Blogmemes are the new tags— e.g., the latest thing LiveJournal has been doing for years but "real" bloggers are only just now getting excited about. Can emoticons and fey movie-quote-graphics be far behind?

A bookish meme-plague recently seen circulating amongst the DC blogosphere has now been passed to me, and so I post my replies here.

A book that's changed my life? I can't point to any one book that has had any one specifically-measurable affect on my life. But I'll credit Stephenson's Cryptonomicon with pretty significantly affecting a lot of how I approach the world.

A book I have read more than once: Infinite Jest.

On a desert island it's Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus' rambling meditation on Dadaism, witchcraft and The Sex Pistols, which is sufficiently huge and nonsensical to stay interesting for a long long time.

A book that made me laugh: M. John Harrison's Light is stunning. It made me laugh, for starters.

A book that made me cry: Fables And Reflections is my favorite of the Sandman books. It mostly ignores the epic meta-narrative in favor of these quick elegant ad-hoc fairy tales. One, called Ramadan, really flipped me out.

A book that is overrated: Ken Goffman's Counterculture Through The Ages: From Abraham To Acid House finally explains to the world why Martin Luther King is Good and Fascism is Bad. The answer is Counterculture! Who knew?

What I wish had not been written: I don't have an answer for this one.

One book I am currently reading: The Guns Of August. The reading of which was inspired, I'm embarassed to say, by a Washington Post editorial. I am completely engrossed.

What I've been meaning to read: I've been meaning to finish both The Looming Tower and Night Draws Near. I've gotten halfway through both before stalling.

And now- propagation! I hereby transmit this meme to DKP, Michael and Jason.

After eight long months of work, I am mega-excited to announce the new Ashoka.org.

Man, days like today, I love my job.

Orgy In Rhythm has been posting full-length out-of-print Jazz/Latin LPs for months now. One of the latest is Sabu Martinez 'Afro Temple'. I previously knew this only from the Hotel Alyssa-Soussie, Tunisia track on DJ Food's Solid Steel mix, but the whole album turns out to be completely brilliant and fun and experimental.

At Rob's suggestion, Toneland watched Spike Lee's When The Leeves Broke on HBO earlier in the week. A stunning four hour weave of stories, images, emotions and music surrounding the Katrina disaster, and well worth watching on the anniversary.

If you want to check it out, BitTorrent has seeds and HBO is rerunning it often.

The doco included Kanye West and Wynton "Giant Bronze Statue" Marsalis, but not The Legendary K.O., perpetrators of the legendary George Bush Doesnt Like Black People. Today, Toneland sends a shout out to K.O. with a pair of favorite tracks from their 1997 Spontenaity EP:

• 7 MCs, Part II: There were a slew of Puffy diss tracks floating around back then, but this one was the best.
• Falling Behind II: An apropos flip of Bobby Hutcherson's Montara.

KO is on tour in Texas now, representing hiphop in turbulent times. Much respect!

Two new interesting-looking MIDI controllers are on the market: Korg's PadKontrol and Akai's MPD24. I'm googling these because I've been attempting to use a Midiman Oxygen8 for drum programming for the past four years and have come to strongly suspect that ultimately a keyboard is not a drumkit, and real virtuosity just requires something better laid-out.

Based solely on the publicity photos, the Akai has my speculative vote for pure no-frills versatility. Unfortunately, it's new enough that all I can find about it are press releases and hopeful conjecture-- no reviews yet from anyone who's actually used the thing. The worry of course is that it turns out to just be a rehash of Akai's apparently-laughably-poor MPD16.

Have any of you used the PadKontrol or MPD24 yet? Are they any good? Any other favored drumpad-style midi-controllers about there?

Diplo's recent show at Black Cat was a much-needed light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel for my depressed ruminations on vinyl's obsolescence; the man deftly demoed some ludicrously-powerful and heretofore-unconsidered possibilities opened by vinyl-free software-only DJing.

ONE being the speed-mixing, which — as Michael noticed — was just really well-done.

TWO being the audio/video synchronization, which was more tightly coordinated than I've seen a DJ pull off live before. Diplo gets help on this from System D128, who in turn gets help from his obvious magical powers.

Bonde Do Role's favela funk was of course the (marginally) lower-tech half of the show, and we of course loved it.

Apropo: /rupture has justed pointed us to Beat Diaspora, a new blog in which Wayne-alum G Scruggs promises to run around Brazil harassing local b-boys & intellectuals to figure out wtf is really actually up with Baile Funk. Yeah, that's right, it's not just a t-shirt — apparently someone has to actually make this music. Who knew?

Greg blogged some time ago about MySpace's spooky intellectual property clauses,

you hereby grant to MySpace.com, a non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce,

etc etc etc, scary stuff, right? Then Billy Bragg's Guitar Of Justice brought the issue to the MSM and now the terms have changed:

MySpace.com does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you post to the MySpace Services. Please do not hurt us! LOVE US LOVE US! Without this license, MySpace.com would be unable to digitally compress music files blah blah blah

Me, I'm much more worried about the part where it says they can arrest and jail you for using CSS to cover up their banner ads. (Which really isn't hard to do.) Enforced ugliness! I predict illegal-XHTML hacks on Murdoch-owned YASNs as the pointless "culture jamming" battleground of the new era...

Dev Seed gets things in gear! We're back again on July 26: