Harry’s Place Arts

I had the very great pleasure of sitting front and center at the Open Fist Theater in Los Angeles for the Saturday evening performance of Frank Zappa’s Joe’s Garage .
In my opinion Joe’s Garage represents the very best of everything Frank Zappa created through a career marked by densely packed, sometimes inaccessible avant-garde compositions that [...]

If you watch the video at this BBC story about Guitar Hero, you’ll hear Jason ‘Jay’ James, from Bullet for My Valentine, say:
You get involved playing the notes.
Let’s make this clear, You get involved in “playing” the notes in Guitar Hero in the same way you get involved with fine art by doing painting by [...]

The photo above is of an extremely rare James Brown record. The record is rare not because it flopped – believe it or not hit records, mass produced in their millions, are not as rare or as valuable as ‘misses’ – but because the government of the country in which it was pressed, destroyed every [...]

Well, my new Q Magazine has just dropped through the door. I see the fidgety editors have overseen yet another re-design. It now looks like counterfeit Wired. I can’t keep up with the redesigns and reformats of what was once an iconic magazine. But that’s not what I want to post about today. It’s the [...]

Leaving aside the ghastly garish website and the rather annoying claim that this is all about “embracing social networking” rather than promoting Universal’s forthcoming Motown 50 album, deciding what your favourite Motown songs are is a great opportunity for pub-conversation-style musical discussion.
For the record, I’ve chosen purely on the basis of the ones I always [...]

The Times reports that a new format - ultimately to replace CD - will be launched in the USA next month and the UK towards the end of the year.
A sliver of plastic the size of a postage stamp, the Sandisk slotMusic format will sontain an album in MP3 format (without, apparently, copyright protection or [...]

Honestly, I can see the attraction of blogging to newspapers who appear to have lost sight of what News with a capital ‘N’ means, and the latest buzz around so-called “citizen journalism” must be quite threatening (though it shouldn’t be), but seriously people, this is a new low for journalism. For editors - not always [...]

“Every politician is a failed rock star,” says Culture Secretary Andy Burnham MP, in a rather interesting feature article in the current (October 2008) edition of Q Magazine.
The article is about a cross-party group of MPs - calling themselves MP4 - who have a band. They are:

Ian Cawsey- Bass & Vocals - Labour MP for [...]

The feisty little Cyberhome DVD player in the bedroom finally gave up the ghost - or at least the remote control (without which it is virtually useless) did so it was time to go out and get another budget player, particularly one that can play all sorts of file formats like Divx and Mpeg, and [...]

I don’t approve of downloading music you haven’t paid for. I wouldn’t say I’m a fundamentalist about this because I can imagine some scenarios in which it is excusable or even legitimate to do so, but in general I think it is fair to say that the copyright holder has a right to defend their [...]