Just got this from the good folks at the Prometheus Project. It seems they’re putting on a public hearing with Stopbigmedia.com; FCC commissioners Adelstein and Copps will be present to hear your thoughts on the subject. So if you liked what you heard at yesterday’s meeting on the hill with Mac MacCaughan and others, now it’s your chance to participate — let your voice be heard!

Public Localism Hearing
at the Federal Communications Commission
Room TW-C305 following open commission meeting
FCC, 445 12th Street SW, Washington, D.C. 20554 (map)
Date: Wednesday, October 31
Time: 9am - 2pm

More details here; if you would like to hear Prometheus’ thoughts on media consolidation, visit their website.

Merge Records Mac McCaughan, among others, is at the Senate speaking on behalf of the future of radio today. Did you tune in? Thoughts?

Update: Damn, they were awfully quick about getting the archive & statements on the sites — not even 5 minutes after it was finished!

We all complained about the hierarchy of music writing — too few deciding for many — and depending on your perception blogs decimated and/or leveled the playing field. But there’s a world of difference between even ground and the riotous free-for-all feeling pervading that particular end of the business. I can’t help but wonder if the OiNK shutdown is like a virtual Gas-X, attempting to cut down on the bloat of the business.

Shannon & Michaela were these two awesome ladies who attended the SXSW music blogging panel I spoke on a couple years back. Aside from being one of the few women in the audience, they were snazzy dressers and knitting while the panel rambled on.

They’ve kind of moved on from blogging, but not the knitting — looks like they’ve started up a small custom knitwear biz called Kindling & Tinder:

Hi All,

I hear you saying, “Michaela and Shannon, those nice girls who used to run The Rich Girls Are Weeping, that amazing music blog? Didn’t they used to go out all the time? How come we haven’t seen them at shows lately?”

(Alternatively, some of you reading this may know us from our Austin days, or elsewhere… Hello!)

Well, I’ll tell you: we have a little side business called Kindling & Tinder and we make custom knitwear — gloves and scarves for now, but we’re mocking up sweaters as we write this! — for all you handsome gents out there.

And hey, we have a website, even! http://www.kindlingandtinder.com

We coerced the lovely Anthony and Curtis to model and Aubrey to take the pictures — then Michaela hacked away on the CSS and in Photoshop, and Shannon provided moral support and design assistance.

And look: we’re open for business! Check out the site, let us know what you think!

Thanks to everyone who’s been of utter invaluable assistance so far. We’ll probably be bugging you for help again.

Thanks for reading!

xo
Shannon & Michaela

SeanAgnew posted this on October 17th, 2007 @ 1:23:20 pm

okay - so that band THE BLACK KIDS - who less than 10 days ago were just a local young band from FL w/ a myspace page - well they got a great review on Pitchfork last week and today it’s reported that they are now being managed by The Arcade Fire and Bjork’s manager.

Totally Makes Sense

I feel like everyone is just throwing shit at the wall and just waiting to see what sticks

Who needs CMJ when you’ve got a messageboard? Hooray for careerist indie rock?

Pablo bit his lip, the two undergraduates at the table next to him in The Satellite were talking about Pi Lam.

“Dude, Sean Agnew and Dave P. were totally in there, like tripping balls!” said one, sporting a new Animal Collective T-shirt.

“I know, Philebrity even said it was the coolest party in town that weekend!” answered his cohort. The cohort apparently was more a fan of Parts & Labor.

Pablo looked into his Candy Bar Latte and his mind drifted…back to 1994, when people caleld him Acorn and he lived in various squats around the neighborhood. Pi Lam had given out free beer on Thursdays and the squatters were fond of it. Once he had been ejected from a Boss Hook-Up / Thorazine / Dead Gerber Babies show for pissing in their trash cans in the basement. Well, at least Pi Lam was still around.

Pablo finished his latte and headed back to his job at the Linguistic Data Consortium…

This is easily the best thread on the internet today. And it pokes fun of this abortion of an article.

From the “Right Place, Right Time” department: I’ve chimed in on the so-called Meg White sex tape for Idolator.

But while I’m here, I just want to give a shout out to Idolator, who celebrates their first year of existence in the music blog world. Maura and Jess (and previously Brian, too) have done a great job — here’s to more years of success. If I could be in NYC tonight, I would!

OMG, school is so freaking awesome. I read hundreds and hundreds of pages, then I think about how it relates to the things I do! Granted, the thing that I do is listen to music, watch TV and goof around on the internet — which really means the only thing I can focus on these days is Britney Spears. (Who, I should add, looks great for having two kids but seriously needs to rethink the whole “wearing underwear on stage” schtick. So confidential to Brit Brit: listen to your handlers, please, when they tell you to cover up.)

