42 posts tagged “unheard”

Science Friday Archives: The Happening

This is one of only two NPR programs I listen to regularly, and while I occasionally find it a little "soft on science" it is generally well produced and presented.

That's why the recent segment allowing Mr. Shyamalan to flog his new movie "The Happening" was surprisingly bad. Evidently Mr. Shyamalan believes we must stop expecting Science to save the day, embrace our ignorance, and find God in all his many and multifarious disasters.

From bees to storms, Mr. Shyamalan blithely rattled off some failings of modern Science (as he sees them) and then reminded Mr. Flatow that Einstein started out life as a non-believer, but was a wholly religious man toward the end of his life.

Unfortunately, Mr. Flatow only corrected his most baldly false assertion, but was unable or unwilling to engage him on his larger agenda. The anti-science pro-Jeebus lobbies are indeed poisoning the well, infiltrating public schools, and, of course, getting prime airtime to flog unreleased films on NPR's Science Friday. 

I pray for America's brain.

Flight of the Conchords is a musical comedy duo from Wellington, New Zealand. Official Site.
Flight of the Conchords: HBO Series.
Flight of the Conchords: on Wikipedia.
Flight of the Conchords: Google Video search.

 

The musical comedy duo Rhett & Link are at the Official Site and on YouTube.

Evidently, they are live every Thursday night at 9 p.m. EST, 6 p.m. PST.

In celebration of the Supreme Court of California's recent ruling.

The "This Week in Law" Program is one of the TWiT family of shows.

In Episode 14 "Blogger and Podcaster Liability" Denise and her panel of guests talk about law, risk, insurance, defamation, anonymity, "broadcasts", corporate blogging, forums, blogging policy, and more.

This episode is chock-full of information of interest to "anyone who has hosted an online conversation." That's my term for blogger, podcaster, lifestreamer, moderator, online community manager, etc.  Many legal issues remain unresolved, and will find resolution every time a landmark case gets decided. 

Blogging isn't going away, so it's important to familiarize oneself with the legal issues.  This program does not overuse "legalese," but will help you learn terms of art such as "expectation of privacy." 

One interesting issue discussed is the emergence of blogging lawyers, one in particular who was "recruited away" and caused his old law firm to embrace blogging in the interests of remaining competitive.

Aquí lo tienes
Aquí el "podcast"

Lecciones de Español, y ahora noticias de Latino America también.

Update: I'm having trouble with their podcast feed; they may have stopped in favor of video podcasts or local Spanish lessons (in Colorado.) I thought they had started up something more regular...

Recent Peabody award-winner Brian Lehrer (see previous post) has another excellent series on his program, this time about Congestion Pricing.

Some of us are aware that the same situation applies here in San Francisco as in New York; there is federal money to be awarded if municipalities implement some kind of congestion pricing plan before the imminent deadline.  (most recent segment first)

Coldcut Site
Coldcut on Google
Coldcut on Wikipedia

Quoting Wikipedia:

Coldcut first came together in the autumn of 1986. Computer programmer Matt Black carried a tape recording that featured the inception of "Say Kids, What Time Is It?", a track he had made for a Capital Radio mix competition, browsed in the Reckless Records store on Berwick Street, in London. Ex-Art teacher Jonathan More, who worked in the store at the time, listened to the mix, suggesting a separate edit be made of the Jungle Book's "King of the Swingers" - Black had mixed this with the break from James Browns "Funky Drummer". Using his contacts from his Meltdown Show on Kiss FM and his club night, in January 1987 this mix was released on a white label and "Say Kids, What Time Is It?" became their first single.

