Social Media: an open-air market located at the intersection of voyeurism and narcissism, where the currency exchanged is cultural in nature and often has no value outside the borders of this odd collection of shops and huts. And for every shopkeeper that is able to create a successful franchise there are hundreds of beggars scraping [...]

Assorted nonsense and marginally relevant shenanigans via my personal delicious.com bookmarks. – The Great Seduction: We are all Scoble now: Is personal branding via social media just a big pyramid scheme? Articles like this start to make me think that…which will ultimately undermine the opportunity for the common folk to be seen and heard. – [...]

So for the last few days I’ve been presenting Philip Larkin‘s take on the state of modern jazz, circa 1971, via his introduction to All What Jazz. (Check out both part 1 and part 2.) As I said from the start, Larkin seems to have a pretty narrow point of view regarding the genre. His [...]

Picking up from part 1 yesterday, here’s the rest of the excerpt from Philip Larkin’s introduction to All What Jazz. Again, I’ve attempted to footnote via Wikipedia and other readily available web resources. The tension between artist and audience in jazz slackened when the Negro stopped wanting to entertain the white man, and when the [...]

While it’s been a while since I’ve been published, I still consider myself a music journalist. (Perhaps being out of practice yet still full of dubiously formed opinions officially makes me a “music critic” these days, but why split hairs?) A good friend of mine recently sent me a remarkable piece by British poet, novelist [...]