Must watch interview of Liam Gallagher at Cannes pitching his Beatles breakup pic:

Guardian: Why is [this] more interesting to you than a straight Beatles biopic?

LG: Because it’s been done before mate. And the Beatles aren’t going to be in this film. There’s going to be no-one auditioning for John, Paul, George, Ringo. I ain’t going to be doing that, and there’ll be no wigs.

LG: I’m not doing films about whales…or unkempt eyebrows or anything like that. I’m doing this and that’s it, I’m out of here mate.

Guardian: Are you a film fan though, what films do you like?

LG: I like films, they’re alright, they’re alright. Film business is just like the music business innit, it’s a load of blaggers talking shit.

So true.

Maximum Rocknroll: Kick-Ass Photos From Iconic Punk Mag

They don’t always get it right, but they’re bang on with this one. On James Murphy:

“I spent my whole life wanting to be cool… but I’ve come to realize that coolness doesn’t exist the way I once assumed,” said Murphy in a recent Guardian feature. This realization probably has something to do with his rising cultural cache. After all, Murphy has done what all other music fiends only dream about— he’s flipped the system and become the embodiment of coolness. This is a phenomenal coup.

And the music:

Opener “Dance Yrself Clean” starts quiet and stuffed with circular paranoia: “Talking like a jerk except you are an actual jerk, and living proof that sometimes friends are mean,” Murphy mumbles to himself. “All My Friends” this is not. But then a massive, meaty synth expands the speakers, lifts the singer up, and plops him down smack in the middle of the dancefloor.

Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald featured an excellent essay by Neil James, of the Plain English Foundation, defending the impact of “new media” on language. Insanely it is not available on the SMH website¹, and even the author/PEF has had to resort to a scanned copy1. Some of the many excellent points include:

Increased use of the written word:

In the US, a National Commission on Writing survey of teenagers and parents found that teenagers spend a considerable amount of time writing, and that they clearly distinguish between social media and more formal text. Their parents reported that their teens do a lot more writing than they did at the same age.

Improving communication:

Increasingly, the public will expect to take an active part in a more meaningful dialogue, whether as students or patients, customers or clients. Already, academic and industry conferences are running a Twitter backchannel through their events so participants can share comments and resources more widely. It is the kind of application that has made adults - not teens - the most prolific adopters of Twitter.

Diversifying public debate:

If a defining feature of democracy is the ability of citizens to participate in open debate, then the new media will inevitably strengthen and diversify our public conversations rather than dumb them down. The scale of participation is now beyond anything we’ve previously experienced.

There’s a Sydney Writers' Festival event debating this topic this week.

David Simon:

“Fuck the exposition,” he says gleefully, as we go back into the bar. “Just *be*. The exposition can come later.” He describes a theory of television narrative. “If I can make you curious enough, there’s this thing called Google. If you’re curious about the New Orleans Indians, or ‘second-line' musicians - you can look it up.” The Internet, he suggests, can provide its own creative freedom, releasing writers from having to overexplain, allowing history to light the characters from within.

Interesting thread from Hydrogenaudio responding to this NYT article covering the merit (or otherwise) of audiophile equipment & compressed music. The discussion includes this stellar quote from Gordon Hold, founder of Stereophile:

Audio as a hobby is dying, largely by its own hand. As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a source of endless derisive amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me.

Disagree? I have some cables to sell you.

Local noise merchants selected by Lou Reed for the Vivid Festival Noise Night - sounds deafening.

Kotaku:

When I started Mass Effect 2, I had Shepard wear a helmet. I wanted the statistical advantages that came with any one of them. That’s a choice of math over aesthetics, of course, my standard priorities while playing a game. That’s a sound strategy for success in a virtual world: Be better at something; don’t care how you look doing it.

But not seeing Shepard’s face bothered me more with each muffled conversation. I realized that I valued emotional expression in Mass Effect 2 over a 5% health bonus.

Reminds me of the travesty that was Sly Stallone’s Judge Dredd, where he spent lost of the movie helmetless despite one of the key JD themes being he never never never removed his helm.

Ryan Tate (from Gawker’s Valleywag) fired off an incensed email to Sir Steve after watching an iPad TV advert proclaiming it was a revolution:

If Dylan was 20 today, how would he feel about your company?

Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with “revolution”?

Revolutions are about freedom.

Jobs:

Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin', and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.

And it goes on. Even if you can’t stand the guy, it’s fascinating to see such an influential figure responding to Joe Public emails.

Cédric Delsaux via The Guardian