Ramones Manager Found Bludgeoned to Death in New York Apartment
By munroe on 11-01-2007
Reports are streaming in from multiple sources that claim Linda Stein, former manager of The Ramones, has been found dead in her Fifth Avenue apartment in New York. The city's medical examiner ruled the death a homicide, as Stein was found with multiple contusions to the head and neck. Police are claiming no visible signs of forced entry or break-in, and some of her closest friends are baffled.
Elton John reported to The New York Times that he is "absolutely shocked and upset," while friend (and co-manager) Danny Fields said, "I don't have a lot of friends in their 60s who are hit on the head in their chic apartments. It makes no sense."
Stein is credited with bringing The Ramones to the UK for their breakthrough show, which paved the way for other seminal punk bands such as The Clash and The Sex Pistols. Following her stint with punk artists, she garnered fame as the "Realtor to the Stars," working as a real estate broker for Madonna, Sting, Billy Joel, Angelina Jolie, Steven Spielberg, Bruce Willis, and Michael Douglas. She was 62.
BitTorrent Is The New Flesh; Judge Finally Deciding On How P2Ps Will Filter Content
By Hatchet on 11-01-2007
There's a fantastic Betty Boop cartoon from 1932 called "Minnie the Moocher." It features Cab Calloway singing one of his most memorable songs, "Hi-Dee-Ho." I know, Betty Boop is gross, and I almost can't stand to look at her. There's something about this particular episode, though, something unsettling and oddly unnerving about it; Max Fleischer's cartoon stays with me. This, along with "Betty Boop in Snow White" from 1933, which also features another uniquely smooth yet raucously enjoyable song from Cab Calloway, are perfect shorts to watch for Halloween. In the 1933 cartoon, Calloway sings "The St. James Infirmary Blues," and it is really something to see. Both are fantastic, but "Minnie the Moocher" has a solemness, a darkness that undercuts the whole thing; this isn't your normal cartoon.
In a lot of ways, both are music videos. The plot is almost pointless, or if not pointless, certainly unimportant. The beginning shows an obligatory set up, and when you get through the Betty Boop scenes, you're rewarded with fantastic music and nonsensical and oddly creepy images. Yet even in these more "realistic" parts (a talking gramophone, what!?), Betty Boop is abused, she contemplates killing herself in song, and she writes the saddest, sweetest, most ominous letter I've ever seen in animation:
Dear Ma & Pa-I'm leaving Home because
you're not so Sweet to me. I
won't ever be Home again.
Betty
Poor Betty Boop. "Home Sweet Home" is a nice touch, really, and she's off to meet Bimbo. They run off and it gets dark and they get scared. Ironically, they pick the darkest, largest tree to hide in, and that's when this seven-minute short earns its keep.
If I have my history right, this is an early example of rotoscoping, a technique of drawing or painting over a live action filmed image. So the dancing ghost is Cab Calloway's own patented shuffle, and in some ways, that makes it even more terrifying. The song is performed call-and-response, and when the skeletons at the bar call back, I think I could listen to them all day. The skeletons die -- skeletons die! Their ghosts come back and look up from the bottom of a well like souls lamenting, heaving up the better part of a death rattle.
The response team shifts to ghosts in a jail cell. They walk through the bars, uncomfortably close to the frame, and walk back, but they still need a ghost guard to let them out. And he does, but he leads them to electric chairs and fries them. Ghosts. Who knew Betty Boop was so startlingly creepy? Over all of that, though, is the friendly animation, the sheen of a cartoon for kids, and that is really where the horror is. It's mostly absurd, but with echoing human voices bouncing through this cave, knowing that Betty Boop is still on Earth, with Hi-Dee-Ho swirling around; this is a thrill to see.
My point is: You can watch it. Online. Halloween is over, sure, but that hasn't stopped me. The quality isn't great, but you can find it on BitTorrent and get a great version with better sound. As P2Ps die down, torrents are the future, but that hasn't stopped our court system from being several steps behind everything. They are only now deciding how Kazaa and Grokster will filter out copyrighted content. According to the Wired blog:
On Wednesday, Judge Wilson issued an Order to a court-appointed expert to determine the best combination of the following methods for filtering unauthorized works out of peer-to-peer systems: artist/title information, file hashing, and acoustic fingerprinting. If the expert has better ideas, he's welcome to include those too -- whatever combination works best on the Morpheus network. The arrived-upon method could become a legal precedent applied to other user-driven sites and networks.
In the meantime, torrents are everywhere. Software, music, movies, and whatever else is being digitized. You just need to know where to look, because eventually the courts will be several steps behind these, and you just might not have moved to the next delivery method of awesome Betty Boop cartoons from the 1930s. Watch it!
Nirvana Song “Breed” Finally Licensed, Kurt Cobain Rolls Over in His Grave, Dave Grohl Writes a Lame Song About It, Krist Novoselic Does… Nothing
By Nobodaddy on 11-01-2007
Well, well, well. It’s finally happened. You might want to avert your eyes, purists and Kurt-worshipers. The shaggy, legendary man that you loved for giving the underdog the benefit of the doubt within the heretofore (and here-ever after, some might say) insidiously clueless and utterly tasteless music industry has finally completed his post-death transformation, rising from his singer/songwriter ashes to becoming a pawn of the Man (and much more quickly than Jimmy Page, too).
So if you’re a Kurt-Freak (i.e., do you call him by his first name all the time?), prepare to be slightly humiliated and/or mortified, as Nirvana's "Breed" will officially be the first (oh, but probably not their last) song from their catalog to be used in advertising. And I bet you’ll never even GUESS who’s indirectly responsible!
That’s right: earlier this year, everyone’s favorite widower Courtney Love, who owned the vast majority of the rights to Nirvana's back catalog, up and sold 25% of it to the Primary Wave Music Publishing company for a reported $50 million. Word is she needed... groceries.
Now the fiendishly good-fortuned organization, reportedly one of the most aggressive groups acquiring music publishing rights for licensing (TMT News), and also apparently one of the most tactless, have done-saw fit to sell use of the track "Breed" for an Austrian Telecom ad (hey, Kurt was nothing if not a masterful communicator, right?), the videogame Major League Baseball 2K7 (and we all know how much Cobain advocated professional sports), and of course the upcoming film Shoot ‘Em Up (hmm, I wonder if there’s any shotgun suicides in that movie).
So there you have it. I guess you just can’t beat big business, no matter how many hideous sweaters and Daniel Johnston t-shirts you wore in life. Oh, and in case you were wondering; finance-related website portfolio.com reports that Publishing companies can earn between $10,000 and $300,000 for a song's use in a film and between $5,000 and $40,000 for use on television.
That’s a lot of groceries.
