Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 12 Editor's Choice: 1
-
Only 99%???
[Read the article: "CSI: Miami" vs. "Grand Theft Auto"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But I refrained, just as 99 percent of everyone who has ever played a violent game refrains from throwing a punch at someone in flesh and blood.
Only 99%? I bet it's much higher than that, actually.
Paul Reiners
-
Only 99%???
[Read the article: "CSI: Miami" vs. "Grand Theft Auto"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm not sure I made myself clear in the preceding post and may have inadvertently sounded sarcastic. Anyway, I'd be willing to bet that the percentage quoted is actually off by at least a factor of 1000 and is at the very least 99.999%.
-
Did David Chase or HBO decide on a six-month hiatus?
[Read the article: Much ado about nothing]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Much of the commentary in this article assumes that David Chase decided to make last night's show the finale and to break this final season into two parts with a six-month hiatus in the middle. But maybe this was the decision of HBO.
It would be interesting to know whether the final 8 episodes are filmed and "in the can", and HBO decided on this six-month break for some sort of 'business' reasons. And whether HBO picked a somewhat arbitrary breaking point between the two halves of the season that Chase and his writers couldn't have predicted when designing the 'arc' of the last season (both this 'season' and the 8 final episodes). It wouldn't be the first time that sort of thing has happened.
-
My 10
[Read the article: The definitive 200?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Here's mine:
-
McCartney, Paul McCartney
-
The Forgotten Arm, Aimee Mann
-
Tim, the Replacements
-
East Side Story, Squeeze
-
Get Happy!!, Elvis Costello and the Attractions
-
Sandinista!, the Clash
-
Hard Rain, Bob Dylan
-
Darkness on the Edge of Town, Bruce Springsteen
-
Jesus of Cool, Nick Lowe
-
A Ghost is Born, Wilco
-
-
"I don't recall"
[Read the article: The attorney general's "tremendous credibility problem"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]A remix of the hearings:
http://www.leipzig48.com/mp3s/remixes/WhoseIdea.mp3
-
My top five songs that are missing from Rolling Stone's list.
[Read the article: Rolling Stone hits the big 4-0]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]-
"No Fun"/"Push It" by Iggy & The Stooges/Salt-N-Pepa and 2 Many DJs
The best of the mash-up world.
-
4'33" by John Cage
Sometimes silence is golden.
-
The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky
How come riots never happen at any of the concerts I go to?
-
"Police and Thieves", "White Man in the Hammersmith Palais", or "White Riot" by the Clash
How come everybody's afraid to throw a brick in this country?
-
Any song by the Replacements
Actually no song by the Replacements ever changed the world, but many of them changed individuals.
-
-
Yes and no
[Read the article: Is it too late to start a band at 45?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here][I] would love to start my own record label and also record my own album.
Hey, who's stopping you? I'm 46 and I found myself in the same position a couple of years ago. Here's what I did:
(1) Wrote and recorded a bunch of music by myself. Multitrack recording on a computer is easy nowadays. Assuming you can get by on piano or guitar, you don't need any other musicians to record an entire album. Except for drum loops, I record every instrument myself, and I'm not the world's greatest instrumentalist by any means.
(2) Started my own website and uploaded my music to it. Maintaining your own website is not that hard a skill to learn.
(3) Released my music under a Creative Commons license and posted links to it on opsound.org.
I've been doing this for a couple of years now and have easily written, recorded, and released 2 albums worth of material. I decided early on, though, that I wasn't going to sell it and would release it under a Creative Commons license. I think this is the smartest thing people like us can do. If our music is any good, it will eventually get noticed. This also means not quitting your day job. If you're worried about money all the time, you're not going to make good music.
If you're worried about looking like an idiot on stage, just skip the touring years and go straight to your "studio period".
The people I work with, while nice, are not in any way relatable to me. I view them as mindless robots who do whatever society tells them to do.
They're just people like you, trying to make it through the day. You think they don't have secret sorrows and secret ambitions? If they've given up on their dreams (and they probably haven't), well, that probably wasn't their fault.
-
Sherlock Holmes
[Read the article: Hives among us]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The epidemic is a mystery in need of a particular detective, a cross between Agatha Christie and Rachel Carson
Sherlock Holmes would obviously be your man:
"But you have retired, Holmes. We heard of you as living the life of a hermit among your bees and your books in a small farm upon the South Downs."
"Exactly, Watson. Here is the fruit of my leisured ease, the magnum opus of my latter years!" He picked up the volume from the table and read out the whole title, Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen. "Alone I did it. Behold the fruit of pensive nights and laborious days when I watched the little working gangs as once I watched the criminal world of London."
---from His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
-
$5 for hi-fi
[Read the article: Trent Reznor's free-music experiment: The numbers]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Regarding this part of the article:
Well, yeah -- more people are listening to him. On the other hand, though, "is it good news that less than one in five feel it was worth $5? I'm not sure what I was expecting but that percentage -- primarily from fans -- seems disheartening."
Reznor's reasoning is a bit off here. Actually, less than one in five feel that the increase in fidelity is worth $5. There are probably a lot of people who like the album and are perfectly happy with the lower-fidelity, free version of the album. I'm not even sure most listeners understand what the difference in compression rates mean. And not all music lovers are audiophiles.
But I would hope that any reasonable person who liked the album, even if they didn't care about the fidelity, would have contributed $5 to the artist.