Music Education 101: Open Letter to NBC Universal

(NOTE: Not the usual case, but this post is being posted on both blogs since the series that is the subject of this post resides on both blogs…)

So, based on a glance at my Tweets on Twitter that night, I noted that I spent approximately nine hours replacing YouTube videos that have been removed since the last time I looked at my (so far) four-part Music Education 101 series of posts. If you missed that before (or just want to check them out again), all the video links except maybe one are working now, although I’ve had to replace several with “alternate” versions (some I’m not too thrilled about), but also added some extras that weren’t there before.

The series lives in my Music Education 101 category on both blogs, or here are the links:

• Lynnster’s Musical Education in Three (Now Four) Posts – The Beginning
• Coming Into My Own – Lynnster’s Musical Education in Three (Now Four) Posts
• No Turning Back Now – Lynnster’s Musical Education in Three (Now Four) Posts
• Postscript – Lynnster’s Musical Education, Now In Four Posts

I can’t even begin to illustrate what a painfully tedious process it was, searching for and updating all those video links – made even worse by the fact this series is on both my blogs, since it was begun before I added the music blog, so that doubled the work. But of all the posts on either of my blogs – spanning back nearly 13 years on the main blog – those four are probably the most important to me, so whatever.

What pains me, really, is the number of them removed because so-and-so company/organization has declared their ownership/copyright. Fine.

Do these people not understand the power of YouTube these days and the potential for financial gain in a YouTube partnership? When there are everyday people uploading their own videos – be it comedy, commentary, their own music, or what amounts to the video version of a traditional blog (i.e., vlogs) – and making better money doing that than they would with the salary of many very good full time jobs – is the potential financial gain of allowing music and video to be heard and seen on YouTube completely beyond the comprehension of the music and visual media companies?

If Joe Blow next door is able to make a living wage off of YouTube these days, just think how much cash these record companies and other media companies could be raking in by putting up their own partnered YouTube channel. Some have, yes (mainly individual artists/bands though) – but not nearly enough.

There’s one case in particular that gripes me the most – some of what are undeniably the most important performances – American debut and otherwise – of many artists’ careers are their first appearances on Saturday Night Live. These are almost impossible to find – if they get uploaded, it doesn’t take long before they get pulled. Replacing some of those (like Elvis Costello’s famous show-stopping appearance from 1977) is what took me so darned long the other night, and it just irritated the crap out of me.

So here’s my open letter to NBC Universal:

Get your heads out of your collective asses and put up your own YouTube partner channel with these fantastic performances so that they’ll be back in public view where they SHOULD be, for people to enjoy these fabulous pieces of music history – instead of repeatedly blocking them and keeping them hidden from public view.

In this day and age when almost anything can be instantly viewed on the Internet in all kinds of different venues, it’s a doggoned shame that some of the finest musical performances in rock & roll history are being withheld like this. You have the potential to make far, far more profit on those clips as a YouTube partner than you likely ever will recoup in DVD or video sales.

I guess there’s a DVD or music video out there on the market already – point being, I don’t care, and they probably don’t contain the clips I want to see most anyway. How many DVDs have I bought in the past three or four years? Less than ten, and virtually all are feature films.

That said, I’m your target audience with those SNL music clips, NBC Universal – listen to me. Do the right thing and get those clips up on YouTube under your own account so those precious pieces of musical performance history are out there for the public to enjoy (and for those young musically-minded kids, like I once was myself, to learn from) – and make money off of me and everyone else who will watch, rate, and favorite those clips time and time again.

You have nothing to lose – except for the profit you’re not making by withholding them for DVD or whatever purposes, in which case you’re never likely going to profit nearly as much as you would have as a YouTube partner – and instead, the whole world is losing out by not being able to easily access and view these like you now can most anything else on YouTube. I know a big music fan – and Elvis Costello fan – in his twenties who has never even seen that priceless infamous clip. It’s a danged shame.

