From the link archives, pt. 1

• Maybe I should try this. Another way to stop smoking: YPL: Nicolaxx Nicotine Anal Suppositories (via ap-project).
• The Big Book of Sign Language by rotten.com's The Gaping Maw (via daypop).
• Google Zeitgeist now with the most popular searches broken down by country: the UK and Spain were recently (about a week ago) obsessed with Big Brother (Gran Hermano) whereas France looked for Britney Spears and Germany was into the Muttertag (mother's day) (via Mefi).
• Slashdot discussion on Two Books from Haruki Murakami (via monkey puzzle).
• A nice new feature at the New York Times (free registration): audio music reviews (via fimoculous). The critic reads his review in between music extracts. Examples: Sonic Youth - Murray Street and Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
• Did I already link to Strange Fruit, a rather new well-written music blog I discovered via badger?
• Mefi: info and links concerning Harry Smith , who compiled the Anthology of American Folk Music, which saved traditional American music from oblivion and influenced so many musicians to come. Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes are unthinkable without the Anthology.
• [parallax view] (July, 10th) on Cinerama's (not so new band by Chief Weddoe David Gedge) new album Torino: "But rumours of a return to form, a darker more guitar-oriented sound and Steve Albini helping out on production tempted me to try out Cinerama's third album 'Torino' and I glad I did. It's basically The Wedding Present 'with strings attached' and the guitar squall on tracks like 'Starry Eyed' could have come off 'Seamonsters' (hmm...now there's an album that merits inclusion in my soon-to-be-resumed Lest Ye Forget series)."

Feeding the mice

• David Keenan's 100 essential albums. On first looks an interesting wide-ranging selection. The first ten records are: Springsteen's Nebraska, Throbbing Gristle's Heathen Earth, The Stooges Funhouse, Belle and Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister, Kiss Destroyer, The Boatmen's Call by Nick Cave, John Coltrane's Meditations, Odyssey and Oracle by The Zombies, Sonic Youth Sister and Liege and Lief by Fairport Convention (via douze lunes). I own 25 albums of the list. There are several under those I mainly got as they were on other best of lists. Of those there are some albums I never listen to as I find them rather dull and overrated, for example Nico's Marble Index (depressive in the worst sense), Van Morrison's Astral Weeks (ok, but no masterpiece, except maybe for the lyrics which I don't understand), The Incredible String Band's The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (unlistenable and annoying) and Grateful Dead's Live/Dead (aimless dated noodling). Neither Joy Division nor New Order feature on the list. And where are two of the foremost songwriters: Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake? For you to judge...
• Long ten page interview with Thurston Moore at Nude as the News on Murray Street, the album, the street and the studio. Other topics are the way Sonic Youth compose, what Jim O'Rourke adds to the band etc. (via fluxblog)
• I participated in a thread on Nick Drake on I Love Music where the thread poster asked for good reasons why Nick Drake is considered so highly. I lost the URL as ILM is down again. The skeleton of a new ILM forum outside of Greenspun where posting is possible already is here. For ILM discussion on mainly technical issues concerning the new ILM there is the Yahoo! Group 12 ft lizards (free registration required) which is quite active when the Greenspun hosted ILM is down. P.S. The Nick Drake thread is here: Nick Drake: why???
• Stylus Magazine's Chris Smith writes on each song on the Nuggets box (via badger). By the way after the Sonic Youth concert last Thursday an acquaintance made me discover a wonderful almost forgotten late sixties psychedelic band from Boston: Ultimate Spinach (AMG entry). I think they recorded three albums and disbanded because of drug problems. I listened to their 1968 album Behold & See which is somewhere in between Jefferson Airplane, Love, The Strawbs and Fairport Convention. In view of this crossover between West coast psychedelia and British folk-rock the label Bosstown sound referring to Boston makes a lot of sense. The stand-out track is called Mind Flowers and when listening to it in the right mood you can watch the flowers blossoming in your brain.
• The music weblog vain, selfish and lazy is back after an 8 months hiatus, Fred Solinger starts with his 100 fave albums.
• Two music weblogs I found via Wisdom Goof: modern music from the UK which is indie-oriented and more or less daily. It features news, links and personal opinions. Swordfight from Halifax, Canada is full of humour and offers you the phantastic blogrock feature. You link to Swordfight, e-mail Philip and he makes a song about your weblog which you then upload on your site.

