Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 28, 2026
Sunday, April 26, 2026
Glen Campbell
[ed. Never heard this before, but apparently Brian Wilson gave it to Glen as a thank-you for something or other. Glen does a great job, but you can easily guess who wrote it.]
Thursday, April 23, 2026
I'm Just a Sound
One Sunday morning recently I listened, one after the other, to Monteverdi’s Selva morale e spirituale (1641) and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966), and it wasn’t in any way jarring. I have to say, though, that it was by Pet Sounds that I felt truly transported. Between July 1965 and April 1966, the 23-year-old Brian Wilson wrote, arranged, produced and sang on songs including ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)’, ‘Caroline, No’, ‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’ and ‘God Only Knows’. All around three minutes long or a bit less, they can make you feel as if you are standing alone in a cathedral, bathed in sound. Wilson was able to make pop music that was uplifting without ever being sickly. Secular hymns baited with pop hooks; heavy themes made exquisitely light. ‘His progressions are always going up, then pausing before they go up again, like they’re going towards God,’ says a musician quoted in David Leaf’s liner notes to The Pet Sounds Sessions (1997).
From ‘In My Room’ (1963) to songs like ‘’Til I Die’ (1971) and ‘Sail on, Sailor’ (1973), the Beach Boys made music that for some of us has become a kind of gospel. This may seem a large and baffling claim if what you see in your mind’s eye when someone mentions them is an image of leathery old guys in Hawaiian shirts, or if all you know of their music is zippy hits like ‘Fun Fun Fun’, ‘Barbara Ann’ and ‘I Get Around’. Yet there is a logic here. Rock’n’roll was born from the uneasy tension between Saturday night and Sunday morning, church pew and dance floor, showing out and making things right with God. After those beginnings, pop and rock would go on to supply plenty of carnal jolt, but far fewer intimations of the sacred.
To an extent rivalled only by the Beatles, the Beach Boys have become the tales told about them, the ever expanding archive, the cornucopia of box sets, the shelves of books. It’s easy enough to see why. This is a tale stuffed with unlikely heroes and monstrous villains, which moves back and forth between glorious sunshine and the depths of despair. Many of the people in it – abusers, exploiters, bad magi – are not rounded or sympathetic figures; it sometimes seems as if everyone is trying to become the worst possible version of themselves. Here are Eugene Landy, Charles Manson, Phil Spector, Murry Wilson. Then there are the scarcely believable transformations of the boy-child Brian Wilson. How did he jump through the hula hoops of novelty pop to arrive, in the blink of an ‘I’, at a place where it seemed perfectly natural to come up with the idea of writing a pop music suite embodying the four elements?
Everything in this story is multiple and contradictory. No fact is secure, no testimony certain: all is apocrypha, surmise and legend. Over the years, the principals have offered wildly different readings of the same events, none more so than the prodigy at the heart of it all. In his brisk, canny, entertaining book Surf’s Up – a summa theologica of Beach Boy lore and legend – Peter Doggett sums it up: ‘As ever with Brian and the past ... the details altered sharply in each new telling.’ Sometimes during the course of the same interview. As if this or that reminiscence were simply one more of the musical ‘feels’ he said flowed through his head. There are even two starkly different Brian Wilson memoirs. [...]
Brian studied Bach and Beethoven, and learned to trust in the healing balm of counterpoint. And like Beethoven, who also had two brothers and a violent, overbearing father, he was slowly going deaf. ‘Before he entered his teens,’ Doggett explains, ‘Brian’s parents noticed that he tended to talk out of one side of his mouth and would turn his head around to pick up sounds or voices that came from the opposite side of his head. Tests were carried out, and it was determined that he enjoyed less than 20 per cent hearing in his right ear.’ There seems never to have been an official diagnosis. All we know is that Brian didn’t seem to hear like anyone else. As with Beethoven, his partial deafness and the ringing in his ears didn’t hinder his work as a composer, but it did make live performance a living hell and caused him to withdraw slowly from the hubbub of social life. The crossroads moment took place high up in the air: in December 1964 Wilson was flying to Houston to start a tour when he had some kind of convulsive breakdown. Too much pressure, in both senses. Things that make your head go pop. He no longer wanted to be up on stage with all the feedback and screaming.
