*Disasters: The trailer of a movie with many. Also, a shit-ton of bongos. [@bozofish]

*Whoa: Spezify – Type a word, then see it, hear it, know it. [blackrimglasses]

*Computers: Fake Steve Jobs is back, and he’s talking about the Google OS. San Dimas High School Football rules. As you know.

*Bests: The best thing I’ve linked to over the past week or so. The Eternal Moonwalk.

*Weiners: Oscar Mayer died. He lived a long life and many people enjoyed his weiners. Which is to say hot dogs. Ugh.

*Drink: Production of Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass” beer begins today. Guaranteed to taste like sweat. And motor oil. And maybe hep C.

*Literature: Things I Have Written in Cover Letters. Not me. The author. I’m not looking for a job. (Call me!) [coudal]

*Meta: Tests use virtual reality to examine questions of race and bias. This is serious stuff, so let’s all stay serious for a second here. [murketing]

*Music: Buzzfeed identifies Crabcore, a genre of music “characterized by the guitar player’s “crabwalk,” an extremely low stance, wherein both feet are set apart from one another as far as possible in a very deep squat.”

*Ahem: I’m keeping up the Twitter linking, but also doing an occasional link round-up. I think.

[eyeteeth]

[the daily swarm]

No Klingon. Which is weird.

[buzzfeed]

Old video, but love the hair. I used to have hair.

[thedailyswarm]

Many years ago (maybe 2005) for the day job, we wrote about the Burn to Shine DVDs, a series of concerts held in homes that had been abandoned and designated for demolition. A few things felt interesting about the story at the time – 1) The fact that bands were being taken out of their typical music venues and put on display in a wholly different context. 2) The idea of scarcity (currently a hot topic once again, as seen by the Gladwell vs. Chris Anderson debates) – in this case, a fact heightened rhetorically; these concerts were not only one-shot deals in offbeat locales, but they were being recorded in buildings that would soon be destroyed.

Since then, a number of music and pop-culture sites have sprung up around the idea. They invite indie bands-of-the-moment to perform a song or two in a strange setting, then put the mini-concert resultant videos online. (Daytrotter was an early example of a channel that amped up the rarity factor, but did little to change traditional context.)

The most prominent example of sites peddling unique live performances – of taking bands out of context – and putting them online might still be a Take Away Show with the Arcade Fire from 2007. (Another notable example is Brian Wilson’s Black Cab Session. Here’s Bon Iver’s Black Cab Session.)

Here are some additional channels who have, over the past few years, recorded video of live performances in unique venues – in parks, on elevators, in graveyards, in cabs careering across town – thus creating an event that is unique in its context and also wholly one-of-a-kind – then posted them online:

-Take Away Shows
-Off the Beaten Tracks
-Black Cab Sessions
-Handheld Shows
-They Shoot Music, Don’t They?
-Laundromatinee
-Pitchfork’s performance series- I’m still not sure what the overall series is called (if anything); Pitchfork has done one called Cemetery Gates and one called Daytripping (and they’re shunting me to the main page right now for some reason)
-(I’m sure I missed a few?)

Everyone already knows that the internet is a copy machine. But what channels like the ones above try to take advantage of the fact that we also live in an era of broader access along the – hold your nose for this – entire entertainment supply chain. It’s important that MP3s can be infinitely copied. But increased access to musicians through multiple media is a shift, as well – and it’s one that creates all kinds of opportunity.

Like inviting indie bands over to play their most pop-friendly songs in your apartment’s elevator, and then publishing the results for an audience of hundreds of thousands.

Last week, an amusing, music-related meme popped up on Twitter. The nugget of the idea – “Cool Bands Made Uncool” – was to take a band name and add something to it to give it nerd flair. Fleetwood Mac becomes Fleetwood PC (many times over); Megadeth becomes Megabeth. You get the picture; it’s easy to get – and that’s sort of the point.

Below is a sampling of some of the Cool Bands Made Uncool that appeared on Favrd (plus a couple more):
-The Whom
-Memetallica
-50 Centrum
-Hug
-Sigur Ray
-Steppenwalrus
-REO Stationwagon
-Nine Inch Toenails
-Ham Radiohead
-Bacterial Culture Club

Although the meme seemed to have peaked sometime on Tuesday, new ideas continue to roll in. (I, for the record, made one very brief foray into the genre.)

The two things I find interesting about this and other mini-memes centers around the scalability of ideas and the potential to use this platform to figure out what one might want to think about next.

Viral ideas that are Gutenbait – tumblrs that seem almost as if they’re optimized to garner book deals – usually aren’t very deep. They’re easily graspable, one-trick ponies – to wit: This Is Why You’re Fat – that happen to scale well; in this case, in a specific direction beyond tumblr (and toward traditional publishing). Even smaller amusements, like twitter memes, also demonstrate a scalability of concept; one that’s become increasingly easy to watch play out from start to finish, and one that might also hold some significant potential beyond fleeting entertainment.

