R.I.P. Mark Linkous
FEW stars have embodied the wild side of Hollywood like 23-year-old actress Lindsay Lohan. From her tumultuous relationship with her father, her trouble with the law and her run-ins with the paparazzi to her on-again/off-again relationship with Samantha Ronson and her stints in rehab, Lohan’s downward spiral was well documented.
In a recent exclusive interview with Britain’s The Sun newspaper, she says, “When my father was going public, that’s when I hit rock bottom…. I tried to mask my problems with alcohol, cocaine and mind-altering substances. Now I’m in a place where I don’t need to use anything and I can feel emotions because I choose to. I learnt from my mistakes and I’m now healthy and happier. I never want to be close to losing everything I worked for and aspired to have my whole life.”
While she obvious made some poor choices, it’s hard not to wonder what effect the TMZ-tabloid-and paparazzi-driven nature of Hollywood has on people.
“The thing is, at the times I was going out a lot and being seen everywhere, I would have been in college,” contends the young actress. “My brother, who is 18, and his friends go out to bars and stuff till whatever time. That’s what you do in college. Mine was all in the public eye so it was magnified that much more.”
ONE of the more promising shows on the fall TV lineup, the reboot of V is scheduled to return to ABC (CTV in Canada) on March 30 at 9 p.m. Despite an extended hiatus, the show should be able to bounce back thanks to a strong lead-in from Lost, which is wrapping up its final season. If you missed the first four episodes, you can view them on-demand at CTV.ca.
Elliott Smith - The Complete Live Covers
RECORDED at various points of Elliott Smith’s critically acclaimed career, these 51 live covers include his interpretations of songs by the Beatles, the Kinks, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Led Zeppelin and even Oasis. The late singer-songwriter approaches most of these cuts with the same real, rough and raw emotion that he used on his own material. A revealing look at some of the artists that Smith admired.
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 4, 2010 E3
Chatroulette Bingo/Drinking Game
Only around a few months, Chatroulette has taken the web by storm. While the appeal of the face-to-face video chat is that you never know who you are going to be connected to, there are a few typical users that you are bound to run into if you spend any time on the site. Looking to take things to another level, the Holy Taco blog has put together a hybrid bingo/drinking game that should keep you extra entertained as you jump from person to person on Chatroulette. Although you can play this alone, fire up your laptop the next time people are over and your parties will never be the same.
Five Best Music Streaming Services
The web has obviously revolutionized how we listen to, seek out and purchase music. While much of the music industry is still clinging to the old way of doing things (hoping that what is happening is just a dream), there are a few signs that we’re finally moving forward. With more digital content moving to an on-demand/in-the-clouds model, Lifehacker takes a look at the five best music-streaming services. From old-timers such as Pandora and Last.fm to newcomers such as Spotify, you’ll never have to complain about not having any new music ever again.
Quick Hits
MP3 of the Week: Greg MacPherson - First Class
It’s been five years since blue-collar singer/songwriter Greg MacPherson released Night Flares on G7 Welcoming Committee. With the label on hiatus, MacPherson has followed Propagandhi over to Smallman Records and is set to release Mr. Invitation on March 30. If First Class is any indication, the record has been worth the wait. MacPherson and his band will perform on April 10 at the West End Cultural Centre.
White Stripes: Under the Great Northern Lights
Filmed on its cross-Canada tour in 2007, Under the Great Northern Lights will finally be available in stores on March 16. More than just a typical concert DVD, the band also filmed a bunch of impromptu performances along the way. Locally, Jack and Meg White performed on Winnipeg Transit for a handful of savvy fans who headed down to The Forks to catch the duo. That footage is part of the DVD and trailer. The band is also encouraging people to hold screenings, and kits will be made available through its website to help you throw your own premiere.
Hot Chicks at Art Openings
Art + hot women = lots of web traffic and followers on Tumblr.
Winnipeg Red Bull Thre3 Style Champ DJ Fin-S
DESPITE an already crowded marketplace, last week Google unveiled its new social-networking platform, which borrows elements from Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. This isn’t the first time the search giant has become involved with social networking. A few years back Google purchased Orkut, but it never really caught on in North America. Despite this, Orkut has 100 million active users worldwide.
Looking to capitalize on the fact it already has a built-in user base through its Gmail application, Google was hoping its hybrid approach to social networking would pull people away from the Big 3. Looking to avoid the problem many social startups have with attracting users after the site first launches, Gmail users were automatically connected through Buzz to the people they emailed the most frequently. Although this information didn’t automatically get posted to the public, many users felt Google had overstepped its bounds and felt that some of the privacy options were difficult to understand.