C’mon, NBC Universal. The solution’s so simple, and everybody wins. You line your pockets probably a lot more than you would have counting on DVD sales – and that music’s back out there where it belongs, for folks to dig. Simple.

The Biggest Time Sucker Ever Invented

Kat Coble posted the other day about the coming release of The Sims 3. I have a love-hate relationship with The Sims. I love playing with Sims because it’s fun and I could sit there for 15 hours straight every day playing with them. I hate it because it’s fun and I could sit there for 15 hours straight every day playing with them.

I actually broke myself of the habit not too long after The Sims 2 came out. My computer couldn’t run it very well, so I never really got it into the second version, and much later on when I had a computer that was sufficient, I just never installed it. I went back to playing with the original edition for a while, but eventually I kicked the habit… not without having spent countless more hours building a couple of new neighborhoods though.

That actually was the best ever Sims period I had because that was when I built the Twin Peaks Sims neighborhood. I had every house populated with Twin Peaks folk – Pete & Catherine Martell and Josie Packard in one (naturally Josie and Catherine hated each other), the Palmers in another, the Haywards in another, and so on… and my best Sims house ever, the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department – all of them plus Agent Cooper lived together, and it was the greatest house. I built it on one of the empty lots and made it look very police station-y on the outside, and it had EVERYTHING. At one point, there was nothing left for me to buy for it because I had played that house so much and had bought everything there was to buy and stuck it in there. What a great house. Yeah, I’m twelve.

I think I still have the files on my computer. Hmm… nononononono I better not…!

Tuxedos & Oscar Just Kinda Go Together Anyway

I hadn’t been by one of my fave blogs in a while, Abbie the Cat Has a Posse, so when I stopped by tonight I was distressed to learn that Abbie had been missing for a while (for real) earlier this month.  Upon further reading, I was relieved to discover that he had been found, thank goodness.   Not really surprised he turned up – a 20-lb. tuxedo cat wouldn’t get overlooked very easily, I don’t think – but certainly glad he did, after what was apparently a pretty large effort by many folks to help find him, and his owner, known as The Guy, is understandably relieved.  Hopefully Abbie will get back to blogging and report on all his adventures away from home soon.

And, if by chance you missed the Oscars tonight, The Squirrel Queen live blogged the whole thing, so drop by and catch up if you have a mind to.  Apparently red was the in color this year, and you know, I’m sorry, but Cameron Diaz just sucks anyway.

It’s A No-Brainer

I am a bit tardy in posting my official endorsement of this brilliant idea, but yeah.

Cranky may claim to be cranky (cough)… but do you really know anyone as crotchety and curmudgeonly as this guy?

I mean, come on.  Hell, they even look alike and Sarcastro’s got the sneering from behind the desk down freakin’ pat. I’m all for it!

Bud Bundy Busted

My kinda sad pop culture reference of the day, as per The Smoking Gun.

Man, I would probably still have TV/cable if Fox were still in its glory days like way back when.

In other news, I’ll probably stick to short post bits for a while, I am getting entirely too warm to deal with thoughtful blogging.  They are coming to look at the AC on Thursday (which presents a whole new batch of stress in itself) and I am preparing for a fight.

Stunned

Oh, yeah.  I almost forgot.

Some may recall that since I cut HBO & Showtime a while back (and later, cable altogether) that I have been catching up on most of my fave series, many of which I got behind on during a period of busy-ness back in 2003, via DVD thanks to Netflix.  I just finished The Sopranos, Season 6/Part 1.

Of course, I have been rather acutely aware that the current run is being broadcast and have mostly painstakingly gone out of my way to avoid finding out what’s going on… but after seeing three or four mentions about the shocking last episode, I caved and read a recap.

I don’t know what to say, I’m so stunned and shocked.

And a little regretful that I caved, but oh well, it’ll still be good to watch on DVD release.  But WOW.

