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Small Potatoes is a boutique marketing, advocacy, and consulting firm. We specialize in working with small-scale and start-up food product companies to launch and grow their businesses.
We understand the challenges facing small-scale foodpreneurs and also understand the intricacies and opportunities in the burgeoning new food economy. We use our 10+ years experience to help our clients break into the marketplace in a way that is practical, manageable, and sustainable.
Small Potatoes is committed to improving communities by supporting their local food system. We focus on developing and cultivating relationships and collaborations that are valuable for all the stakeholders in the food system.
If you are a potential foodpreneur with just an idea for a product, an established producer looking for ways to grow, or anyone in between, we can support your business.
We offer long term and short term consulting packages, as well as dynamic workshops.
Besides working with food product companies and their support networks, we offer services to all other stakeholders in the food system. If you're a chef looking to incorporate local ingredients into your menu, we can help you come up with a plan that fits your needs. We are available for speaking engagements large and small, public or private. We have spoken to community organizations, private businesses, and in classrooms at elementary schools and universities. We can also help you get the word out about your business by supporting your social media, crafting press releases, and other writing services.
Martin Butts


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In order to give you the best user experience on our website this content must be opened in a separate window by clicking the button above.
Apply for loan assistance using our secure online credit application in Baton Rouge, LA. You don't have to be stressed out about paying for your dream car! Let the experts here at All Star Toyota help you today. We work to ensure that you can get a pre-approval prior to stepping on our lot so that you know what you're working with. You can also contact our professional finance department prior to applying to discuss any questions or concerns you have with the initial process. Take advantage of our new car specials after you apply for loan assistance. Drivers near Prairieville and Central, Louisiana are crazy about our extensive inventory. You can drive home in a new Toyota vehicle today. It starts with a simple credit application.
You deserve transportation that you can count on. Contact our team in Baton Rouge, LA and learn about your options today. Various factors can impact your credit, and once you apply for a loan, we can discuss what is impacting yours. A new Toyota car loan could be just the thing you need to continue building your credit history! You'll never know until you apply for a loan near Central, LA. Take the chance and see how you can continue building credit for a solid financial future today! Our expert team members at All Star Toyota of Baton Rouge are waiting to help Louisiana drivers now! Don't wait, contact us.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Now that it's 2018, it also means it's officially tax season. Korean tax filing occurs in the month of January and it usually happens quickly. As an expat it can be a rather overwhelming experience, if you are under-prepared and ill-informed. Koreans let you know things at the last minute and expect you to file taxes as quickly as possible. It's just the nature of their culture, so it is better to be organized in advance, instead of being caught off-guard.
Here are the top 3 things you need to know about doing your taxes while teaching in Korea.Read More


text:
The Snow
It sifts from leaden sieves,
It powders all the wood,
It fills with alabaster wool
The wrinkles of the road.
It makes an even face
Of mountain and of plain, --
Unbroken forehead from the east
Unto the east again.
It reaches to the fence,
It wraps it, rail by rail,
Till it is lost in fleeces;
It flings a crystal veil
On stump and stack and stem, --
The summer's empty room,
Acres of seams where harvests were,
Recordless, but for them.
It ruffles wrists of posts,
As ankles of a queen, --
Then stills its artisans like ghosts,
Denying they have been.
--Emily Dickinson
photo by Geoffrey A. Landis, 2009
- link to Snow poems and poetry


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The following resources provide key measures on labor market activity including, but not limited to: the unemployment rate, employment, and unemployment levels.
Current Employment Statistics (CES)
Measure of the monthly state and local nonfarm employment and wages. It is considered a leading economic indicator. Current and historical data can be accessed on the CES home page.
Unemployment Insurance Statistics
Unemployment insurance (UI) benefits paid and number of UI recipients by county. It also includes statewide UI workload reporting data, employer contribution data, claims by industry and UI trust fund solvency analysis. Current and historical data can be accessed on the Unemployment Insurance Statistics home page.
Unemployment Rate & Labor Force (LAUS)
Monthly and annual estimates of total labor force, employment and unemployment for the State of Iowa, its counties, metropolitan statistical areas (MSA), districts and various regions across the State. These estimates are key indicators of local economic conditions. Current and historical data can be accessed on the LAUS home page.


text: A database of inactive Mozilla usernames and passwords was exposed on the Internet earlier this month, the Mozilla Foundation disclosed on Tuesday. The database, which contained 44,000 inactive user accounts for the addons.mozilla.org site, was inadvertently placed on a public-facing Web server, wrote Chris Lyon, the Mozilla director of infrastructure security, in a blog posting. Lyon stressed that the exposure "posed minimal risk to users." The organization erased all the passwords, which were encrypted. It also accounted for every download of the database.Current users of addons.mozilla.org are not affected, because the organization upgraded its procedure for encrypting passwords in April 2009, Lyon stated. Mozilla security officials were first notified of the exposure on December 17, through the organization's web bounty program, which allows volunteers to submit security-related bugs. The Foundation notified all the account holders by e-mail on December 27 of the exposure. Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is firstname.lastname@example.com


text:
BOSTON, MA – A local citizen decided to spice up Pepsi's new ad campaign banners in Boston's South Station with Bat Boy.
It was revealed in late 2008 that Pepsi would be redesigning its logo for most of its products in early 2009. The old logo was turned sideways, and has appeared in major campaigns across numerous American cities.
In order to help the campaign, a concerned citizen decided to help out by adding the face of the one and only Bat Boy!
The culprit agreed to speak to Weekly World News, but only on condition of anonymity, for fear of being charged with defacement of property. "I just wanted to brighten people's day, you know? I kept seeing these ads around that said HOPE, and I just thought, who's the face of hope? Who's the face of justice? It seemed so obvious."
Weekly World News cannot legally encourage readers to replicate this good citizen's idea, but we do advise you to think that it is awesome.


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Posts Tagged 'weapons'
The New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center
A fine museum and research center concerning New York State residents who have served from the American Revolution through Iraq and Afghanistan.
The mission of the museum and research center is to preserve, interpret and disseminate the story, history and records of New York State's military forces and veterans. The collection is divided into the museum and the library/archives holdings
From the website; The mission of the museum and research center is to preserve, interpret and disseminate the story, history and records of New York State's military forces and veterans. The collection is divided into the museum and the library/archives holdings.
Begun in 1863, the collection has not had a secure, permanent home until the Governor announced in 2001 that the historic armory in Saratoga Springs, NY would be renovated to house the collection. The building, designed by Isaac Perry and constructed in 1889, is a fine example of armory architecture that was popular in upstate New York in the late 1800's.
The museum houses over 10,000 artifacts dating from the Revolutionary War to Desert Storm that relate to New York State's military forces, the state's military history and the contributions of New York's veterans.
The artifacts include uniforms, weapons, artillery pieces, and art. A significant portion of the museum's collection is from the Civil War. Notable artifacts from this conflict include Colonel Elmer Ellsworth's uniform, the medical kit of Jubal Early's surgeon, and the uniform and bugle of Gustav Schurmann.
Included in the museum are significant holdings relating to New York's 27th Division in World War I and World War II and notable state military regiments such as the 7th, 69th, 71st, and 369th New York Infantry.
The museum also owns the largest collection of state battle flags in the country and the largest collection of Civil War flags in the world. The flags date from the War of 1812 through the 1991 Gulf War.
The library and archive holdings in the Veterans Research Center include a 2000 volume library of military and New York State history, over 6,000 photographs, unit history files, broadsides, scrapbooks, letters and maps. Highlights of the library and archives material include over 2300 Civil War photographs, a collection of Civil War era newspaper clippings arranged by New York units, and New York National Guard service cards and service records dating from the 1880's to 1965.
Museum Publications: Genealogy Resources in the New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center; Veteran Oral History Program Self-Interview Packet; and the Library and Archives Guide.
The museum floor is completely accessible for people using wheelchairs. The research room is currently located in the basement which is only accessible via stairs.
There is no admission charge to visit the museum or use the research center.
Museum Hours:
Tuesday – Saturday: 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Sunday: 12:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Research Center Hours:
Tuesday – Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Appointments are required.
If you have a research question you may mail it to:
New York State Military Museum
61 Lake Avenue
Saratoga Springs, NY, 12866
Note: the Museum is closed on Mondays and on all New York State Holidays.
Thanks to @juliasgenes for calling this to our attention on one of the genealogy message boards. Seems a fitting day to tell it to the readers of Upstate New York Genealogy Blog. – Happy Memorial Day! We thank all veterans past and present for their service.
Check out their website and get directions to visit.
Relocating to NYC because of your job or looking for more than just a Movers New York City that offers a wide range of professional services unmatched in the industry that include local and long distance moving, commercial moving, residential moving.


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Learn About the Law
Get help with your legal needs
FindLaw's Learn About the Law features thousands of informational articles to help you understand your options. And if you're ready to hire an attorney, find one in your area who can help.
Mr. George E. Beechwood, of Philadelphia, Pa., for petitioner.
Mr. Joseph S. Clark, Jr., of Philadelphia, Pa., for respondent.
Mr. Justice McREYNOLDS delivered the opinion of the Court.
Acting under Pennsylvania statutes (7 P.S.Pa. 1 et seq.), October 5, 1931, William D. Gordon, Secretary of Banking (respondent Herr is his successor), closed the Franklin Trust Company, a banking institution in Philadelphia, and took control of its business and assets.
Thereafter in the United States District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, petitioner, a New York corpora- [ General Baking Co. v. Harr 300 U.S. 433 (1937) ] [300 U.S. 433 , 434]
tion, presented a bill against Gordon, setting up an agreement by which it undertook to keep on deposit with the Trust Company a sum specified, and the latter undertook either directly or through correspondent banks to accept deposits of cash, checks, etc., and to forward the proceeds therefrom to petitioner in New York. Also that when closed the Trust Company had in its assets $49,590.17 received under this agreement, and its correspondent banks had on hand deposits likewise acquired amounting to $32,403.26.
The bill prayed for a decree declaring petitioner owner of the $32, 403.26 and that a trust existed in its favor in respect of the $49,590.17 deposit; also for general relief. The answer suggested some qualifications of the alleged agreement and denied that there was no adequate remedy at law. Otherwise, the allegations of the bill were generally admitted.
The District Court took jurisdiction of the controversy; held petitioner was not owner of the $32,403.26; also that no ground existed for impressing a trust upon assets because of the $49,590.17 deposit; and dismissed the bill. 9 F.Supp. 210.
The Circuit Court of Appeals concluded the District Court had no jurisdiction and should have dismissed the bill without adjudicating other questions. 85 F. (2d) 932. It accordingly approved the dismissal but directed that the cause be referred to the state court for proper procedure there.
Although entered in September, 1936, the opinion below does not refer to Commonwealth Trust Company of Pittsburgh et al. v. Bradford, Receiver, 297 U.S. 613, 5 l S.Ct. 600, decided here March 30, 1936. Nothing indicates that this opinion was brought to the Court's attention. The doctrine there approved, we think, is decisive of the issue concerning jurisdiction now presented.
It was error for the Circuit Court of Appeals to hold that the District Court was without jurisdiction of the controversy. It should have passed on issues properly presented upon the appeal. [300 U.S. 433 , 435] The questioned decree must be reversed and the matter remanded to the Circuit Court of Appeals for further proceedings.
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text: I have done a fresh install on a fedora 4 box using your perfect setup. Then installed frontpage. Then installed ispconfig. My problem I can log into the admin page of ispconfig but all the icons and the server pages that are on the right side are not there. when i click on the pages it says this page can not be displayed. why?


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When Apple introduced the iPhone 4 roughly 16 months ago, they couldn't shut up about the 3.5 inch "retina display". After having used that display for over a year, this writer has become the biggest pixel density fanboi lucky enough to have a soap box to stand on that's read by millions of people every month. Once you break the 300 pixel per inch barrier, there's no going back, which is why we were floored when Samsung and Google announced the Galaxy Nexus last week in Hong Kong. That device packs a 4.65 inch screen with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. Now smartphones are one thing, but what about tablets? Samsung announced a 10.1 inch display with a resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels a little over 5 months ago, though they failed to say when it'll actually show up in devices that we could buy from our local electronics store. It's widely expected that the third generation iPad, which we're assuming will be announced and be made available in the spring, similar to how the first and second generation iPad were announced and then shipped several weeks later, will have a "retina display". Does the innovation stop there however?
Toshiba just announced an LCD panel that does 2560 x 1600 pixels, and it's an incredibly tiny 6.1 inches. Compared to the 329.65 pixels per inch an iPhone 4 does, the 315.83 pixels per inch the Galaxy Nexus does, and the 298.9 pixels per inch that Samsung panel that's yet to ship does, Toshiba's display is capable of absolutely mind bending 494.9 pixels per inch. Check out the image above to see just how sharp that actually is.
Now for the bad news, we have no idea when this thing will hit the market, and worse yet we don't think anyone will even use it. Apple has made 10 inches the standard for tablets and 3.5 inches the standard for smartphones. The iPhone 5 will likely have a larger screen, and there are rumors of a 7.85 inch iPad mini, but 6.1 inches? The only company building devices with screens of that size are Amazon, and they're using 6 inch electronic ink displays to prevent eye strain. We severely doubt they'll switch to LCD.


text:
I got smart this year and formally hired help outside of my household. Right now, my friend Laurie comes by every week and lends me a hand with our project of the week. This week, it was feathers including an experiment on peacock feathers. Why peacocks? Well, the Art Bead Scene's monthly challenge is Black Peacocks with Japanese Persimmons. It's a lovely painting.
My peacock feather borrowed from a couple of feather tutorials on PolymerClayCentral.com and then… I sort of improvised. It worked out, mostly. When I do another, I'll brighten up the shading and thin down some lines, thicken other but I really like how it pops on a black bead with the little persimmons.
I took the art bead and wired it up into a bracelet with my usual random collection of rocks and bits. The magpie approach to things. The sparkly lampwork right beside my focal is made by Cheryl Harris of California.
One of my resolutions for the year is to be disciplined and do ALL of the ABS challenges. We'll see how that goes!


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The Wire, February 1992
by Simon Reynolds
to relate to this album you need to have been whacked around by life a
bit," says Lou Reed. "This record won't mean that much to an
eight-year-old, except you can just luxuriate in the sound, it's so
thick and defined and dimensional. But an eight-year-old won't have the
faintest idea what I'm talking about. And I'm not trying to offend
eight-year-olds," he adds, the faintest of smiles flickering across his
impassive features. "Maybe there's a very sophisticated one out there
Where New York railed against the here-and-now
specifics of Manhattan's disintegrating social fabric, Magic And Loss is
Lou Reed raging against the limits of existence, the absolutes of life
and death; it's also a glowing tribute (literally glowing, since the
playing is luminous) to two friends who died recently. One was Doc
Pomus, a songwriter friend from Reed's pre-Velvet Underground days as a
salaried songsmith. The other, "Rita", was "just a friend. Not a
celebrity, put it that way."
New York was socially engaged and
street-real: Magic And Loss is a spiritual document. 'Power And Glory',
for instance, trembles with a palpable feeling of revelation: "I was
captured by a larger moment/I was seized by divinity's heart breath —
gorged like a lion of experience... I wanted all of it, not some of it".
The song teems with mystical imagery of metamorphosis, rooted in the
paradoxes of terminal illness ("I saw a great man turn into a little
child") and of radiation therapy ("The same power that burned
Hiroshima/Causing three legged babies and death /Shrunk to the size of a
nickel/To help him regain his breath").
"I came to understand
that the album was about transformation," explains Reed. "Alchemy. The
purpose of alchemy wasn't to transform lead into gold, that was just one
example of the process, to be used later to transform yourself. I call
the album Magic And Loss because that experience can be taken two ways.
That's why the song 'Power And Glory' occurs twice, in different forms. A
whole different tempo, a whole different way of looking at the exact
same thing. The way they faced illness and death was very inspirational.
In the end, it was a magical experience. A positive experience.
Positive to have known them, positive to have watched them go through
this. When, to quote myself, 'you loved the life others throw away
nightly'. I thought they were giants."
Magic And Loss says Reed,
is "an extension of the Songs For Drella album which was an extension of
New York —.the idea of a thematically whole album. Right now, I'm not
interested in the idea of twelve or so disparate songs." Each song has a
subtitle, "like a novel, at the head of each chapter, a little phrase
explaining what it is".
The album conducts you methodically
through each stage of terminal illness and bereavement. There's the
morbid, unbidden reveries of 'Dreamin' ', perhaps the most lovely song
on the record, with its braid of wavering guitar-synth and tremulous,
plangent, pure Velvets guitar. 'Goodbye Mass' vividly evokes the awkward
discomfort of the funeral service, Reed bemoaning the disparity between
its dour gravity and the feisty, irrepressible good humour of the
dearly departed. "You, you would have made a joke/ Isn't this something
you'd say/ Tommorrow I'm smoke".
"Both of
them made jokes straight the way through," recollects Reed. "It's
unbelievable. I had said there's this great widescreen colour TV I could
get for you, and I'll hook up all the wiring for you. And they said,
Lou, this is not the time for long-term investments. Joking. I think
that's magnificent. I just think some people are giants. You may never
hear of them, but they just have this thing. They're like the sun,
they're just glowing all the time. They stay that way. When they get
hurt, they don't suddenly turn into this other thing. It would be
totally understandable. If I get a flu, I start whining!"
there's 'Warrior King', which documents the most confusing and
ostensibly illogical symptom of mourning, a desire for bloody revenge
that can't be slaked because it's intransitive.
"The character
singing is very mad at the elements that have attacked and killed his
friends. But there's no person to aim it at, with terminal illness. It's
like, if you could take a physical, malleable form, I'd take you in an
alley and do this, and this, and this. It's if I could, if I could...
but with death, you can't. So it's that anger that causes the song
afterwards, 'Harry's Circumcision', because you can't walk around with
that anger in your heart. It causes these very negative thoughts, which
is what 'Harry's Circumcision' is all about, taken to its natural
conclusion (attempted suicide)." According to Lou's theory, you can't
just stay in that mental state, you've got to go beyond that. Which is
what happens on the album.
"The songs are in a particular order
for a purpose, it's supposed to take you to a certain place. And that's a
really positive state. This is not a negative, down album. I'm not the
only person in the world who's experienced loss. Everybody has a brother
or sister or father or friend somewhere that died and that means they
can understand. You just have to have been alive for a little while to
experience it. It's not a mystery. It's real life giving you a real
hello, welcome to the club."
That "certain place" is reached on the
final track, 'Magic And Loss', a spectral sleepwalk of mystic jazz-metal
whose lyrics suggest reconciliation. It hints that Reed's even come to
believe in some kind of afterlife: there's a door up ahead, not a wall.
can call it a spiritual awakening, or whatever you like. Things look a
certain way, like you're driving directly into a wall. There's nothing
you can do about it. But no, it's a door. You just didn't see it. And a
door, obviously, can be opened. It depends how you look at things. The
song 'Magic And Loss' I find very uplifting It's resolving the whole
album. You don't wanna come to the end of that experience still feeling
splintered. You have to reconcile yourself to it. But hopefully, it's a
reconciliation with a lot of positive aspects to it. It's an inspiring
thing, what I witnessed. I want to be as good as them. These were the
people who were inspiring to me right the way through the last minute.
It's really sad not being able to call Doc Pomus up right to this day,
because he was like the sun. He was just one of those people that you
feel good when you're around them. You could be feeling bad, and you
visit them and they say two words and you feel good. But then, it would
have been even worse not to have known him at all. That's part of the
whole magic and loss deal."
Lofty speculations
and spiritual quandaries withal, Lou Reed spends the bulk of his time
grappling with the nitty-gritty technicalities of making records. It the
truth be known, he's a bit of a muso. Way back in his decadent days,
Reed could drive Lester Bangs up the wall by discoursing interminably
about how George Benson invented a totally clean, totally pure
amplifier. Even the unendurable din of Metal Machine Music was informed
by audiophile obsessions. The interview has hardly begun before Reed
launches into a diatribe about rock critics' cloth-eared ignorance about
"It always amazes me — and this not meant to be
offensive — how little you people hear, on a tonal level. I find the
sound on the new album awe-inspiring. There is a radiance to it, an
enormous tonal range. It's like a stereo image. It's very 3D-ish. You
can actually walk around it. It has the sonic depth to match its subject
matter. This time, I've got the tones I haven't quite been able to
before. On the sleeve of New York I wrote about the equipment we used,
and I was trying to let the people know there's a lot going into the
choices that are there. It's not as spontaneous as it seems."
explains, at considerable length, about the "incalculable hours" he and
co-producer, second guitarist Mike Rathke, spent on research,
refinement, and modification of equipment. He describes how the kind of
tape you use, the pick-ups, even the wood in the guitar can all make a
difference.* It's all very incongruous.
The reality of Lou
Reed-as-technical-boffin jars discordantly with the image of
Lou-Reed-as-icon-of-street- romanticism. In the post-punk scheme,
technique and technology are generally deemed to be enemies of the
gritty authenticity that's allegedly the heart of rock 'n' roll: Lou
Reed and the Velvet Underground, for all the arty input, are generally
taken to represent the epitome of this raw expression. Because they tend
to come from a Litcrit or humanities background, rock critics find the
nuts-and-bolts side of music-making demystifying. But for Lou Reed, it's
where the mystery is painstakingly constructed. It's a sort of science
of magic.
"No one knows that better than me because I know how
much magic disappears when the technical stuff is wrong. At the end of
the whole process, when you listen to your finished CD, you realise that
you've got a cassette from the very beginning that sounds 100 times
better. So what happened? Why is it so cold sounding? There's no
dimension. That guitar hurts my ears. Where's the bass? Why is it muddy?
If you get into the why of it, it's fascinating. And it's a real thrill
if you finally get it to sound right. The only way to learn is to make
records. But most people aren't really interested, they think the magic
is all over there, and the technical stuff is another matter, and if you
have a good producer that's all taken care of. The writing and
performance are one thing, but if the production and technical side
aren't there... and I've got the records to prove it. A lot of my
records, 'till I could get a handle on it, aren't even produced, except
in the sense that I wouldn't let the producers do anything, rather than
let them do it wrong. And the records are completely dry, 'cos I didn't
know how it worked, but I knew they'd fuck it up so I wouldn't let 'em
do anything. It takes a long time to learn, when you're making a record
every couple of years. It's fascinating, but it's like this onion with
all these skins, endless."
Far more congruent
with Lou Reed's received image is the fact that Penguin are soon to
publish Between Thought And Expression, a selection of lyrics that he
felt could stand up on their own without music. It's strange that it
took him so long to get between book covers, considering that back in
1979 he declared "my expectations are very high... to be the greatest
writer that ever lived on God's earth. In other words I'm talking about
Shakespeare, Dostoevsky..."
"That was just me shooting my mouth
off, but it is a real dream. To do something that's not disposable, that
could really hold its own for ever. It sounds kind of glib and
pretentious, to say you want to be up there with Dostoievsky, but I
would. I wanna create art that will live forever, whether it's on record
or on the printed page. That's why I avoid slang, any expression that
will date, like 'dig it' or 'freaked out'."
Despite his aversion
to transient argot, Reed's lyrics exude a great sense of demotic,
everyday speech, rather than the ornately poeticised. The same love of
'conversational tone', the faltering rhythm of thoughts taking shape as
they're spoken, informed his interviews with novelist Hubert Selby (Last
Exit To Brooklyn ), and Czechoslovakian playwright turned President,
Vaclav Havel, both of which are included in Between Thought And
"I don't like it when the interview's so cleaned up
that both interviewer and subject sound like the same person. I like to
keep the real rhythm of the way the person talks. With Selby, hopefully
from the interview I did with him, you can hear him think. The way he
puts things together I found really fascinating. Hearing a writer think
like that, you can see why he's a great writer."
The most
interesting thing to emerge in the Havel encounter was the Velvet
Underground's indirect effect on history. First there was a Czech
avant-rock band called Plastic People Of The Universe who covered Velvet
Underground songs, and then they got sent to prison, and then the
campaign to get them released evolved into Charter 77, which in turn led
to Czechoslovakia's 'Velvet Revolution'. That's a coincidence (the
"Velvet" means soft, bloodless) but a beautiful one, and it highlights
the way a band like the Velvet Underground, by symbolising absolute
possibility, can be 'political' without being politicised, can change
things without being explicitly consciousness-raising. Most touching of
all for Reed is the fact that the Charter 77 activists recited his
lyrics to themselves as a source of spiritual fortitude.
"I have
the handprinted book of my lyrics, in Czechoslovakian, that Havel gave
me, and it's an astonishing thing. It meant so much to them. Music was a
real expression to them of social change. We walked over this beautiful
bridge in Prague and they told me that a few years ago you wouldn't
have seen a guitarist on that bridge with kids singing. It was
considered dangerous. Where people get together is where ideas are
generated, and that's a problem for totalitarian governments. It's hard
for us to even conceive of living under such constraints."
When he goes about his daily life, or looks in the mirror, does he feel mythic, an icon?
don't even relate to that. It doesn't even cross my mind. What I'm
really interested in is stuff like analogue to digital converter
shoot-outs. I don't even conceive of that other stuff at all. It's like,
they must mean someone else. It doesn't compute with me, simply because
I know how hard I have to work with the limitations that I have, just
to get to where I am."
Nonetheless, Lou Reed is one of those
artists that people of a certain generation tell the time by. Like Neil
Young, Reed is one of the few figures from his era to survive with
credibility intact and muse in working order. But Reed denies feeling
any responsibility to the people who look to him for the next big
statement. "It wouldn't even dawn on me," he shrugs. He also claims to
be oblivious to the legions of copyist who have turned 'Lou Reed' into a
"I always thought of it as a situation where some really
obvious ideas were sitting there, and I happened to be one of the guys
who happened to hit the dirt first. It's like, hey, look at that,
there's a whole continent over there. It seemed really obvious. Then you
start listening to Brecht or Weill, and you realise quite a few people
have been running around there."
spend a lot of time researching. You could call it studying. I ask, Why
does digital do that? What's the analog-to-digital conversion process?
Are the filters better now? It goes back to the wood in the guitar,
which pickups to use. Everything I have has been modified, tinkered
with, to make it work for me." Reed and his co-producer, second
guitarist Mike Rathke, spend "incalculable hours" in research and
refinement. "I practically studied with some technical people who really
helped me out. Because there's millions of choices out there and even
if you had a zillion dollars and bought all these to try them, it'd take
forever. So you really need someone knowledgeable and talented to guide
you. Even down to the kind of tape you record on."
Reed takes
similar pains when it comes to selecting compatible musicians,
preferring to work with people he knows personally. He's quick to
demolish the idea that tension heightens creativity, and is particularly
scathing about what he calls "the Lou Reed/John Cale myth" (that the
duo's prickly relationship is the font of their collective genius).
"Things would be 1,000 times better without that tension." When you
recall that he and Cale disagreed about such minutiae as the amount of
time between tracks on Drella, it's easy to believe.
Reed's team
on Magic and Loss is almost the same as for New York: Mike Rathke as
second guitarist, Rob Wasserman on bass, with frequent Tom Waits and
Elvis Costello accomplice Michael Blair replacing Fred Maher on drums.
"We have the interaction of a real band. The music's based on ebb and
flow. A song should give the impression of being a living thing. It's
always going to be assembled; that's how recording works. But our stuff
is about as live as we could get it and still satisfy my requirements
for sound."
According to Rathke, the approach to Magic and Loss
was, with New York, a fusion of vintage and state-of-the-art. "We try to
blend the old with the new. Lou and I spend a lot of time on
pre-production. It goes down to the kind of wood, strings, pick-ups,
wirings, speaker cabinets you use. Neither vintage nor state-of-the-art
does it all. If I was a painter, I'd want the colors to harmonize. And
sounds are like colors in a way; they have to match."
With his
perfectionism ("compromise makes me ill"), it's not surprising that Reed
has only ever produced one other artist, Reuben Blades. "It's too much
work. You'd have to love what they did, to spend that much time with
their material. Plus I want things my way. I could imagine producing one
song, maybe, and only if I got alone with the person. But I couldn't be
brought along to produce a group – that's too many factors I couldn't
control. I want as much control as possible."
Reed is legendary for his antipathy to being interviewed. During our
encounter, he had to cadge a couple of soothing cigarettes, even
though he's quit smoking, because, he says, "I get nervous about
interviews." He was even more uptight about being on the other side of
the tape recorder.
"With Hubert Selby, I came in with typed
questions, because I was sure I'd be nervewracked and I didn't want to
forget anything. Same with Havel. The only reason I did it was that
these were people I really wanted to meet, that I really admired, and
here was a chance to meet them and ask them things that I was really
interested in. I'm sure there are a few others I could think of, but
it's just really hard work. I'd much rather go out for a drink with
them. I found with someone like me it was really good to have notes, in
order of asking, so that I didn't glaze out. And later kick myself
'cause I forgot to ask them the most important question. I had loads of
spare batteries, and a microphone that I knew worked."
"there are immaturities, but there are immensities" - Bright Star (dir. Jane Campion)>>>>>>>>>>>>>> "the fear of being wrong can keep you from being anything at all" - Nayland Blake >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> "It may be foolish to be foolish, but, somehow, even more so, to not be" - Airport Through The Trees
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Friday, October 25, 2013
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
Brian Eno-David Byrne
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
Uncut, 2006
by Simon Reynolds
On its original 1981 release, this album was widely dissed for being "cold-blooded," "detached", an eggheads-in-the-soundlab experimental exercise. Yet Bush of Ghosts drips with emotional intensity, it's just that the feelings don't come directly from the record's makers but from the found voices--Pentecostal preachers, Algerian Muslims--harvested by the duo from American radio and ethnic field recordings. In another sense, the whole project is framed by the conflicted emotions--uneasy fascination, admiring envy--that this material stirred in Byrne & Eno, at once attracted by the fervour of these true believers yet incapable (as progressive sorts trapped within modernity's rationality and temperance) of accessing that kind of passion themselves.
Chances are, you'll feel the same cold rush as Byrne & Eno the first time they heard the preacher who "stars" on "The Jezebel Spirit. " The electrifying conviction of his cadences as he exorcises the slutty she-devil that's possessed an unfaithful wife will make your hair stand on end, even as your liberalism recoils from the patriarchy he's restoring ("Jezebel, you have no rights to her, her husband is the head of the house"). Elsewhere, it's the mystical rather than moralising aspect of religion that enthralls Byrne & Eno: "Regiment," for instance, entwines the ecstastic ululations of a Lebanese mountain singer with sinuous bass and arabesques of synth. Throughout Ghosts, the duo lovingly recontextualise their sources, embedding the voices in a sticky web of psychedelic rhythm, funky ambience, and some of the most counter-intuitive and contortionist basslines you'll ever hear.
Tracks 1 to 5 (the original first side) are great, but 6 to 11 (side two) is a whole other plane, gliding you through a phantasmagoric sequence of steadily more untaggable and precedent-less groovescapes. Following "Moonlight in Glory"-- falter-funk laced with the halting cadences of Scriptural chants and astral gospel plaints, as incanted by a literally isolated African-American sect from the Sea Islands off Georgia's coast--"The Carrier" shimmers like a portent or future-ghost of The Unforgettable Fire. But instead of Bono, thankfully that Lebanese dude[tte?] reappears to kiss the heavens. "A Secret Life" is an itchy microcosm as gorgeously infolded as Can's "Quantum Physics," while "Come With Us" pretzels bass-gloop and stereo-flickering sorcery into a disorientating audio-maze. Heading out into a non-specifically Oriental hinterland of gaseous gong sounds, "Mountain of Needles" sounds like God sighing with satisfaction at the end of the sixth day. Byrne & Eno, the Creators of an equally marvelous if somewhat more compact universe of sound, ought to have felt pretty pleased with themselves too.
It's a pity that the immaculate construction that is Ghosts now has an extension tacked onto it: the inevitable slew of out-takes, most of them sketchy and substandard, diminishes the sense of conclusion achieved by "Mountain". A couple of the bonus tracks work as intriguing footnotes ( the ungodly exhalations of "Vocal Outtakes", the needling stellar twinkle of "Solo Guitar with Tin Foil") but overall, the effect is a bit like the Almighty following up the Cosmos with an encore of… Croydon.
the excised cut
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
Uncut, 2006
by Simon Reynolds
On its original 1981 release, this album was widely dissed for being "cold-blooded," "detached", an eggheads-in-the-soundlab experimental exercise. Yet Bush of Ghosts drips with emotional intensity, it's just that the feelings don't come directly from the record's makers but from the found voices--Pentecostal preachers, Algerian Muslims--harvested by the duo from American radio and ethnic field recordings. In another sense, the whole project is framed by the conflicted emotions--uneasy fascination, admiring envy--that this material stirred in Byrne & Eno, at once attracted by the fervour of these true believers yet incapable (as progressive sorts trapped within modernity's rationality and temperance) of accessing that kind of passion themselves.
Chances are, you'll feel the same cold rush as Byrne & Eno the first time they heard the preacher who "stars" on "The Jezebel Spirit. " The electrifying conviction of his cadences as he exorcises the slutty she-devil that's possessed an unfaithful wife will make your hair stand on end, even as your liberalism recoils from the patriarchy he's restoring ("Jezebel, you have no rights to her, her husband is the head of the house"). Elsewhere, it's the mystical rather than moralising aspect of religion that enthralls Byrne & Eno: "Regiment," for instance, entwines the ecstastic ululations of a Lebanese mountain singer with sinuous bass and arabesques of synth. Throughout Ghosts, the duo lovingly recontextualise their sources, embedding the voices in a sticky web of psychedelic rhythm, funky ambience, and some of the most counter-intuitive and contortionist basslines you'll ever hear.
Tracks 1 to 5 (the original first side) are great, but 6 to 11 (side two) is a whole other plane, gliding you through a phantasmagoric sequence of steadily more untaggable and precedent-less groovescapes. Following "Moonlight in Glory"-- falter-funk laced with the halting cadences of Scriptural chants and astral gospel plaints, as incanted by a literally isolated African-American sect from the Sea Islands off Georgia's coast--"The Carrier" shimmers like a portent or future-ghost of The Unforgettable Fire. But instead of Bono, thankfully that Lebanese dude[tte?] reappears to kiss the heavens. "A Secret Life" is an itchy microcosm as gorgeously infolded as Can's "Quantum Physics," while "Come With Us" pretzels bass-gloop and stereo-flickering sorcery into a disorientating audio-maze. Heading out into a non-specifically Oriental hinterland of gaseous gong sounds, "Mountain of Needles" sounds like God sighing with satisfaction at the end of the sixth day. Byrne & Eno, the Creators of an equally marvelous if somewhat more compact universe of sound, ought to have felt pretty pleased with themselves too.
It's a pity that the immaculate construction that is Ghosts now has an extension tacked onto it: the inevitable slew of out-takes, most of them sketchy and substandard, diminishes the sense of conclusion achieved by "Mountain". A couple of the bonus tracks work as intriguing footnotes ( the ungodly exhalations of "Vocal Outtakes", the needling stellar twinkle of "Solo Guitar with Tin Foil") but overall, the effect is a bit like the Almighty following up the Cosmos with an encore of… Croydon.
the excised cut
Posted by SIMON REYNOLDS at 9:55 AM No comments:
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
4AD : the Dozendirector's cut, eMusic, 2006
by Simon Reynolds
4AD was founded by Ivo Watts-Russell and Peter Kent in 1979 as an offshoot of the independent label Beggars Banquet and intended as a spawning group for groups to graduate to the larger label. The imprint soon became its own entity, with a sensibility rooted in the adventurous, open-ended spirit and sonics of 1979, but tilted towards the darker, more existentialist side of post-punk- (Joy Division and the Banshees, rather than the politically militant Gang of Four end of things).
Crucial to 4AD's burgeoning mystique was the lush and enigmatic artwork of Vaughan Oliver, whose role in establishing the label's identity was as important as Peter Saville's at Factory. 4AD's earliest acts were proto-Goth outfits like Bauhaus, The Birthday Party, and Rema Rema, but the label really blossomed circa 1983 with a sound you could call, not unkindly, Goth-lite: delicately textured and gentler on the ear than the harsh 'n' hammy horror-show that Goth proper had degenerated to, oriented more to rapture and reverie than the macabre or morbid.
4AD will be forever identified with its signature Goth-lite group the Cocteau Twins, but other key signings of this period include Dead Can Dance, Xmal Deutschland, and Wolfgang Press. Just as the "4AD sound" was getting perilously close to formula, the label reinvented itself in the late Eighties, by catching a wave of arty-but-raw, rootsy-but-weird rock coming out of America: the brilliant New England outfits Throwing Muses and Pixies (and later its offshoot The Breeders). In the Nineties, the label diversified again, signing shoegazers Lush and Pale Saints while keeping an eye out for American talent like Nick Drake-like melancholics the Red House Painters. The label faded from earshot for much of the Nineties but has recently resurged with critically acclaimed acts like TV on the Radio, Piano Magic, and living legend Scott Walker.
After the Snow
Many British groups in the early Eighties struggled to shake off Joy Division's influence. The cold marble beauty of their sound and the mature majesty it lent to adolescent despair proved so compellingly original it practically condemned a generation to non-originality. (Hell, even New Order had some difficulties carving out a fresh path). Following their Closer-damaged 1981 debut Mesh and Lace, Modern English stepped boldly into the light with a sound that found the interzone between Joy Division-style severity and Orchestral Manoevures in the Dark winsomeness. The tom-tom churning drums frequently infringe Steven Morris trademark patterns and the bass guitar drones melodiously a la Peter Hook, but the sparkling guitars and soaring synths could be Tears for Fears or Depeche Mode. The bouncy gloom of a tune like the oh-so ironically titled "Life in the Gladhouse" is perfect for Goths who want to dance but keep their deep'n'mysterious cool intact. The sighing chorus "oh me, oh my" verges on comical but the great rolling beat banishes any reservations. Indeed throughout it's the lithe exuberance of the rhythm section (drummer Richard Brown and bassist Mick Conroy) that makes After the Snow such a winning slab of Goth-lite. That, and artful arrangements and mad-catchy tunes, such as MTV perennial and wedding-song fave "I Melt With You".
Far from 4AD's most famous or celebrated band, instrumental quartet Dif Juz were nonetheless reputedly the Cocteau Twins' favorite group. Indeed Robin Guthrie produced this, their sole full-length excursion. Soaked in reverb and echoplex (the group were huge dub fans but thankfully never stray into the faux-skank zone), Dif Juz's dual guitar interplay resembles an out-of-focus Television or Durutti Column heard from the bottom of a lake. Impressionistic and rhapsodic, the plangent ripples and frenetic flurries scattered by guitarist brothers Dave and Alan Curtis dominate the proceedings, but Harold Budd-like piano peeks through on "Love Insane" (along with an offkey Elizabeth Fraser from the Cocteaus) while Richie Thomas' saxophone on tunes like "Crosswinds" recalls the serene fjord-scapes of ECM artists like Jan Garbarek. Listen expecting shapely song-structures or clearly signposted melodic pathways, and you'll be frustrated. But if you surrender to the be-here-now meander of it all, the spangled eddies and lustrous whorls of the Dif Juz sound will carry you up and away.
