Nate Haduch

These days, Nickelback are such a walking punchline that even a big ol' nerd like Mark Zuckerberg can stuff them into a metaphorical locker. Which he did, in a recent joke video introducing his custom-built AI butler Jarvis. You see, Jarvis can also turn on the stereo system and play music for the Zuckerberg … More »

Collaborating with a number of different people from all over the place, filmmaker Oscar Boyson went out into the world and came back with this excellent 18-minute video on the future of cities. Among the cities profiles are Shenzhen, Detroit, Singapore, NYC, Copenhagen, Seoul, Lagos, and Mumbai.

What does “the future of cities” mean? To much of the developing world, it might be as simple as aspiring to having your own toilet, rather than sharing one with over 100 people. To a family in Detroit, it could mean having non-toxic drinking water. For planners and mayors, it’s about a lot of things — sustainability, economy, inclusivity, and resilience. Most of us can hope we can spend a little less time on our commutes to work and a little more time with our families. For a rich white dude up in a 50th floor penthouse, “the future of cities” might mean zipping around in a flying car while a robot jerks you off and a drone delivers your pizza. For many companies, the future of cities is simply about business and money, presented to us as buzzwords like “smart city” and “the city of tomorrow.”

A few tidbits from the video to whet your appetite:

• An estimated 70% of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050. (It’s currently 54%.)
• Buying a Toyota Corolla in Singapore costs $140,000.
• In 2012, 52% of the cost of US highways and roads was paid by general tax revenue rather than by drivers (through gas tax and tolls). In 1972, it was only 30%, which means car usage is much more heavily subsidized than it used to be.
• When you buy a car in Denmark, you pay a 150% tax, even if it’s electric.
• And a relevant quote from Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities: “Lowly, unpurposeful, and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life may grow.”

And boy, listening to Janette Sadik-Khan talk about cities being for people and the importance of public transportation and then, directly after, having to listen to some dipshit from Uber was tough. (via @mathowie)

Tags: architecture   cars   cities   Jane Jacobs   Oscar Boyson   video

For the next few weeks, Barack Obama is still the President of the United States, which means we might still get a few more new laws that are not absolute bullshit. Case in point: Yesterday, as Endgadget reports, the President signed the Better Online Ticket Sales act into law. The BOTS act -- see … More »

Solange released her fantastic new album A Seat At The Table, one of the very best albums of the year, at the end of September. And it looks like she'll tour behind it, because she's just announced auditions for her backing band via her Saint Heron website: … More »

Kanye West has taken to Twitter to explain his surprising yet also completely not surprising visit to Trump Tower today. His comments on meeting with President-Elect Donald Trump mark his first tweets since October and his first public statement since his hospitalization under psychiatric hold last month. West wrote, "I wanted to meet … More »

Alan Thicke, the Canadian-born actor, songwriter, TV host, and father of singer Robin Thicke, has died. TMZ reports that he suffered a heart attack this afternoon while playing hockey with his 19-year-old son Carter. He was 69. More »

Bill Gates and a number of other investors are starting a billion venture fund focused on “cheap, clean, reliable energy”.

Bill Gates is leading a more than $1 billion fund focused on fighting climate change by investing in clean energy innovation.

The Microsoft co-founder and his all-star line-up of fellow investors plan to announce tomorrow the Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, which will begin making investments next year. The BEV fund, which has a 20-year duration, aims to invest in the commercialization of new technologies that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in areas including electricity generation and storage, transportation, industrial processes, agriculture, and energy-system efficiency.

The company’s tagline is “Investing in a Carbonless Future” and their investment criteria are:

1. CLIMATE IMPACT. We will invest in technologies that have the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least half a gigaton.
2. OTHER INVESTMENTS. We will invest in companies with real potential to attract capital from sources outside of BEV and the broader Breakthrough Energy Coalition.
3. SCIENTIFIC POSSIBILITY. We will invest in technologies with an existing scientific proof of concept that can be meaningfully advanced.
4. FILLING THE GAPS. We will invest in companies that need the unique attributes of BEV capital, including patience, judgment by scientific milestones, flexible investment capabilities, and a significant global network.

Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Reid Hoffman, and Jack Ma are also participating in the fund.

In related-yet-unrelated news, a recent report says investment funds controlling more than $5 trillion in assets have dropped some or even all of their fossil fuel stocks.

The report, released Monday, said the new total was twice the amount measured 15 months ago — a remarkable rise for a movement that began on American college campuses in 2011. Since then, divestment has expanded to the business world and institutional world, and includes large pension funds, insurers, financial institutions and religious organizations. It has also spread around the world, with 688 institutions and nearly 60,000 individuals in 76 countries divesting themselves of shares in at least some kinds of oil, gas and coal companies, according to the report.

“It’s a stunning number,” said Ellen Dorsey, the executive director of the Wallace Global Fund, which has promoted fossil fuel divestment and clean energy investment as part of its philanthropy.

Like it or not, economics has to be a significant driver for combatting climate change. Driving public opinion against fossil fuel companies, falling prices for solar and battery energy, and clean energy investment funds: it all helps support the decisions made by the world’s forward-thinking leaders. And maybe, just maybe, if you can get the world’s leaders, the public, and the economy all pointed in the right direction, we’ve got a chance.

Tags: Bill Gates   climate change   economics   energy

Advantage; benefit.

The Golden Globe nominees were announced this morning, and 50 Cent wasn't one of them. He's not so happy about that. More »

Sturgill Simpson's A Sailor's Guide To Earth was one of our favorite albums of the year, but it was still pretty surprising to see his name alongside mega-stars like Adele, Beyoncé, Justin Bieber, and Drake in the Grammys' list of Album Of The Year nominees this morning. Simpson himself seems as surprised as … More »

Don't say Shakira didn't give you shit for Christmas this year. More »

[Label: Modern Love | Cat#: LOVE105]

1. Curzon (5:21)
2. Animal Style (7:09)
3. Hardnoise (10:36)
4. Blue (0:58)
5. FullEdge (eMpTy-40 Mix) (5:29)
6. Sourcer (5:28)
7. Airborne Latency (7:03)
8. Fridge Challenge (3:29)
9. Overstaying (5:44)

Apple held one of its webcasted press conferences today to announce new product developments, and the big news is that, yes, they are really removing the headphone jack from the iPhone 7. The phone comes with stereo speakers for the first time, and they can produce twice the volume of the speakers in the … More »

Rolling Stone polled actors, critics, producers, and showrunners about their picks for the greatest shows ever to air on TV and aggregated the responses. Some random results:

94. Jeopardy
87. Doctor Who
73. Transparent
57. Fawlty Towers
43. The Americans
27. Arrested Development
12. Game of Thrones
5. Seinfeld

That’s really high for Thrones, isn’t it? It’s no spoiler to say that the top two picks are The Wire and The Sopranos…you’ll have to click through to see which order they put them in. It’s been awhile since I’ve thought about what my list of favorite shows would look like, but just off the cuff, maybe (in no particular order):

The Wire, Seinfeld, Arrested Development, Transparent, Mad Men, Deadwood, The Simpsons, Iron Chef, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Doctor Who, The Americans.

A couple of those are definitely not great shows, but they are favorites all the same.

Tags: best of   lists   TV

In a big feature, New York Magazine chronologically recaps Barack Obama’s presidency with help from dozens of participants, including the President himself.

More than “hope,” Obama’s candidacy promised “one America.” It is the deep irony of his presidency, and for Obama himself probably the tragedy, that the past eight years saw the country fiercely divided against itself. The president still managed to get a ridiculous amount done, advancing an unusually progressive agenda. But however Americans end up remembering the Obama years decades from now, one thing we can say for sure is that it did not feel, at the time, like an unmitigated liberal triumph. It felt like a cold civil war.

Or a never-breaking political fever. There was the tea-party rage and Occupy Wall Street. Every other week, it seemed, a new shooting. Each movement was met by a countermovement, and yet, somehow, both the left and the right were invigorated, watched over by a president marked so deeply by temperamental centrism even his supporters called him Spock. Whether you noticed or not, our culture was shaken to its core. There was a whole new civil-rights era, both for those whose skin color and for those whose love was long met by prejudice. The first iPhone was released during the 2008 campaign. We got our news from Facebook, debated consent, and took down Bill Cosby. Elon Musk built a spaceship to Mars.

