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Blog: Scenes From a Debacle in Phoenix

Jason Tate

Dave Eggers, writing on Medium:

In downtown Phoenix, in the space of a few blocks, there were 15,000 Trump supporters and 10,000 anti-Trump protesters. There were Bikers for Trump and a platoon from the John Brown Gun Club, an anti-fascist group carrying loaded handguns and semiautomatic weapons. There were roving packs of weightlifters wearing pro-Trump attire. There were men in sleeveless Confederate flag jackets, and there was a giant inflated chicken made to look like Donald Trump. There was a man with a megaphone who asserted throughout the afternoon that homosexuals were going to hell, drunk drivers should die, and women who wore skirts deserved to be raped. There were anarchists, antifa, and hundreds of heavily armed police officers. This was a week after Charlottesville, the country grieving and boiling in the madness of its most irrational era, and in Arizona, it was more than 105 degrees and felt far hotter.
That no one died that day in Phoenix is miraculous.

Force Friday Toy Lineup and Details

Star Wars
Jason Tate

Star Wars fans know today as “Force Friday.” There’s a whole bunch of new toys out, and Star Wars News has the full list:

Hasbro has been kind enough to set us up with some details and images on all of the toys, games, and retailer specific releases hitting shelves today to aid in your search for everything that is offered. We’ve of course got the new The Last Jedi figures, but also everything else you’d expect from a major Force Friday release. We’ve got Black Series releases, ForceFX sabers, board games, nerf guns, and of course…Porgs!

Lots of fans are talking about their haul in our forums. I’m definitely eying that Rey Funko POP.

Flavor Flav Sues Chuck D, Public Enemy Camp Over Profits

Legal
Jason Tate

Althea Legaspi, writing for Rolling Stone:

In the lawsuit, Flavor Flav (real name William J. Drayton) claims that he and Chuck D (real name Carlton Ridenhour) had a long-established agreement that profits from their music, merchandise and concerts would be split between them. Despite that alleged arrangement, Flavor Flav claims that Public Enemy’s business management firm Eastlink has not been sending the earnings he is owed, which have “diminished to almost nothing, and Drayton has been refused accountings, even on the items bearing his likeness,” according to the lawsuit.

‘The Simpsons’ Composer Fired

The Simpsons
Jason Tate

Alf Clausen, the composer for almost all of the episodes of The Simpsons, has been fired. Variety reports:

Two-time Emmy winner Alf Clausen has been fired from “The Simpsons” after 27 years of providing music for Bart, Lisa, and company.

Clausen told Variety that he received a call from “Simpsons” producer Richard Sakai that the company was seeking “a different kind of music” and that he would no longer be scoring the longtime Fox hit.

World Air Guitar Championships

Air Guitar
Jason Tate

Jacob Pinter, writing at NPR:

Great rock guitarists need great nicknames. There’s Slash, Slowhand and The Edge.

Meet a new one: Airistotle. No, that’s not a misspelling. The nom de rock belongs to Matt Burns, a waiter and world-class competitive air guitarist living in New York City. He decided to try air-rocking almost a decade ago when he saw the documentary Air Guitar Nation.

And:

But his creative niche is air guitar. Competitors generally use the same routine for a year, then create a new one in time for the start of a new air guitar season.

Burns’ creative process involves a couple of months of listening to pop-punk songs — he grew up with Green Day and Sum 41, he says — and narrowing it down to a song he likes. Then he crystallizes his performance routines with the help of a few friends.

You can watch all of the performances here. Today is better because I learned this exists.

Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett Talk With Rolling Stone

Courtney Barnett
Jason Tate

Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile sat down with Rolling Stone to talk about their upcoming collaborative album:

“It’s a scary process, taking a half-written song to someone,” Barnett says. “I didn’t want him to be like, ‘God, this sucks. What have I gotten myself into?'” But they hit it off immediately. “The vibes were strong,” says Vile. “We discovered we could finish things on the quick, like an outlaw country singer, or Neil Young.” Adds Barnett, “We were mucking around, eating pizza, and we had all these songs all of a sudden.”

The album, Lotta Sea Lice, will be out in October.

Kendrick Lamar Joins Nike

Kendrick Lamar
Jason Tate

Kendrick Lamar has officially left Reebok and joined Nike. GQ reports:

And while Reebok sneakers are having a moment right now, there’s no arguing that the Nike Cortez has been a bigger staple of hip-hop style, particularly in Lamar’s hometown Los Angeles. And now it looks like K.Dot has decided to leave Reebok in favor of Nike, taking to social media to post a photo of himself in a pair of Nike Cortez kicks with the caption “Cortez. Since day 1. #teamnike.”

Tesla Working on Own Streaming Service?