The recording studio made possible new ways of listening. Tiny increments of syllable and sound to juggle. Listen to tapes of Wilson working in the studio and you can hear just how precise and in control he is: this is the one place where he knows who he is and what he wants. Did he ever sound more sensual than when he delivered the lines ‘I can hear so much/in your sighs’ and ‘Listen, listen, listen ...’ from ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)’? ‘Music became his language of choice,’ Doggett writes, ‘with which he was far more articulate than he ever was with words.’ You could say things to girls you could never say in real life. You could conjure up swells, plateaux, shivers; the sound of the sun coming up over the sea. Like many a Romantic man, his way of feeling intimacy is via something cloudy, oceanic, mountain-top. The nearest faraway place.
One of the mythic promises of rock’n’roll was escape to a place where the action was and where you could maybe find others like yourself. But there would be no such getaway for the Beach Boys – no big city salvation, no yellow brick road. They would live and die in LA. The Beach Boys didn’t scour snow-strafed city streets looking for old blues 78s. They idolised the very ‘square’ barbershop quartet the Four Freshmen; Wilson wrote a song called ‘Be True to Your School’. They were not, in a word, cool. They didn’t leave home, didn’t mooch, didn’t stray: they were already in the teen fantasy promised land. In Hawthorne, south-west Los Angeles, everything was on their doorstep, including their future bandmates: livewire cousin Mike Love; high-school classmate Al Jardine; long-time neighbour David Marks.
The Beach Boys, like many of the new bands of that era, sprang out of a local scene with its own heroes, slang, fashion. In this bright diurnal paradise, four of their early singles were hymns to a local leisure pursuit/metaphysical quest: ‘Surfin’’, ‘Surfin’ Safari’, ‘Surfin’ USA’, ‘Surfer Girl’. But then there suddenly appeared the achingly introspective ‘In My Room’. Co-written with Gary Usher, it’s a swerve away from the world of the drive-in, the burger place, the drag strip into a wholly/holy inner world where the singer can ‘lie awake and pray’. It’s a vulnerable song about the desire to be invulnerable. ‘You’re not afraid when you’re in your room,’ Wilson once said. The recording studio was his other panic room. It was somewhere you could explore a spectrum of emotional tones, as heard in early songs like ‘Lonely Sea’ (1963), ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ (1964), ‘The Warmth of the Sun’ (1964) and, most of all for me, the near-perfect pop record ‘Guess I’m Dumb’ (1965), written, arranged and produced by Wilson, sung by a young Glen Campbell.
Wilson would soon become notorious for how much time he took to record things, but at this early stage everything was a blur. There were ten Beach Boys studio albums between 1962 and 1965. There were no maps, no precedents; their de facto manager and ‘appropriate adult’ at this point was their irascible, interfering father. Brian Wilson may have had his mood swings but he was, in his own way, quite sturdy. Something you begin to notice, leafing through all the Beach Boys books, is how strapping the teenage Brian looks in high-school snaps and how sporty too; this was no neurasthenic squirt. He also had a reputation for being a bit of a cut-up. A twelfth-grade report card reveals that he got an A in Physical Education, a B in Senior Problems (Personal Psychology) and only a C for Piano and Harmony.
Wilson was famously not a surfer: he may have held business meetings in his swimming pool and set up his piano in a sand pit, but he had to be dragged into the sea as if he was undergoing aversion therapy. The Beach Boys’ early hits were the sound of everything to do with surfing, absent the sensation of surfing itself. Surfers try to control unpredictable swells and curls, seeking moments of transcendence, measured in seconds or a few short minutes – just like the pop music Wilson was about to unleash on the world.
To an extent rivalled only by the Beatles, the Beach Boys have become the tales told about them, the ever expanding archive, the cornucopia of box sets, the shelves of books. It’s easy enough to see why. This is a tale stuffed with unlikely heroes and monstrous villains, which moves back and forth between glorious sunshine and the depths of despair. Many of the people in it – abusers, exploiters, bad magi – are not rounded or sympathetic figures; it sometimes seems as if everyone is trying to become the worst possible version of themselves. Here are Eugene Landy, Charles Manson, Phil Spector, Murry Wilson. Then there are the scarcely believable transformations of the boy-child Brian Wilson. How did he jump through the hula hoops of novelty pop to arrive, in the blink of an ‘I’, at a place where it seemed perfectly natural to come up with the idea of writing a pop music suite embodying the four elements?
Everything in this story is multiple and contradictory. No fact is secure, no testimony certain: all is apocrypha, surmise and legend. Over the years, the principals have offered wildly different readings of the same events, none more so than the prodigy at the heart of it all. In his brisk, canny, entertaining book Surf’s Up – a summa theologica of Beach Boy lore and legend – Peter Doggett sums it up: ‘As ever with Brian and the past ... the details altered sharply in each new telling.’ Sometimes during the course of the same interview. As if this or that reminiscence were simply one more of the musical ‘feels’ he said flowed through his head. There are even two starkly different Brian Wilson memoirs. [...]
