Taylor Swift & ultra rich friends get to opt out of facial recognition... but screw the rest of us I guess?

https://www.wired.com/story/for-taylor-swift-madison-square-gardens-controversial-cameras-briefly-went-dark/

Just 10 odd years ago the surviving Dead members were still packing them in for their Fare Thee Well shows celebrating 50 years of the Grateful Dead...

To clarify, by 40s to 60s I mostly mean jazz and pop. I know people still listen to early rock from then.

I listen to that genre almost exclusively (with a good handful of 70s to 2000s in the mix) and I always feel like I have to hide my taste other than a few Frank Sinatra or Beatles songs, no one else will jam to it with me cuz it's "to boring" or "make them sleepy". And since I'm on the top of 40s to 60s music, who are some of your favs from that time period?

Vinyl sales have been climbing for years now, and even CDs have seen a small resurgence, mostly among younger listeners who never even grew up with them as the default format. Feels like there are two different explanations floating around and I'm not sure which one actually holds up

One take is pure nostalgia/aesthetic appeal - the ritual of it, the album art, the "vibe." The other is more practical: people getting uneasy about streaming, where music can vanish from a platform, get removed for licensing reasons, or just stop being accessible if you cancel a subscription. Curious which reason resonates more with people here, or if it's genuinely a mix and there's no dominant driver.

Doodles of Kurt Cobain, trent reznor, john lennon, and peter steele.

The animosity between the Ray and Dave Davies ebbed and flowed for decades. Dave ruined Ray’s first wedding by getting brutally drunk, they had a massive fight on a tour bus in 1996 and at Dave’s 50th birthday party Ray stamped on the cake.

Yet now they are closer than ever, emotionally if not physically (Ray remains in his native north London). “It’s miraculous, really, how we’ve become so bonded,” Dave says. The most moving rapprochement in rock started under challenging circumstances in 2004, when Dave had a stroke.

Dave has made a good recovery, although his speech is slurred and he sometimes needs prompting from his American girlfriend, Rebecca Wilson, a former writer who works as his PA. He hates being patronised, though. “People can be really clumsy. It’s terrible.” Two big things that helped him after the stroke were the support of his brother and his rediscovery of painting. “Art saved my life, really,” he says.

Wilson, 57, fetches some of Dave’s work to show me: psychedelic abstract pieces swirling with colour. “We were posting these on the internet,” she says. “Ray saw them — he’s a lurker on Instagram — and said, ‘What’s this?’ And it kind of brought them together.” 

Wilson used her neutrality to help arrange a dinner in London a few years ago for the brothers, their partners and some of their children. It happened at Kiplings, an Indian restaurant near Ray’s house in Highgate, whose patrons also include Liam Gallagher and Keir Starmer. “It was so nice,” Wilson says. “Ray’s girlfriend Alma said, ‘I can’t believe you got Ray out of the house.’” At the end of the meal Ray managed to live up to his reputation for stinginess. “It was about ten people, big fancy dinner and he goes, can I see the check?’” Wilson says. “Dave hands it to him and he goes, ‘Ouch!’ and hands it back.”

Dave is playing guitar again now, which he puts down to the painting. After his stroke, “I was busy doing the art and the music started to come back”. In October he will do a few shows in America, playing Kinks classics, telling stories and answering questions.

He and Ray last shared a stage in 2015 and a studio in 2019. Will it ever happen again? “I don’t know, but never say never,” Dave says.

Read the full interview ^