"A symbolic clock is as nourishing to the intellect as a photograph of oxygen to a drowning man."

The most preposterous thing about Zack Snyder's bloated, flaccid big-screen adaptation of Alan Moore's Watchmen comic is that it posits a world in which the doomsday clock is at a minute to midnight, Nixon has served five terms, and real life superheroes walk the streets and the plains, fighting crime and winning wars, and this has had no effect whatsoever on contemporary pop music.

How Music Got Game (Or Game Got Music)

" . . . Badges must be worn at all times . . . "

Read more about music apps, gamification and exploitationware in my "Wreath Lecture" for The Quietus here.

. . . have you hugged, kissed and respected your brown Venus today? Robyn Orlin reviewed. . .

". . . The challenge for Robyn Orlin then becomes how to make a piece of theatre which re-tells the story of, and pays tribute to, Baartman, without in the process exacting the same work of spectacularisation of which the latter has historically been the victim. This she achieves through the deft manoeuvre of exhibiting instead the audience to themselves. . ."

Read more at Exeunt Magazine.

Rock and Roll Vs. The American Federation of Musicians

 ". . . Listening to rock & roll, then, is to cross a kind of sonic picket line. . . "

Read more at The Quietus.

The Atari Video Music and the Music Video

"... There is a kind of whig history of the music video in which early performance based clips, such as Jan & Dean’s ‘Surf City’ on the Pacific Coast Highway and the minimalist cool of The Animals’ sound-studio set for ‘The House of the Rising Sun’, give way to a burst of creativity which starts with The Beatles and explodes with MTV and Michael Jackson. It is a seductive narrative, and not uncoincidentally one that neatly dovetails with the rock heritage mag lists of the great classic albums . . ."

Read more at the ÉCU - European Independent Film Festival music blog here.