The dude got a lot done, despite a Congress that fought him tooth and nail for all eight years. Writing that just reminded me: Obama’s March nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court is still pending in the Senate. They’re holding it for a possible Trump-nominated judge.

Tags: Barack Obama   politics

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for November 28, 2016 is:

vicissitude • \vuh-SISS-uh-tood\  • noun

1 : the quality or state of being changeable : mutability

2 a : a favorable or unfavorable event or situation that occurs by chance : a fluctuation of state or condition

b : a difficulty or hardship usually beyond one's control

Examples:

"The vicissitudes of life strike us all. But when life gets difficult for the poor, economically or emotionally, or most often both at once, it can pitch them into complete chaos." — The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 22 Aug. 2016

"A good coach on tour is at once a friend and a taskmaster, a psychologist and an emotional buffer against the vicissitudes of competing at the highest level of the game." — Geoff Macdonald, The New York Times, 1 Sept. 2016

Did you know?

"Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better," wrote British theologian Richard Hooker in the 16th century. That observation may shed some light on vicissitude, a word that can refer simply to the fact of change, or to an instance of it, but that often refers specifically to hardship or difficulty brought about by change. To survive "the vicissitudes of life" is thus to survive life's ups and downs, with special emphasis on the downs. Vicissitude is a descendant of the Latin noun vicis, meaning "change" or "alternation," and it has been a part of the English language since the 16th century. In contemporary usage, it most often occurs in the plural.

What.cd, the popular invite-only music torrent tracker site launched after the demise of Oink in 2007, has been shut down by French authorities, The Verge reports. According to French cybercrime website Zataz, French police seized 12 of What.cd's servers in a raid. "Due to some recent events, What.CD is shutting down," reads a … More »

French film director Leos Carax, who was responsible for 2012's fantastic Holy Motors, is working on his English language debut, a movie that Variety characterizes as a "music-filled drama" called Annette starring Adam Driver and Rooney Mara. Some new details have emerged about the film, and Variety reports that Rihanna is rumored to have … More »

John Awesome and Nydia Hernandez were having an engagement photoshoot with photographer Janet Wheeland in Holy Jim Canyon, California when they stumbled into an entirely different kind of shoot. Black metal band Coldvoid happened to be in the same woods shooting promo photos under the full moon, and the two groups decided to join forces. More »

"Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen" is the debut song from Piko-Taro, a fictional singer-songwriter created by Japanese comedian Daimaou Kosaka. It's only 45 seconds long and consists of less than 50 words, but it has over 59 million views on YouTube in the US which counts toward its stream equivalent plays in Billboard's chart system. Thus it debuted at … More »

Stutterer by Benjamin Cleary won the 2016 Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film and is now available to view online for free courtesy of the New Yorker.

It’s a thirteen-minute movie about a young London typographer named Greenwood (Matthew Needham). Greenwood stutters, to the extent that verbal conversation is difficult. When he tries to resolve an issue with a service representative over the phone, he can’t get the words out; the operator, gruff and impatient, hangs up. (For surliness, she rivals the operator in the old Yaz song.) When a woman approaches Greenwood on the street, he uses sign language to avoid talking. But in his thoughts, which we hear, he does not stutter.

Great little film…my heart broke three separate times watching it.

Tags: Benjamin Cleary   crying at work   language   Oscars   video

Ben Roy and Andrew Orvedahl of the comedy troupe The Grawlix and truTV’s Those Who Can’t join the CBB First Timers Club! They join Scott and world record holder for most wishes Frank Dorito to chat about wishes, smoking on planes, and favorite films. Later, our good friends Victor and Tiny are back to tell us about their relaxing time at the happiest place on Earth. Your wish for a classic episode in the making has been granted!This episode is brought to you by Thursday Boot Company, Jack Threads, Blue Apron, and Legal Zoom.