Filigree & Shadow
With This Mortal Coil, 4AD boss Ivo pioneered a format since adopted by the likes of U.N.K.L.E.--the non-musician with loads of ideas surrounded by a floating pool of musicians and guest collaborators who help realise his vision. In this case, the project largely involved cover versions of obscure Ivo favorites and is perhaps best understood as a form of rock criticism and an act of canon-making. In the mid-Eighties, the choices Ivo made were striking: then largely forgotten post-psychedelic minstrels like Roy Harper, Big Star's Chris Bell and Alex Chilton, Tim Buckley, Tom Rapp. While the first This Mortal Coil album, 1984's It'll End In Tears, features the project's single most successful reinterpretation (Liz Fraser's awesome and damn near original-eclipsing version of Buckley's "Song to the Siren") Filigree & Shadow has the edge over the debut. Two more Buckley tunes ("I Must Have Been Blind" and "Morning Glory") are joined by "Strength of Strings" off Gene Clark's solo album No Other and a version of Pearls Before Swine's "The Jeweller". The stand-out remakes aren't from the singer-songwriter era, though, but postpunk: a clangorous treatment of Talking Heads' "Drugs" and a version of "Alone" even more glacial and gripping than Colin Newman's original on his post-Wire solo debut A-Z. Ivo's overt over-arching concept for This Mortal Coil was a twin celebration of "the beauty of despair" and the timelessness of song. But one also suspects a secret semi-conscious motivation: claiming for 4AD the kind of maverick stature held by Elektra Records in its heyday.
The Moon and the Melodies
No one would claim this is Harold Budd's finest half-hour (that would be his Brian Eno Ambient Series collaboration The Plateaux of Mirror), nor that it's the Cocteau Twins' peak achievement (too many contenders to list). But it is a captivating cul de sac off the beaten track of both artists' trajectories. And an apt pairing, given their idyllicism and mutual ardour for effects-saturated texture. Cocteau soundboys Guthrie and Raymonde do a good job of standing in for Eno on "Memory Gongs", cloaking Budd's piano in a mist of reverb to create an effect like the autumn dawn-mist slowly rising while a watery sun peeks through yellow-hazed sky. The instrumentals are nice but inevitably the most breathtaking moments come when Liz Fraser's voice enters the soundscape. All updrafts, currents, tides and breakers, "Ooze Out and Away, Onehow" is a mermaid torch song, while the shatteringly lovely "Eyes Are Mosaics" would be regarded as a Cocteau Twins classic if it had appeared on one of their "proper" albums.
Within the Realm of a Dying Sun
Dead Can Dance's motto could be "anywhere but here, anywhen but now." At once somber and ornamental, their music forges links between Medievalism (Gothic in the original sense of the word, DCD's sound often recalls liturgical music designed for the reverberant spaces of massive cathedrals) and the non-West (you can hear threads of Middle Eastern, African, and Oriental music in their tapestry of exotica). This Australian duo is also something of a split personality group. Running a very close second to Liz Fraser, Lisa Gerrard's voice is a thing of wonder in both senses of the word: awe is her primary emotion, awe is what her piercing ululations strike in the listener. Brendan Perry is closer to the mold of the troubled troubadours that inspired This Mortal Coil, figures like Tims Rose and Buckley, and above all Scott Walker. This means that his rather portentous lyrics (song titles like "In The Wake of Adversity") sometimes weigh down his undeniably grand and mellifluous singing. On Within the Realm, the follow-up to Dead Can Dance's dark masterpiece Spleen and Ideal, the split personality was splayed across the two separate sides of the original vinyl album. Side One frontloads Perry's doomy ballads and gloomy instrumentals, while the reverse is devoted to Gerrard's devotionals, like the dervish-whirling "Cantara". Her singing is so bliss-rich that "In the Dawn of the Iconoclast" was sampled for the Ecstasy anthem "Papua New Guinea" by the Future Sound of London. Later in the group's career, DCD would cross over to a mass audience of the sort of people that listen to New Age, Gregorian chants, and Enya. But Within catches them at the perfect median point between the crypt and the chill-out zone.
Lonely Is An Eyesore
A prodigious feat of self-celebration from a label then at its zenith of eminence, this compilation of new tracks specially recorded by the 4AD roster came sumptuously packaged in an over-the-top style last seen with Fleetwood Mac's Tusk. The standard issue came as a lavishly designed cardboard case with a three-way folding inner sleeve, but there was also a limited edition of wooden boxes containing deluxe prints. Sonic contents wise, it's a curate's egg, ranging from the slight to the sublime. Colourbox's "Hot Doggie" is brash dance-rock decorated with movie soundbites, loud and trivial, while "Cut the Tree" is a typical slice of The Wolfgang Press's brand of failed pretentiousness. But Dead Can Dance's two offerings "Frontier" and "The Protagonist" are bewitching moodscapes, Cocteau Twins' radiant "Crushed" is one of their best songs ever, and "No Motion" is Dif Juz at their most dynamic, crashing chords scattering shards of dazzle hither and thither. Best of all is "Fish" by one of the truly unique groups of the late Eighties, Throwing Muses. David Narcizo's martial but static drums, the gyrating rhythm guitar chords of Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donelly, and Leslie Langston's sidling bass create a strange feeling of suspended motion last heard in rock on Led Zep's "Four Sticks", as though you're stuck on a treadmill or struggling in quicksand. Her voice midway between a Stevie Nicks croon and a Gaelic pagan ululation, Hersh sings what appears to be a love song--"I have a man/he follows my hips with his hands… He follows my lips with his melting eyes"--although with a lyricist as wayward as Kristin you can never be sure. One of the song's more opaque verses--"lonely is as lonely does/lonely is an eyesore/the feeling describes itself"--provides the compilation's name.
Blue Bell Knoll
It's so hard to pick a Cocteau Twins album as the One. Head over Heels is their early classic, and EPs like Sunburst and Snowblind, The Spangle Maker and Love's Easy Tears are mid-period highs. Still, Blue Bell Knoll is their most flawless record, and also the one that's the most approachable for virgin listeners while still retaining the group's bottomless mystery. You can hear a smidgeon of Kate Bush on the title track opener, but Fraser soon sheds all ancestral traces to assert her candidacy as one of the five or six most original vocalists of the rock era. Likewise the group, having started out as a sort of soft-core Siouxsie & the Banshees, now mature into a sound without parallel or peer. Lindsay Buckingham to Liz's Nicks, spangle-maker Robin Guthrie drapes his lover in iridescent canopies of guitarstuff. Fraser's sculpted gush of liquidized language is almost entirely indecipherable but always sounds rich in wholly private, non-verbalisable meaning. Sometimes these sweet nothings seem like songs for swooning lovers, sometimes they seem literally like baby-talk, making you imagine an Eskimo mother chirruping to her newborn. The Cocteaus struggled after this album: when you've made songs as sublime as "Carolyn Fingers," 'Cico Buff" and "Ella Megablast Burls Forever" what do you do for an encore? They made a mistaken pop-wards move, with Fraser singing first in better enunciated gibberish and then in distinctly plain English. She said so much more when you couldn't understand a word.
Combining the raw power of The Stooges with a penchant for all-American grotesquerie reminiscent of David Lynch, Pixies seem like an unlikely match for 4AD . But they were an arty group. Singer and main songwriter Black Francis cited the Surrealists as his big crush, and gave them the nod in Doolittle's opener "Debaser", the lines "Slicing up eyeballs" and "I am un chien Andalusia" paying homage to the Luis Bunuel film. Given his Charismatic Pentecostal background, it makes sense that Pixies music would be a valve for Francis to vent all his repressions in a "stream of unconsciousness" (as he put it). His lyrics seethed with images of self-mutilation, incest, sleaze, "broken faces" and bodily fluids. The title Doolittle, from the children's books about the doctor who learns to talk to the animals, suggests the Freudian notion of man as "the sick animal", sick precisely because he cannot accept his own bestialism. Songs like the gorgeously fatalistic "This Monkey's Gone To Heaven", "I Bleed" and "Hey" bore witness to Francis' grim fascination with the bare necessities and base fatuities that comprise the biological facts of life: sex, birth, excretion, death. "Hey" grimly notes that "uh" is the sound people make when they fuck, give birth, take a dump, and concludes "we're chained". Others like the rampant "Tame" and heavy-breathing "Dead" revel in the nitty-gritty of nookie. Following hard on the heels of the group's rabid opening salvo Come On Pilgrim and ragged classic Surfer Rosa, this album was Pixies' peak. After this they veered off into a lighter-and-cuter pop direction, as if scared by the dark voids they'd glimpsed on Doolittle.
Where Pixies and Throwing Muses brought something new to 4AD, His Name Is Alive seem transparently to be that rare thing: the American 4AD obsessive, purposefully endeavoring to make music to caress Ivo's ear-drums. His Name Is Alive is essentially a solitary obsessive, Warren Defever, who draws on a fluctuating cast of accomplices to help realise the noises in his head. Those sounds have a spidery exquisiteness that couldn't be further from the late Eighties/early Nineties Amerindie norm. The vibe of Livonia (which sounds like a fantastical imaginary land but is named after Defever's hometown in Michigan) is very much the reclusive studio-whiz alone with his sound-warping boxes. If the effect is sometimes overly precious and forced in its faux-mystery, the culprit is often singer Karin Oliver, who sometimes entrances like such shoulda-been-on-4AD ethereal girls as Cranes' vocalist Alison Shaw and Shelleyan Orphan's Caroline Crawley, but often merely grates with her wavery shrillness. Still, Defever's menagerie of strange processed noises and aberrant guitar parts generally keeps things diverting.
Joy 1967-1990
Signing New York indie rocker Kurt Ralske was another example of 4AD stretching beyond its usual parameters. His music as Ultra Vivid Scene had far more in common with the Sixties-referencing meta-rock of the Jesus & Mary Chain and Spacemen 3 than with the Cocteaus or Dead Can Dance. Like the Spacemen especially, Ralske's songs play clever games with the language of love, drugs, and religion, equating them as expressions of a human ache to fill the hole at the heart of being with a holy absolute--the sweetest girl, the perfect prescription, God's grace. At its least, it's like Matthew Sweet with hipper reference points, both musically (Velvet Underground, Suicide) and philosophically (Barthes, Bataille). But at its most--"Guilty Pleasure", "Extra Ordinary"--it's reminiscent of Prince in his neo-psychedelic mode. The opening triptych of "It Happens Every Time", "Staring At the Sun" and "Three Stars" makes for an irresistible salvo of swashbuckling psych, while "Special One," featuring Pixie Kim Deal's wonderfully carefree backing vocals, feels as euphoric as mainlining helium.
The Comforts of Madness
Shoegaze was an obvious fit for 4AD--after all, many of these British bands were inspired by the label's groups, especially Cocteau Twins and AR Kane. If Lush were 4AD's shoegaze-as-pop gambit, Pale Saints were the artier proposition, making music that was dense, at times overwrought, but always interesting. The name "Pale Saints" fits them to a tee. Ian Masters' blanched vocals have a pure-of-spirit, devotional quality, resurrecting that monk-like quasi-Gregorian chant style introduced by British psychedelic groups like Tintern Abbey. Riddled with imagery of nature and the elements, songs like "Language of Flowers" hark back to the Romantic poets Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley. "Sea of Sound" sounds like the missing link between Neu!'s "See Land" and Flying Saucer Attack's Distance, conjuring mind eye's images of a pink-and-gold cirrus-streaked skyline at dusk. "A Deep Sleep For Steven" is a cavern of a ballad, its walls daubed with mercury-splash guitar and echoing to the rumble of drums from some remote interior cavity. And "Little Hammer" is a delightful neo-psychedelic oddity, the sepia-tinted melancholy of what sounds like a ghost-town's out-of-tune piano (but is more likely a hammered dulcimer) offset by incongruously vivacious percussion.
The Drift
Ivo first approached his hero Scott Walker back in the mid-Eighties, asking him to sing on the second This Mortal Coil album Filigree & Shadow. Nothing came of it, but perseverance obviously pays off eventually, because twenty years later 4AD got to release the legendary balladeer's comeback album The Drift. Walker's four astonishing solo albums of the late Sixties showed that he was a kind of cinematographer of sound, using intricately detailed orchestration, opaque-but-vivid lyrics, and his elegantly anguished voice to paint the kind of motion pictures that scar your memory and fill the immediately subsequent days after viewing with a vague feeling of disquiet. With The Drift, the 63 year old Walker clearly aimed to make a work on a par with the great European modernists of film, directors like Bergman, Pasolini, Resnais. Accordingly the themes are heavy, verging on ponderous (songs about the gruesome execution by mob of Mussolini and his lover, about twilight-era Elvis conversing with his dead twin Jesse) while the execution is challenging for artist and listener alike, involving bizarre gambits like pounding sides of dead meat for percussion, horns that caw bleakly like crows, harrowingly atonal string parts, and sundry mis-shapen noises. The lyrics that issue from Walker's peerless mouth--"the slimy stars," "nose holes caked in black cocaine"--evoke atmospheres of grotesquerie and malaise. From the "curare!" chorus of "Jolson and Jones" (a reference to a poison that causes suffocation through muscular paralysis) to the hair-raising demonic laughter that erupts in "The Escape", The Drift makes Radiohead's Kid A look like a walk in an extremely sunny park. It is a powerful album but one that is easier to admire than to love. The Drift may not get that many repeat plays but, like one of those great European modernist films, it's something you'll want to experience at least once.
Posted by SIMON REYNOLDS at 9:15 AM No comments:
Monday, October 21, 2013
Imitation Invisible Jukebox with Simon Reynolds
(postpunk records chosen and presented by Wilson Neate)Pop Culture Press magazine, 2006
During an interview with Simon Reynolds about Rip It Up and Start Again in 2006, I played him five songs (without telling him what they were beforehand) and asked him to talk about each one in turn – along the same lines as The Wire's Invisible Jukebox.
"Careering" - PiL (Metal Box, 1979)
This is one of two songs on what's perhaps the best side of post-punk ever, although this is lost today because it's on CD and not in its original format of three 45 rpm 12-inch records... "Careering" is the second of two songs on the third side — side one of the second record. The first track is "Poptones," an amazing trance-like, almost psychedelic song, with a looping, gyrating guitar riff and this incredible Jah Wobble bassline. Rotten is singing from the point of view of being abducted and you can't work out if he's been murdered or not, or if he's just lying in the woods, cowering in the foliage, with all his body heat going. And the next track is "Careering," which has no guitar in it; instead, Keith Levene uses a synthesizer in a really abstract way and the sounds swoop over your head. The song is obliquely about Northern Ireland, at a time when the conflict must have been at its worst and there were people on hunger strike. Lydon talks about people going over the border, bringing weapons and bombs. It's very oblique but it's definitely about civil strife in Northern Ireland. It's Public Image at the peak of their inventiveness. Metal Box is PiL's masterpiece and this is their best side; this two-song sequence is a real killer.
"Lions After Slumber" - Scritti Politti (Songs to Remember, 1982)
This was originally the B-side of "The 'Sweetest Girl'," which is when Scritti Politti reinvented themselves as a pop band. "The 'Sweetest Girl'" is — as its title suggests — a very "sweet," almost cloying pop-reggae song. It's a beautiful love song, but the sort of love song that actually questions the idea of love songs and problematizes notions of love and possession. And then, on the other side, "Lions After Slumber" is a very strange track. It's a list song — a list song through the lens of Green's narcissism. It's a list of things to do with him: "my languor," "my greed," "my elbow," "my indecision," "my sex," "my white chocolate" and so on, all these states of mind, bodily dispositions, little moments, fragments of time, things he owns, his stance. It's obviously very influenced by post-structuralism and the idea of the self not as a unitary entity, but as a plurality or as a multiplicity, and the idea of there being no essence to someone — just these moments and interactions with things or with people. Despite the fact that it's about the fragmented self, coming through it all is this very strong, almost feline narcissism. The way Green sings it, you feel he's like a cat basking in himself, arching his back, really in love with himself. It comes through in this sort of falsetto he sings in. So there's an interesting tension there between the fragmented self and this absolute self-love conveyed by the vocals. It ties in with the band's failing really: Scritti Politti ultimately wanted to be a pop group but none of their songs ever really got beyond Green's psyche. I imagine people bought Scritti's records and found meanings in them for themselves but it's all so tied up with Green and his particular anguishes and doubts.
"Houses in Motion" - Talking Heads (Remain in Light, 1980)
This is an interesting song. It was a single in England but it wasn't a hit. It followed "Once in a Lifetime," which was a big hit in the UK but not in America. "Houses in Motion" was sequenced on Remain in Light to follow "Once in a Lifetime," which is about someone who's suddenly estranged from his routine, his life, his possessions, his family, his wife. He's estranged from it and it all seems absurd, yet that realization hits him with this sort of a cosmic force. It's almost like a blinding, mystical epiphany: the idea that you cruise through everything without connecting with reality. And then, immediately, it goes into "Houses in Motion," which is back inside alienation. It's based in the same musical ideas as "Once in a Lifetime" but whereas "Once in a Lifetime" is a kind of mystical, oceanic funk, "House in Motion" is a sort of eerie, neurotic funk. The protagonist in the song is back inside neurosis. The key line is: "He's digging his own grave." He's trapped in routine, going round and round, just working for these goals and missing life. So it's almost as if the two songs are sister songs. In the first one, the guy sees through everything and grasps the oneness of existence, in an almost mystical way. In the second song he's like a prisoner. He's blinkered. He's working for ambition and goals, digging his own grave, going nowhere.
"Sketch for Summer" - The Durutti Column (The Return of the Durutti Column, 1980)
Durutti Column are interesting because, a lot of the time, people think of post-punk as this sort of angular, abrasive music but a lot of lovely, ethereal music was made during that period. I would think of Cocteau Twins as a post-punk group in some ways and Young Marble Giants, for instance, made very pretty, intricate, atmospheric, low-key music.And Durutti Column are a case in point. There's this intricate, spider web filigree of guitar-playing that's almost too exquisite at times. I almost feel it's vulgar how exquisite it is — all these arpeggios. It's very delicate. There's nothing abrasive about it. It's a dream music, a music of reverie, of drift, of fleeting prismatic perceptions. Vini Reilly was a very delicate figure. He was anorexic. He was almost wasting away and so there's a sense in which you almost feel that the music is an expression of his body, of his fleeting, weak grip on the world. It's almost as if he's going to drift away, like his music.
"We Are All Prostitutes" - The Pop Group (Single, 1979)
The Pop Group started out as quite Romantic. They were into the Beat poets and their lyrics were very abstract and imagistic. They were political but in the sense of "impossible politics": they were into the Situationists, whose famous slogan was "Be Reasonable: Demand the Impossible." It was that very Romantic idea of politics. Everything was politics, mysticism, poetry; it was all indivisible. Somewhere along the line, though, they got more didactic, a lot more like protest singers, and "We Are All Prostitutes" is the turning point. It's still a very exciting song today. The music is a burning punk-funk sound. The lyrics are guilt-wracked. It captures a certain aspect of post-punk: the idea that everything's corrupt and we're part of a system where everything we do is connected to something evil. The Pop Group agonized over the fact that they were signed to Radar, which was part of a bigger label owned by a conglomerate involved in arms-dealing. That tortured them and they left and formed their own indie label. So that was all part of it — the feeling of being unclean and wanting to be pure. "We Are All Prostitutes" was an almost hysterical rant about consumerism and capitalism as a barbaric religion. It imagines the future when our children will be ashamed of us, stone us, disown us and feel that we're totally corrupt. It turned a lot of people off, fans who liked the early Romantic, Byronic stuff. The Pop Group were a bit like the Romantic poets, like Blake, Shelley and Byron who were also political. Shelley and Byron were involved in liberation struggles. Byron was involved in the attempt to free Greece from Turkish rule. The Pop Group were into all those guys. But they lost a bit of their Romanticism and became very guilt-haunted. They were flagellating themselves, so guilty and tortured by living in this corrupt Western society. People found that a very black-and-white view of the world, very blinkered and a big turn off. The album For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? was very lecturing. The lyrics were almost like pamphlets given out by some left-winger outside the Tube station. It was very guilt-tripping and they lost a lot of their support but "We Are All Prostitutes" is still a powerful piece of music. In some ways, it's more focused than their early stuff because their early Romantic phase is quite chaotic musically. But as they got more militant, they actually got more focused and hard-hitting sonically.
