M Is FOR MASHUP - July 6th, 2009
JULY 2009 - THREE SPLENDID MASHUP COLLECTIONS
By DJ Useo
I know you are all (mostly) getting outside & enjoying the Summer sun's rays (work willing). If you have, you've noticed that there's a feeling under the sun this year that is the feeling of hope. I know you've felt it, I certainly have. I think you should take along the latest mashup comps in your mp3 players & enjoy the outdoors July mashup mood. It's been an amazing season for mashup collections with the recent SUMMER BOOTY 2009 & MICHAEL JACKSON compilations, but there's no holdup in great releases as some more big bootleg names sidle up to the bar & present 3 awesome records! All three contain the familiar gone astray, the tame made wild, & the mixer's dream realized. That's the true substance of the hope this Summer. The realized concepts shining in the sun. Pure hope.
First up is a collection that looks at one set of artists, & what a well-known set! What an unlikely choice it seems at first to spotlight the MUPPETS for a mashup comp, but considering their enduring popularity & the twin history of Muppet musical success, you will understand the reasoned approach to this set. DJ BC, he of many a popular past mashup compilation has coordinated & brought into being 'MUPPET MASHUP' ( djbc.net/muppetmashup/ )
This is a record you can enjoy for the glee of the MUPPETS or just as much for the performance of the mixers. The lure of the felt ones is strong & has brought crowd-pleasing names like Dunproofin, McSleazy & Atom onto this project. Once you experience the musi-combo delights of tracks like Martinn's 'The Muppet Strut' (The Muppets vs The Stray Cats) & RIAA's 'Spinning Rubber Sing Thing', you'll be glad you did. I hope they continue this one every year.
Next up is a collection called "It's Britney, Mixed!" / The Britney Spears viral pop tribute. Prepare yourself for seventeen mellifluous mashups that focus in on the Queen of Pop by 9 mixers of considerable ability. Britney has held a fast appeal with the fans & the mixers follow that pattern here with a large batch of bastard pop tunes that build on her appeal. You will hear fantastic mashups like WORLD FAMOUS AUDIO HACKER's 'If You Seek Lucretia' (Britney vs The Sisters Of Mercy), & you will find remix's like TIGER MENDOZA's 'Slave 4 U'. Names of contributors like TEAM 9, Elvis Of Dallas, OSCAR TG, & ARRATIK conjure much past pleasure in the mashup fan. Here they fulfill that promise & that's with using the music & talent of Britney, an artist that admittedly some have percieved as over-played. You won't notice that perception with this release. Get yours now before the bandwidth dissipates ( britney.audiohacker.com/ ) (Don't miss the 2 vids as well)
Now comes a dream bootleg compilation. Not only because of the mixers involved, although they are dream mixers, but because this collection takes a major musical moment in human history & gives us a stunningly new approach to it. Here is the record you never thought would be done - DJ Zebra's 'BOOTSTOCK : Bootlegs From The Original Soundtrack And More'. That's right, you get to hear mashups with COUNTRY JOE And THE FISH, CANNED HEAT, JIMI HENDRIX, THE WHO, & all the rest! This collection was first broadcast on July 4th 2009 in the Zebramix radio broadcast, on Virgin Radio France. I signed up for the show in itunes as a podcast, & I was impressed immediately with the mixing execution of DJ Zebra & his compilation cohorts, Electrosound, Mighty Mike and Totom. DJ ZEBRA's "Wooden Ships On The Moon", ELECTROSOUND's "Who's Zooming The Who", & TOTOM's "Street Sweeper Social Volunteers" are just the tip of the Icestock with this release. If you know of WOODSTOCK, or if you don't (!!!) this is a batch of bootlegs you'll bop to all Summer.
Get yours here ( djzebra.free.fr/Bootstock.html )
Now that'sa some'a great Summer mashup, eh? Thanks for reading & drop me a line if you have a thought to share.
