“Submitted for your approval…”

Jaron Lanier Speaks To Canadian Music Week

Anyone remember Rod Serling? He hosted a little show called ‘The Twilight Zone’ which started every bizzare-o episode with the above. I use it because I’ve been trying to tell people since I got started doing my little sideshow that the world the ‘Internet-Empowered’ world they think that they live in is as surreal as anything Rod ever cooked up. In fact, ‘surreal’ isn’t really the word for it because far from being merely an entertaining alternate reality — like believing in Santy and the North Pole, this illusion is specifically designed to delude, control and exploit pretty much every one of us. So perhaps the analogy I’m looking for is actually ‘The Matrix’.

As Jaron points out, the story that there are lots of indie musicians out there making tons of money through self-promotion is just a myth. It just doesn’t happen. Well, actually it does but in such small numbers as to be statistically insignificant. Pretty much every […]

The five or six of you out there who are following my recent rants on various ‘operatic’ themes know that something is up with Detroit. It ain’t like I’ve got a deep, dark secret about it. What it is, is more a matter of ‘packaging’ or rather approach.

I’ve written that, although I love opera now, the reason I didn’t love it in my youth (aside from all the fat people screaming in Italian) was that I didn’t know that it was already dead. And by ‘dead’ I mean, no longer a currently relevant art form. Oh sure, people still write operas, but people still try to finish Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. Big deal. It doesn’t mean that these pieces have anything to say to me. This is tough talk as I know that Adams, Glass and Corigliano win all manner of fancy schmansy awards for long works about Einstein and Nixon and so on. How clever. But just between us girls? The last real opera; the one that will […]