Murry Wilson, the father of Brian and his two brothers, fellow Beach Boys Carl and Dennis, was not by all accounts an easy man to love. He was a businessman, but his dream life was dominated by the siren call of music. It nagged at him that his talent as a composer and songwriter wasn’t getting its due. Why weren’t his melodies heard everywhere? He was snappish, sniping, volatile, and doled out violent punishments to his three sons. The only time he wasn’t angry was when he could be soothed by the syrupy sounds of easy listening music. Off the back of his sons’ success he would eventually release his own LP, The Many Moods of Murry Wilson (1967) – the title is apt. The middle Wilson, Dennis, took the brunt of Murry’s physical abuse, but Brian, first born and most gifted, was the one in the dangerous position of being able to realise his father’s dreams. The ire of a disappointed god: anything you do will be either too good or not good enough. In this eggshell atmosphere, while the boys’ mother, Audree, rustled up huge amounts of anaesthetic food – hyperactive Dennis was the only one who didn’t pile on the pounds – Brian taught Carl and Dennis to sing in harmony; this, he later reflected, ‘brought peace to us’.
Brian studied Bach and Beethoven, and learned to trust in the healing balm of counterpoint. And like Beethoven, who also had two brothers and a violent, overbearing father, he was slowly going deaf. ‘Before he entered his teens,’ Doggett explains, ‘Brian’s parents noticed that he tended to talk out of one side of his mouth and would turn his head around to pick up sounds or voices that came from the opposite side of his head. Tests were carried out, and it was determined that he enjoyed less than 20 per cent hearing in his right ear.’ There seems never to have been an official diagnosis. All we know is that Brian didn’t seem to hear like anyone else. As with Beethoven, his partial deafness and the ringing in his ears didn’t hinder his work as a composer, but it did make live performance a living hell and caused him to withdraw slowly from the hubbub of social life. The crossroads moment took place high up in the air: in December 1964 Wilson was flying to Houston to start a tour when he had some kind of convulsive breakdown. Too much pressure, in both senses. Things that make your head go pop. He no longer wanted to be up on stage with all the feedback and screaming.
The recording studio made possible new ways of listening. Tiny increments of syllable and sound to juggle. Listen to tapes of Wilson working in the studio and you can hear just how precise and in control he is: this is the one place where he knows who he is and what he wants. Did he ever sound more sensual than when he delivered the lines ‘I can hear so much/in your sighs’ and ‘Listen, listen, listen ...’ from ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)’? ‘Music became his language of choice,’ Doggett writes, ‘with which he was far more articulate than he ever was with words.’ You could say things to girls you could never say in real life. You could conjure up swells, plateaux, shivers; the sound of the sun coming up over the sea. Like many a Romantic man, his way of feeling intimacy is via something cloudy, oceanic, mountain-top. The nearest faraway place.
One of the mythic promises of rock’n’roll was escape to a place where the action was and where you could maybe find others like yourself. But there would be no such getaway for the Beach Boys – no big city salvation, no yellow brick road. They would live and die in LA. The Beach Boys didn’t scour snow-strafed city streets looking for old blues 78s. They idolised the very ‘square’ barbershop quartet the Four Freshmen; Wilson wrote a song called ‘Be True to Your School’. They were not, in a word, cool. They didn’t leave home, didn’t mooch, didn’t stray: they were already in the teen fantasy promised land. In Hawthorne, south-west Los Angeles, everything was on their doorstep, including their future bandmates: livewire cousin Mike Love; high-school classmate Al Jardine; long-time neighbour David Marks.
The Beach Boys, like many of the new bands of that era, sprang out of a local scene with its own heroes, slang, fashion. In this bright diurnal paradise, four of their early singles were hymns to a local leisure pursuit/metaphysical quest: ‘Surfin’’, ‘Surfin’ Safari’, ‘Surfin’ USA’, ‘Surfer Girl’. But then there suddenly appeared the achingly introspective ‘In My Room’. Co-written with Gary Usher, it’s a swerve away from the world of the drive-in, the burger place, the drag strip into a wholly/holy inner world where the singer can ‘lie awake and pray’. It’s a vulnerable song about the desire to be invulnerable. ‘You’re not afraid when you’re in your room,’ Wilson once said. The recording studio was his other panic room. It was somewhere you could explore a spectrum of emotional tones, as heard in early songs like ‘Lonely Sea’ (1963), ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ (1964), ‘The Warmth of the Sun’ (1964) and, most of all for me, the near-perfect pop record ‘Guess I’m Dumb’ (1965), written, arranged and produced by Wilson, sung by a young Glen Campbell.
