Lee, again, asks:

the glock comes in at like 1.5 seconds doesn’t it haha? … at 1:30 def some glock =D.

oh that. no i think thats some kind of bad electronic congo sound i pulled from some drum machine.

Eric asks:

Does listening to your songs grant me access to any musical “prestige classes”, or am i going to have to earn experience points by defeating Isaac Hayes with my +5 Vorpal Amplifier of Serious Smoothness first?

clever. i see what you did there, eric.

oh, d&d, how i miss you. my regular d&d group hasn’t played for around 6 months – one of the dudes went and had a baby and it RUINED EVERYTHING. no, that’s not true. i’m sure the birth was just a coincidence. still… a pox on you and your child.

my dungeons & dragons character is theo, he is a carmendine monk wandering the forgotten realms with his brothers. he comes from an order of monks known as the zealots of the written word, they combine kung fu knowledge with wizardry. technically, he is a conjurer. he carries a masterwork kama and has some messed up special abilities. like, four times a day, he can teleport 10 feet immediately in any direction. very handy in melee.

one of his favourite spells is glitterdust – one of the campest spells invented ever, theo rubs his fingers together and then his opponents are covered in glittery gold fairy dust, temporarily blinded. another of his favourite spells is belker claws – claws of smoke jut out from his hands and tear into a nearby enemy causing severe damage. i like to imagine him doing some kind of kung fu flourish at this point.

did i mention he bears a striking resemblance to an adult malcolm jamal-warner?

i’m a fuckin bad-ass

theo and his pals are currently poised on a cliffhanger – at the end of our last session we were about to have our asses handed to us by miscellaneous demons entering an evil church via recently opened gates of hell. should have seen it coming really.

if you want to play theo in your own campaigns – and trust me, you do – here is theo’s character sheet.

send your questions to asktim@iamfauxpas.com. i’ll quote your first name on the blog unless you request anonymity.

speaking of sexy. idol. i got into it this year. what fascinated me this year of all years? drunk astroboy? andrew g’s obvious battles with the wardrobe and hair departments – dude did his best to show how NOT to wear a suit as a man who isn’t stick thin like drunk astroboy. unbutton your jacket, dude, i kept screaming at the television. andrew g cuts a fine figure but spent most of the season looking like a barrel wearing a suit with an andrew g head stuck on top.

i was also bewitched by ricki-lee to some extent, i’m still not entirely sure why. strike that. i know exactly why.

did i ever tell you i wandered the streets of perth one night with a microphone and a cardboard andrew g mask? yeah that was ME interviewing you while we queued up to get into that bar

i didn’t really pledge allegiance anywhere during the show’s run but i think in the end my favourite was the husky melburnian foghorn leghorn.

i was as intrigued by his shocking resemblance to foghorn leghorn as i was disappointed by his failure to sing “campdown races” not even once during the course of the show.

for real. mark spano, your sex was on fire. buff dude from “the lost boys”, your sax is on fire. (thanks yerock)

Despite a fallow legal landscape, most defendants cannot afford attorneys and settle for a few thousand dollars rather than risk losing even more, Beckerman says. “There are still very few people fighting back as far as the litigation goes and they settle.”

“It costs more to hire a lawyer to defend these cases than take the settlement,” agrees Lory Lybeck, a Washington State attorney, who is leading a prospective class-action against the RIAA for engaging in what he says is “sham” litigation tactics. “That’s an important part of what’s going on. The recording industry is setting a price where they know you cannot hire lawyers. It’s a pretty well-designed system whereby people are not allowed any effective participation in one of the three prongs in the federal government.”

only one RIAA file sharing case has gone to court – that of minnesota mom jammie thomas who was last year ordered by a jury to pay over $200,000 for sharing 24 songs on her home computer. that verdict was overturned last month when the judge from the original case had second thoughts and declared a mistrial – so a court victory for the RIAA is still proving elusive despite having had 5 years to land a guilty verdict.

30,000 pirates settling out of court with the RIAA for a few thousand dollars each – that amounts to a sum of money but surely not even remotely enough $$ to cover the costs of their ongoing litigation campaign. never mind the fact that the money is not redistributed to the artists whose music is at the heart of the debate. the litigation was never about the money, but just about instilling more of that homespun fear into the already beleaguered hearts of americans:

The RIAA admits that the lawsuits are largely a public relations effort… Spokeswoman Cara Duckworth of the RIAA says the lawsuits have spawned a “general sense of awareness” that file sharing copyrighted music without authorization is “illegal.”

yeah, a “general sense of awareness” that if the RIAA decides on a whim to match your IP address to your kazaa profile, and you happen to have been sharing a couple of sade tracks and maybe something from lenny kravitz, you’ll be paying them a monthly stipend of $110 until february 2013.

the most surreal aspect of this – something absurd enough to make me think twice as to whether its some kind of piss-take – is that litigation targets can settle their lawsuit online at www.p2plawsuits.com:

This site will guide you through the settlement process for your case. You can pay the settlement by credit card, using either Mastercard, Visa or Discover. If you wish to pay the settlement by cashier’s check, you will need to telephone one of our settlement representatives.

