Raise the Corn

This is a twelve-acre corn maze made by a New Hampshire farmer in honor of Stanley Cup-winning goalie Tim Thomas. How will you top this when the Sharks win in 2012?

Crooked Fingers

Summer music is supposed to be light and frothy, but I don't like that kind of music in any season. My obsessions gravitate toward darkness, and let the therapists dissect my sodden corpse. It's August, and time for immersion in Crooked Fingers, the only go-to band I have that morons might call indie. Yes, Eric Bachmann led 90s darlings Archers of Loaf and is currently touring with them, but the band he's had for the last eleven years can't be pigeonholed by fat, lazy goateed asswipes. I'm sure musical categories drive Bachmann to the tormenting vices he's chronicled so eloquently, if his lyrics are to be believed. I have no idea what to call Crooked Fingers, other than that rare band that can move you in mid-morning and the intemperate wee hours. I don't know what you care about in music, but if melody, emotional content and lyricism still matter to anyone, you should at least put prejudices aside and give 'em a listen. Let me help, because with just five records out, I might get through each one without passing out on the keyboard.

Crooked Fingers- S/T- Bachmann started the band spare, and the first offering is almost suffocating in its relentless grimness. The lush instrumentation to come later ain't here, but the naked vulnerability of the lyrics coupled with the hauntingly beautiful melodies made just about everybody who heard this a lifelong fan. I could listen to "Broken Man" or "New Drink for the Old Drunk" or "A Little Bleeding" any time or anywhere, and I'd just have to stop and listen and feel. I'm not sure how many suicides he prevented or sent over the edge, but it's that kind of record.

Crooked Fingers- Bring on the Snakes- and more of the same for round two, how the obsessive devotees wanted it. "The Rotting Strip" opens the eight songs here, and it may be my favorite ever from Bachmann.  Ever had a failing relationship? "Blurry eyes half bent and I can't take you sober/ Tricking off the rotting strip that we've been trudging under/ We ducked into a dim lit room out where the river bends/ And turned to walk the burning bridge that we would build/ And crossed our hearts half hoping/ That we could both quit smoking/ And kick the booze and blow/ And one day go make something of ourselves." And later: "So we branded our hearts and we toasted the stars/ Getting wasted by the light of the moon/ You were a two-bit tramp and I was a low-life lying scam/ We were a bad lay coming undone burning for someone to use." No one gets off easily in these songs, the first-person narrator most of all. You don't have to feel like a complete fuck up and loser to immerse yourself in this album, but it fucking helps.

Crooked Fingers- Red Devil Dawn- the critics love this one more than the others, but I don’t. It’s fine for what it is, an attempt to flesh out the sound, broaden the scope of the tunes and produce more fully developed pop songs, which it does, but it doesn’t quite reach the heights of the next one, so let’s get to that.

Crooked Fingers- Dignity and Shame- for my money, this is Bachmann’s magnum opus. The mood has lightened, and the hooks are enormous. Apparently, this is supposed to be a concept album about some Spanish bullfighter’s doomed love affair, but that makes little difference. The greatness comes not from any tragic story, but from the songs, the wonderfully crafted and absurdly catchy tunes that come one after the next. While this might sound shiny and bright and sell-out to the studio apartment dwellers still clutching those first two records and their bottles of Peach Schnapps, terrified to jerk off for fear they no longer can, I’m calling masterpiece on this shit.

Crooked Fingers- Forfeit/Fortune- This is my least favorite of the five, even if a few tunes reach the high standards of previous efforts. I can’t even put my subjective critical ear-finger on the reason, other than that the songs don’t move or grab me the ways songs on other albums do. How is that for deep analysis?

Crooked Fingers will be releasing its sixth album in October, and I am excited. Or doomed. Or hopeful to have a new midnight friend. Or drunk. E?

"Spotted Owls"

Warren Buffett, Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, in a New York Times opinion piece, is calling on the so-called mega-rich to pay more in taxes.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett is calling on the so-called "mega-rich" to pay more in taxes.

Buffett said Monday in a New York Times opinion piece that he would immediately raise rates on households with taxable income of more than $1 million, and he would add an additional increase for those making $10 million or more.

He also recommends that the 12 members of Congress charged with devising a deficit-cutting plan leave rates for 99.7 percent of taxpayers unchanged.

