Note: I will post anything and everything Ken Nordine puts up on his YouTube channel until the end of time. Tagged: immunological systems, ken nordine, music, music 2.0, spoken word, video, word jazz, youtube

[culture bully] Tagged: come dancing, music, music 2.0, pancake mountain, the walkmen, tv, video, youtube

*Radio: Paul Harvey died. *Beards: I have two items on beards to share today: 1) Are you a Christian hipster? (I am not.) 2) Beardhead - a combination winter scarf and fake beard. [lhb, kate] *Lists: Are these the 100 worst album covers ever? And are these the 20 weirdest album covers? [eyeteeth, tds] *Quotes: Howard Zinn talks about Viggo Mortensen, “I saw Viggo Mortensen on the “Charlie Rose Show” wearing a T-shirt - “Impeach, Remove, Jail” — that made me think, “Oh, Viggo Mortensen — he’s a serious political thinker.” I need one of these t-shirts. *Bono: I have something in common with Bono’s children after all. United in our embarrassment, we shall stand together until the end of time. (I don’t know where that came from. Well. The heart, I guess.) *Music players: Mufin is a music player that sorts your music collection by sound. (I haven’t tried it yet.) [cnet] *Twitter: In the New York Times, Alessandra Stanley writes probably one of the most strangely angry articles about twitter you’ll see this week. “Those who say Twitter is a harmless pastime, which skeptics are free to ignore, are ignoring the corrosive secondary effects.” *Side Twitter note: Is their revenue plan to take a cut ...

A quick tour around Real Groovy Records, Auckland Record stores have interested me quite a lot recently. My local independent record store here in Birmingham closed down last weekend while I was away in New Zealand, so to commemorate that fact, I visited a couple of Auckland record stores - Conch in Ponsonby, which is the spiritual equivalent of what Jibbering was (part cafe, part meeting spot, and a hub for local funk, hip hop and reggae DJs); and Real Groovy Records - a massive emporium of new and second hand vinyl and CDs, books, DVDs, computer games and so on. Real Groovy is particularly interesting, because it went into liquidation last year and was closed down - but was rescued by an injection of capital (as I understand it) and was a thriving hive of activity when I visited. It got me thinking about what music retailers can and should do to survive - and also about the extent to which the closure of record shops is quite the tragedy it’s generally portrayed as. The guys at Jibbering love music, but were never really that excited about being in the retail sector. Closing the Jibbering store frees them up to concentrate on ...

A quick tour around Real Groovy Records, Auckland Record stores have interested me quite a lot recently. My local independent record store here in Birmingham closed down last weekend while I was away in New Zealand, so to commemorate that fact, I visited a couple of Auckland record stores - Conch in Ponsonby, which is the spiritual equivalent of what Jibbering was (part cafe, part meeting spot, and a hub for local funk, hip hop and reggae DJs); and Real Groovy Records - a massive emporium of new and second hand vinyl and CDs, books, DVDs, computer games and so on. Real Groovy is particularly interesting, because it went into liquidation last year and was closed down - but was rescued by an injection of capital (as I understand it) and was a thriving hive of activity when I visited. It got me thinking about what music retailers can and should do to survive - and also about the extent to which the closure of record shops is quite the tragedy it’s generally portrayed as. The guys at Jibbering love music, but were never really that excited about being in the retail sector. Closing the Jibbering store frees them up to concentrate on ...