Wilson would soon become notorious for how much time he took to record things, but at this early stage everything was a blur. There were ten Beach Boys studio albums between 1962 and 1965. There were no maps, no precedents; their de facto manager and ‘appropriate adult’ at this point was their irascible, interfering father. Brian Wilson may have had his mood swings but he was, in his own way, quite sturdy. Something you begin to notice, leafing through all the Beach Boys books, is how strapping the teenage Brian looks in high-school snaps and how sporty too; this was no neurasthenic squirt. He also had a reputation for being a bit of a cut-up. A twelfth-grade report card reveals that he got an A in Physical Education, a B in Senior Problems (Personal Psychology) and only a C for Piano and Harmony.
Wilson was famously not a surfer: he may have held business meetings in his swimming pool and set up his piano in a sand pit, but he had to be dragged into the sea as if he was undergoing aversion therapy. The Beach Boys’ early hits were the sound of everything to do with surfing, absent the sensation of surfing itself. Surfers try to control unpredictable swells and curls, seeking moments of transcendence, measured in seconds or a few short minutes – just like the pop music Wilson was about to unleash on the world.
by Ian Pernman, London Review of Books | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
Did Streaming Subscription Prices Just Hit the Wall?
This isn’t just an idle threat. According to Deloitte, 40% of consumers have already cut back on subscriptions during the previous three months. Even more revealing: 61% say they would cancel their favorite service if the price went up by just five dollars.
Let me repeat that—they would cancel their favorite service, not just any platform.
People now complain of subscription fatigue—and for good reason. If things don’t change, it will soon reach the point of subscription exhaustion. Tech companies have created this mess, and now must live with the consequences.
They did it with three exploitative strategies.
(1) Everything got turned into a subscription. [...]
(2) You’re now punished with intrusive and endless advertising if you don’t subscribe. [...]
(3) Instead of competing on quality and service, companies focus on “audience capture”—and then exploit the captives.
That’s you, by the way—you are the captive. At least that’s how you’re treated by the big tech platforms.
Years ago, these same companies started by offering stuff for free, or at a small price. They only forced through huge price increases after they had captured a huge user base. You see that strategy at Netflix, Spotify, Instagram, etc.
These companies make little effort now to improve their offerings or user interface. In many instances, quality has declined, even as they raise prices. But consumers aren’t stupid—they can see that they’re getting a shaft that won’t cop out...
But even I can’t believe how greedily they have now implemented that strategy. Spotify has raised its price three times in less than three years. It’s now asking $12.99 per month. And if you want a family subscription—which is essential in a household like mine—the price jumps to $21.99 per month.
Those are US prices, but Spotify is doing the same thing everywhere. Last summer, the company forced through price increases in 150 countries.
YouTube is even more avaricious. The company is now raising its premium subscription to $15.99 per month. And the family rate is a whopping $26.99—that adds up to $329 per year.
But Netflix may have gone too far. The company’s stock dropped 12% last week after its latest quarterly results. Investors expected the company to raise its guidance for future earnings—because of this subscription price boost. But the company refused to do so, and took a more cautious stance.
According to Morningstar analyst Matt Dolgin:
“The market likely hoped for increased full-year guidance, given that the March price hikes came as a surprise…Growth acceleration in 2027 now seems less likely.”The more you dig into the latest earnings report, the more ominous things look. Netflix only met expectations because of the breakup fee after it walked away from the Warner’s acquisition. Without that one-time benefit, earnings per share would have dropped year-on-year.
If you try to find some good news here for the company, it comes from Netflix’s shift to advertising. This may be its growth engine in the future—because price increases are now stirring up consumer resistance.
I’d like to be able to provide specific numbers here, but Netflix now refuses to tell us the number of total subscribers. That’s revealing in itself. Not long ago, the company bragged endlessly about subscriber growth. Their silence now tells you everything you really need to know.
Three Ways to Defeat Subscription Fatigue
You aren’t helpless here. You do have options for battling subscription fatigue. Here are three of them.
For a start, customers have learned that canceling a subscription might make sense even if they are just bluffing. It’s amazing how different the rate looks if you’re willing to walk away. I recently canceled a subscription, and was offered an 80% price cut if I would reconsider.