Tesla
Jason Tate

Fred Lambert, writing for Electrek:

A friend of the site and Tesla tinkerer known as Green, who brought us Tesla’s new maps and navigation engine and the Autopilot debugging mode, has found a new client in Tesla’s most recent updates for the new streaming service.

It’s called ‘TTunes’, which could likely only be a placeholder name for the actual service.

Taylor Swift’s Gamification of Ticket Sales

Taylor Swift
Jason Tate

HitsDailyDouble:

“Taylor Swift Tix,” her newly unveiled promo with Ticketmaster, requires you to register on TaylorSwift.com to put you on a wait list for tickets. You can then pre-order the album, share her pitch on social media.

You can buy the album at different retailers and get a boost each time, with a limit of 13 items to boost your chances (or spend the same amount on StubHub—not that we’re endorsing such a gambit). And if you buy a CD or a T-shirt—or multiple albums and merch—from her site, each buy ups you in the queue for tickets. But it doesn’t actually guarantee that you’ll get them.

In essence, Swift’s strategy leaves open the option for a bundle at some point closer to release date without cannibalizing her Target exclusive or iTunes now.

This entire strategy for selling tickets, and boosting album sales, is fascinating to me. The gamification of music. It’s kinda brilliant.

Why Indie Bands Go Major Label in the Streaming Era

Pitchfork
Jason Tate

Marc Hogan, writing at Pitchfork:

Scott Rodger, who manages Arcade Fire, Paul McCartney, and Shania Twain, points me to various artists’ pages on Spotify. Arcade Fire have 5 million monthly listeners on the streaming service. Radiohead have 6 million, while Grizzly Bear, the War on Drugs, and LCD Soundsystem all have more like 2 million. But Imagine Dragons, while critically scorned, have 30 million-plus. And the most popular artists right now, like “Despacito” hitmakers Daddy Yankee and Luis Fonsi, along with Ed Sheeran and Calvin Harris, have upwards of 40 million. “With the world moving towards streaming, most indie or alternative acts simply don’t stream as well,” Rodger says.

Google Search Uses a Medical Quiz to Help Diagnose Depression

Google
Jason Tate

Jon Fingas, writing for Engadget:

Only half of Americans who face depression get help for it, and Google is determined to increase that percentage. As of today, it’s offering a medically validated, anonymous screening questionnaire for clinical depression if you search for information on the condition. This won’t definitively indicate that you’re clinically depressed, to be clear, but it will give you useful information you can take to a doctor. And importantly, the very presence of the questionnaire promises to raise awareness and promote treatment beyond what a basic information card would offer.

Blog: Cloudflare’s Lava Lamps

Technology
Jason Tate

Katharine Schwab:

When you walk into the San Francisco office of the cloud network and security firm Cloudflare, you’re greeted by a receptionist–and a giant wall of 100 lava lamps. It isn’t just a throwback to the 1960s. The lava lamps act as a random number generator, helping to encrypt the requests that go through Cloudflare, which make up 10% of all internet requests.[…]

Cloudflare turns the “Wall of Entropy” into encryption using a camera that photographs the wall every millisecond of every day of the year. Any one of the company’s systems can turn the display of pixels–which changes based on a multitude of factors, like the movement of the lava, the inclusion of anyone who’s walking by, and the shifting daylight–into random numbers.[…]

In London, they use dual pendulums. While a single pendulum swinging back and forth is very predictable, mathematicians have shown that if you take a pendulum and hang another pendulum from it, you’ll create a system that no one has figured out how to model.

The Apocalyptic World of Brand New’s ‘Science Fiction’ Feels Realer Than Ever

Brand New
Jason Tate

I really liked this review of Brand New’s Science Fiction by Craig Jenkins, published at Vulture:

In any other year — hell, any other month this year — Science Fiction’s gallery of druggies, atom bombs, and separatist militiamen would’ve read like, well, real-deal science fiction. But summer 2017 is a place where guys with guns tout full-fledged white supremacy, and the guy with the nuclear codes promise “fire and fury” to overseas enemies. The protagonist of Brand New’s “Desert,” a gun-toting, homophobic wing nut who thinks God commanded him to wipe out liberals, isn’t a far cry from the people on TV rallying in support of ethnic cleansing. The nuclear winter of “137,” a song literally named after a byproduct of decaying radioactive uranium, suddenly seems possible.

Architects Stop Festival Show To Call Out Sexual Assault

Jason Tate

The Huffington Post:

Sam Carter, lead singer for the metal band Architects, has rightly been hailed a hero for stopping in the middle of a show to defend a fan from a groper. […]

“I saw a girl, a woman, crowdsurfing over here, and I’m not gonna fucking point the piece of shit out that did it, but I saw you fucking grab at her boob,” Carter said. “I saw it. It is fucking disgusting and there is no fucking place for that shit.”