Mix Of The Week - DJ Nak _Freddy M_ - June 09 Summer Mix holds lots of Summery vibe & shares it generously over it's half hour of mixing.
(www.imeem.com/freddy08/music/_C8pU6rI/dj-nak-freddy-m-june-09-summer-mix-dj-nak/ )
Mashup Tip : Share all your pellas & if you know how to make more, do that, too. It will come back to you tenfold.
DJ Useo's Podcast
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Al Franken's secret
... Al Franken's dirty secret is that he's a big policy wonk.
Scott Burns: Life of Riley Index - Retiree Version (assetbuilder.com)
It requires gobs of money to be a person of independent means when you are young. But age changes everything. Once you have achieved geezerhood, your personal fortune can be a small fraction of what a younger person needs, and you'll live just as well.
Kira Cochrane: Can more men be persuaded to buy Tampax? (guardian.co.uk)
A new campaign for sanitary protection running online stars a boy, Zack, who wakes up with a vagina.
Greg Kot: Time has no hold on the reconstituted Feelies (Chicago Tribune)
Like the band's 1986 song "Slipping (Into Something)," the Feelies have a tendency to sneak up on people, then disappear.
Dan Bolles: Steve Earle Talks Love, Marriage, Divorce and Townes Van Zandt (Seven Days)
Now sober for more than a decade, Earle has released a brilliant tribute to his fallen and underappreciated idol. The lovingly conceived and intimately understated album is entitled simply Townes.
"Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice" (UK Edition) by Patricia Fortini Brown: A review by Andrew Butterfield
Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese painted alongside one another in Venice for thirty years. No other sixteenth-century Italian city could attract and nourish a triumvirate of great painters, or for so long a time.
Brian Burnes: For author Richard Lawrence Miller, it's all Abe all the time (McClatchy Newspapers)
Readers of Miller's first volume, "Lincoln and His World: The Early Years, Birth to Illinois Legislature" learn how, in the late 1820s, Lincoln and friends, walking home on a freezing night, encountered a drunk, passed out and oblivious to the cold. While Lincoln's friends thought the man should remain where he was to pay the price for his folly, Lincoln picked him up and carried him to a nearby fireplace.
Michael Phillips: Michael Mann explores the legendary dark sides of home (Chicago Tribune)
Michael Mann, the son of Jack and Esther Mann and the director and co-writer of "Public Enemies," grew up all around Chicago. At 66, his voice retains remnants of the flat, hard "a's" of his old neighborhood.
Roger Ebert's Journal: I'm a proud Brainiac
So let's focus on those who seriously believe "Transformers" is one of the year's best films. Are these people wrong? Yes. They are wrong. I am fond of the story I tell about Gene Siskel. When a so-called film critic defended a questionable review by saying, "after all, it's opinion," Gene told him: "There is a point when a personal opinion shades off into an error of fact. When you say 'The Valachi Papers' is a better film than 'The Godfather,' you are wrong."
David Bruce: Wise Up! Good Deeds (athensnews.com)
... Major League baseball player Roberto Clemente ... looked out for other players from Puerto Rico, such as pitcher John Candelaria, who says, "The first Pirate I met when they were trying to sign me was Clemente. Clemente was supposed to be arguing for the front office. But while they were trying to talk me into signing, Clemente kept telling me in Spanish, 'You can get more money.'"
Virtual Age (sonnyradio.com)
How long will you live?
"Home": Free 93-minute Movie (youtube.com)
The Weekly Poll
Current Question
Results are delayed a few days.
The 'Taking it Personally' Edition
Has the unexpected death of a celebrity ever affected you in a profound manner?
Send your response to
Results tomorrow
noted:
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Still sunny, but cool.
DreamWorks Eyes Toy As Movie Concept
View-Master
View-Master, the Fisher-Price toy with little 3-D picture discs of mountains, rivers and caverns that kids could rotate through a viewfinder, is the latest vintage toy getting a second life on the big screen.
