ideometric

The catchy song on the (otherwise boring) Volvo Spring Sale commercial is by Melpo Mene. Thank you internet, holder of all knowledge.

http://www.myspace.com/melpomenemusic

Sometimes I wish I could remember the 80s.

CNN running a story on consumer electronics infected with viruses from the factory…

In most cases, Chinese factories — where many companies have turned to keep prices low — are the source.

So far, the virus problem appears to come from lax quality control, perhaps a careless worker plugging an infected music player into a factory computer used for testing, rather than organized sabotage by hackers or the Chinese factories.

You can talk to the people in the news, if you want to. In a story about the Spitzer prostitution scandal, the NY Times links to the Myspace profile of the woman he was with. Edit: One of my friends just added her on Facebook, haha.

CNN also posts AIM transcripts or screen names. What’re the ethics on that?

It’s like invasion of privacy, but not really. The net blurs the lines between public and private…

CNN has a story about this here.

After she was identified by The New York Times, throngs of journalists staked out her home.

At the same time, she appeared to have jumped on her MySpace page, which was identified by the Times, and a Facebook profile with the same name and photos.

It seemed she was trying to stay one step ahead of journalists, attempting to limit what information they could access.

She was seemingly aware that the press would have access to her friends and every word, photo and comment on her profiles, so she began by deleting connections between her friends on Facebook.

And this bit:

The page had received more than 1,100 friend requests on Facebook. Initially, she ignored them.

The US State Department has a government take on Snopes.com called ‘Identifying Misinformation’.

Apparently the net is a boon to Arab metalheads…

• CNN has a video report about blackmetal/deathmetal bands in the middle east using Youtube and Myspace to get their music out in countries where public performances are illegal.

• Another article mentions mp3s, online stores, and album trading coordinated through web communities as factors sustaining the metal subcultures in these countries.

“In the previous article I had discussed that since there are no record labels in Iran, the people here have to ask their friends and relatives who live in the other countries to bring them the albums they want. However as Internet has become wide-spread in the recent years in Iran, Iranian metallers have found a better way to get the metal albums. There are some sites that sell these albums in very cheap price and one can download the albums that he wants from them in MP3 format. […] Trading is one of the other ways that metaller can get the albums they have been searching for.“

All of the links above are from an unlikely post @ samefacts.com

The Arabic logo above (awesome) belongs to the first band that came up on myspace, called Narjahanam. From Bahrain, not bad either.

In a world of simulacra, copies without originals, when is a work “finished”? Is it a perpetual work-in-progress?

I think I like that idea.

I was listening to Steve Reich’s ‘Pendulum Music I’ and wondered how anyone could play something like that. Turns out it’s ‘played’ by hanging mics.

“The microphones are pulled back, switched on, and released over the speaker, and gravity causes them to swing back and forth like pendulums. As the microphone nears the speaker, a feedback tone is created.

The music created is then the result of the process of the swinging microphones. ‘The piece is ended sometime shortly after all mikes have come to rest and are feeding back a continuous tone by performers pulling the power cords of the amplifiers’”

wiki