In order to process your settlement, you will need to have your case identification number. That number appears above the salutation of the letter sent to you by the record companies.

is this for real? or are anti-RIAA crusaders subtly trying to undermine the litigators through the art of really lame web design?

here is the full wired article on the riaa’s 5-year litigation campaign.

He bought a coffee at Starbucks, where a young woman said something nice about “30 Rock.” “I do feel I’m entering that Clinton phase,” he said after we left. “I’m fifty. There are women who’ll go up to a young movie star and they’ll look at him, like, ‘There are certain things I really want to do with you, and it’s pretty plain to anyone why I’d want to do them with you.’ And then there are people who look at me now, at my age, and they’ll look at me and the look is ‘I can’t explain why, because it’s kind of strange . . .’ It confounds and perplexes even them. ‘In spite of the fact that you don’t look like a young leading man anymore, I’d quite like to throw you down on this blanket right now.’ A bit of that.”

…and a particularly succinct (if perhaps a little breathless) pro-Obama editorial. if you know any swing voters, send them to this link…

By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness.

i’m very excited that obama is going to be the president because he is going to fix climate change, terrorism, the economy and basically eliminate famine, injustice and evil. this will take about 2 weeks. then he will take us aboard the mothership and we will all transcend into the singularity.

something else that got my attention over the weekend: a new dvd documentary on arthur lee and love is coming out. hooray!

in the meantime, check this out if you are near a computer in the next 8 hours or so:

As part of Melbourne’s Digital Fringe, Netlag sees Audiovisual collectives Plug N Play and Share Outpost, both of whom run regular Melbourne events, combining forces for one night, and extending their experiments to the internet – connecting to performances from other cities, as well as the net-connected roving Mobile Projection Unit.

its a big live audiovisual mish-mash across 5 cities (melb, perth, brisbane, tokyo, NYC). if, like me, you can’t make it to Horze Bazaar in melbourne tonight (or the Tiger Tiger Bar in perth) to see it come together live, tune in to the live webcast at http://netlag.com.au. featuring jean poole (http://www.skynoise.net/) and thugquota (http://www.myspace.com/thugquota) from melbourne, and over in new york – peter kirn, who is the man behind the formidable create digital music and create digital motion

EDIT: its all over now…

Mon. 9/15/08 9:33pm
From: CJ

This is the best radio I’ve ever heard in my life.

three hours of rock band 2, live to air on wfmu in new york city, courtesy of trent and friends on sound and safe.

mp3 stream. trent’s rendition of pearl jam’s “alive” at approx 60:00 is a highlight.

over at whothehell.net, blink and you would have missed jerry’s post on the digital millenium copyright act or, more accurately, about his blog’s first-hand experience of a takedown notice from the RIAA – they were asked to take down a pnau remix. never mind that they were actually sent the file by pnau’s label:

My post is just one of the many examples how this law is being misused. It’s true that the mp3, being hosted with Dreamhost a US company, falls under US court of law jurisdiction. But hosting companies are so fearful of being sued by labels, movie studios and huge bands like Metallica and U2 that as soon as they received a takedown notice they restrict access to the disputed file without even doing background checks to the validity of the notices…

One of the sites has example of how to write a counter takedown notice, so I did a simple cut and paste, filled in the details and sent it back not to Dreamhost but to antipiracy@riaa.com, letting them know that they are in no position to serve this notice in the first place because they don’t even represent the copyright owner of the song. And then I waited, to see if I’m going to be sued for blogging an mp3 I was given permission to. A few days passed, and then I received an email forward from Dreamhost, the RIAA has rescinded their notice and the file has been put back up online. It is now available again. whothehell.net 1, RIAA 0.

full article.