The World’s Shortest Eddie Izzard Fan

Meet my “nephews”, Jinx and Tidbit. They are a bit older now, this shot’s from their younger years.

I’m posting this today because I ran out of time to write about my L.A. trip (because I read five billion thousand blogs during the night and got enamored of Technorati and Google search scores over and over again), and because the Cobles are good people, and because I know Kat Coble is kind of an Eddie Izzard fan, and so is Tidbit.

What, you say? Yes, you read that right. Tidbit totally has a crush on Eddie Izzard. Or something. You think I’m kidding, I’m sure, but I’m really serious, he’s a huge Eddie Izzard fan.

Eddie Izzard: Dress to Kill from several years back, that’s been rebroadcast on TV over and over again? Tidbit will sit and watch the whole thing. Totally enthralled. Every time.

No word yet on whether The Riches got a recent Tidbit thumbs (paws) up. I’ll have to ask and find out.

Jinx is kind of like having a house plant around. A plant that looks like a cat, yes, but a house plant all the same. They kind of share the same personality.

Seven Best in 2006

I got tagged by Newscoma almost a couple of weeks ago for this, so I saved it for New Year’s since I thought that would be a good topic to reflect on for the holiday. However, I think it would have been a lot easier for me to come up with the seven worst things I did in 2006 than the best. But still, I’m willing to give it a go, boring though it may be. 2006 just wasn’t a real great year. Funny, almost all of my “bests” have something to do with blogging or bloggers or something otherwise online. Guess that makes sense since this is where I spend most of my free time.

By the way, my favorite number is seven. Just in case you didn’t know.

So anyway, here – The Seven Best Things I Did in 2006.

1. I ditched cable TV. I got tired of paying almost $70 a month (not long before that, it was $90 a month) for cable I never watched and ditched it forever. With the exception of the first year or two I was in Memphis, this is just about the first time in almost all my life I have never had cable. My grandparents’ house was the first home in Paris, Tennessee to get cable when it was available there, and my house was probably among the first dozen. The ex and I did without it for a little over a year when we first moved down here, but then some plant started getting built up the street a ways and the more that got built, the worse our reception got, so we broke down and got cable again.

Cable was reasonable when I was in my twenties and it was $15-20 a month. $70 and $90 a month for cable is ridiculous, I don’t care HOW many channels there are.

The other best thing in relation to that was opening my Netflix account, and once I cut off cable, I upgraded my Netflix account. And am STILL paying less than half of what I was for cable, only now I can watch what I want to when I want to, and stuff that’s been long gone from current television. I am very happy with this tradeoff. Between that, YouTube, and networks themselves finally getting smart and airing many of their shows online, who needs it. Screw cable.

2. Traveled to Texas and hung out with old friends. I spent a couple of days in Houston and renewed some bonds with old friends, most of whom I talk to often but hadn’t seen and hung out with in over two years because we’re spread out all over – Houston, Memphis, Florida, Brooklyn, Boston, and eastern Canada. It was too short a visit, but it was worthwhile and an extra special couple of days. Also my first visit ever to Texas.

So that was fabulous, and the only real traveling I did in 2006. The only other places I went last year were to Birmingham and otherwise all in Tennessee – Jackson, McKenzie, Paris, and Chattanooga – none of them except the last really count as “travel”.

3. Opened my MySpace account. You may laugh, but while MySpace as a whole is kind of silly (and I swore for years I was never going to have one), if you’re as much into music as I am, it’s an AMAZING resource for musical interests. I have found new “local” music from around the globe that has just been incredible, and likely stuff I never would have known about otherwise. And not only have I gained a lot of new contacts and acquaintances in the music world, but I have renewed communication with an unbelievable number of old music contacts and friends, some of whom I’d thought dropped off the face of the earth and I’m sure some thought the same of me. That’s been really cool.

