“Trends come and go, but if there is one sure thing in the music business, it’s this: Holiday albums sell. Rod Stewart has a hit with his “Merry Christmas, Baby,” an album that’s gone as high as No. 3 and has sold more than 475,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.”
Tag: 12.20.12
China Shows “V for Vendetta” Movie, Amazing Critics
“The airing of the movie Friday night on China Central Television stunned viewers and raised hopes that China is loosening censorship.”
What A Vinyl Record Printed By A 3D Printer Sounds Like
“It’s about the worst version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” you could find. But it is awesome all the same for its totally unique medium. This particular LP is part of the batch of the first records ever to be created on a 3-D printer.”
The WikiLeaks Movies Are Coming
The not-quite-finished documentary We Steal Secrets, starring (in effect) Pvt. Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, is the “first of several Hollywood films about the little-known people who grew larger than the most powerful of governments by using the Internet to broadcast their secrets.”
Unsilent Night – Composer Phil Kline On The World’s Favorite Christmas Sound Installation
“Advent is about expectation and longing, and I started by asking how that applies to somebody in the big city who, like so many of us, comes from somewhere else. You can be alone here in the middle of eight million people. I felt somehow with music I could put something into that void. … [It’s] the whole accretion of a lifetime of befuddled spiritual pursuits.”
Does Nirvana = Happiness? Does Heaven?
Leszek Kolakowski: “Both Buddhism and Christianity suggest that the ultimate liberation of the soul is also perfect serenity: total peace of the spirit. And perfect serenity is tantamount to perfect immutability … like the happiness of a stone. Do we really want to say that a stone is the perfect embodiment of salvation and Nirvana? … We are told that Nirvana entails the abandonment of the self. This might be taken to suggest that there can be … happiness without a subject – just happiness, unrelated to anyone’s being happy. Which seems absurd.”