Posted by SIMON REYNOLDS at 9:27 AM No comments:
Labels: POSTPUNK
Friday, October 11, 2013
(article to accompany Synth Britannia BBC 4 documentary)
director's cut, The Guardian, October 9th 2009
by Simon Reynolds
(article to accompany Synth Britannia BBC 4 documentary)
director's cut, The Guardian, October 9th 2009
by Simon Reynolds
The synthpop era really kicked off in June 1979 when Tubeway Army's "Are Friends Electric" hit Number One. Soon the charts were teeming with thin white dudes caked in Max Factor 28 panstick and playing one-finger melodies on Korg keyboards. The sound and visuals owed a substantial debt to David Bowie's Berlin trilogy and his stranded alien in The Man Who Fell To Earth. Chuck in some Europe Between the Wars atmospherics and you had the recipe for Visage's "Fade To Grey" and "The Damned Don't Cry", Japan's "Nightporter" and "Ghosts," Ultravox's "Vienna", and the rest of the scene known (confusingly) as both Futurists and New Romantics. Bowie himself resurfaced with the synth sadness of "Ashes To Ashes". And bringing up the rear were the pioneers , the chaps who'd coined the whole Mittel Europa/ Mensch Maschine shtick in the first place: Kraftwerk, #1 in February 1982 with their 1978 tune "The Model".
Synthesizers in popular music actually go back much further than the mandroid melancholy of Gary Numan. All the way back to the psychedelic Sixties, when American groups like Silver Apples and The United States of America ditched guitars for oscillators. In 1969 George Harrison put out a whole album of Moog doodles called Electronic Sound. German cosmic rockers Tangerine Dream gradually streamlined their Pink Floyd-wannabe grandeur into a minimal, darkly pulsing, all-electronic sound. Floyd themselves forayed into full-blown synth-rock with Dark Side of the Moon's "On The Run", whose brain-searing wibbles anticipating acid house, while other proggers like ELP's Keith Emerson and Yes's Rick Wakeman performed behind massive banks of electronic keyboards but tended to use their synths as glorified organs, hamming it up with Bach-style variations and arpeggiated folderol.
Far more unearthly electro-tones could be heard on the telly via s.f. series like Doctor Who and The Tomorrow People or at the cinema courtesy of dystopian movies like A Clockwork Orange, The Andromeda Strain, and Logan's Run. Black music too had its complement of visionaries besotted with the synth's cornucopia of otherworldly tone-colours, from fusioneers Weather Report and Herbie Hancock to funkateers Stevie Wonder and Funkadelic.
Black or white, these precocious knob-twiddlers all had a freakadelic, proggy mindset: they dug synths for the "far out, man" noises they generated, so they let rip long noodling solos or oozed out abstract dronescapes. None stood a chance of troubling the hit parade.
In some ways the crucial word in synthpop isn't "synth" but "pop". The British groups who took over the charts at the dawn of the Eighties were catchy and concise. Here they followed the lead of Kraftwerk, who were not only the first group to make a whole conceptual package/weltanschauung out of the Electronic Age, but were sublime tunesmiths. It's righteous that Kraftwerk's long-awaited remastered catalogue is getting reissued at almost the exact same time as the long-awaited remastered catalogue of the Beatles, because Hutter & Co rival the Fab Four for both their transformative impact on pop and their melodic genius.
Equally inspiring to the synthpop artists was Kraftwerk's
formality: their grey suits and short hair stood out at a time of jeans and beards and straggly locks, heralding an European future for pop, a decisive break with America and rock'n'roll.
Perhaps even more of a portent here was Giorgio Moroder's Eurodisco, whose clockwork-precise sequencers and icily erotic electronics forged the connection between synthesisers and the dancefloor, as opposed to the early association of Tangerine Dream/Klaus Schulze type music with getting stoned and supine on your sofa. Released in 1977, Donna Summer's Moroder-produced "I Feel Love" and Kraftwerk's "Trans-Europe Express" divided pop time in two as profoundly as "Anarchy in the UK". The Eighties begin there.
Conveniently, these singles arrived at a time when synths got vastly more affordable, portable, and user-friendly. As Synth Britannia reveals, what once cost as much as a small house (and therefore stayed the preserve of prog superstars) became something you could buy for a few hundred quid, or cheaper still if you mail-ordered a build-your-own-synth kit and were prepared to spend weeks assembling the bugger. Groups who'd been inspired by punk's confrontational rhetoric and sartorial provocations but who found the actual sonic substance of punk rock to be too ye olde rock'n'roll seized on the cheapo synth as the real coming of do-it-yourself.
Synthpop went through two distinct phases. The first was all about dehumanisation chic. That didn't mean the music was emotionless (the standard accusation of the synthphobic rocker) but that the emotions were bleak: isolation, urban anomie, feeling cold and hollow inside, paranoia. On the postpunk underground that meant Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle, both of whom ironically used a fair bit of guitar but heavily treated it with electronic effects. On the pop overground it meant John Foxx and Gary Numan. Gaz also used guitar prominently on his early hits under the name Tubeway Army. The secret of his success was that his music, for all its majestic canopies of glacial synth, rocked. Even when he dropped the guitar along with the name Tubeway Army and went fully electronic on "Cars", he kept his flesh-and-blood drummer.
The second phase of synthpop reacted against the first. Electronic sounds now suggested jaunty optimism and the gregariousness of the dancefloor, they evoked a bright, clean future just round the corner rather than J.G. Ballard's desolate Seventies cityscapes. And the subject matter for songs mostly reverted to traditional pop territory: love and romance, escapism and aspiration. The prime movers behind synthpop's rehumanisation were appropriately enough The Human League (just check their song titles: "Open Your Heart", "Love Action", "These Are The Things That Dreams Are Made Of").
Soft Cell were also crucial with their songs of torrid passion and seedy glamour. Their line-up--male-diva Mark Almond, keyboard wiz David Ball--set the template for the first half of the Eighties. The new compact synths resembled an orchestra in a box; you didn't need to have a whole band of instrumentalists. Suddenly pop was packed with duos who divided labor neatly between the composer/technology-operator and the singer/lyricist: Eurythmics, Yazoo, Tears For Fears, Blancmange, Pet Shop Boys. The shape of a synthpop outfit was subversive, or at least enough to make rockists uneasy: the rock band's gang-like structure replaced by same-sex "couples" plus the occasional female diva/male boffin partnership.
Yazoo were a classic example of this fire-and-ice combo: Alison Moyet's proto-Josh Stone soulfulness matched with Vince Clarke's pristine perkiness. Clarke had been the brains behind Depeche Mode, or so everybody thought. Yet while he went on to commit a spree of cultural crimes under aliases like The Assembly and Erasure, it was Depeche who unexpectedly grew into Major Artists, leaving behind dinky ditties like "Just Can't Get Enough" for the musically sophisticated, politically engaged/enraged Construction Time Again and Some Great Reward. The anti-monetarist smash " Everything Counts" caught the melancholy of that moment after the re-election of Thatcher, while "Master and Servant" combined an S/M-inspired personal-is-political allegory about power ("it's a lot like life," so "forget all about equality") with a pop translation of Einsturzende Neubauten/Test Dept-style metal-bashing. Best of all was the haunting "Blasphemous Rumours," a jibe at the Almighty which suggested "God's got a sick sense of humor."
One running theme in Synth Britannia, voiced repeatedly by Daniel Miller, the founder of Depeche's record label Mute, is the notion of electronic music being essentially un-British. But that would seem to beg the question of why the UK became the world's leading nation for synthpop, and later the major force in electronic dance music all through the Nineties. The truth is that the real kingdom of synthphobia was the United States. But this also meant that American misfits could express their deviance by spurning standard high school fare like Motley Crue for "faggy" English electropop. Depeche's cult following in the States expanded as they turned out to be surprisingly kick-ass live performers on the arena circuit, peaking with a 1988 show at the Pasadena Rose Bowl that drew seventy thousand. They were bigger still in Europe, almost Beatles-level in Germany where to this day there are Depeche raves that play Mode music all night long.
A curious thing that comes through watching Synth Britannia is how the futuristic-ness of this music is largely irrecoverable to us, precisely because we live in the future that the synthpop era helped to bring about. Electronic tonalties are omnipresent to the point of banality, thanks to Nineties techno-rave and Noughties R&B, videogames and ring-tones. "Electro" in the early Eighties meant cutting-edge, the future-now; nowadays "electro" refers to the kind of sounds that lit up hipster bars in Hoxton all through this past decade and then unexpectedly went mainstream this year with La Roux and Lady GaGa, which is to say synthetic pop that isn't state-of-art, doesn't use the full capacity of the latest digital technology, and is therefore almost as quaint as if it were made using a harpsichord.
With the future-shock aspect depleted, what comes through now is the pop in synthpop: OMD's pretty tunes, the aching plaintiveness of Numan and Human League. Oddly, what's made this music last are the same things that made The Beatles and Motown immortal: melody and emotion.