It’s also been quite a humbling experience, like when I found that a kid half my age who’s newly become a Replacements fanatic had a link to my old ‘Mats pages along with other more “academic” (for lack of a better word) links, or the occasional commenter or mailer who says they remember my old Hoodoo Gurus page. Or when someone whose work I have had a huge amount of respect for, for years – when I said I was pleased to finally meet “the famous (name)” – replied that I was more famous (LOL, don’t get excited, only in Australia and only among circles of a certain music genre). I was simply taken aback by that. Come to think of it, not really sure why I never made an effort to make a career out of it.

On the other hand, I do know the answer to that. I have never made a dime from efforts helping to promote other people’s music that I like, but I’ve spent a significant amount of my free time over the years doing it, online for the most part in many online mediums. I’m not sure it would have all been anywhere near as much fun and as satisfying if it were a job rather than a labor of love.

4. Volunteer work and trying to be a little more charitable in general. Hopefully the volunteer work I have involved myself in the last several years helps folks, at least I hope so – I’m really not at liberty to speak publicly about it because it’s generally an anonymous organization, and I do a lot more technical work these days rather than personal involvement, but it’s one of those situations where I figure if I helped one person make a good decision because I knew the answer to their question, or helped one person find the information they needed because of some tech work I did, then I feel like I’ve done something good.

I also did a couple of other things I generally never have much done. In 2006, I started donating a small part of my monthly salary to an Episcopal church in Mississippi that could use it as a way to honor my grandmother’s memory, after she passed away right before Christmas in 2005. There’s a reason why I picked this church in particular that I won’t go into here (not that interesting of a story), but given the fact I have been a severely lapsed Episcopalian for many years and the fact that this would make my grandmother happy, it’s pretty significant for me. I also did some more donating I don’t generally do to some stuff I strongly believed in. So that was all cool.

5. Started blogging regularly again after a really long mostly-break. Pretty soon it will be ten years since I started “journaling online” and whew, that’s a long time. For about five years, though, I took what was mostly a long break and was really haphazard about it, especially the three year period from 2003 to 2005. I skipped 2004 altogether.

In January of 2006, I finally left behind HTML hell for good and started moving all my old archives to Blogger, with a mirror on LiveJournal, and wow – how much easier was it to do after that. I started blogging more often and before the year was through, I got back into almost daily blogging (mostly thanks to the kickstart of pledging to do so during NaBloPoMo). Apparently that was the kick in the butt I needed to get back in the swing of things again.

And then in December and sick of the hassle of Blogger Beta, I jumped to WordPress for good, which is the other aspect of this best thing I did in 2006. In retrospect, I wish now I had just gone to WordPress to begin with. It ROCKS.

But it’s been good to get back in the regular blogging habit again and loads of fun. A little bittersweet for me since some of my old longtime peanut gallery is gone (actually, sometimes that’s a relief depending on the day’s blogging subject matter, heh). But having not only gotten back into it, but also becoming involved in a fabulous blogging community of other Tennesseans has been terrific and great fun. I’ve made a lot of good new friends this past year, and maybe a couple of enemies, but one can never have too many friends! And, speaking of, another of the best things I did in 2006 was…

6. The best dinner date I ever had. Getting to meet Hutchmo in person and getting to know him, with an extra bonus being that we both share a longtime mutual friend we just recently found out each other knew, was terrific. We had a fabulous and fun dinner at one of my fave Mexican restaurants in Memphis in December, and the two guys just had me laughing till I almost cried all night, and John is just a really good friend now who I absolutely adore, plus it’s extra cool that we share so many of the same musical interests. Like I said, friends are good, can’t have too many of them!

My post-Christmas tour plans to meet some more Middle TN bloggers got waylaid by my post-holiday tardiness getting on the road, but I hope in 2007 to meet everyone else I’m dying to meet and hang out with and feel sure I will meet most everyone, at least. Planning to make many trips to Middle Tennessee in the coming year, and anyone who may be coming to Memphis (like Newscoma in a couple of weeks, matter of fact – can’t wait to see her and her Squirrelly sidekick!) – let’s do BBQ, Mexican, veggie pizza, Huey burgers, or whatever!

