proportioned rooms and high ceilings. The Gallery will occupy the entire 50,000 sq ft building giving the gallery scope for a book shop, educational facilities and a café/bar. It is ideally located in a central London location on Kings Road, Chelsea. The Triumph of Painting will be on hold until the new Gallery opens.


Grayson Perry - Pottery - The Saatchi Gallery

Wiki Altruism | Wallstrip

I can't work out why I cannot embed the video frame here - increasingly I find this a very poor blogging tool - anyway, have a look at the link below ... good old URLs, they never let you down ...

A very interesting - and funny - interview:

5-18-07 Jimmy Wales Wallstrip

The YouTube Election: On The Web: vanityfair.com

The YouTube Election

The "Vote Different" anti-Hillary ad, Newt Gingrich's Spanish apology, Mitt Romney's trail of flip-flops—this is the mouse-click mayhem of the 2008 campaign, in which anyone can join. It's the end of the old-fashioned, literary presidential epic, and the dawn of YouTube politics.

The presidential epic is poised to become a quaint relic, like the concept album and the comic operetta. Those who love words and lots of them will miss its dramatic heaves and reverses, mourn the loss of its grandiose scale. The presidential epic dramatizes the race for the White House as a cattle drive, with all the cunning intrigue, betrayal, coloratura, tainted ambition, and bluster of a Shakespearean saga.

Consider the gargantuan gulp of What It Takes, Richard Ben Cramer's thousand-plus-paged, tunnel-visioned account of the 1988 campaign, a rollicking Tom Wolfe–ish probe of the political right stuff with a cast of characters (Richard Gephardt, Joe Biden, Michael Dukakis, Robert Dole) that in lesser hands might have come across as painted dummies; the spewing, drug-lashed delirium of Hunter S. Thompson's influential Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72; Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago, with its high-definition portraits of Richard Nixon as a jerky robot out of rhythm with himself, Eugene McCarthy's Jesuitical face ("hard as the cold stone floor of a monastery at five in the morning"), and the brute force of Mayor Richard Daley's jowly constituency; and the one that started it all, the granddaddy of the tarmac chronicles, Theodore H. White's The Making of the President: 1960.

Consider, too, those classic tributaries to the presidential epic, instructive treats such as Timothy Crouse's The Boys on the Bus, Joe McGinniss's The Selling of the President: 1968, and Joe Klein's bacon-flavored roman à clef, Primary Colors. If the old-fashioned, bookish presidential epic depended upon intimate access or hovering proximity to the candidates as they work an endless series of rooms and stages, the newfangled campaign narrative is a peep-show collage—a weedy pastiche of slick ads, outtakes, bloopers, prankster spoofs, unguarded moments captured on amateur video, C-span excerpts, grainy flashbacks retrieved from the vaults, and choice baroque passages of Chris Matthews venting. YouTube, the free video-sharing bulletin board founded in 2005 by three former PayPal employees, is where it all happens. Mouse clicks and video clips, they go together like a nervous twitch. Where the presidential epic entails reams of psychological interpretation, novelistic scene setting, and historical placement, YouTube puts politics literally at one's fingertips in the active present, making it a narrative any mutant can join.

The 2008 presidential campaign had barely cracked its first yawn when a mischievous imp created a sensation with an update of the famous 1984 Apple TV commercial showing a buff, blonde Über-babe shattering a giant screen with a sledgehammer, liberating the slave drones from their indoctrinated trance. Only, in this revised version it was Hillary Clinton hobgoblinized as the looming commandant in the Orwellian nightmare, her bossy specter hectoring the flour faces of the bedraggled inmates. I didn't find the "Vote Different" ad particularly inspired or persuasive as anti-propaganda in its invocation of Fascism, but the whoosh it caused in the media fed off the Hillary fatigue felt by many, that calcified, sanctified aura of lockstep inevitability.

After a speculative tizzy in the political chatsphere as to the secret identity of the "Vote Different" auteur, Phil de Vellis surfaced at the Huffington Post to take credit and have his personal say. A supporter of Barack Obama's and a staffer at Blue State Digital (a pro-Democratic technology firm, from which he departed after the ad was sprung), de Vellis laid out his rationale for the mashup, insisting that he intended Hillary Clinton no disrespect. With a Nixonian clearing of the throat, he wrote, "Let me be clear: I am a proud Democrat, and I always have been. I support Senator Obama. I hope he wins the primary. (I recognize that this ad is not his style of politics.) I also believe that Senator Clinton is a great public servant, and if she should win the nomination, I would support her and wish her all the best."

What's less clear is how you can portray Clinton as totalitarianism's dour answer to Miss Jean Brodie, plugging into the right wing's witchiest caricature of her, and insist there's no ill will. It'd be like depicting Rudy Giuliani as Mussolini on the balcony, a malevolent bullfrog exhorting the masses, then disavowing it by saying, "Hey, don't get me wrong, I dig the guy." The most salient point in de Vellis's fess-up was not why he did what he did but how easily it was done: "I made the ad on a Sunday afternoon in my apartment using my personal equipment (a Mac and some software), uploaded it to YouTube, and sent links around to blogs." No muss, no fuss, no brainstorming sessions with the creative team, no sending out for coffee and Danish, just a little quality time on the computer and voilà. Given the editing tools available to even a modest laptop and the ultra-low point of entry into the YouTube marina, de Vellis is no doubt correct when he signs off, "This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed."
I have just been sent a link to an Internet site that shows me delivering a speech some years ago. This is my quite unsolicited introduction to the now-inescapable phenomenon of YouTube. It comes with another link, enabling me to see other movies of myself all over the place. What's "You" about this? It's a MeTube, for me. —Christopher Hitchens, Slate, April 9, 2007.

More creative involvement in the democratic process—how can this not be healthy? "Citizen journalists" and "citizen ad-makers," united in idealistic purpose—what's not to like? Yet inwardly I groan. Speaking for Me-self, the last thing I need is more crap to watch, no matter how ingenious or buzz-worthy it may be. I spend enough zombie time staring at screens without access to a supplemental pair of eyeballs. Between cable-news chat shows, regular news shows, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent reruns, I already clock so many hours watching TV on my TV that watching even more TV on my laptop is like giving myself extra homework. We're reaching the saturation point of what the social critic Paul Goodman called "spectatoritis."

Not only do we (especially Me) face the dismal prospect of being bombarded by professional spot ads every time we turn on the radio or TV until the '08 election, but now, for fear of not being in the loop, we're compelled to keep up with an inundation of personal commentaries, fake ads, newsclips set to music, and homemade amateur guerrilla sorties from the Tarantinos of tomorrow.

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The YouTube Election: On The Web: vanityfair.com

RED HERRING | The $6M Buzz on Buzznet

Just about every web site loves buzz, but perhaps none so blatantly as Buzznet, a social networking site built around music and other pop culture brands, which on Thursday announced a $6 million round of funding.

The two-year-old site lets users post blog entries, videos, and photos revolving around specific musical artists and other popular personalities. The site has seen some buzz of its own of late, growing its users from 2 million to 6 million in the span of six months.

Redpoint Ventures joined the site’s original investors, Anthem Venture Partners, in the second round. Buzznet’s founders plan to spend some of that money to establish a separate social networking site focused on other topics, breaking away from the more music-oriented site.

“All these venture guys, they’re looking at what gets organic traffic, looking at the real DNA of things that are growing,” said Buzznet chairman Tyler Goldman. “We were getting inbound calls from all the top venture capital firms. We thought that since Redpoint had also been a big investor in MySpace that they understood the next evolution of the model.”

Mr. Goldman went to great pains to distinguish his site from MySpace, the social networking behemoth that also attracts plenty of attention from the music community. Mr. Goldman asserts that Buzznet provides more of a “programming” eye towards its content.

It culls from user-generated additions, expert blogger contributions, and professional contributions from popular personalities, such as the popular Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy, to create what it hopes comes across as an authentic, engaging, controlled environment for users.

Mr. Goldman said that model offers a safe, lucrative space for advertisers to create their own mini-social networks for targeted demographics, as Honda recently did on Buzznet for its Civic campaign.

