by Rodney Eric Griffith | Armour of Rod | |
I’m not home during the day (and I own the colour run on DVD anyway), but if I was, I’d be watching BBC America at 4:00 PM EST weekdays. About time they started showing something other than remodel-my-house/till-my-garden/auction-my-fucking-life-away programming.
Rodney | 10:12:00 AM [permalink]I’m greatly irritated by the propagation of the “optical discs not so immortal” article published recently by the Associated Press, which is actually a very old story pertaining primarily to discs with manufacturing errors, e.g. the CDs pressed between 1989 and 1991 by Philips Data Optical (PDO) whose deterioration has been common knowledge amongst music collectors for at least a decade, or to discs that suffer due to extreme lapses in manufacturing quality.
The AP even quoted Fred R. Byers, whose Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs had already addressed the source of the panic in the article. People who treat their discs carelessly have a problem. People who don’t care about quality aren’t archivists.
bp: 117/80
The second wave of Apple Records reissue CDs, including The Iveys Maybe Tomorrow, will be on sale in the UK toward the end of May. Amazon US have already revised their existing listing for the 1992 CD to "usually ships within 2-3 days" (which is curious, since they’ve listed Ass at an import price with the 24 May release date). From December 2003, approximately half of the Apple CD catalogue was made available—the three Mary Hopkin CDs, the two Billy Preston CDs, the John Tavener and Modern Jazz Quartet discs. I would presume, like the first half, that this is a European-only affair (since most of the Badfinger discs remain available in North America).
The etymology of “Rodney”:
“Rodney” originated as Rodenye, the name of a medieval settlement in the marshes of England, near Markham. The literal translation of “Rodney” is “Hroda’s Island.” Hroda is a Germanic name meaning “fame.”
bp: 126/84
No prepared statement; another perfect day; however. I will leave you with this: almost all literary endings are false endings.
bp: 129/89
bp: 124/91
Sunny and cool, even now as I write this. A rare spring treat.
This is one of my inspirations for narrative style (both the review by Pierre Comtois and Gregorio Montejo, and the source material, naturally). One of the sister sites collects all of the 1960s Bullpen Bulletins; for a lark, I created a perfect replica (forgery is an occasional hobby. One of the reasons I cringe at bootlegs (* see Extended Playhouse #11! —Smilin’ Stan.) is the poor design and lack of attention to detail that comes so intuitively to me).
Mark Lewisohn, author of one of the few quality Beatles books, is writing a three-volume history of the group over the next 12 years. This is good news. Really, out of all of the books on the Beatles published over the last four decades, I'd keep his Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, the Miles/McCartney book Many Years From Now, George’s book I, Me Mine, George Martin’s autobiography, the Hunter Davies biography and Anthology… and throw the rest away.
bp: 143/90
The Beastie Boys video is a masterpiece.
bp: 140/99
(Photo by courtesy of Brian Alter.)
The city of Cleveland, Ohio is poised to spend $200,000,000 on what they’re calling the “Euclid Corridor project”—a bus/trolley hybrid running down a tarted-up Euclid Avenue. In other words, to anyone objective who has been there in the last 40 years, good money after bad. The city of Cleveland is never coming back to life no matter how much money they throw at it.
A decade ago they built a new baseball/basketball stadium to bring more traffic downtown, which temporarily infused income into a handful of restaurants which closed as soon as the baseball team resumed its habit of losing. The powers that be were counting on the Trix Rabbit-like addiction of local sports fans who haven’t cottoned on to the fact that it’s all fixed to linger downtown indefinitely, but no one in this demographic has that kind of money to spend. (The shrapnel is that on game days, downtown office workers are expected to pay $20 event parking; no one in this income bracket should ever have to pay to park to go to work, ever.)
Dressing up Euclid Avenue isn’t a realistic answer when looking at the big picture. The city is structurally corrupt. “Man’s oldest dream has been to block out the sun.” You’d think so after spending any appreciable amount of time downtown. Buildings are crammed so close together that daylight has almost no chance of getting through. (The close proximity locks in the humidity nicely, which brings a biannual plague of sticky insects.) This mustiness gives the city a dirty feel that will never come clean. There’s a lovely waterfront that has been completely blocked off, a waste opportunity beyond belief. Add to this the nonsensical traffic patterns (which include streets running counter to numerical order) and road surfaces that look like the face of the moon.
There are a few cultural attractions, but I’m always amazed to hear of international travelers to, say, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (which has no justification to be here). Most of the more vocal inhabitants suffer from a lifetime of isolation with a collective chip on their shoulders. The city, which cut a great swath for itself a century ago, has been in ruins for decades, and it’s not coming back.
bp: 125/91