7. I didn’t cry. Nope, I didn’t cry when my kid sister and brother-in-law left Memphis, after being here for five years prior, moved to Nebraska for good. At least not where they could see. Granted, they were in Florida, then northern Ohio, then Rhode Island for years before they moved down here for a while. But that was different. Even though sometimes we’d go months without seeing each other, for five years they were right across on the other side of town, and now they’re in freakin’ Nebraska. Sigh.

But right now in freakin’ Nebraska with 14+ inches of snow. Heh heh. I am trying very hard not to say “I told you so” right now!

Well, OK, there’s my Seven Things. I’m not tagging anyone, but feel free to tag yourself by proxy if you get a mind to do so. This one was kind of hard; like I said, I could have probably easily come up with The 100 Worst Things I Did in 2006 in comparison.

We Three Things

I’ve no idea where this one came to me from, but after this I’ll be caught up and will institute a temporary moratorium on memes. At least until the day comes I’ve run out of something to say again, which is, like, never. So, here.

Three things:

That scare me: Heights; spiders or basically anything creepy or crawly; and winding up with some illness or condition that leaves me completely awake, alert and oriented but totally without any control of any other functions (and karma is going to bite me in the ass one day and get me for now having documented this fear in black and white for posterity, I just know it).

People who make me laugh: The Young Ones, The Kids in the Hall, Travis L. Harmon (OK, I know technically that’s WAY more than three people but it constitutes as three things/entities, or at least I say so, which is all that counts here).

I love: Music (duh!), cats, working four days a week instead of five (officially anyway, only problem there is I usually end up working on my day off anyhow).

I hate: Any peas except for black-eyed peas, washing dishes, flat land (yeah, I know – so why do I live in Memphis?).

Things on my desk: A bottle of hazelnut liqueur from the Czech Republic, Tim Lee‘s Concrete Dog CD, and an orange cat who is sleeping and won’t move his head off the edge of my keyboard.

I’m doing right now: Wondering why I didn’t go to sleep last night AGAIN, dreading having to start work soon for what is going to be a long and painful ten hours, drinking coffee.

I want to do before I die: Visit Australia (at least Sydney and Perth), live in an actual house again and not a duplex or apartment or whatnot, figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

I can do: Waste an incredible amount of time; play guitar; appraise, buy and resell vintage Barbie stuff at a hell of a profit (my “part-time job” for several years).

I can’t do: Wrap presents well at ALL, sew, keep plants alive or garden.

I think you should listen to: Paul Westerberg and The Replacements, the silence when (if) it snows, your heart or instinct instead of your head or what other people tell you most times.

You should NEVER listen to: Telemarketers, only certain music just because it’s what everyone else is listening to or tells you that you should, me when I’m talking in my sleep.

I’d like to learn: How to cook on a grill, to play guitar a little better than I do, how to fix up and repair various things without messing them up in the process like I normally do.

Favorite foods: Mexican, southern BBQ, breakfast.

Beverages: Lipton Citrus Green Tea, coffee, anything alcoholic that tastes like Kool-Aid basically.

Shows I watched as a kid: The Monkees, American Bandstand, Saturday Night Live (well, and cartoons… I was kinda a normal kid, sometimes).

I’ll Be Your Mirror

I Googled thru about a half dozen Google pages and was just left in sheer disbelief.

Hasn’t anyone noticed that young Aaron Carter (most recently of E’s House of Carters – yeah, it’s reality trash and yeah, I just can’t stop watching) is practically the spitting image of a young ’70s-era Cheap Trick frontman Robin Zander?

Sometimes he doesn’t look so much like him, but most of the time it’s just like, WHOA… eerie.

Neither he nor twin sister Angel look much like the others… DNA paternity test in order mayhaps? I’m just sayin’…