July 14, 2004
Three Stars Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry
Posted by nerdling | July 14, 2004 03:48 PM
"Call it a spirited assault on a pantheon that has been foisted upon us, or a defiant rejection of the hegemonic view of rock history espoused by the critics who preceded us." Hailing from the Lester Bangs school of rock journalism, Jim DeRogatis has collected a new book of critical esssays that combat the mythology of everyone's favorite albums.
"It's fun to fight about rock and roll. If we don't care about this stuff enough to fight about it, why the hell have we devoted our lives to it?" That, my friends, may be the most profound thing I've heard a critic say about rock 'n' roll in ten years. {Via donewaiting.com}
After six years of legal battles, the Dead Kennedys are finally done with their suit against Alternative Tentacles and plan to move ahead with (what's left of) their career.
Rhino is at it again with Left of the Dial: Dispatches from the '80s Underground, which might just be the sexiest box set they've released to date.
Boston tradesmen are boycotting the Macworld convention because the company that runs Macworld, IDG, outsources American jobs overseas. Macworld started yesterday and runs until tomorrow, then it will pack up until the January 2005 convention in San Francisco.
In yet more Apple news, AirPort Express began shipping today with a total of 80,000 pre-orders. Someday soon I'll get myself together and buy an AirPort card and AirPort Express so I can set up a really fly home network. But not today.
As for today's quota of cool gadgets, how about edge-to-edge printable CD-and DVD-Rs?
Random cool news: absinthe is now available for purchase in the United States. Derived from wormwood and herbs such as anise and fennel, absinthe was the drink of choice amongst the Impressionists and most of the Parisian expatriates during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The drink was banned because of fears that thujone, a chemical found in wormwood, would harm absinthe drinkers. Thujone is still listed officially as a poison by the FDA, so Americans cannot purchase absinthe except by ordering it from Europe. But here's the rub: the proprietors of the Crazy Fox Saloon found one type of wormwood that does not contain thujone, which they use to produce Absente—absinthe without the poison, and thus without FDA prohibitions. {Via largeheartedboy}