This has been a public-relations fiasco for Google. Users complained that potentially harmful information could have been exposed to the public and that Google didn’t make Buzz’s privacy options clear enough. Google has been backtracking and making tweaks to its newest online product. Buzz is currently under investigation by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
Although the rollout of Buzz has been anything but smooth, Google’s managed to do some things right. Along with it’s real-time Twitter-like feed, you can easily connect other sites like Flickr, Picasa or Google Reader. Buzz also richly integrates photos, videos and links into your posts.
Buzz’s biggest advantage may be its mobile features. Similar to Foursquare, Buzz’s GPS functionality allows users to geo-tag locations around the city with comments that can then become a crowd-sourced city guide. From finding out what the best dish is at the restaurant around the corner to seeing all the posts about a certain event in real time, location-based info is only going to get more popular as more people get GPS. Buzz also invites dialogue among users, something that doesn’t really happen in Facebook and can only go so far in Twitter, owing to the 140-character restriction. Buzz actually brings the social part back to social networking.
It is too early to tell what type of impact Buzz will have on the social-networking landscape. People tend go where their friends are and for Buzz to be successful it is going to have to pull users away from Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. That’s going to be a tough task and Google might need to reimagine how Buzz can be used if it wants to survive.
One approach might be to turn Buzz into a social-networking aggregator similar to Friendfeed, pulling info from a variety of services into one central location. This would let people keep using their favourite service, but make Buzz the hub for all their social-networking activity. Considering most people resist change and are already dealing with social networking overload, this might be Google’s best option to ensure Buzz is around in a few years.
CLAIMING be the definitive list of stuff you should have seen, these 99 links should catch you up on what’s been happening on the Internet the last few years. From Tay Zonday’s Chocolate Rain to exploding fountains of Diet Coke to the skateboarding dog, You Should Have Seen This has all the bases covered.
Red Bull’s Thre3 Style
Heading into its fourth year, Red Bull’s annual Thre3 Style event has quickly become the most prominent DJ competition in the province, since the DMC elimination battle hasn’t happened for the past couple of years. Eight DJs will have 15 minutes to play at least three different genres and impress the judges (and crowd) with their skills behind the decks in an all about battle to find out who’s the best party rocker in the 204. Each performer is rated based on creativity, track selection, skills, stage presence and audience response. Not only is there a $1,000 on the line locally, but also a shot at representing Manitoba at the national championship in Toronto on March 13, during Canadian Music Week. The winner in The Big Smoke will represent Canada at the World Finals in Paris, France, in December 2010. Back to defend his title at Tijuana Yacht Club on Thurday, Feb. 25, DJ Fin-S will have some tough competition in the form of 2008’s winner Dow Jones and recent iMix champ D-Lo. Other DJs looking to knock off Fin-S include Hectic, Hipnotic, Hypnos, The Gaff (Saskatchewan) and a wild card entry selected the week before the event. Former Halifax-based turntablist/frequent Buck 65 collaborator Skratch Bastid will perform following the competition. Tickets are $10 and are available at CanadInn Polo Park 24 hours a day or at the door. To see what it’s going to take to win the national title, videos from last year’s competition are still available on-demand.
Savour Winnipeg
Even though 2010 seems to be the year of the food blog, there aren’t a ton of options on the web for local foodies. Around for a few years, Savour Winnipeg is mix of restaurant reviews, recipes, event info and local food-related news. Recent items have included The Fort Whyte Forager, a gadget review of the Microplane Ultimate Citrus Tool and a review of Segovia, Winnipeg’s answer to a Spanish tapas restaurant.
Quick Hits
MP3 of the Week: Broken Social Scene - World Sick
World Sick is the first single from the forthcoming Forgiveness Rock Record, Broken Social Scene’s first album in five years. The record comes out May 5.
Video of the Week: YACHT - Psychic City (Voodoo City)
DFA Records’ YACHT will perform in Winnipeg for the first time on Thursday, Feb. 25 at The Pyramid Cabaret. Psychic City (Voodoo City) is from the duo’s 2009 album, See Mystery Lights.
First-Person Tetris
Even if you think you are a master at Tetris, this interesting twist on Russia’s most famous puzzle game should keep you busy for a while.
Chatroulette.com
This past December, the newest Internet phenomenon was quietly born. Embracing the anything-goes Wild West days of the early Internet, ChatRoulette allows users with a web cam to instantly connect face-to-face with random strangers around the world.
“Our most popular new online tools - Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Digg - were designed to help us tame the web’s wildness, to tag its outer limits and set up user-friendly taxonomies,” wrote Sam Anderson in a recent article for New York Magazine. “ChatRoulette is, in this sense, a blast from the Internet past. It’s the anti-Facebook, pure social-media shuffle.”
During December, only about 300 people were using the service; as of this month, that number has grown to over 10,000 with no signs of slowing down.
The site’s popularity is driven by the fact you never know who you are going to be connected with. It also plays off our society’s voyeuristic instincts. The interactions can be as brief or as long as you decide. Don’t like who (or what) you see? Click next and see who pops up. From the bored housewife tired of surfing food blogs to the college kids drinking in their dorm to the net addict who is always at his or her computer to the fat guy jacking off, ChatRoulette is not for the faint of heart.
Some of the interactions on ChatRoulette are driven by sex (just like Craigslist or any old-fashioned chat room out there), but that doesn’t mean the site should be totally written off.
“Meeting a new person is thrilling, in a primal way - your attention focuses completely, if only for a nanosecond, to see if the creature in front of you has the power to change your life for better or worse. ChatRoulette creates this moment over and over again; it privileges it over actual conversation. Eventually, I realized that clicking ‘next’ was not so much a rejection as it was pure curiosity, like riding a train past an apartment building at night, looking briefly into as many lit windows as possible,” Anderson wrote.
Although the sheer simplicity and utter randomness is what makes ChatRoulette appealing to people, it could be taken in a different direction. With a couple of small changes, you can see the potential of fine-tuning the idea by allowing users to filter connections by different criteria but, then again, that might change the entire spirit of the the site.
Quick Hits
MP3 of the Week: Radiohead: Live in Los Angeles
High-quality 29-song Radiohead bootleg recorded at a concert for Haiti in Los Angeles.
Video of the Week: Roadkill
Classic snowboarding film from 1993, directed by Dave Seoane and featuring Jamie Lynn, Shaun Palmer, Terje Haakonsen, John Cardiel, Bryan Iguchi and others. Who needs the Olympics? This is what snowboarding is really about.
IF there’s one celebrity who understands and embraces the new paparazzi-driven/TMZ/Perez Hiltonized world of online tabloids, viral YouTube videos, ubiquitous cellphone cameras and ego-driven bloggers looking for the next big Tiger Woods-style scandal, it’s Grammy-winning singer/songwriter John Mayer.
A regular in the tabloids and in the spotlight, whether for his outrageous quotes outside nightclubs or his did-he-really-just-post-that-tweets to his relationships with A-lister Jennifer Aniston or singer-turned-reality-star Jessica Simpson, Mayer is almost as famous for his life off-stage as he is for his music.
He’s at the forefront of the group of actors, musicians, reality stars and socialites who use Twitter, Facebook and MySpace to connect with their fans and mug for the cameras outside the latest hot spots, hoping to get some more exposure.
“One of the most significant differences between us was that I was tweeting,” says Mayer of his relationship with Aniston, 41, in a recent controversial interview with Playboy magazine. “There was a rumour that I had been dumped because I was tweeting too much. That wasn’t it, but that was a big difference.
“The brunt of her success came before TMZ and Twitter. I think she’s still hoping it goes back to 1998. She saw my involvement in technology as courting distraction. And I always said, ‘These are the new rules…’
“I’ll always be sorry that it didn’t last. In some ways I wish I could be with her. But I can’t change the fact that I need to be 32.”
According to Mayer, his nearly one-year relationship with Simpson was addictive. “That girl, for me, is a drug. And drugs aren’t good for you if you do lots of them. Yeah, that girl is like crack cocaine to me… Sexually it was crazy” says Mayer. “That’s all I’ll say. It was like napalm, sexual napalm…”
Mayer will be at the MTS Centre on April 7 performing material from his recent album, Battle Studies. Despite the fact much of the album was written during his time with the former Friends star and that some of that relationship is reflected in the lyrics , Mayer claims his recent single, Heartbreak Warfare, isn’t about Aniston.
DEBUTING last Sunday on HBO Canada, How to Make it in America is a new series executive produced by Mark Wahlberg that has been described by USA Today’s Whitney Matheson as “like Entourage… if Vinnie Chase never became famous.” Centered around two friends chasing the American dream while they try to make it in New York, the show stars Bryan Greenberg and Victor Rasuk. In case you missed it, the network is streaming the pilot on-demand.
You can also download the How to Make it in America-inspired digital mixtape, featuring tracks by Lupe Fiasco, the XX, Chromeo and Yacht (who will be in Winnipeg at the Pyramid Cabaret Feb. 25). Make sure to select the American HBO site after you begin your download. If you go to the Canadian site, it won’t allow you to download the free MP3s.
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 18, 2010 E3
Do You Compute - Drive Like Jehu