But a lot of folks are attempting to build branded media sites right now. Yahoo, for example, recently introduced its branded universe initiative that brings together content around specific, popular themes, such as the television show “The Office.” Traditional media companies themselves, meanwhile, are trying to hang on to some of their own buzz with social networking sites they run themselves, as NBC recently began doing.

Bill Woodward of Anthem Venture Partners, who was on the board of MySpace and the now-Yahoo-owned Launch Media, believes branded media networks are only in the “second inning”, poised for rapid growth.

“Making brands the key part of driving demographic traffic, there’s a lot more that can be done there,” said Mr. Woodward.

RED HERRING The $6M Buzz on Buzznet

A rule that isn't set in stone | Visual Arts | Arts | Telegraph

A controversial new building has the denizens of Bath in a lather, writes Ellis Woodman
Prior to settling in Bath in 1815, where he amassed one of the great private art collections of the 19th century, Sir William Holburne led a less sedentary life.

He joined the Royal Navy at the age of 11, fought at Trafalgar before the year was out and then in Brazil, the West Indies and the Mediterranean.

One likes to think that on the darker days during their five-year campaign to extend the museum that today houses Holburne's collection, the trustees have been able to draw strength from their founder's fondness for a battle.

For a battle it has certainly been. The idea of extending one of the country's best-loved small museums was always going to be contentious.

Given that the building is Grade I listed and occupies one of the most prominent locations in a world heritage site, for many Bath residents - the most vociferous of whom have instigated a "Halt the Holburne" campaign - it is little short of criminal.

So why have the trustees committed themselves to this thankless venture? In short, because the museum's future depends on its success. At present, space is so tight that 70 per cent of the Holburne's holdings (predominantly Old Masters, bronzes and decorative artworks) have to be kept in storage at any time.

Still more frustratingly, there is room to host only the smallest of temporary exhibitions - a situation that has stymied all attempts to increase annual visitor numbers above the current 33,000.
Eric Parry Architects' scheme, which has recently been submitted for planning permission, promises an 80 per cent increase in display area. If built, it is anticipated that attendance figures will more than double.

The Holburne stands at the end of the ramrod-straight Great Pulteney Street - arguably the grandest street in a city where there is plenty of competition for that title.

Dating from 1796, it was originally built as a hotel and gaming house, but doubled as a gateway to Sydney Gardens, the pleasure ground that lies behind. Passing under the building, visitors would emerge beneath a raised bandstand to discover a bucolic landscape dotted by freestanding "supper boxes" (dining huts).

Having bought the building in 1910, the trustees of the museum commissioned Sir Reginald Blomfield, the architect of London's Regent Street, to remodel it. The two grand galleries that he created on the upper floors are magnificent.

However, if Blomfield's scheme has a failing, it is the poor relationship that it establishes to the park. His recast garden elevation is dominated by a central bay, accommodating a new staircase, which carves the building into two. More problematically still, this staircase blocks the passage from the street into Sydney Gardens.

Parry's project will correct this, re-establishing the building's significance as a gateway between city and park. His plan is to take Blomfield's staircase and move it a couple of metres off the central axis, enabling visitors to pass directly through the café that occupies the ground floor of the extension and into the garden beyond.

Supported above the fully glazed café are three floors of largely windowless exhibition space, giving the building something of the appearance of a casket. The external walls will be faced in large ceramic elements, glazed to a colour that the architect describes as "cobalt over olive".

This choice is designed to reflect the colour of both trees and sky: it is with the natural environment of Sydney Gardens rather than Bath's Georgian architecture that the building seeks its alignment. The play of shadow and reflection where the ceramic fins weave into the lower level glazing should be particularly rich, giving the building an ephemeral quality that resonates with its verdant setting.

Nevertheless, the fact that the scheme contravenes the one sine qua non of building in Bath - all projects have to be in Bath stone - has proved a particular source of outrage to its opponents. The material homogeneity of Bath's architecture is undoubtedly one of the city's great glories, and should not be sacrificed lightly.

However, on this site if nowhere else, one can make a powerful case that the normal rules should be suspended. The experience of passing into Sydney Gardens via the Holburne stands to be a charmed "through the looking glass" moment, in which Parry's building will seem the gateway to a new world.

A rule that isn't set in stone Visual Arts Arts Telegraph