Apple hearts Duncan and vice versa
Oh, Apple. We Three Sheiks all heart you a real lot, especially now. Great Apple.com profile of Duncan and Spring Awakening as part of their Pro Profiles feature. Duncan sold me on Macs about seven years ago, after nearly a decade spent on Windoze, and I’ve never looked back. And these days Kacie is making music on Macs, too.
So, Bill Gates, I am not mad at you, dude, even though it appears you did get up on the wrong side of the Zune this morning, but Steve Jobs gets us the goods we need for make benefit glorious musicals of Broadway.
February 4th, 2007 at 7:29 am
Are you as excited about the iPhone as I am?
February 5th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
i heart this blog post. great links.
you may become mad at Gates due to his conflicting investments:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-na-gatesx07jan07,1,5699306.story
and i heart the Jobs picture. reminds me of when i would visit my brother while he was going to berkeley and i would play on his mac. i remember that graphic of the woman and, oh yeah, there was that mac character on “Bloom County.” not that i want to go back to the 80’s.
February 6th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
noripink:
thanks for the link. it’s a great point, and I’m going to go totally off topic for a minute in order to address it, so if anyone wants to follow suit, feel free.
Nice. Reading things like this reinforces my longstanding suspicion towards elite altruism. I don’t want to generalize, and I’m quite sure Bill and Melinda Gates mean extraordinarily well, but within our global economic system, it’s far too easy for seemingly well-meaning, extraordinarily affluent individuals to have their positive and life affirming deeds nullified by the standards and practices of corporate entities that are responsible for these individuals having amassed inordinate wealth in the first place.
In Bill Gate’s case, that relationship goes even deeper, since not only does he chair Microsoft (which, as this piece states, has a pretty good track record in terms of corporate responsibility, anti-trust allegations notwithstanding), but he’s also responsible for the investing arm[s] of his Foundation, which he instructs to, for the most part, disregard social responsibility in favor of higher returns when deciding which companies they invest the Foundation’s money in. Naturally, the result is billions of dollars in dividends thanks to some pretty unsavory characters like BP, Shell and Dow Chemical.
Consider an equation in which one writes a grant in the service of social responsibility yet pays for that grant by investing in companies that are socially irresponsible. If the net value of that equation is a negative number (in this case, if it results in the socially irresponsible entity accruing more wealth than the value of the grant), can that be considered an investment in anything besides ego?
It’s the double-edged sword of capitalism: human beings’ natural instinct towards mutual aid and support is undercut by corporate interests’ dogged deference to profit margins.
I’m tempted to say investing in socially responsible companies is the answer (i.e., the Ford Foundation; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; the Rockefeller Foundation; and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation) but while I think it’s a step in the right direction, I also think it’s a band-aid that doesn’t address the underlying issue.
Anyone who just read this whole thing can thank noripink for getting me on a tangent. Thanks, noripink. Sorry, everyone else.
February 6th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
umm, you’re welcome or i’m sorry. whatever applies to you.
i like tangents. . . as long as the recess bell isn’t about to ring and the third-graders and i haven’t finished our discussion of metaphors. but i’m changing topics again.
February 7th, 2007 at 11:41 am
Congrats Duncan. Looks really good. I’m still wondering though how you get your arrangements done in Logic. I’ve been using it for a while now to record my music and still I find it a PITA to work with. Better than anything else out there, but a pain nonetheless. In any case the profile on Apple is pretty nice to have.
February 9th, 2007 at 4:58 am
Apple products are overpriced and underpowered IMHO. Anyways, onto more important matters…. Duncan!… start touring again! I need a live DS music fix!
February 10th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Zach Braff encourages people to see SPRING AWAKENING here:
http://blog.myspace.com/zachbraff
February 15th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
oh, joy! tour dates! it’s been, like, half a year. . .
February 27th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
This is very off-topic, but I thought it might be interesting:
Some of you may remember that Duncan lent his voice to a track called “Vicarious Bliss” a few years back. I’m not sure what the situation was that gave rise to Duncan singing on that record (maybe you could tell us the story, Duncan), but I remember that it had some of the silliest lyrics I’d ever heard sung over a kinda pop-techno beat. It had lines like, “They say that the grass is greener on the other side, but maybe it’s the sheep who’ve been telling me lies.” and “Your shoes look so good, they’re almost part of your clothes.”
Anyway, so that is not any new information. What _is_ new information to me is that this track has received a number of interesting remixes that are available on the DJ music site, Beatport. As something of a bedroom DJ who’s always on the lookout for new tracks, I was surfing around Beatport and stumbled upon these remixes. Some of them are by really, really respected names in the dance music world, like Dave Clarke, Lifelike and Justice.
If you want to check it out for yourself, head over to www.beatport.com and do an artist search for “Vicarious Bliss.” The official title of the track is “Theme from Vicarious Bliss.” It’s kinda strange hearing what some of the remixers did to the original song as well to Duncan’s voice.
Did you even know about this Duncan? Thanks!
May 9th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
See you tomorrow Night Duncan.
I’m sure you will be Shining. :)
Best,
BW
XO
August 13th, 2007 at 8:55 pm
Stasis that is nuts about VB. Cool mixes, though. I like D’s original.
So Duncan, I see that all Kacie’s press say she’s from Brick. (I live in Point and grew up in Brick.) But not any I’ve seen of yours. Did you spend any time down here?