I’m now thinking I should cancel every streaming subscription once per year—just to see what special offer I’m missing. Even if I sign up again at the old rate, I haven’t lost anything by trying this tactic.
Another way of combating costs is a rotation strategy. Under this scenario, consumers only pay for one video streaming subscription at a time. When they want to watch something on another platform, they simply cancel the current subscription and move to the new provider. This lets them watch anything they want for just one monthly payment.
Sure, it’s a hassle. But when annual subscriptions can cost $300 per year or more, consumers are increasingly willing to go to the trouble of ‘rotating’ from service to service.
Of course, you always have the final option of just walking away. Judging by the mood of the consumer, that will start happening more and more.
by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker | Read more:
Image: uncredited/Netflix
[ed. One more option: Earlier this year I got tired of Amazon Prime's video service - more ads and almost every movie I wanted to see was either a rental or purchase. So I quit Prime altogether (or suspended my account, as Amazon put it). Then one day I saw they had exclusive rights to some movie or other that I wanted to see; they'd increased their speed of delivery in my zip code; and I really did miss free shipping and returns. So I unsuspended my account and started paying a monthly membership fee again. But... just by turning off my service for a few months I got back to my initial lower subscription rate simply by cost averaging over the year (albeit with a few less months of service). So you don't have to quit completely, just for a few months. (Might also note this blog has always been ad and subscription free!)]
Monday, April 20, 2026
Angine de Poitrine
[ed. Now for something completely different (and delightful). See also: They broke the internet. Here's how they did it.]
Thursday, April 16, 2026
A Monkey Goes to Court
What happens when something that isn't human makes art? A series of bizarre court battles trying to answer that question centred around this image. Ultimately, it will influence what ends up on your screens and headphones forever.
It was a humid day in the Indonesian jungle, and photographer David Slater was following a group of crested black macaques, a critically endangered and particularly photogenic species of monkey.
He wanted pictures, but the macaques were nervous. So, Slater put his camera on a tripod with autofocus on and a flashbulb, allowing the monkeys to inspect it. Just as he hoped, they started playing with his gear. Then one of them reached up and hit the shutter button while staring directly into the lens. The result was a selfie, taken by a monkey. And its toothy grin inadvertently answered a basic question that sits at the heart of technology.
What came next was nearly a decade of legal battles around an unusual dispute: when something that isn't human makes a work of art, who owns the copyright? Thanks to AI, that's become a issue with some deep implications for modern life – and what it means to be human.
One of the most alarming predictions about AI is that corporations will replace the human-created music, movies and books you love with an endless stream of AI slop. But the US Supreme Court just upheld a decision about AI and copyright which suggests that future may be harder to pull off than the tech industry hoped. The path is still uncertain, and right now, the legal system is the site of a battle that will shape what you read, watch and listen to for the rest of your life. It all traces back to that one little monkey.
Monkey business
The monkey took that selfie in 2011. For a brief, blissful period, Slater enjoyed global attention from the picture, but the troubles began when someone uploaded the photo to Wikipedia, from where it could be downloaded and used free of charge. He asked the Wikimedia Foundation to take it down, arguing it cost him £10,000 (worth about $13,400 today) in lost sales. In 2014, The organisation refused, arguing the photo was in the public domain because it wasn't taken by a person.
The row prompted the US Copyright Office to issue a statement that it would not register work created by a non-human author, putting "a photograph taken by a monkey" first in a list of examples. (Slater didn't respond to interview requests, but his representation arranged for the BBC to use the photo in this article.)
The story gets weirder. Soon after, the advocacy group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) sued Slater on behalf of the monkey. The case argued all proceeds from the photo belonged to the macaque that took the picture, but it was really seen as a test case, an attempt to establish legal rights for animals. After four years and multiple court battles, a San Francisco judge dismissed the case. The judge's reasoning was simple: monkeys can't file lawsuits.
"It was kind of the biggest public conversation piece on this topic," says intellectual property lawyer Ryan Abbott, a partner at Brown, Neri, Smith and Khan in the US. "At the time it was very much about animal rights. But it could have been a conversation about AI." [...]
The missing author
When the US passed the Copyright Act of 1790, we only had to deal with things like writing and drawing. But the invention of photography decades later raised troubling questions. You could argue cameras do the real work, a person just hits a button.
"The Supreme Court looked at this and said, you know, we're going to interpret this purposively," says Abbott, who represented Thaler in a case against the Copyright Office. "Copyright was designed to protect the expression of tangible ideas. And that's broad enough to cover something like photography."
The same logic could apply to AI. "What you really have in photography is exactly the same thing you have here. You have a person issuing instructions to a machine to generate a work," he says. "What's the difference between that and me asking ChatGPT to make an image?"
by Thomas Germain, BBC | Read more:
Image: David Slater/ Caters New/BBC
[ed. More issues than you might imagine.]
It was a humid day in the Indonesian jungle, and photographer David Slater was following a group of crested black macaques, a critically endangered and particularly photogenic species of monkey.
What came next was nearly a decade of legal battles around an unusual dispute: when something that isn't human makes a work of art, who owns the copyright? Thanks to AI, that's become a issue with some deep implications for modern life – and what it means to be human.
One of the most alarming predictions about AI is that corporations will replace the human-created music, movies and books you love with an endless stream of AI slop. But the US Supreme Court just upheld a decision about AI and copyright which suggests that future may be harder to pull off than the tech industry hoped. The path is still uncertain, and right now, the legal system is the site of a battle that will shape what you read, watch and listen to for the rest of your life. It all traces back to that one little monkey.
Monkey business
The monkey took that selfie in 2011. For a brief, blissful period, Slater enjoyed global attention from the picture, but the troubles began when someone uploaded the photo to Wikipedia, from where it could be downloaded and used free of charge. He asked the Wikimedia Foundation to take it down, arguing it cost him £10,000 (worth about $13,400 today) in lost sales. In 2014, The organisation refused, arguing the photo was in the public domain because it wasn't taken by a person.
The row prompted the US Copyright Office to issue a statement that it would not register work created by a non-human author, putting "a photograph taken by a monkey" first in a list of examples. (Slater didn't respond to interview requests, but his representation arranged for the BBC to use the photo in this article.)
The story gets weirder. Soon after, the advocacy group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) sued Slater on behalf of the monkey. The case argued all proceeds from the photo belonged to the macaque that took the picture, but it was really seen as a test case, an attempt to establish legal rights for animals. After four years and multiple court battles, a San Francisco judge dismissed the case. The judge's reasoning was simple: monkeys can't file lawsuits.
"It was kind of the biggest public conversation piece on this topic," says intellectual property lawyer Ryan Abbott, a partner at Brown, Neri, Smith and Khan in the US. "At the time it was very much about animal rights. But it could have been a conversation about AI." [...]
The missing author
When the US passed the Copyright Act of 1790, we only had to deal with things like writing and drawing. But the invention of photography decades later raised troubling questions. You could argue cameras do the real work, a person just hits a button.
"The Supreme Court looked at this and said, you know, we're going to interpret this purposively," says Abbott, who represented Thaler in a case against the Copyright Office. "Copyright was designed to protect the expression of tangible ideas. And that's broad enough to cover something like photography."
The same logic could apply to AI. "What you really have in photography is exactly the same thing you have here. You have a person issuing instructions to a machine to generate a work," he says. "What's the difference between that and me asking ChatGPT to make an image?"
by Thomas Germain, BBC | Read more:
Image: David Slater/ Caters New/BBC
[ed. More issues than you might imagine.]
Wednesday, April 15, 2026
Sinéad O'Connor
[ed. I didn't know she died, in 2023. How could I have missed it. This song from her stunning album I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got came out just around the time my own marriage was breaking up. It still resonates.]
Tuesday, April 14, 2026
Friday, April 10, 2026
Gil Scott-Heron
[ed. Welcome home Artemis II. Safe and sound. See also: NASA Announces Plan To Put Moon On Mars By 2040]
Wednesday, April 8, 2026
Sunday, April 5, 2026
Monday, March 30, 2026
Sunday, March 29, 2026
Flea
[ed. Quite an evolution from his Chili Pepper days. See also: a live performance of this song on Jimmy Fallon.]
Séamus and Caoimhe Uí Fhlatharta feat. Malinda
“Eileanóir na Rún”. An Irish song performed in the sean-nós style, originally composed by Cearbhall Óg Ó Dálaigh in the 17th century.
[ed. Beautiful and heartfelt. No wonder this song has survived for centuries.]
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
Michael Hurley
I'll walk with you, 'til the morning slows me down
I'll walk with you 'til it's over my friend
And if it proves that in the end I can't be found
Keep on rollin' and I'll find you 'round the bend
June, June, sweet June, and July
Juniper berries and rye
There go the flowers to the sky
[ed. For my lovely grandaughter, June. My little juniper berry.]
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