Monday, January 15, 2007

NYTimes Sunday Roundup

I've noticed the phrase "Talking Heads-like" appearing more and more in my reviews of new music. So it's perfectly appropriate the NYTimes did a profile of David Byrne as a grand old man of rock n roll. He's been a good elder statesman, with his cool record label exploring world music and the such. But they're stretching it when trying to imply he's still musically significant today -- nothing he's done has mattered 1/100th as much as the first four or five Talking Heads albums.

They do a good piece on the crazy restrictions Apple and others put on your music. This should be a class action lawsuit: manufacturers of CD players and iPods, etc. use technology to prevent you from performing perfectly lawful actions, like making a copy of your own CD or DVD, which Congress has SPECIFICALLY said all Americans have the right to do. It's bad for consumers, and though they don't know it, it's bad for the creative industry as well.

A cool piece on a ceramics sculpture artist and the massive artworks he's creating in the heartland.

Finally, the Bible of Selfishness -- Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" -- may finally become a movie. I love the stories of her paranoia:
Rand, who had fled the Soviet Union and gone on to inspire capitalists and egoists everywhere, worried aloud, apparently in all seriousness, that the Soviets might try to take over Paramount to block the project.

“I told her, ‘The Russians aren’t that desperate to wreck your book,’ ” Mr. Ruddy recalled in a recent interview.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm embarrassed to admit that I alwasy thought Ayn Rand was a man. I've never seen a picture of her.

Michael in New York said...

I keep forgetting the same thing about George Elliot.