As one watches Cool Bands Made Uncool spread, it’s immediately apparent that duplication – purposeful and accidental – quickly piles up as the crowdsourcing around this type of little ideas surges. The Dead Kennedys take a thousand different zags off the same zig – The Alive Kennedys, The Remaining Kennedys, The Alive-And-Kicking Kennedys. REO Speedwagon becomes R.E.M. Speedwagon, REO Stationwagon (multiple times). The Who becomes The Whom to one person and then to a dozen more, replicating through creativity or mimickry, whichever.

One can watch the memes morph, as well. Instead of changing band names, smart asses take up different tacks. Cool bands made uncool? Try U2. Or simply “You like them.”

Other twitterers stay on track, following the idea to places of delicious absurdity. Kernel Panic at the Disco. A Letter Writing Campaign Against the Machine. And my favorite; quirky, stupid and fantastic: Echo and the Furcon Attendees. From some dude from Portland. Whom I didn’t even follow. And probably won’t ever. And probably will never cross paths with again.

The thing that I’ve found compelling about twitter for the past couple years – the core of this post that I’ve barely even brushed up on (because I can’t yet adequately explain it) – is that the platform feels like the start of a recommendation engine for ideas. One can see it easiest in these little memes – where the action is sped up. Just as Last.fm can monitor one’s musical decisions and recommend “neighbors” whose tastes greatly overlap, twitter – though the tools are still dull at this point – can align users with their own “neighbors,” based purely on ideas.

There’s much more to say about this; so more to come. I guess.

(Updated 7.6.09 – added a couple of blogs with deals)

Below is a list (by no means exhaustive) of tumblrs that are now available in lovely printed form. I’ve also included a number of near-tumblrs – simple, single-concept tumblr-like blogs that are as much about images and an idea as they are about prose. Is like half of all book-reading now being done on the toilet or something?

Anyway, I informally propose blogs of this type and flavor henceforth be called Gutenbait (Digg-bait for the gutenberg-era).

*Look at this fucking hipster – St. Martin’s
*This Is Why You’re Fat – HarperStudio
*Hot Chicks with Douchebags (this should have been a Tumblr) – Simon Spotlight
*FML – Michel Lafon Publishing
*Pets Who Want to Kill Themselves – Three Rivers Press
*Rules for My Unborn Son – St. Martin’s
*Texts from Last Night – Gotham
*Sleeveface – Artisan Workman
*Cake Wrecks – Andrews McMeel Publishing

*I’m not counting: Postcards From Yo Momma, I Can Haz Cheeseburger or Stuff White People Like. Because I am in charge here.

I’d like to recommend for bookization:
*Goths in Hot Weather

Furthermore, Give Us A Book Deal offers a regular stream of idiotic book deal-bait tumblr ideas such as “Rules for My Future Dog” and “Slutty Ninjas.”

*Update: Apparently Gawker doesn’t read the Listenerd. Or at least doesn’t link to it! Not much new info in this book-to-blogs post, but a shout-out to Boner Party, which is good?

I’m not a natural writer. A terrible one? Frequently. An accidental one? Pretty much. A passable one? Once in a while. A natural one? Never. (Here’s a natural one.)

Anyway, it’s always a struggle (even to write a couple hundred words for work or a longer blog post for the ‘nerd). But despite that struggle – or maybe because of it – I take a special interest in language I find that’s compelling, or even just new. Sometimes full-blown prose captures my imagination (more on that soon), but often I’m just as interested in simply collecting (and watching develop) neologisms.

Here are a couple words – new or new to me – that have pumped through my feed reader recently:

*Funemployment: The idea that the idle time coming from being laid off is enjoyed by some.

*Ethonomics: Ethical economics. Or the overlap between what’s good (social ethics) with traditional economics.

*Plastectomy: The ritual burning, cutting or other destruction of credit cards. [murketing]

*Further, Mark Peters on GOOD recently wrote about America’s collective “Syndrome Syndrome” and the weight the word “syndrome” now pulls in the English language. Writes Peters “Other words are workaholics, pulling triple shifts and all-nighters, describing stuff that is deadly serious, kind of serious, totally ridiculous, and everything in between. Syndrome is one of these overachievers.”

A tangentially related item he doesn’t talk about is one we’ve addressed extensively (and for years) at my day job: the creep of “sensitivity.” The sensitivity – not a full-blown allergy, but still something that carries the sound of a “condition” – now, to an often absurd degree – protects people from annoyances ranging from the serious to the frivolous, from co-workers wearing too much perfume to the burden of having to wear clothing with unnatural fibers.

While we as a culture may have a syndrome syndrome, personally, I have a sensitivity sensitivity.

This thing is terrifying. And awesome.

I’m thinking of seriously curtailing the link dumps on this blog. In a highly experimental move, I’m going to throw the links on a twitter account instead for a while – twitter.com/thelistenerd. (This was formerly my Fake Sam Beam account, so please feel free to amuse yourselves with Dead Fake Sam’s previous tweets.)

If this experiment doesn’t work, I’ll probably start linking here again.

(I think there’s something to pounding through the feed reader on a regular basis. Whether batching the links adds anything to them or not, I don’t know.)

What will appear on this listenerd during this highly volatile experiment, you ask?

I have no idea.

Thank you.