Monthly Archives: June 2008

Brad Sucks-Out of It

One of my favorite Net musicians(someone relying mainly on the internet from the onset of their musical career) is Brad Sucks. Firstly, for cool music and commitment to open source ethics. He makes all of his files available under Creative Commons licensing for other musicians or anybody for that matter to play with and use as they choose within the terms of license. He is also very cool about the pay me if you like my stuff, way before Radiohead or even NIN found their way to doing this. He and Jonathan Coulton 2 of the earliest adapters of this digital tip jar nethod.

Now Out of It-Brad's 2nd release is avialable. You can find it here. Go check it out and give him some feed back and even some tip money if you feel the inclination. Kudos Mr. Sucks!

Hotel Rwanda

I watched this movie on a local cable station last night. What a brilliant performance depicting a sad reality. In some ways like Schindler's List offering some rays of hope on a very dark day. I always liked Don Cheadle and feel this was the best and fullest performance  I've seen him in. Don is not one of my favorite black actors, he's one of my favorite actors that happen to be black. The saddest line in the movie was uttered by Nick Nolte's UN Peace keeper character attempting to illustrate the level of despair in the Rwandan genocide, "You people aren't even niggers, just Africans." Sad how TV, movies and the media in general has desensitized us to tragedy and human suffering: feel bad for a minute, change the channel and order some Domino's.

Don't know what it takes to make people care-probably only affecting them on their doorstep. If you haven't seen Hotel Rwanda I highly reccomend it. There were several excellent performances besides Cheadle's. The woman that played his wife and a couple of others all quite good.

Music for music’s sake…


Here is the latest podcast installment. I actually do a little shout out thingie to Evo Terra on his 50 something birthday-funny I used to be older than him, oh well! Feature 3 songs see what you think:

Look Mexico-Crucial Collection

Truckosaurus-Angels Sound Like Bottle Rockets

The Charlatans-You Cross My Path

That's all she wrote except for support the artists, buy some stuff from them and go see them when you can.

Wire…

I can't pimp this band hard enough. I was just telling a friend one of the greatest live shows I ever saw was Wire back in the heady punk/new wave years (late 70s early 80s). I actually saw them two nights back to back at different venues with different mitigating circumstances. The first night was at some old theater that a local NYC radio station got a hold of to do live broadcast with the band. It was obvious by the bands antics that they were clueless as to why they were there. In fact just minutes before the broadcast was scheduled to go out live-someone from the station whispered something in singer Colin Newman's ear. He quickly signaled to the band and it was just awesome how the power fell over them and the audience. They were totally riveting-this was still the period of their 1st or 2nd releases which were still in the Ramones 1minute 2 minute plus song length pogo marathon for a half hour or 45 minutes until everybody just dropped from exhaustion. The main difference was while the Ramones tended to channel Mad Magazine/Don Martin Wire was more in the William Burroughs vein.

The good news is that for those of you who are curious you can check out their site here and sample some free mp3 as well. The 2nd show I saw them at was at CBGB's and as you can imagine that too was the stuff of legend. Great band that ciontinually takes risks and reinvents themselves remaining very musically aware all the time.

New Big in Asia Podcast

Some of you already know of both my eclectic nature and the fact that I've been living in Asia for over 20 years. I'm doing Big In Asia as a means to offer more information on culture, news and business activities here in Asia through people that are here, from here or virtually here. Our first show guest is Carrie Marshall a talented lady that is from Canada and has been living in Asia for 6 years. Come hear more from Carrie here.