And speaking of Nagano, here's a bit of the concert he conducted at UC Berkeley in 1984.
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Hi, I'm Thad. I build websites.
This blog's been up in one form or another since 1999. In that time I've written about topics ranging from comic books to video games to copyright law to creators' rights to Frank Zappa.
I also write eBooks and narrate audiobooks. Here's where you can find them:
Via uploader YourArf:
Kent Nagano tells the story about how he got involved with Zappa and his classical music. Kent Nagano is an american conductor and opera administrator who conducted London Symphony Orchestra for Frank's music.
From the swedish radio documentary "Titties & Beer", broadcasted 1994-01-23 on SR P2.
Uploaded by fruhko, who says it's from 1984. Sounds slightly sped up, or possibly helium is slowly leaking into the room.
Today I learned that my prescription migraine pills make my vertigo much much worse!
Well, it's got "America" in the name. That's good for a 4th of July post, right?
Vocals are pretty hard to hear but there's some great clarinet work by, if I'm not mistaken, Bunk Gardner.
Detroit, 1968; uploaded by Whoaduderighteous.
My dizziness has mostly been improving, but today it was pretty bad. Wound up going to bed and staying there for about the past four hours.
Head's not really together enough to share much just now; no Fourth of July insights or reviews of comics I read today (the last half of the latest Sergio Aragonés Funnies was even better than the first, while the Unwritten/Fables crossover didn't really satisfy me as a fan of either series and frankly felt a little icky) -- maybe I'll get to that stuff another time.
The Today Show, 1990. Discussion of Zappa's influence in Czechoslovakia before, during, and after the fall of communism, his contribution to Jacques Cousteau's Outrage at Valdez, and his interest in politics combined with his distaste for major and third parties alike.
Yesterday Image Comics announced that it's going to start selling digital comics from its own site, independent of third-party distributors, in standard formats and DRM-free.
There are a lot of reasons for Image to pursue a DRM-free option. Chief is that DRM doesn't fucking work and anyone who wants to get the latest issue of The Walking Dead illegally can get it whether Comixology's version has DRM or not. Second is that this rampant piracy of The Walking Dead has somehow failed to prevent it from being a sprawling multimedia bestseller.
But I think what really precipitated this decision isn't The Walking Dead at all -- it's Saga.
More specifically, Saga #12 and its asinine, albeit temporary, ban from the iOS version of Comixology.
I wrote about the story back in April. Gist is this: Saga #12 was an arguably-slightly-dirtier comic in an inarguably-already-pretty-dirty series; Comixology decided not to sell it in the iOS version of their app out of a reasonable but, it turns out, false presumption that it would run afoul of Apple's vague, capricious, and arbitrary content guidelines.
In a nutshell, it was an object lesson in the one thing DRM actually is good for: locking publishers into a single distributor who may not always have their best interests at heart.
You know, for those who needed an object lesson because they were too busy scratching their balls to notice how this exact thing caused a problem for the music industry and then later for the book industry.
But hey, it may have taken Image awhile, but this still puts them way the fuck ahead of all the other major publishers, and they absolutely deserve praise and encouragement for doing the right thing. And they deserve your business for it.
Only problem is, it's still early days and the Digital Comics section is looking a little sparse. I'll plan on coming back with links when my favorite Image books are available -- those'd be the aforementioned Walking Dead and Saga, plus Chew and Prophet, off the top of my head.
This is good news, and I hope and expect it will be just the first step in the comics industry realizing what the music industry already has and the book industry is starting to: that standards-compliant, DRM-free formats aren't just better for consumers, they're better for publishers, too.
Lawson discussing his working relationship with Frank; the Persuasions published an album under the Straight label. This is from the documentary From Straight to Bizarre; I posted the trailer last October.
Got this in the mail on Saturday:
It's what I bought in the Ditko Kickstarter back in April -- The Ditko Public Service Package #2, plus various other goodies, some Ditko and some non-Ditko, from publisher Robin Snyder's collection.
I've barely scratched the surface of this delightful haul, and I think it's far too early for me to do a writeup that would do it any kind of justice. Suffice it to say it's just what I'd hoped for -- brilliant and raw and undiluted and baffling and infuriating and contradictory and didactic and oblique and funny and heartbreaking and ingenious and so very, very pretty to look at, in turns and sometimes all at once.
So yeah, I'm pretty happy with it.
Bring on the next Ditko Kickstarter.
But I'll need some time to finish reading all my stuff from this one.