For one thing, Peter and I are talking about bringing back the Hesperia Star podcast, which ended in 2005, before most people even knew what a podcast was.
For another, I looked at my “Top 100” smart playlist in iTunes, which tracks the 100 songs I’ve listened to the most in the current calendar year, and I noticed that, other than about 28 songs or so, I’ve rarely listened to the same song more than once this year. I realized that’s because I’m now up to more than six hours of podcasts a day on my iPod/iPhone, and some days, more than 10.
I think podcasts are great, and provide the sort of democratization of broadcast media that HTML pages first provided for print media years before. Just like anyone can now write a newsletter or newspaper (even if they’re called blogs) and have it posted online, there are much fewer barriers to entry to someone who’s always wanted to be a broadcaster.
Naturally, the best podcasts are by the pros — NPR and affiliate station KCRW pretty much school everyone in the podcasting world, and even podcasting maven Leo Laporte got his start in radio — but there are also plenty of good ones, especially music shows, created by fans-turned-podcasting pros.
But there are a lot of fan or amateur podcasts that I’d love to listen to, but can’t, because they’re so, so long. I keep running into this with World of Warcraft podcasts, but, looking through iTunes, the problem seems to transcend all genres.
Far be it from me to dampen the enthusiasm of amateur podcasters, but I’d listen to a lot more podcasts if I didn’t have to commit an hour (or even up to two hours) to listening to a rambling, unfocused podcast (sometimes with all of the technical snafus left in), instead of several tighter podcasts instead.
I intend to practice what I preach: If we do revive the Hesperia Star podcast, I’ll be pushing to make it either a 15 or 30-minute production, with dedicated amounts of time for various categories of discussion. All it will take is a stopwatch and a merciless hand on the editing controls in Garage Band.
For the last 18 months or so, I’ve been listening to less new music. Oh, I still listen to a lot of it, but I’m also rediscovering a lot of stuff in the dusty back shelves of my iTunes library.
The way I do it is through a smart play list, which is a playlist that iTunes will auto-populate based on criteria you set. I realized a while back that, although I was succeeding in my goal of not just listening to the same stuff that was in my CD collection when I graduated college (and succeeding albums from only those artists, forever and ever, amen), I was turning into some sort of NME/Pitchfork douchebag who could only listen to artists that were five to 10 minutes from being discovered, and nothing else. (Which is ironic, since I think that the staff of Pitchfork should be dealt with harshly, using their titular farming implement.)
So back into the library my iPhone now goes, with a Deep Cuts play list, which I named after a segment that one of the Washington, DC classic rock stations (does anyone really have the ability to distinguish one classic rock station from another?) that basically consisted of “hey, it turns out there’s more than four songs that we can play, although we promise to still play ‘Stairway to Heaven’ every hour.” They would go “deep” into an album and play something other than the main hit said album was best known for.
My version of this idea is an iTunes smart play list with the following criteria:
Genre is Rock
Play Count is 0 (I reset the play counts of all the songs in my iTunes once a year, just so I can track the year’s top 100) Last Played is not in the last 12 months
Limit to 50 items selected by random
Then there’s several bands that I exclude — I have Billy Joel’s 1970s albums in my iTunes collection, but I don’t want him popping up in the middle of a bunch of modern rock tunes.
So every time I listen to the play list (which I have set to random play on my iPhone), I get a whole lot of surprises. Often it’s songs that have made my previous top 100 lists — the current Deep Cuts line-up includes “Swimming Pool” by the Submarines, “I Turn My Camera On” by Spoon and “One of these Days” by Kraak & Smaak — but it’s also a lot of stuff that I’ve rarely, if ever, listened to since getting my first iPod for Christmas in 2004 (including, at the moment, “Jesus Wrote a Blank Check” by Cake, “Since I Don’t Have You” by Guns N’ Roses and a remix of “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood).
The nice thing about this sort of play list is that it should work for anyone, whatever their taste. (If you don’t like rock music, just change the genre to one you prefer.)
Although J. Jonah Jameson’s newsroom was supposed to be a scary environment for Peter Parker, even as a kid, I realized that the Daily Bugle was a heck of a lot more realistic than the bland Daily Planet that Clark Kent worked at. Jameson and much of the rest of the staff are pretty recognizable newsroom staples, to the extent that I suspect a lot more people with actual knowledge of newsrooms have written stories relating to the Bugle than ever have dealt with the Planet.
Of course, this is comics, after all, where Superman can die, Batman can get his spine snapped, get better, and then later die, and eventually, it all works out. So the Bugle will be back in some form, eventually. Hopefully not as a TV station, which some fans seem to think is a more realistic choice — the issues of Amazing Spider-Man leading up to the Bugle’s destruction in December talked about the state of the newspaper industry repeatedly — when broadcast news is also facing its own substantial challenges. The folks at Marvel Comics’ House of Ideas will probably have to come up with a novel solution all their own on how to revitalize the Daily Bugle — and, frankly, the newspaper industry could use the help in that regard.
One of the things that I’ve learned from listening to Coverville for the past few years is that a great song can take a lot of interpretation by other artists. That’s as opposed to a great performance, which might well be singular. There are great performances that we mistake for great songs, but since no one else can do even a credible job with said song, it becomes clear that it’s just the performance that’s great, not the song at all.
In any case, “Glory Box,” originally performed by Portishead, is a great song.
Inexplicably, it never registered on the charts in the United States.
John Martyn’s cover makes me want to hear this done with a full-on blues approach, and no instrumentation or arrangements that aren’t true to that genre.