We just named Danny Brown's new album Atrocity Exhibition our Album Of The Week, and now you can hear it in full. He's already shared a bunch of singles from it -- "When It Rain," "Pneumonia," "Rolling Stone," "Really Doe" (with an all-star lineup that included Kendrick Lamar, Earl Sweatshirt, … More »

The Wilco-curated Solid Sound Festival will live to see another year. Organizers announced today that the event will return to MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA June 23-25 in 2017. The lineup will be announced soon, and past performers include Levon Helm, Neko Case, Mac DeMarco, Mavis Staples, Richard Thompson, Reggie Watts, Bill Frisell, Yo … More »

The late Elliott Smith is one of the most universally beloved songwriters in the history of indie rock, and many of his admirers have contributed songs to the forthcoming tribute compilation Say Yes! We've already posted Julien Baker's version of "Ballad Of Big Nothing" and Yuck's take on "Bled White," and the … More »

From a new Kickstarter publication called The Creative Independent, Philip Glass was interviewed about the importance of artists owning their work and getting paid for it.

My personal position was that I had wonderful parents. Really wonderful people. But my mother was a school teacher. My father had a small record shop in Baltimore. They had no money to support my career. I began working early. You’re too young to know this, but when you get your first Social Security check, you get a list of every place you’ve worked since you began working. It’s fantastic! I discovered that I was working from the time I was 15 and putting money into the Social Security system from that age onward. I thought it was much later. No, I was actually paying money that early.

The point is that I spent most of my life supporting myself. And I own the music. I never gave it away. I am the publisher of everything I’ve written except for a handful of film scores that the big studios paid. I said, “Yeah, you can own it. You can have it, but you have to pay for it.” They did pay for it. They were not gifts.

A lot in this interview resonates, including this:

It’s never been easy for painters, or writers, or poets to make a living. One of the reasons is that we, I mean a big “We,” deny them an income for their work. As a society we do. Yet, these are the same people who supposedly we can’t live without. It’s curious, isn’t it?

And this bit about making work vs performing (italics mine):

What happens, is that the artists are in a position where they can no longer live on their work. They have to worry about that. They need to become performers. That’s another kind of work we do. I go out and play music. The big boom in performances is partly because of streaming, isn’t it? We know, for example, that there are big rock and roll bands that will give their records away free. You just have to buy the ticket to the concert. The cost of the record is rather small compared to the price of the ticket. It’s shifted around a little bit; they’re still paying, but they’re paying at the box office rather than at the record store. The money still will find its way.

Then you have to be the kind of person who goes out and plays, and some people don’t.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the economics of writing online. Making a comfortable living only by writing is tough and very few independents are able to do it. More successful are those who are able to get away from writing online by speaking at conferences, writing books, starting podcasts, selling merchandise,¹ post sponsored tweets and Instagram photos, building apps, consulting for big companies, etc. This stuff is the equivalent of the band that tours, sells merch, composes music for TV commercials, etc. But as Glass said, what about those who just want to write? (And I count myself among that number.) How can we support those people? Anyway, more on this very soon (I hope).

Photo is of a Chuck Close painting of Philip Glass taken by me at The Whitney.

1. Just this morning, a friend texted me a photo of The Pioneer Woman’s line of products on the shelf at Walmart.↩

Tags: business   interviews   music   Philip Glass   working

Kanye West and Founders Entertainment have not had good luck together. Kanye ended up not performing at Governors Ball after the fest's third day was cancelled due to inclement weather, and tonight, he ended his set at The Meadows early due to a family emergency. He stopped the show after being pulled aside in … More »

Did you know that George Lucas approached David Lynch about directing Return of the Jedi? After a visit to Lucas’ studio described here by Lynch, Lynch turned Lucas down pretty quickly. But what might have been, huh? Well, this fan-made trailer gives us a taste of a Lynch-helmed Star Wars movie. (via one perfect shot)

Tags: David Lynch   George Lucas   movies   remix   Star Wars   trailers   video

Amoeba Records' Berkeley location announced last year that they were looking to convert their jazz section into a marijuana dispensary (how fitting). They were denied the permit to do so last fall, but they've now been granted one to start "the most epic dispensary ever" according to a Facebook post by employee Debby … More »