Later that year, spurred on by an enthusiastic rep from Island Records, they released their influential remix of Eric B. & Rakim's "Paid in Full," which made the top 20 and was voted best remix of the year. Featuring a prominent Ofra Haza sample and many other vocal cut ups, it is now regarded as both a hip hop classic and a breakthrough in the remix field. The looped rhythm at the heart of the remix can be seen as an early precursor to the Breakbeats genre (one has merely to speed it up to note the similarity). The tracks "Beats and Pieces" and "That Greedy Beat" were soon to follow on the duo's self-run "Ahead Of Our Time" label (a forced acronym results in "AHOOT", and the duo wittily catalogued one release as "AHOT 14U"). All of these tracks were made by the painstaking assembly of spliced tape edits that would sometimes run "all over the room". The duo showed originality and resourcefulness by sampling Led Zeppelin as well as James Brown.

In 1987 Matt Black joined KissFM with his own mixed based show, the pair eventually joining forces, More and Black produced their own radio show, Coldcut Solid Steel.

Their first major hit as Coldcut was the top 10 hit "Doctorin' The House" in 1988, featuring singer Yazz. In the same year, under the guise "Yazz featuring The Plastic Population", they released "The Only Way Is Up", a cover of a Northern Soul gem which brought the song into the House Music era. The record reached no.1 in the UK charts, and the success of this funded more studio equipment for the duo. Their other most well-known hit single was the UK top 20 hit "People Hold On", released in March the following year. It featured singer Lisa Stansfield, whose band Blue Zone UK had been creating a mild buzz with the single "Jackie", and whose charismatic video presence was getting noticed within the industry. She would go on to have a UK chart number one in her own right later that same year, with "All Around the World". Prior to that major hit, Coldcut and Mark Saunders had produced the single "This Is the Right Time", which appears on her debut album "Affection".

The subsequent 1989 album "What's That Noise", released on Ahead of Our Time and distributed by Big Life records, featured reggae vocalist Junior Reid, the fictional George Jetson (on the single "Stop This Crazy Thing") and Mark E Smith. The United States version was distributed by Tommy Boy Records and featured Tommy Boy artist Queen Latifah rapping over the (previously instrumental) track "Smoke This One". Latifah's rap was decidedly anti-drug, while Coldcut's reggae dub-ish instrumental had tongue-in-cheek connotations of marijuana appreciation by virtue of its title.^{[citation needed]} Its UK follow-up, "Some Like It Cold" released in 1990, also featured a collaboration with Queen Latifah.

In 1991, whilst touring Japan, they conceived and started their second record label, Ninja Tune, which continues to release diverse music by a small army of like-minded artists. In 1997 the duo unveiled their own real-time video manipulation software, VJamm. Coldcut's current live and DJ sets rely on video as much as records, taking the concept of multimedia performance into largely uncharted territory.

Conceptually, Coldcut owes as much to the ideas of beat writer and cut-up theorist William S. Burroughs, 1970s art / industrial group Throbbing Gristle, and the religious writings of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs as they do to Hip Hop originators like Grandmaster Flash or later innovators Double Dee and Steinski.

Recognizing the power inherent in Burroughs' cut-up technique and its presence in hip hop music, Moore and Black have relentlessly pushed the D.I.Y. ethic and an understanding of play as a means of fostering greater interaction with and understanding of the world. The similarities between this ethos and that of hacking need hardly be stated. Ninja Tune uses a corporate facade to communicate via the marketplace itself, an idea first implemented by Throbbing Gristle via their own Industrial Records imprint.

One of the key aspects of the Ninja Tune ethos, Stealth, implies that their following of DJs and listeners are "agents" in a Burroughsian sense, propagating the D.I.Y. ethic of play as an essentially subversive act by replaying and manipulating media under the radar of mainstream culture. In 2003, Black worked with Penny Rimbaud (ex Crass) on Crass Agenda's Savage Utopia project. In 2006, Coldcut released the album Sound Mirrors which has helped build up a massive underground audience thanks to the popularity of the single True Skool. The song itself features an Indian sample from a cult Bollywood era making the track incredibly popular on the bhangra and desi scene and with much of British Asian urban culture.

In 2008, Coldcut remixed ourselves, a #1-hit song by Japanese popstar Ayumi Hamasaki. This mix was included on the album Ayu-mi-x -GOLD-, which gave Coldcut a big increase in worldwide popularity.