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in the comment boxes for the above post you’ll find dj donna summer – aka jason forrest – weighing in with gusto… this is a great opportunity for me to, first, point you towards the birthday party berlin blog being healthily maintained and furnished with pop-core type stuff by forrest and his homies over in berlin, and second, clue you in on the fact that he’s recently made all the songs on his myspace profile available for download. that includes 3 tracks from what is close to my favourite album of all time “shamelessly exciting.” go over there and do some downloading – i know you’ll do the right thing and buy the album eventually from sonig, cos of its undeniable brilliance.

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i generally only use the street press to wipe my ass with (sorry dudes, for the vitriol and for the visual!) but there’s a great interview with cool hunter sia in this week’s inpress if you are around melbourne town. i love anthony carew’s (rrr broadcaster and international pop evangelist) subtle technique – which often takes the form of a kind of sly character assassination that you don’t catch the first 2 or 3 times you read the article:

The New York-based 32-year-old was born in Adelaide, raised in a new-age, beyond-Bohemian household that seems to have ingrained in her, from the very start, the need to be self-consciously kooky. A conversation with Furler feels like an interaction with someone who’s been told, from when they were very young, how ‘crazy’ they are; like you’re privy to a kind of performance. You’re warned to expect anything, but all you end up with are quirks, smirks, and mid-interview trips to the toilet.

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finally, tv on the radio do something that i can relate to:

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and finally finally – and i fear this is going to become more regular, at least until the novelty of me mentioning it wears off (for me) – but despite evidence to the contrary i won’t be appearing with Never tRuSt Hippie at the wall of the death concert in, um, мурманск russia this coming saturday night. but just remember, as i always say… Значит твоё место в СТЕНЕ СМЕРТИ!!!

most immediately obvious would be that this blog has had a long overdue makeover – behind the scenes, an upgrade to wordpress 2.6.2 WHAT A NERD and a new theme courtesy of some warhammer gaming dude (seems fitting). but also various other places round the net getting a spit and shine and its making me wonder about how cool (or uncool) it is to be spread so keenly across the informatic superhighway.

i mean, this is something i genuinely, straight up, enjoy doing, updating or maintaining my web presence. providing a little internet playground for the faux pas fans i imagine in my dream-fantasy-land to wander around in. communicating with people who have an interest in the music i make is something i enjoy almost as much as making the music, and the internet facilitates 99% of that, for me anyway.

its a funny thing. i think there is definitely a thing with indie music, where to be inaccessible is quite fashionable, quite cool. its one thing to be a myspace featured band, but its WAY cooler if you don’t even have a myspace profile. shit, you mean you don’t even have a gmail account? you don’t even know what gmail is? woah, so cool! i suppose with this medium its so easy to over-promote yourself, even when you have the best of intentions; put everyone on the back foot about what you are doing by emailing them too often, spamming them with myspace fliers, hounding them on facebook et cetera. it makes sense that people who remain distant from the internet are in many ways taking the safer route in terms of not alienating dudes.

its cool to be ‘mysterious’ but its uncool to let too much yourself out there. people lost their shit about burial, for example, and it always bugged me that so much of a fuss was made about the fact that no one knew who he was. staying behind the curtain like the wizard of oz is so much more fashionable i guess than putting yourself out there.

i suppose more generally this relates to the idea that, particularly with some forms of music, it makes sense to try and abstract it as much as possible. not just taking it easy on the internet presence, but more than that – give your songs names that mean nothing so that people can attach their own meanings to them; make your album cover just a splatch of blue lines and a red dot; give yourself a non-committal band name or whatever. perhaps this train of thought applies to instrumental music the most – once you put words in the mix, you are (unless you are ranting a sort of inane drivel in your lyrics, heaven knows how rare that is) committing yourself to meaning… something… but its the same reason why songwriters whinge about explaining their lyrics to people, they don’t really want to commit to something because they don’t want to take anything away from the listener. whether you say thats because they genuinely value the listener’s experience of subjectivity that highly, or because they just don’t want to alienate potential customers, that depends on how cynical you are.

listening to music is so much about escapism, and people like to embue music with their own dreams and feelings. finding out too much about the person behind the music – and learning, perhaps, that they might be the kind of person or personality that might grate with you in the ‘real world’ – even something as simple as “oh what? you mean, this guy doesn’t even use capital letters when he blogs? what a douchebag” – can sometimes really taint that escapist experience of letting music carry you away. like when i realised daedelus dresses up like he’s going to a bad fancy dress party in every press shot (its ok, i got over it). its like meeting that hot dude at the party, and making out with him, and next day finding out he’s a family first voter. you don’t look at him the same after that.

when you make music largely without words, you really are leaving it open for people to attach their own emotional or intellectual or whatever type of symbolism to your music – sometimes i wonder whether blogging (in so much that me posting youtube clips of robert palmer and whinging about negative ratatat reviews constitutes ‘blogging’) might taint the experience of my music for some people.

