The Books of Bokonon

That's the question keeping Jimmy Kimmel up at night : “I don’t know if there will be any late-night television shows on network TV in ten years. Maybe there’ll be one but there won’t be a lot of them,” he said on the Politickin’ podcast. “There’s a lot to watch and now people can watch anything at anytime, they’ve got all these streaming services. It used to be Johnny Carson was the only thing on at 11:30pm and so everybody watched and then David Letterman was on after Johnny so people watched those two shows but now they’re so many options. Maybe more significantly, the fact that people are easily able to watch your monologue online the next day, it really cancels out the need to watch it when it’s on the air and once people stop watching it when it’s on the air, networks are going to stop paying for it to be made.”  I doubt Jimmy Kimmel will have much to worry about the Monday after his last late night broadcast, whenever that happens (hopefully not for a long time). But he is ...

A couple of years ago, I was playing a lot of late-1970s and early-1980s synth pop videos, which I've loved since I was probably still a preteen. I was also listening to a lot of minimal wave (also sometimes called minimal synth) on YouTube as well. We all know how YouTube's algorithms work, so it was no surprise that I'd get suggestions for videos from different artists in the same basic genre. If I'm going to be obsessed with minimal wave, why not get a bit more obsessed? A video by a band I'd never heard of before, Poeme Electronique, had apparently cut a video of their one released single, The Echoes Fade . It's a haunting track that I continue to enjoy. It was apparently released in 1982, and it does sound like a synth pop song of the period. The lyrics have some depth to them, and the production and musical craftsmanship is outstanding, especially given what was likely a very limited budget. The video is also definitely a period piece, and clearly shot on ...