I recently re-read Douglas Coupland’s Shampoo Planet; inspired by its Table of Elements and Tragic Character Flaws, it popped into my mind to boil down a lot of the phenomenological and cultural elements of the 1990’s into bite-sized, two-word phrases. Here’s some suggestions, courtesy of friends. (Thanks to all who indulged in this exercise.) I have no idea why I capitalized this originally — maybe it was the spirit of Coupland flowing through my veins:

PLATFORM BIRKENSTOCKS
OK SODA
CRYSTAL PEPSI
GRUNGE ROCK
RIOT GRRRL
120 MINUTES
SEVEN INCH
CHAPEL HILL
BILL CLINTON
SASSY MAGAZINE
BENETTON COLORS
GLOBAL TEENS
REALITY BITES
DOC MARTENS
FLANNEL SHIRTS
THE CROW
PEARL JAM
INDIE ROCK
ALTERNATIVE NATION
GANGSTA RAP
THE CHRONIC
NOTORIOUS B.I.G.
ARSENIO HALL
SUB POP
SIMPLE MACHINES
JESSE CAMP
VANILLA ICE
COUNTING CROWS
SPIN DOCTORS
BLUES TRAVELER
BEE GIRL
SPICE GIRLS
MONICA LEWINSKY
LILITH FAIR
AARON SPELLING
SHANNEN DOHERTY
TORI AMOS
KOSOVO CONFLICT
NAPSTER DOWNLOADS
SMART DRUGS
FOAM PARTIES
BLIND MELON
ANTIOCH RULES
SPIN MAGAZINE
MATT PINFIELD
SECOND STAGE (as in Lollapalooza)
SOUL PATCH
THIRD WAVE
‘ZINE CONVENTION
SOUP NAZI
YADDA YADDA
DOT COM
INTERNET STARTUP
STOCK OPTIONS
URBAN FETCH
SMASHING PUMPKINS
POP LOSER
ROLLINS BAND
NEW MEDIA

My life has been on a good streak lately, so there’s no real reason to clog it up with negativity, but these things I’m about to tell you, well, they gnaw and pick away at the very fabric of my soul….

The Italian Market = Ethnic Cuisine Amateur Hour
Over the weekend, I went to every store that carried Italian products, inquiring about panelle and arancine. I’ve been itching to have these lately, but was shocked to discover that none of the big names — Claudio’s, DiBruno Bros., Tallutos and so on — carried them. Well, half-truth: apparently Pronto, the DiBruno Bros. to-go store, carries a meat-free, wussed-out version of arancine — excuse me, croquettes. As for the panelle, looks like I’m going to have to take a trip to Bay Ridge or figure out a way to make my own recipe stop sucking.

Blogs I Can’t Fucking Read
Deep down, underneath the mania of Web 2.0, we all desire to be special snowflakes. It’s the motivation behind the countless, endless tweaks of blogs. As you may notice, I’ve fallen prey to the siren’s call time and time again. And I know I’ve put you through some lousy blog templates, but the one thing I’ve never done is made the type so small that it defies the whole reading aspect of it. So I ask bloggers, both near and far to do this for me — make your type size bigger. Please. Em, pixel, pica, point, whatevs. I shouldn’t need to create a Greasemonkey script for cleaning up your design oversight. Just nothing smaller than 11px — I don’t have health insurance, and the eyestrain is really, really taking its toll.

New Slang: “Gettin’ Honused” / “Honus Bonus”
This comes straight from my pal MTV and his sister, coined by being frequently shortchanged on coffee fill-ups by a certain barista-cum-indie-darling. If the coffee cup has way less than you paid for, you “got honused”. Similarly speaking, if your cup had an ample amount of coffee in it, you were the recipient of a “honus bonus”. Seeing the words “honus”, “cum”, and “indie” in the same paragraph = not a bonus.

Tobacco Companies & Their Marketing Ploys Strike Again
Seems like the upcoming Dinosaur Jr. show in town is being sponsored by Camel Cigarettes. It’s not being marketed that way, but if you wanted to know who’s ponying up the cash for the gig, well, there you go. I have this strong feeling that Dinosaur Jr. can command a hefty sum on their own, so why they’d want to get tangled up with R.J. Reynolds is beyond me. Looks like RJR is lobbying against a tax increase on cigs right now, anyway. Aside from the whole issue of bands being stupid enough to take this money, I wonder if RJR feels middle class indie rock yuppie types have the political clout they desperately need to make legislation like this happen. I just can’t imagine West Philly basement punks organizing a show a la Books Through Bars. Funny, I feel like I’ve been down this road before…

Ahhhh, I start school in exactly two weeks!!! On the one hand I’ve been waiting for this moment, on the other I’m just not ready to think about homework and grades just yet (despite the fact that I’ve been TAing a film history course all summer long, so really, this is a non-complaint). Make no mistake: I am psyched. More psyched than you could ever imagine.

On that note…

» More blogging for Billboard is up. As you know, it’s a competition and the grand prize is covering an awards show from the red carpet. I could be the greatest writer since Dickens and a better photographer than Ansel Adams* but this is a game of cold, hard numbers, folks, and right now an entry about C14y 41k3n is kicking my ass. I need your comments and pageviews now so that I can fulfill my destiny of attending a red carpet event in a satin gown. Tell your friends, family and dogs to log on.

[* I don't like Dickens or Adams, but I think you get the symbolic nature of the references.]

» The baritone sax player from the Budos Band is really, really hot.

» Jancee Dunn’s memoir is very funny. Probably the best out of the current round of “I Lived Through The 90’s” memoirs.

» My last radio show of the summer is 8/21, don’t forget to tune in.