Just two links Sorry I am in a hurry. The concerts were great. I'll write about them later. Thank you for the feedback.

• There is a long article plus discussion at kuro5hin on Go: Life Itself: "There is one board game that stands above all others. The most beautiful, most ancient, most strategic, most subtle. The king of games. A game which teaches as much as it entertains, whose enthusiasts number tens of millions and which has often been compared to life itself." I never played Go though I was very much into chess. But Go has always fascinated me. Especially the "strange" space logic in it where you don't take the opponent's pieces directly but you try to isolate them and you try to dominate the board in terms of space I found appealing. A game for an overpopulated world where the battle is for anthroposphere and not so much for material wealth.
• Salon on Mission of Burma: "The undeniable truth about Burma Mission of Burma recorded 21 songs, helped invent post-punk, and left a legacy that resonated from R.E.M. to Moby. More than 20 years later, no one will let the band die."

Tired of the internet Somehow I am suffering from information overload these days. I don't know how many blogs I am following but I suppose it must be more than a hundred. Then I read a couple of news sites and my extensive weekly paper. And a Sunday paper. It is all too much. Sometimes I would just like to shut myself in without any connection whatsoever to any media. I don't find the time to blog and to think about myself and my life. Though I have a lot of ideas of themes I could write about. But blogging seems to be such a futile exercise in the moment. In the last weeks I forced myself to post something every two days but I usually posted links as I didn't feel like writing something. The strange thing is that finding worthy links takes much more time than writing something yourself. And it is much more frustrating as you have to go through such a lot of boring stuff, you don't have the satisfaction of creating something yourself and there is hardly any feedback. Yes, feedback is the magical word. I didn't get too much in the past weeks and I would be grateful to know if anyone cares for this weblog. There are almost one thousand visitors per day but how many readers are there and how many people are regulars? Sorry for this boring and depressive post. Tonight I will see Do Make Say Think (thanks for the tip Wortmetz) from Toronto who are on the same label as Godspeed YBE! at the university and tomorrow Sonic Youth who will play in Cologne. And I am very much looking forward to those concerts. So I guess I will have something to write about soon.

I Love Music threads

• 'Marquee Moon' LP is overrated: Me too I think that Television's debut is a little overpraised. It has its moments but there are not enough of them to fill an LP.
• Their voice gets in the way on rock singer voices people can't stand.
• Forthcoming Albums - Second half of 2002, What you looking forward to?: a very long list by dj martian which is completed by the ILM contributors.

Business as usual

• Discussion on How to Read Quickly Without Really Trying at kuro5hin. Some tips on how to accelerate your reading skill and how to read more efficiently.
• FilmWise is a site with a weekly quiz on movie stills. You can guess eight movies per week, the persons are taken out of the stills so that only the clothes can be seen. Quite surreal with the dresses hanging in space and rather difficult (via dekaf).
• Review of Sheila Hale's book The Man Who Lost His Language on her husband John Hale: "When a great historian lost his speech to a stroke, what remained of him?"... "The mystery is that the huge physical insult to his brain seems to have changed everything about him except who he was. His spirit, as we might once have called it – or his "personality" if we feel we no longer can – survived the general devastation." (via wood s lot). Another review of the book in The Economist.
• ILM discussion What's up with hating on the Doors where I tried to defend the music of The Doors and Jim Morrison against a huge majority of Doors dispraisers.
• Via the excellent music weblog Wisdom Goof which is updated daily now and featured the Doors reunion on Friday I found a great music blog called Slow Thrills with another review of Yo La Tengo's Sounds of Science score to the old underwater short films by Painlevé. I'd like to read more of Slow Thrills but a bright font on black background is so awful to read... That really is an attack on my sensitive eyes. Catherine's pita and the Stylus Magazine's blog (in an incredibly small font) are doing the same. How can someone choose a dark colour background scheme? Something to do with Netscape? I use Internet Explorer and these pages turn out almost unreadable. Or are these people night cats?
• Monosyllabic :: the rotation is an indie music blog worth your attention (via badger).
• The Rub is another music blog (via somnolence who has redesigned).
• German: 40.000-Zeichenerguss über den Aufenthalt in einem Swingeretablissement.

