Appropriately, I sampled this article from Daily Candy.
Mix Fortune : From simple principles genius is born.
from Daily Candy, 11.26.02
For example, chocolate and peanut butter. Up there with Newtonian physics.
Or take bootlegging. The latest online music craze involves amateur DJs inventing new songs by mixing together old ones. It's "Bootylicious" lyrics to the tune of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." The result? Songs more clever than a Reese's peanut butter cup, edgier than imesh.com, and great to listen to.
This isn't about P. Diddy sampling Diana Ross. This is Kylie Minogue blended with New Order, Celine Dion with Sigur Ros, Pink with David Bowie, Missy Elliot with Mettalica. Unexpected. Hilarious. Rocking. You have to hear it to believe it. (In fact, hop to it. Someone is going to ban this soon.)
If you can't do the download, buy the import CD by British DJ duo Soulwax. (Pretentious DJs globe-trotting through fancy-hotel lobbies? So last year.)
But knowing you, you'll be inspired to start making your own mixes. Beck meets Hanson, anyone?
Get started with these sites: Ritmic (in Spanish but pretty self-explanatory) and Dsico.
Soulwax CD is available online from townsend-records.co.uk.
Tuesday, November 26, 2002
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Salon: Watch ad, read articles for free
By Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com
For some Web sites, online advertisements make for an atmosphere like a gaudy Las Vegas strip. For Salon.com, they are a new bargaining chip.
The news and commentary Web site is allowing visitors to read articles that otherwise would have to be paid for in exchange for watching a four-page commercial from Mercedes. If they interact with the ad, visitors get an all-day pass to Salon.com's premium content areas, for which subscribers usually pay about $6 monthly, or $30 annually.
Full article here.
Thursday, November 21, 2002
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Magdalen Powers writes for a number of publications. Here's a snip of a recent article she whote for The Morning News.
Little Indignities: A Beginner’s Guide to New York
Magdalen Powers, 10 September 2002
‘…New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience – if they did they would live elsewhere.’
– E.B.White, Here Is New York
There are as many New Yorks, it’s been said, as there are people living here. I’ll go a step further and say there are as many New Yorks as there have ever been people herein. Bleeding-edge but salved by the weight of history. Full of little indignities and big beauties: getting shoved through a turnstile at Grand Central only to come aboveground and see the sun glaring off the silver eagles’ heads you hadn’t even known were on the lower corners of the Chrysler Building. Having a rat almost run across your foot in Central Park, then getting to a small wooden bridge and leaning out over a little stream to watch the fireflies dance in the dusk.
New York really is more an entity than a geographic place, its Dickensian infrastructure (Central air? Who evahearddathat?), forming a deceptively solid base from which the rest of the world sometimes seems created. (Do not think that substandard anything is ‘the price you pay to live in New York,’ but get used to the substandardness nonetheless.) It’s a fast town, sure, but in some ways not fast enough. On escalators here, ‘stand on the right, walk on the left’ doesn’t seem to occur to people. And taxis can offer some stereotypically ‘New York’ experiences, but a lot of the time it’s faster (and of course always cheaper) to walk. But however you travel, don’t get locked into a looking-down-walking-fast-day-to-day routine all the time. I mean, don’t gawk like a tourist, but do look around: at your feet may be a pile of terrier droppings, but two stories up may be an art deco frieze you won’t see the likes of outside the Old Country.
Speaking of taxis, there is the matter of the lights. This may be old news to you, but I know at least one genuinely brilliant person who can’t keep these straight to save his life. To wit: There are three lights across the top of each cab. If the middle one is lit up, the cab is available. If the lights are out, the cab is occupied. Do not wave frantically or stamp your foot or curse. It will get you nowhere and make you look very silly. Now here’s the tricky part: If the lights on either side of the middle light are on – whether or not the middle light is on as well – it means the cab is off duty. Those lights read ‘off duty’ for just that reason. People have been known to get rides in off-duty cabs, but I consider it a courtesy not to try. So here comes a cab, that middle light beaming like a beacon down the avenue. Do not yell. Do not whistle. Do not wave. There is no need. Just lean, hip perhaps insouciantly out, into traffic and ever so nonchalantly raise your arm to hail one. It’s a beautiful feeling.
Why would one get so thrilled – feel so in control of the known world – just by flagging a cab? Because New York is an emotional magnifying glass. It’s hard to have small feelings here. One day a grocery store manager sends a box-boy down to the basement to fetch some yogurt for you after the power went out in the dairy section and sure, he’s only getting yogurt from a cooler downstairs – still, you walk home feeling like you own the neighborhood. Another day somebody gets their Metrocard hung up in the subway turnstile and you miss your train, and suddenly feel like throwing yourself in front of the next one.
Full article is here.
Magdalen Powers stands on the right and walks on the left, and wishes others would do the same. She lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and will knock your block off if you say ‘Oh,’ that way again. You can read excerpts and buy her book, Hand Over Fist here.
Monday, November 18, 2002
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