Worth Your Consideration #019 - A GF5 Linkdump

• Ain’t It Cool News and Lostpedia hooked us up with the promotional poster for the fifth season of Lost last night, and I have to say that I’m a big fan of this thing. Blue Eagle Islander at the Lostpedia Blog calls it “too much of a clone of the Season 4 poster,” but I have to respectfully disagree. If it’s close in theme to the season four poster, it deviates in how much more attention is given to the characters, as opposed to the landscape. It’s a subtle difference, but could actually end up being a telling one.
• If Lost inspires you to write, as it sure as hell does for me, then Forty Chapters might be worth checking out. Mashable offers a pretty favorable review.
• The Nine Inch Nails tour that I and others have been telling you to go and see since the summer now has trailer. It’s brief, but it gives you a full-motion snippet of what you’re in for if you’re lucky enough to score a ticket.
• I have never been a big fan of music subscription services like the Zune Pass—as Uncle Steve suggests, I’d rather own my music—but a recent development has piqued my Interest. As reported today by Electronista, the $15 monthly Zune Pass now gives subscribers the option of keeping 10 songs permanently at the end of each month. That’s a really tempting offer. Access to all of the music in their library, plus 10 songs per month to keep even if/when I quit the service? If Apple/iTunes offered that, I’d be signing up today.

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Worth Your Consideration #018 - A GF5 Linkdump

• RandomKitty.net provides a review of last week’s Nine Inch Nails show in Manchester, NH that is chock-full of YouTube links. If you’ve seen the band perform live on this tour and want to relive the magic, or if you haven’t seen them yet and you’re wondering what you’re missing, please do check out the YouTubeage. It’s not quite as good as being there, but it comes close.
• In her review, our good friend Beth provides a different perspective on the Manchester show, as well as some thoughts on the Worcester show that preceded followed it. (Thanks to Beth for the correction.) She writes, “Having seen it firsthand from three different angles, it seems to me to have been constructed with an eye for detail I’ve seen put into museum installations, with the view of it from every last vantage point taken into account.” Yeah, that pretty much sums up how I felt about it, and I only saw it from one angle. I’ll repeat this again: if you haven’t seen this show yet, and you’re at all interested in Nine Inch Nails, you need to get your ass in gear right fucking now.

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NIN Oeuvre Blog: Leaving Hope

A 2005 Q&A with Rolling Stone establishes that Trent Reznor got off of drugs and alcohol in late 2001, just as the live album And All That Could Have Been and its companion disc, Still, were about to be released. AATCHB and Still are therefore our best windows into the world of Mr. Reznor as he transitions out of the chaotic milieu of the 1990s and into the creatively ripe era of the new millennium. And it’s my contention that the final song on Still, “Leaving Hope,” is a perfectly positioned bridge from one era to the next.

It was in the hopeful yet haunting soundscapes of “Leaving Hope” that I took refuge from the world of musical shit that the rest of humanity was wading through in the years between Nine Inch Nails releases. From January 2002, when Still first entered my consciousness, to April 2005, when With Teeth arrived, songs like “Leaving Hope” were what gave me, well, hope.

I think I always knew that the return of Nine Inch Nails would be more headbang-worthy than daydream-appropriate, but even the arrival of With Teeth and Year Zero, with their relative dearth of instrumentals, didn’t diminish my hope for another group of songs that, like Still, would encourage stillness in the maelstrom of my turbulent brain. “Leaving Hope” was like a final exam written for a course that had begun with assignments like “A Warm Place,” and it proved, to me at least, that the man behind this music was never going to abandon a musical form that he had worked so hard to get good at.

“Leaving Hope,” in my opinion, predicted the arrival of Ghosts I-IV, half a decade before its arrival. It is a remarkably narrative song, for an instrumental. Perhaps it is because I will always tie the music of Still to the videos that were released to the Internet to accompany it, but I can’t help but listen to “Leaving Hope” and see Trent sitting at a piano in New Orleans, candles flickering, curtains quivering in the breeze. When I listen to “Leaving Hope,” I hear the gentle sound of rain falling just outside the window, even though it isn’t there, and I hear a thunderclap at the end, like punctuation, telling me to move on. I feel suddenly at one with a man who seems to be making a decision, who seems to be finally making up his mind to stop hoping for better days and to start actively seeking them out.

That’s what “Leaving Hope” means to me. Whenever I hear it, I can’t help but feel compelled to get off of my ass, once the stillness is over, and to try and step out from underneath the rain cloud I’ve been palling around with for so long.

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Geek Force Utterz #034 - Tap Tap NIN

I still don’t own a copy of Tap Tap Revenge, the NIN Edition, but I will soon. How could any iPhone-owning NIN fanatic resist? It’s priced at only $4.99 and, as I mention in today’s episode of Geek Force Utterz, I think that really is the sweet spot in terms of iPhone app pricing.

Listen in to the call above (or listen on Utterli.com) and leave your thoughts in the comments.

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Geek Force Utterz #023 - Books as Souvenirs

This morning I got to thinking about whether books, like CDs and DVDs before them, are becoming (or should become) little more than souvenirs to remember the pre-release experience by. We often hear entire CDs leaked before their official release dates, and then buy them only if we enjoyed the illegal listens that we had beforehand. It’s probably the norm that we buy DVDs only after we’ve seen the films contained therein. So, why not books? I think it might be moving that way, with people Scott Sigler leading the charge.

Listen in and leave your comments below.

Oh, and remember: If you can’t see/hear the embed above, remember that you can always listen to this call directly on Utterli.com.

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