"My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress," Buffett wrote. "It's time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice."

Buffett noted that the mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most investment income but practically nothing in payroll taxes. The middle class, meanwhile, typically falls into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets and is hit with heavy payroll taxes. He said Washington legislators "feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species."

Buffett said he knows many of the mega-rich well, and most wouldn't mind paying more in taxes, especially when so many fellow citizens are suffering. He also said he has yet to see anyone shy away from investments because of tax rates on potential gains, even when rates were much higher in the mid-1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

"People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off," he said.

Not to get all MBA on you, but this is a pretty interesting article on the much hyped Spotify service. I'd like to hear if anyone has tried it.

Unless you've been living somewhere without net access for the past week or so, you have heard about Spotify, an online music service that just launched in the U.S. The initial reviews have been pretty positive, and it has generated a lot of buzz, although it's quite similar to some services that have been available here for some time (Rhapsody comes to mind). But there's something pretty insidious buried inside music rental models like this. It's prime territory for a bait-and-switch strategy. In fact, this approach could be exactly what the music labels are relying on.

At first blush, paying a monthly amount to "borrow" content like this over the net seems like a pretty good idea. Many of us have used Netflix or Hulu and become accustomed to the idea of paying our monthly subscription fee and getting to watch as much as we want. Both of these companies have done a fantastic job with their offerings. Netflix has become so popular that it recently surpassed the amount of Bittorrent ("pirate") traffic on the web, proving that it's compelling offerings, not lawsuits, that win customer's hearts and minds. But if Hulu and Netflix are so fantastic, what's the concern about Spotify?

Simply put: the way we consume music is fundamentally different to the way we consume movies and TV.

Think about it. It is relatively rare to own a movie or TV series that you sit through and watch multiple times. Sure, there are some classics where that's the case, but most people watch a video once and that's it. Music is not like this. The same songs get listened to time and time again. We build playlists (custom CDs or even mix tapes, if you're old enough) around them. It's the very reason most people don't just listen to the radio. They want to own their favorite songs and albums so they can play them when they want. Understanding this — that we consume audio in a fundamentally different way from video — is critical to understanding why, from a consumer point of view, paying a monthly rental fee is a risky way of obtaining music.

Let me illustrate why.

Again, unless you've been living somewhere without internet for the past week or so, you would have seen the outrage when Netflix upped its prices. Well, if you think this is bad, just wait until Spotify does it. With Netflix, if the price gets out of step with what the company delivers you every month, it's a pretty simple decision to stop subscribing. You were paying your $10 per month to watch your movies or TV shows, you watched your shows, and now they're charging too much. So you stop subscribing. You don't lose anything, because you don't really want to re-watch all those old shows and movies that you've already seen. All you need to do is find somewhere else to watch next week's episode, or next month's movie.
But if Spotify were to do this and you choose to stop subscribing, all that music you have on your Android or iPad is gone. You can't get the music out, and there's nothing to suggest that you'll be able to get the playlists on your computer out as easily as Spotify does from iTunes.

This makes it the ultimate breeding ground for a bait-and-switch strategy: once you're invested, your willingness to pay goes up dramatically. Most of us would probably be willing to pay quite a lot to not lose all our music. That becomes all the more alarming when the initial indications suggest that Spotify is a tricky balancing act to make profitable. Three big variables affect its profitability: the percentage of paying users, the amount they pay each month, and — here's the real gotcha — the cost of track licensing.

I've got no insider knowledge that Spotify is planning on raising prices. But I do know this: Spotify get all its content from the same place everyone else does — the same industry that has forced price increases on other online services once they have become successful. That appears to be at least partly what happened with Netflix last week. At least in the case of the existing a la cartemusic services, if you don't like the new price, you don't have to buy the new track. In Spotify's world, if you don't like the new price, there goes your music library. Or, if Spotify tries to stand up for its users, the labels can just pull the songs and those songs simply disappear. Here's what one user in the U.K. had to say about that:

"It's really frustrating, and it seems to be happening a lot. Spotify has changed how I buy and listen to music, and I pay for Premium so that I don't have to download albums from iTunes, but now I'm having to do both."

If you're interested in seeing what the buzz is about, you should try it out. But beware. Spotify may try to resist price increases. But, given what we know about the record industry and how it approaches licensing negotiations, I wouldn't let my music get held hostage to a monthly ransom.