MHALLVILLE» Music

Savoy Truffle

Mark Hall — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 00:18:01 +0000

I’ve written so many love letters to last.fm already, I hardly need add another.

But my love for the service is captured by my experience in just the past 2 songs (it’s on now):

Savoy Truffle, the George Harrison gem from the White Album

Grandaddy doing a cover of Fun Fun Fun.

It’s the discovery of new (or in the case of savoy truffle, the rediscovery of old) music that Last.fm does so well. For me, anyway.

The lyrics to Savoy Truffle now…

Creme tangerine and montelimar
A ginger sling with a pineapple heart
A coffee desert - yes you know its good news
But you'll have to have them all pulled out
     After the Savoy truffle.

Cool cherry cream and a nice apple tart
I feel your taste all the time we're apart
Coconut fudge - really blows down those blues
But you'll have to have them all pulled out
     After the Savoy truffle.

You might not feel it now
But when the pain cuts through
You're going to know and how
The sweat is going to fill your head
When it becomes too much
You're going to shout aloud
     - Creme tangerine.

You know that what you eat you are,
But what is sweet now, turns so sour -
We all know Obla-Di-Bla-Da
But can you show me, where you are ? . . .

Creme tangerine and montelimar
A ginger sling with a pineapple heart
A coffee desert - yes you know its good news
But you'll have to have them all pulled out
     After the Savoy truffle.

Old Media, New Media

Mark Hall — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 13:11:06 +0000

Some of the digital media cheerleaders out there are so eager to dethrone “old media” and the MSM, but sometimes I worry their plans will neither cure the disease or save the patient, just replace it with something different and maybe worse in some regards.

In short, despite the fact I’ve made a living in digital media for over a dozen years and consider it my calling, I hope many traditional forms of “old media” won’t go away anytime soon or be displaced by new media.

Books, for example. Love them. Not just the narrative form, the linear story, the artful prose, but the form factor of paper and pages and spines and the feel of them and the portability. They just work, have for hundreds of years, I’m not sure whether hyperlinks or digitization would add anything, and I know they might take away a lot. I can’t imagine, ever, lying in bed and reading a book on an ereader.

Newspapers, as another example. That business, which employed and employs my father for nearly five decades now, put food on our table when I was a kid and helped put me through college. So there is that bias, yes. But also the depth, the lack of interruption, the form factor again — whether spreading the paper over the table next to my coffee at breakfast, or reading a redtop, or the Independent, or the Guardian berliner format on the tube, or sitting in a cafe somewhere in the sun parsing through the International Herald Tribune (so snotty sounding, yes, but so pleasing). No distracting hyperlinks, or e-mail chimes, or other nonsense that results in twitching, not reading. I like the purity of the newspaper experience — reading, thinking, reading some more.

An aside at this point: I go to Ritual in San Francisco to meet friends now and again, and it’s full of people with laptops open cranking on the free wifi. I joked to my friend the other day: “They should put some cubes in here.” Sure, I like my wifi in a coffee house now and again. But at Ritual, it’s always on: few folks, sometime none, have a newspaper or a book there. That makes me a bit sad, I think they’re all missing something really.

Films, on the screen, in a movie theater. Don’t care if it’s digital or analog, but the traditional experience of seeing a movie with a hundred other people, the community of our common laughter or suppressed gasps. That is nice, it feels human and connected and vibrant in a way that sitting in front of a tv doesn’t. I don’t ever want that to go away.

I go back and forth on theater. Yes, when great, which is really just in New York or LA or London best of all. But elsewhere?

Most television and music I’m happy to consume in more digital forms, be it DVDs or just bits on an iPod or over IP.

Cinemas, books, newspapers — I like them analog, I hope they stay that way.

Last.fm, My Favorite Service of the Past 18 Months

Mark Hall — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 19:47:05 +0000

It wasn’t until after I left full time work at Real in July 2004 that I (ironically) began to get re-connected with the web. In my final years at Real, because I spent so much time working on our own web services, I had neither the time nor energy to explore other folks’. Plus, after nearly a dozen years in digital media, I had gotten sick of the internet, my computer, my mobile phone, my iPod, my digital life. I wanted, and was ready, to unplug.
Which I did for about three months. By October 2004, I was back on the Net. First, to follow in excruciating detail the election from London, followed by a gradual re-immersion back into the world of technology. I dived back in because, well, I was refreshed after some time away. But more importantly, I was excited about a bunch of new services like flickr, del.icio.us, and rss feed readers like bloglines. These are now hailed as canonical “web 2.0″ offerings, but I wanted to give a shout out to my favorite, one that seems to get less attention.
That would be Last.FM (powered by sister service, audioscrobber). More than any other service launched the past few years, theirs has had a real impact on how I consume, and enjoy, media. In this case, music. For those of you who haven’t tried the service, there are two essential components: Audioscrobbler, a plug-in for your jukebox that tracks what you listen to in iTunes, WMP, WinAmp etc. The second is Last.fm, which hangs a bunch of useful services off of your listening habits as tracked by the audioscrobbler plug-in.

Technorati Tags: Internet

The best of these services is last.fm radio. Last.fm will be radio playlists for you based on tracks you have listened to, artists that you like, or “musical neighbours” — other last.fm users who have similar tastes. It also allows its users to join groups, and then tracks listening habits in aggregate for those groups. This is useful because you can see in what other folks in the group listen to, and even better get a radio feed informed by the group behavior. I’m an alt-country fan, and belong to one group dedicated to that genre called “Postcard from Hell.”
I am listening to that group’s radio feed now, as I have been for much of the past week (I also love listening to my “musical neighbours” feed) and have found it to be the best way to discover new music — ever. About fifty percent of the tracks played I’ve not heard before, and of those, the hit rate is greater than 50%. For me, that ratio of hits to new songs is better than Launch, Pandora, or Rhapsody radio.
When I don’t like a track, I can just skip it, or if I really don’t like it, I let last.fm know not to play it again. If I love it, I can likewise tell the Last.fm that.
Last.fm has lots of social networking features, and I’m sure some users like them. But for me, what is important is that they use the social networking features as a means to an end: to help you to discover new music efficiently. That’s a useful service.
Finally, I should note I am just using Last.fm after a six month absence. But that had more to do with how and when I was listening to music (not through my computer) during that time than the actual benefits of the service. I should also note that Last.fm is not the service I used most: that award would go to Google search, Bloglines, MyYahoo, and my various e-mail services. And of all those services, I would probably give up Last.fm before the others. The others are simply necessary tools for my work. Last.fm is just something I enjoy. There are few web services about which that can be said.