DreamWorks is in negotiations to acquire movie rights to the toy from Mattel (which owns Fisher-Price) and has asked writer-producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci to do some "Transformers"-style magic on it.
Brad Caleb Kane, who worked as a writer-producer on the duo's Fox series "Fringe," is on board to write the screenplay. Kurtzman and Orci would produce.
Story specifics are being kept under wraps, though Kane, who during the holiday weekend sent out a message on Twitter announcing his involvement, said, "It'll be like the old '80s Amblin movies: 'Goonies,' 'Young Sherlock' ... in that vein." (That post has since been taken down.)
View-Master
Pays Tribute On Haiti Mission
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton paused during an aid mission to Haiti on Tuesday to honour Michael Jackson for helping the Democratic Party raise cash at a crucial time.
The former U.S. president, now a special UN envoy to Haiti, recalled Jackson's performance at a 2002 fundraiser at New York's Apollo theatre.
"He basically helped save my party from terrible financial distress, so he was very kind to me personally," Clinton said during a stop on his tour of a still-struggling northern Haiti, where floods killed several hundred people last year.
Clinton, his face bright red under a scorching summertime Caribbean sun, spoke fondly of Jackson, recalling that the singer performed at his first inauguration in 1993. He also said Jackson had struggled with the burden of early fame.
Bill Clinton
Online Radio Stations Strike Deal
Music Royalties
The future of Internet radio appears more secure after a handful of online stations reached an agreement Tuesday to head off a potentially crippling increase in copyright royalty rates.
The deal is the product of two years of negotiations between webcasters and copyright holders. In March 2007, a ruling by the federal Copyright Royalty Board dramatically raised the rates that Internet radio stations must pay artists and recording labels - leading many online radio stations to warn that the new rates would put them out of business by eating up as much as 70 percent of revenue.
At least one popular online radio service - Pandora Media of Oakland, Calif., which derives much of its revenue from advertising - said the new agreement will help ensure its survival.
The revenue-sharing deal announced Tuesday is between SoundExchange, a nonprofit that collects royalties for recording copyright owners from digital radio services, and three smaller webcasters: radioIO, Digitally Imported and AccuRadio.
Traditional AM and FM broadcasters are exempt from copyright royalty rates for over-the-air radio play, because that airplay is thought to provide free promotion for artists and labels. But the broadcasters are subject to the new rates for any songs streamed over radio station Web sites.
Music Royalties
Museum Program
DNA
It's not your average library collection: Bits of scorpions and snakes. Tissue from jaguars. Leeches from a hippopotamus.
And on Tuesday, officials of the American Museum of Natural History and the U.S. National Park Service signed an agreement for samples from endangered species in America's parks to be added to the museum's existing DNA collection.
The frozen samples provide researchers with genetic materials to study and help protect hundreds of species. The first new submissions will be blood samples from foxes in California's Channel Islands National Park, followed by specimens from the American crocodile and the Hawaiian goose.
Underground in the laboratories of the museum, which was featured in the 2006 Ben Stiller movie "Night at the Museum," a half-dozen metal vats cooled with liquid nitrogen can store up to 1 million frozen tissue samples. They're stored on racks in bar-coded boxes that are linked to a computer database so they can be located in seconds.
DNA
What Global Warming?
Arctic Sea Ice
New NASA satellite measurements show that sea ice in the Arctic is more than just shrinking in area, it is dramatically thinning.
The volume of older crucial sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk by 57 percent from the winter of 2004 to 2008. That's losing more volume of ice than water in Lake Michigan.
NASA scientist Jay Zwally said global warming is to blame. He said rapidly shrinking sea ice in the Arctic warms the rest of the globe indirectly. Older ice is more important in the Arctic because it is thicker, surviving the heat of summer and building over time.
Arctic Sea Ice
Long Weekend
Cyber Attack
A widespread and unusually resilient computer attack that began July 4 knocked out the Web sites of several government agencies, including some that are responsible for fighting cyber crime, The Associated Press has learned.
The Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department Web sites were all down at varying points over the holiday weekend and into this week, according to officials inside and outside the government. Some of the sites were still experiencing problems Tuesday evening.
Federal government officials refused to publicly discuss any details of the cyber attack, and would only generally acknowledge that it occurred. It was not clear whether other government sites also were attacked.
Others familiar with the outage, which is called a denial of service attack, said that the fact that the government Web sites were still being affected three days after it began signaled an unusually lengthy and sophisticated attack. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.
Cyber Attack
Cutting Staff
Penguin Books
Penguin Books, a division of Pearson, is to cut about 100 jobs, or 10 percent of its British staff, as part of a restructuring, it said in a statement on Tuesday
Pearson, which is also the world's biggest educational publisher and owns the Financial Times, said the cuts were not a direct response to the recession but part of a structural effort to position the business for the future.
Penguin said it would cut the number of titles and reduce costs at Dorling Kindersley and Rough Guides in response to long-term pressure on reference publishing, and would increase its emphasis on digital activities.
Penguin employed 4,112 people worldwide on average in 2008. Its underlying sales grew 3 percent to 925 million pounds in 2008, 19 percent of Pearson's total sales, and adjusted operating profit rose 4 percent to 93 million pounds.
Penguin Books
New Monkey Discovered
Mura's Saddleback Tamarin
Researchers have discovered a new sub-species of monkey in a remote part of the Amazon rain forest, a U.S.-based wildlife conservation group said on Tuesday.
The newly found monkey was first spotted by scientists in 2007 in the Brazilian state of Amazonas and is related to the saddleback tamarin monkeys, known for their distinctively marked backs, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) said.
The small monkey, which is mostly gray and brown and weighs 213 grams (0.47 pound), has been named the Mura's saddleback tamarin after the Mura Indian tribe of the Purus and Madeira river basins where the new sub-species was found.
It is 240 millimeters (9.4 inches) tall with a 320 millimeter (12.6 inch) tail.
Mura's Saddleback Tamarin
Prime-Time Nielsens
Ratings
Prime-time viewership numbers compiled by Nielsen Media Research for June 29-July 5. Listings include the week's ranking, with viewership for the week and season-to-date rankings in parentheses. An "X" in parentheses denotes a one-time-only presentation.
1. (22) "America's Got Talent" (Tuesday), NBC, 13.15 million viewers.
2. (26) "America's Got Talent" (Wednesday), NBC, 11.44 million viewers.
3. (5) "NCIS," CBS, 10.83 million viewers.
4. (32) "The Mentalist" (Tuesday), CBS, 10.55 million viewers.
5. (8) "The Mentalist," CBS, 9.79 million viewers.
6. (10) "Two and a Half Men," CBS, 9.29 million viewers.
7. (15) "60 Minutes," CBS, 8.39 million viewers.
8. (4) "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," CBS, 8.236 million viewers.
9. (X) "America's Got Talent," NBC, 8.235 million viewers.
10. (17) "CSI: NY," CBS, 8.20 million viewers.
11. (11) "Criminal Minds," CBS, 8.04 million viewers.
12. (66) "48 Hours Mystery" (Tuesday), CBS, 8.02 million viewers.
13. (14) "CSI: Miami," CBS, 8.01 million viewers.
14. (50) "Wipeout," ABC, 8.00 million viewers.
15. (40) "The Big Bang Theory," CBS, 7.95 million viewers.
16. (71) "The Bachelorette," ABC, 7.94 million viewers.
17. (50) "So You Think You Can Dance" (Wednesday), Fox, 7.73 million viewers.
18. (36) "Law & Order: SVU," NBC, 7.33 million viewers.
19. (50) "So You Think You Can Dance" (Thursday), Fox, 7.23 million viewers.
20. (26) "Cold Case," CBS, 7.00 million viewers.
Ratings
| CURRENT MOON lunar phases |
