A track from Dylan’s new album Together Through Life, “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’”, is currently available from bobdylan.com.
You will be shocked to learn that I really like it.  It has a nice bass groove, great, free roaming guitar, and and gravelly, intense vocals.  It sounds murkier and more bluesy than Modern Times did, in a [...]

The War on Terror is over, says Secretary of State Hillary.  Or, more accurately, the expression is “just not being used”.
It’s often tempting to think that politicians are all the same and that the Obama administration in reality represents only a miniscule shift towards the centre.  In reality, this seems to be another sign that [...]

This picture is incredible – I haven’t done the maths to work out if it’s actually the claimed “1474 megapixels”, but it’s a highly detailed panoramic photo of the Obama inauguration. You can zoom from the whole scene in close enough to clearly see what each member of the crowd is doing, and guess [...]

“Commissar Markov has long been a loyal party member, but I fear his growing influence in state policy. Perhaps it is time to cash in a favor from my friends at the Kremlin.”
More Яolcats here. This is why the internet was invented (ok, maybe not, but it should be why the internet was [...]

Rather ponderously paced, but an interesting insight into the drastic effect the corporatisation of farming had in the U.S. The theme of vast, anonymous commercial organisations arbitrarily destroying productive industries and lives certainly resonates in 2009.

Following on from the recent bikie-gang violence at Sydney airport, there has been a chorus of praise for South Australia’s abhorrent anti-association laws (summarised here at Larvatus Prodeo, who rightly point out the idiocy of presuming guilt based on a person’s mode of transportation, but overlook the fact that in fact the SA laws are [...]

A review of the new Gomez album, A New Tide by yours truly is up over at Rabbit Hole Urban Music.
Executive summary: I like it, but I miss the Good Old Days™.
Right this way if you’d like to read it.

You may recall this rambling post about the new Art Brut album – if you have any interest, you can hear one of the new tracks here. They still have the signature Art Brut sound, although the production sounds very crisp to my ear.
The review is fairly harsh, but I will reserve judgment – [...]

Epic win:

There is a lot of discussion at the moment about the question of whether Australia is moving towards a tort of ‘invasion of privacy’ as a result of the publication of compromising pictures supposedly of Pauline Hanson. There is a useful note on recent UK developments in the Max Mosley case and some speculation [...]

I thought this was an interesting little article about the present state of the music industry and where it’s heading.
In summary, the big labels know that people paying $30/album and $2/track for recorded music is not going to last forever, and have plans in place to deal with that eventuality. Those plans seem to [...]

Following a link from this post at Skepticlawyer, via TIME to the photographer’s website, I came across these excellent galleries of urban decay: Detroit in decline; East-German industrial wastelands; and abandoned theatres.  It’s certainly interesting to reflect on how our civilization would look as interpreted through its ruins.

Unlike, say, the Romans, many of our large [...]

I really enjoyed “Music That Makes You Dumb“, an admittedly psuedo-scientific analysis of intelligence vs musical preferences.  Basically, one Virgil Griffith has assembled data on music taste based on U.S. college campuses, then compared that data with the high school scores required to get into each college to produce an assessment of the correlation between [...]

You might recall this post from a couple of years back about water use in Australia – basically, the point was that as a matter of measurable, objective fact urban water use is utterly dwarfed by agricultural use, and if we are serious about changing our water consumption in this country the only realistic option [...]

For a while there, Bob Dylan seemed to be slowing down with age.  In his youth he was an album factory, cranking out 8 albums between 1962 and 1967, and 9 albums between 1969 and 1976.  But in (ahem) modern times, he dropped off the pace – from 1993’s World Gone Wrong it was four [...]