I Wish It Was More Sordid

• This picture is taken from the first shot of Black Angel, a 1946 film noir. I can’t help but wondering: who’d name a hotel “Gaylord” these days?

Changed the header to a variant of the standard Binary Bonsai Kubrick theme one, this one featuring Martin Fredrikson Core‘s brand new Borgstrand Stencil, part of the “Top of the Notch” Fontpak^TM from Fountain. As always with Core, an extremely well-made font! Check the picture to the right for a real life application. Photo by Finsta.
I also changed from justified to aligned, and added a link back to the front page from the header. I’ll probably adapt Kubrick some more, since there are some things that could be better, or at least more individualized. Or perhaps I’ll try Binary Bonsai’s K2 theme. Problem is I gotta move this server to another computer first. Damn you, Red Hat! This time I’ll go OS X.

The below is the unedited basis for an article I wrote for now defunct free magazine Monitor. The original printed in Swedish of course, and was edited to look like a real interview. I also put up the PDF of the printed article, for posterity or some such thing. Here goes (Derek, if you by some odd reason should see this and in some way feel embarrassed, please come forth and say so):

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Back in 1999, I did a mail interview with Derek Powazek, who at the time was one of the first bloggers (before it was even called “blog”), and, I daresay, one of the main players behind the blogging r-/evolution. His work with fray and other projects was one of the main inspirations behind things I did at the time, like the little text I wrote about 10 days in France, the summer of 1999. That page is a graphic homage to the stuff that was on fray at the time, albeit not nearly as good. If I remember correctly, Powazek was also one of the founders of blogger, which was probably the earliest good free blogging service. At least it was via PowazekI first heard about it.
Anyway, once again, Powazek enters the fray (ho-ho) with a SXSW commentary, wherein he adresses that pet peeve of mine: semi-corporate entities that does nothing but trying to maintain a company-artist status quo, where the artist is constantly manacled, hampered and used up. Powazek, as an artist-of-sorts, puts it in plain text:

Until we (users, industry groups, lawyers, and politicians) finally make a clear legal and procedural distinction between copying a work for noncommercial creation of new works (like mashups or backups) and wholesale piracy for profit (like duplicating a work for the purpose of resale), we’re just going to keep shouting at each other in conference rooms and newspapers, and real innovation will never get made.

I couldn’t agree more. Piracy for profit is near-accepted, whereas small-time downloaders are hunted down. And god-damn the poor bastard who dare sample without clearance: onto him/her shall the hounds be released. Exchange should be easier, and whatever MPAA & RIAA might say: they are NOT there to protect the rights of the artists; they are there to protect the assets of the industry.

Today: Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – Pretending to See the Future
Now, back in 1982-83, I think, I bought Architecture & Morality by OMD (as they are usually called). I must have been about 15 at the time. At any rate, they were kind of grouped together with bands like Ultravox, Depeche Mode, Simple Minds and such. And the genre in Sweden was called, broadly, “synth”. A much besmirched genre it was, too, later on with dubious connections to the New Romantics genre (a genre that generally encompassed what we called “synth”). But unlike the aforementioned bands, OMD sounded murky and glum. Possibly, this had to do with the use of the first Emulator or some such beast, generating lo-fi choral backgrounds. I’m not sure I really liked them, but being 15, it was nice being difficult.
But now, more than 20 years later, I hear those songs differently: like moody punk played on synthesizers, like post punk without the aggro, but with the emo. The earliest OMD songs has not only aged well, they have matured, and in the Peel sessions version that I listened to when biking thru the snow, the roughness of live mixes oh-so-well with the remains of ’77 punk and the emergence of the synthesizer as a pop instrument.