Le Livre des Illusions I got an interesting comment from Stuart Pilkington, a fan of the writings of Paul Auster who is responsible for the excellent Paul Auster (The Definitive Website) which is appropriately enough based in the UK: Here's something from my FAQ page for you: "I e-mailed Paul Auster's assistant and she said "Yes--The Book of Illusions is absolutely wonderful. But I have no idea why it came out earlier in those countries." So I e-mailed his French publishers, Actes-Sud, and they said "Indeed, "The Book of illusions" has been published in France before its coming out in USA and GB. In fact, Actes Sud has a very close contact to Paul Auster as the French echo of his work has highly contributed to his international success. Our editorial direction got the manuscript directly from the author without having to wait for its publication in English language. Therefore, the schedule of each publishing house, from one side or another of the Atlantic or the Channel, are completly independent - and we were so enthusiastic about this new novel that we were especially eager to offer it to our readers as soon as possible!"" Cheers Stuart

L'Amour Etre Le premier venu. René Char

Connecting

• After Napster its successor Audiogalaxy bit the dust as well. But there is no reason to worry. Loads of other P2P services are ready to take over. Who will win the race? Pitchfork: How To Survive Without Audiogalaxy: A Guide to File-Sharing Alternatives. The competition will be fierce as the other side is not sleeping neither: Music labels go after song-swappers.
• Very good Keith Jarrett site with questions & answers
• Did you know that Camper van Beethoven covered Fleetwood Mac's album Tusk, the follower of their biggest selling record Rumours, in 1986 (via robotwisdom)?
• I started the still almost virgin thread on Michelle Shocked: Search and Destroy on ILM. I also write in this thread: Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. According to the fellow forum participators I am stretching the Wilco-Beatles comparison a little.
• Douglas Wolk, who usually reviews music, writes in Salon on the classic bestseller Joy of Cooking written by a supposedly terrible cook
• A board game blog from Salisbury, UK: nimrods. I still haven't found a chess blog.
• You want to meet fellow bloggers near you? Try blog.meetup.com!
• Times Online on Alain de Botton's new book The Art of Travel on how travelling and literature can fecundate each other (MeFi discussion on the perfect combination of a book, a destination and a way of travelling).
• New fast indexing search engine with cache: openfind (via dj martian). It comes from Taiwan and is still in the beta phase.
• German: Revolutionslieder und Protestsongs wurden gerade beim Sofa Blogger diskutiert.

Clevere Geschäftsleute Gestern beim Aufruf der Seite eines nicht ganz unbedeutenden Onlinehändlers, bei dem ich gelegentlich schon eingekauft habe, traute ich meinen Augen kaum, ob dieses genialen Vorschlags: "Alexander F****, verdienen Sie EUR 217,70 Verkaufen Sie Ihre Amazon.de-Käufe bei Amazon.de. " Wollen die sich jetzt zur stark überteuerten Onlinebücherei entwickeln, oder was? Einmal an einem Kunden verdienen, reicht wohl nicht mehr, um bei der Bilanz in die schwarzen Zahlen zu kommen. Aber immer noch besser als Bilanz fälschen, oder? P.S. Au weia, um so viel Geld für Secondhandzeugs zu kriegen, muss ich aber schon ganz schön Kohle bei denen gelassen haben.