Posted by SIMON REYNOLDS at 6:30 PM No comments:
Labels: SYNTHPOP
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text: Gary Hilderbrand, FASLA, is a partner of Reed Hilderbrand LLC, where he has shared design direction of the firm with Doug Reed, FASLA, for nearly 20 years. The firm has been recognized with more than 60 national and regional design awards, and this year was awarded the Landscape Architecture Firm Award by the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). Gary is a professor of practice of landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. At Harvard since 1990, he has taught design studios, landscape technology, and the use of plants as a sustainable medium in design. Long devoted to the exploration of language's role in shaping design intention, he is a recognized author and critic of twentieth-century landscape architecture practice. Through two widely acclaimed books and numerous essays, he has helped to position landscape architecture's role in reconciling intellectual and cultural traditions with contemporary forces of urbanization and change. Gary holds degrees from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and Harvard, where he was recipient of the Charles Eliot Traveling Fellowship and the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, and has served on the advisory and editorial boards of Land Forum, Harvard Design Magazine, and Landscape Architecture Magazine.


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When orkut doesn't borrow features from Facebook, it gets inspired by other Google services. This time, orkut added themes, but not all the users can see the new option. The themes should be familiar, since most of them were created for iGoogle. When you select a theme, only you and your friends can see it in your profile page.
The unofficial Orkut Plus blog has some Greasemonkey scripts that could be used to see the new themes if the feature is not yet enabled in your account. If you notice a link in the header that lets you "change themes", then you have the new feature.
Since iGoogle's themes are really appreciated by users, maybe it makes sense to add themes to all Google services and change them from a central location.
Main Article: Orkut Themes


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2003 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium
San Antonio, TX - 2003 Charles A. Coltman Jr. San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium - Attendees browse the poster session and reception in the Exhibt Hall here today, December 5th, 2003 at the Charles A. Coltman Jr. San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. Over 6000 Physicians, Researchers and Cancer health care professionals from 80 countries gathered at the Henry Gonzales Convention center to share information and data on breast cancer research. Photo © Todd Buchanan/SABCS 2003 Contact info: firstname.lastname@example.com 630.681.1215


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The Guthrie Daily Leader. (Guthrie, Okla.), Vol. 18, No. 56, Ed. 1, Friday, July 26, 1901
Description: Daily newspaper from Guthrie, Oklahoma. Coverage includes local, territory, and United States news, along with advertising.
Date: July 26, 1901
Creator: Niblack, Leslie G.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Newspaper
Partner: Oklahoma Historical Society


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2013 Chevrolet Tahoe LT
|Front Air Conditioning - Automatic Climate Control
|Front Air Conditioning Zones - Dual
|Rear Air Conditioning - Automatic Climate Control , Independently Controlled
|Rear Air Conditioning Zones - Single
|Airbag Deactivation - Occupant Sensing Passenger
|Front Airbags - Dual
|Side Airbags - Front
|Side Curtain Airbags - Front , Rear , Third Row
|Antenna Type - Element
|Auxiliary Audio Input - Bluetooth , USB , Jack
|Headphone Jacks - Rear
|In-Dash CD - MP3 Playback , Single Disc
|Premium Brand - Bose
|Radio - AM / FM
|Radio Data System
|Rear Audio - Volume Control
|Satellite Radio - SiriusXM
|Speed Sensitive Volume Control
|Subwoofer - 1
|Total Speakers - 9
|ABS - 4-wheel
|Front Brake Diameter - 13.0
|Front Brake Type - Disc
|Front Brake Width - 1.18
|Power Brakes
|Rear Brake Diameter - 13.5
|Rear Brake Type - Disc
|Rear Brake Width - 0.79
|Armrests - Rear Center With Cupholders
|Floor Mat Material - Carpet
|Floor Material - Carpet
|Floor Mats - Front , Rear
|Steering Wheel Trim - Leather
|Adjustable Pedals - Power
|Assist Handle - Front , Rear
|Cargo Area Light
|Center Console - Front Console With Storage , Illuminated
|Cruise Control
|Multi-function Remote - Keyless Entry
|One-touch Windows - 1
|Power Outlet(s) - 12V Cargo Area , 12V Front , 12V Rear
|Power Steering
|Power Windows - Lockout Button
|Reading Lights - Front , Rear
|Remote Engine Start
|Steering Wheel - Tilt
|Steering Wheel Mounted Controls - Audio , Cruise Control , Phone
|Storage - Front Seatback
|Vanity Mirrors - Dual Illuminating
|4WD Selector - Electronic
|4WD Type - Part Time W / On Demand Setting
|Axle Ratio - 3.08
|Locking Differential - Rear
|Alternator - 160 Amps
|Battery - Heavy Duty , Maintenance-free
|Battery Rating - 660 CCA
|Battery Saver
|Cylinder Deactivation
|Body Side Moldings - Body-color
|Door Handle Color - Body-color
|Front Bumper Color - Body-color
|Mirror Color - Body-color
|Rear Bumper Color - Body-color
|Rear Trunk/liftgate - Liftgate
|Running Board Color - Black
|Running Boards
|External Temperature Display
|Gauge - Oil Pressure , Tachometer
|Trip Odometer
|Warnings And Reminders - Low Fuel Level , Low Oil Level , Turn Off Headlights
|Daytime Running Lights
|Exterior Entry Lights - Approach Lamps
|Front Fog Lights
|Headlights - Auto On / Off , Halogen
|Side Mirror Adjustments - Manual Folding , Power
|Side Mirrors - Heated
|Roof Rails - Black
|Child Safety Door Locks
|Child Seat Anchors - LATCH System
|Parking Sensors - Rear
|Front Seatbelts - 3-point
|Rear Seatbelts - 3-point
|Seatbelt Pretensioners - Front
|Seatbelt Warning Sensor - Front
|Third Row Seatbelts - 3-point
|Driver Seat - Heated
|Driver Seat Manual Adjustments - Lumbar
|Driver Seat Power Adjustments - 6
|Front Headrests - Adjustable , 2
|Front Seat Type - Bucket
|Passenger Seat - Heated
|Passenger Seat Power Adjustments - 6
|Rear Headrests - Adjustable , 2
|Rear Seat Folding - Split
|Rear Seat Type - 60-40 Split Bench
|Third Row Headrests - Adjustable , 2
|Third Row Seat Folding - Split
|Third Row Seat Type - 50-50 Split Bench , Removable Bench
|Upholstery - Leather-trimmed
|Anti-theft System - Alarm
|Power Door Locks - Anti-lockout
|Hill Holder Control
|Stability Control
|Traction Control
|Trailer Stability Control
|Front Shock Type - Gas
|Front Spring Type - Coil
|Front Stabilizer Bar - Diameter 36 Mm
|Front Struts
|Front Suspension Classification - Independent
|Front Suspension Type - Upper And Lower Control Arms
|Rear Shock Type - Gas
|Rear Spring Type - Coil
|Rear Stabilizer Bar - Diameter 28 Mm
|Rear Suspension Classification - Solid Live Axle
|Rear Suspension Type - Multi-link
|Phone - Hands Free
|Satellite Communications - OnStar
|Wireless Data Link - Bluetooth
|Spare Tire Mount Location - Underbody
|Spare Tire Size - Full-size
|Spare Wheel Type - Steel
|Tire Pressure Monitoring System
|Tire Type - All Season
|Wheel Spokes - 5
|Wheels - Aluminum
|Tow Hooks - Front
|Tow/Haul Mode
|Trailer Hitch
|Trailer Wiring - 7-pin
|Front Wipers - Variable Intermittent
|Liftgate Window - Manual Flip-up
|Power Windows
|Rear Wiper - Intermittent , With Washer
|Solar-tinted Glass
|Window Defogger - Rear
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Yesterday I watched Cision's webinar on Social Media ROI. I guess webinars act as an all-singing all-dancing white paper, promoting thought leadership whilst simultaneously advertising your wares in a more interactive way (there was a Q & A session at the end). Happily, Cision didn't go for the hard-sell, and it was actually pretty informative.
The comments about Twitter were particularly useful. It seems the number of Twitter followers you have has fast become synonymous with the number of Facebook friends you had at uni; breaking through that all important 1000 threshold might make you look popular online, but confirmed 200 "Attendees" on your 21st birthday Facebook event doesn't remotely translate to 200 of your nearest and dearest incarnate on the day (luckily, as my card was behind the bar).
The same goes in the Twittersphere and corporate accounts. It doesn't actually matter how many Twitter followers your company's account has, as a high number of Twitter followers does not necessarily equal a higher number of X sold (subscriptions in our case).
I guess it depends how a company chooses to use Twitter, and who it is they are targeting.Twitter can definitely be used as an effective B2C tool for customer services. It's somehow comforting to think there's a human responding from the vast faceless corporation that is @Starbucks. I think this is great, and if our subscribers chose to tweet us a problem rather than email, we'd be sure to respond (although providing detailed technical support in 140 characters would be a challenge).
Since taking over the Twitter account, however, I quickly realised that, for Exact Editions at least, it's much more effective as a B2B marketing channel than B2C. We provide a platform for 100s of magazines, and we can see that, say, Jazzwise fans aren't going to talk jazz in a forum of thousands of subscribers to different titles; it'd fall on deaf ears, and social media is supposed to be, well, social, not a monologue.
Therefore, our subscribers choose to ask about the subjects relevant to their magazines on the magazine's individual Twitter accounts, and this leaves @exacteditions free to tweet about the things we understand best – digital publishing news, Exact Editions technological updates, blog post alerts etc. Putting out a search for our company name from Tweetdeck has already yielded a few leads from publishers interested in digital editions and iPad apps and we hope to continue in this vein. As the Cision chap pointed out:
Retweet frequency > Twitter followers (154, since you're asking)
And this is a much more accurate KPI – we know we're on the right tracks when others in the profession are engaging with our views and perpetuating them, adding to them, refuting them, and generally causing that all important "Buzz" or "Chatter", that leads people back to www.exacteditions.com to work with us.