ahh this is simply more thinly veiled narcissism here from me i guess, but yeah, i’m a web coder and a social networker myself, so i quite like wandering around myspace, facebook, youtube, changing the colors of things, redrafting bits of copy, all the general maintenance. i’d like to think its not just pure ego, but primarily to do with wanting my music to get heard, and also providing a little faux pas sandbox for people to play in, alongside whatever they might get out of the music. but sometimes i catch myself thinking “would faux pas seem ‘cooler’ if i just shut it all down and left an empty black page where everything else was?”

in related news, here is jens lekman’s myspace profile.

“i love you faux pas”
 

there has also been a few sneaky updates elsewhere… in the meantime, time trumpet catches up with an increasingly odd tom cruise:

watch the entire first series of time trumpet here. lasair will throw you a chocolate jesus. lastly, in case i don’t get a chance to mention it before it happens – melbourne beat-dude AOI joins me on 3rrr on tuesday night for a live on-air performance, and also what promises to be a good chat about stuff like for example his recent mixtape (feat. a capellas from ghostface, mf doom, beastie boys et al over his bubbly proto-wonky productions – downloadable at http://datarook.net/aoi/).

and lastly, if you call my phone and lionel richie answers, don’t be alarmed. as confucious once said “if level two calls melbourne independent musician, but lionel richie answers phone, somewhere an angel dies”

like, for example, did you know that aside from “faux pas”, the most popular google search term that led people here in 2006 was “daniel vettori.” here is daniel vettori, he is appealing:

very appealing.

looking at my web stats is also how i found out that in 6 weeks there have been 40,000 downloads of a moody blues edit i posted in july. whoops. sorry moodies – i never intended to become some major kind of hub for moodies piracy but it looks like i temporarily did (i just removed the track). funny thing is i can’t figure out where any of that traffic has come from, but thats another matter. suffice to say, if you’re here reading this because you came here to download that moody blues track, dude, get in touch and tell me how you got here.

the main thing i wanted to do here, however, (aside from reiterating my attraction to daniel vettori) was reflect briefly on the number of downloads of faux pas tracks since this site started almost 3 years ago. giving music away as mp3s, its something i’ve always wanted to do and something that i support. you often hear debate about the merit of it but you don’t often see the stats. anyway, i was pretty surprised when i did some quick sums, and i wouldn’t say that its changed my opinion on giving stuff away for free… but its food for thought.

MEGA DOWNLOAD CHART (aka faux pas narcissism index #274) November 2005 – August 2008:

For the Trees – 20679 downloads
White Light – 10166 downloads
Tim as a Brim – 8532 downloads
Hermann’s Hermans – 8429 downloads
Barry – 6203 downloads

TOTAL – 54009 downloads

now lets take into account the fact that there is a fairly high percentage of false downloads – from googlebots and other automated spiders corrupting the data, and also people who maybe get half way through downloading a song and then think better of it (understandable) – lets be conservative and say that 50% of the downloads are false. thats still about 25,000 songs i’ve given away for free in close to 3 years. its about 25 a day. if each of those songs had been a paid download, lets say 50c each, i’d have about $12,500. not necessarily enough to quit my day job and move to the bahamas with robert palmer (weekend at bernies style, of course) but… that’d be more than enough for someone like me (someone who isn’t necessarily beholden to exorbatant studio hire costs, giant promotion budgets, or extravagant coke habits) to make another record or two.

but thats not how it works any more and we all know it. the idea that you could sell a song to someone was invented by record labels when they figured out a way to mechanically reproduce (and mass produce) sound – technology invented the idea that recordings had economic value and now technology is turning it around. the framework that underpinned this whole idea of reproducing and selling recordings is an industrial one (one of factories, machines, plastic and vinyl) and its being completely undermined by the internet like so many other outdated mechanical ideas. one day we’ll all be giving it all away for free – and most artists of a certain profile already are giving it all away for free, whether they want to or not, as most of you freeloading mp3-aggregator-loving torrent-seeding hippies are more than aware. selling music, whether it be on shiny discs or in ones and zeroes, is a 20th century idea thats simply taking a long time to die.

i, for one, look forward to the time when i can give all of my music away completely for free to anyone who wants it, and thats exactly what i’ll do if i can figure out another way (patronage, licensing, bank robbery, selling fake watches on ebay) to sustain the little cottage industry that is faux pas. in the meantime, did i mention i sell t-shirts?