“I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.” ~ Mae West

Must. Have. Now.

The Bad Apple

A print from the art collection of Matt Johnon. It’s the glasses. And the pointed toes. But mostly the glasses.

Hat-tip: Karl Elvis

“We were able to convince both Dylan’s management and Sony BMG that this was a perfect project for us. . . . We think (they’ve) done a terrific job of doing a total Bob Dylan promotion. It will be a win-win for everybody involved.” ~ Ken Lombard

Sony YouTube Fail

Okay. Let’s forget the fact that I paid for this song already. On vinyl. On cassette. On CD. Let’s forget the fact that it’s sitting on my living room shelves in two of those three forms and I’m sure the CD is somewhere in a box. Let’s forget that if I wanted to, I could go download it from any number of Chinese sites for free (oh, the blessed irony) without so much as a blip of protest.

IT WAS A BOOTLEG FROM SOMEONE’S PHONE DURING AN IMPROMPTU MOMENT THAT ONLY MATTERS TO FANS. It was shoddy audio, jerky and badly lit. Most people would likely have had a hard time realizing who it was or what song he was singing. Your chance of marketing this in a box set of anything was ten degrees less than nil.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is wrong with you people? How long are you relics going to keep alienating consumers? Get with the friggin’ program.

Whatever the equal is of the ten plagues of Egypt in corporate form, can we please get that started on these boneheads? Let mai Dylan bootleg GO!

(And, yes, you know I’m annoyed when I’m wishing frogs to rain down on people)

“You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.” ~ Frank Zappa

I have a commercial fetish. There is something genuinely enthralling for me when marketing is done well. It is rare that an over-hyped product can put a spin on something that jumps out at me, but Direct TV nailed it with their “Opulence, I Haz It” spot:

Okay, let’s move off the fact that having a pillow-trained teacup-sized giraffe that pouts like a Pomeranian and then relents to offer a peck is just plain cheating. It borders on too adorable to remember what the product is. What’s brilliant about it aside from the cuteness, however, is that it’s absurdist enough to make you sit up and pay attention, and go seek out the commercial again to take a second glance at what might otherwise just be dismissed as a cookie-cutter gimmick spot.

Upstaging the guy with the cheesy Eurotrash accent and the pretty ornamental girls dripping off him in their painted on (and, it should be said, yummy) slink, the giraffe (which had better be in stores by the holidays — if anything ever needed to be taken from CGI into some form of marketable toy, it’s this thing) makes you go back and see what else you missed.

Like the dog holding an ace in his paw under the table during the live-action “Dogs Playing Poker” set up. It does demonstrate something about how the bar is set these days that live dogs actually set up looking to be playing poker is NOT absurd enough to make the grade — they actually faded into the background on my first viewing.

Maybe it’s true that the devil is in the details, but of that’s so, then the devil does good work. And if the devil has teacup giraffes, he can have my credit card number.

“In Los Angeles, they don’t want you to fail, they want you to die.” ~ David Geffen

Some must-read facts from Information is Beautiful about the royalties that are paid to the creators of music. There are still loud talking points about how copyright infringement hurts artists, but the numbers tell the tale — music is really still the domain of the middle men.

Online Earnings For Musicians

“The eye sees a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination awake.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci