I would like everyone to welcome Curt Smith to imeem!

http://www.imeem.com/curtsmith

For those of you who don't know, Curt Smith is the co-founder of one of my all-time favorite bands Tears for Fears (my CT friends can remember me spinning the hell out of my copy of The Hurting on vinyl for The Art of Parties in New Haven).

In addition to TFF, Curt also created Mayfield, has 2 solo albums out AND writes music for TV, film and theater. You can check out his full bio here on his official website.

Please drop in and say hello to Curt, and make sure to check out his new album halfway, pleased.

I am so angry I didn't hear about this earlier;

ATP New York 2008
Fri 19 Sep – Sun 21 Sep




All Tomorrow’s Parties Launches ‘ATP New York’
September 19-21
My Bloody Valentine Set To Play First US Show in 16 Years
Three-Day Festival Announces First 15 Acts

UK-based All Tomorrow’s Parties (ATP) is pleased to announce ATP New York, its first east coast festival set for September 19th to 21st at Kutshers Country Club in Monticello, NY. (http://www.kutshers.com)

The Three Day Festival curated by both My Bloody Valentine and ATP, will be headlined by My Bloody Valentine in their first US appearance in 16-years and include performances by:

My Bloody Valentine - 1st show in 16 years in US
Built to Spill performing Perfect From Now On
Meat Puppets performing Meat Puppets II
Thurston Moore performing Psychic Hearts
Tortoise performing Millions Now Living Will Never Die
Shellac
Mogwai
Polvo
Fuck Buttons
Autolux
The Drones
Low
Wooden Shjips
Edan with guest Dagha
Dinosaur Jr.
A Silver Mt. Zion
Yo La Tengo
Mercury Rev
Harmonia
The Drones
Growing
Wooden Shjips
Lilys
OM
Le Volume Courbe
Apse

The three-day boutique festival will have less than 3000 people attending. Performances start in the mid-afternoon, with around 30 acts set to play live across the weekend along with DJ sets until late night. There is dining, bars and other onsite amenities, such as, an indoor swimming pool, tennis, and golf.

The first batch of three day festival passes are on sale Friday April 25th @ 10AM EST at http://www.atpfestival.com with and without accommodation. More tickets will be on-sale shortly after with accommodations in a nearby hotel. Shuttle buses will run between the second hotel and Kutshers.

Limited accommodations are available on-site in motel-like rooms that sleep 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 people. Accommodations are sold by the room in 3 day blocks only (Friday, Saturday, Sunday.) You are permitted to have any number up to the maximum occupancy in the room. For example, if you wish to purchase a 4 person occupancy room, you are permitted to have 1 – 4 people sharing the room during the event, and the price is the same for the room, regardless of how many people stay. Each person will still need a festival pass.

Accommodation only comes as a three-day package, you cannot buy just a single night. Check-in is from 11am on Friday September 19th and check out is 10am sharp on Monday September 22nd.

Room configuration with price information is available at our website - www.atpfestival.com. Please note that these are all extremely limited.

All rates subject to state and local tax. Rate for less than maximum occupancy is same.

You should work out ahead of time how many people you wish to buy tickets for and share accommodations with, then decide who is going to be the ticket buyer. You will be asked first how many festival passes you wish to buy. These cost $225 each and will gain you entrance into the three day festival including all performances, plus applicable booking fee.

You will then be asked whether you wish to purchase accommodations. If you choose yes, you will be asked which room you wish to purchase and how many people you intend on having sleep in it.

Please note that the person whose credit card is used to purchase the tickets will be required to be present at the site to collect the tickets in an effort to prevent scalping. If the person whose credit card is used cannot be present, a photocopy of the front and back of their card along with the email confirmation letter they received when purchasing the tickets will be required.

More acts and information will be announced shortly.

http://www.atpfestival.com/

Josh Homme (Queens of the Stoneage) throws a fit at a member of the crowd who throws something at his ginger head;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfZm32tpWY8

It sure did piss Perez Hilton off ...

imeem was named one of the 50 Best Websites of 2008 by Time magazine!!!

But what really sets it apart from other online music sellers, like Pandora, Last FM and Slacker, is that Imeem is the first streaming-music site to secure song rights from all four major music labels (which are rumored to have a stake in Imeem).

Requesting a particular song on Pandora, say, is always a crapshoot, but on Imeem you can immediately start listening to most any title you type in. That kind of instant gratification is what the Web is all about — and what has long been missing from other free sites.
—Anita Hamilton

Elbow played a free show last Friday at the Virgin Megastore in Union Square:

Check out my head blocking the shot - lol.

And Saturday at Webster Hall;



More live shots to come!

This weekend, slashfilm.com posted a story on how Uwe Boll, the “filmmaker” responsible for some of the worst video game movies in recent history, promised to stop making films if one million people signed a petition against him. At the time we posted the story, the petition only had 16,000 signatures. I’m happy to report that our posting was picked up by websites across the interwebs, and the petition now has over 127,000 signatures! So we’re one eighth of the way there.

Uwe Boll is starting to feel the pressure and has released a video statement demanding that his fans start a pro-Boll petition, which he expects a million signatures to counter the Stop Uwe Boll petition.

“Look, I’m not a F**king retard like Michael Bay or other people running around in the business… or Eli Roth making the same shitty movies over and over again. If you really look in my movies you will see my real genius,” Boll said in a video statement. “You have to really wake up and see me what I am, the only genius in the whole f**king business.”

I kid you not, he actually said that. You can watch for yourself in the video below. Sometimes I wonder if Boll is actually this ignorant, or if he’s doing an act for his critics.

Also worth noting, Eli Roth responded to Boll’s negative comment against him, calling it the “greatest compliment ever.”

If you haven’t already, sign the petition to Stop Uwe Boll at this link. Watch the video here;

Check out this post on BMZ about a man who actually had his nose amputated;

http://www.bmezine.com/news/pubring/20080401.html

I think I just lost major Goth cred for this but - weee!

http://music.msn.com/artist/?artist=16074457&menu=videos

Looks like the Today show's got the right stuff: All five original New Kids on the Block members – Joey McIntyre, Donnie Wahlberg, Danny Wood and brothers Jordan and Jonathan Knight – will appear together in the morning show's courtyard on April 4, a source tells PEOPLE.

After months of speculation, PEOPLE confirmed in January that the band is reuniting – just in time to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of their mega-hit album Hangin' Tough. The group also recently updated its Web site, nkotb.com.

The boy band, which made legions of tweens swoon in the early '90s, selling more than 50 million albums, became a worldwide phenomenon before calling it quits in 1994. Since then, the oldest "Kid," Jonathan Knight, 39, retreated back to Boston to become a real estate developer. Former members Wahlberg, 38, and McIntyre, 35, have seen acting success, while Wood, 38, has worked as a music producer and Jordan Knight, 37, has continued to record.

Twenty years after Never Gonna Give You Up, Rick Astley became an internet phenomenon - and an unlikely weapon against Scientology

It was more than twenty years ago that Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up first topped the charts. "Never gonna say goodbye," he crooned in his surprisingly basso voice - and who knew how right he was.

Today we're in a different century, a different millennium, a very different era than the one that first offered up twerpy, earnest, high-waistbanded Astley. But his song, and its video in particular, have found new life in the time of YouTube. Never Gonna Give You Up is at the centre of one of the internet's hottest memes - and if you haven't already fallen victim, it's only a matter of time.

It's called the "rick-roll". You're innocently browsing an apparently useful website and see a link to something else that might be of interest, but when you click through to that destination you instead find yourself confronted with Astley's boyish smile, his manly croon, his awkward 1987 dance-moves.

The link was a fake, a trap, a dummy with the nefarious purpose of... bringing you face-to-face with the ridiculous.

As with so many stupid internet fads, the rick-roll trend had its start at 4chan, a message-board whose lunatic, juvenile community is at once brilliant, ridiculous and alarming. 4chan users had taken to "duck-rolling" each other - tricking one-another into viewing a video of a, er, duck with wheels. In the spring of 2007 some enterprising prodigy branched off from this into the rick-roll. And the rest is history.

The internet began to swarm with rick-rollers - from Slashdot to the World of Warcraft, and certainly to Wikipedia. At YouTube, one posting of the video has had more than seven million views since last May; you can be assured that few of these were intentional. There are online databases of fake rick-roll URLs, and countless jokers have created sham web-browser plugins purporting to block rick-rolls while instead sending visitors to you-know-what.

Of late, however, rick-rolling has begun to permeate the mainstream. It comes mostly courtesy of Anonymous, a diffuse group of hackers and activists who have declared war on the Church of Scientology in an initiative called Project Chanology. Organised without official leaders or hierarchy, Project Chanology manifests itself in Denial Of Service attacks against Scientologist websites, stupid YouTube videos, and in-person protests at Scientologist centres worldwide.

At recent protests in New York, Washington, London and Seattle, masked protesters held up boomboxes and chanted the Stock Aitken Waterman lyrics which Astley made famous. "Never gonna let you down!" they roared, in a live rick-rolling of the Church of Scientology.

Their cleverest move however is at AnonymousExposed.org, a website created this week that perfectly mimics the subtly different Anonymous-Exposed.org, created by Scientologists as an indictment of Anonymous' "cyber-crimes". Of course instead of showing an anti-Anonymous documentary, the mimic site displays - well, we'll let you have a guess.

http://www.YouGotRickRolled.com

Samantha Ramirez, Sal Cicconi and Sergio Ocasio have formed Brooklyn Ghost Investigations.
Not surprisingly, they are fans of the 1984 film 'Ghostbusters.'

It's Ghostbusters, Brooklyn-style.

A team of self-made paranormalists is offering to come over to your house in the middle of the night to chase away any unwanted spirits.

"I'm fascinated with the supernatural," says Sal Cicconi, 27.

Cicconi, along with Sergio Ocasio, 20, and Samantha Ramirez, 18, have plastered Brooklyn offering their services for just $20 an hour.

Their business plan is a bit unorthodox, but then again, so are they.

"When I was a kid, I had this ability, this gift," Cicconi said in an interview in the trio's East New York apartment. "When I was 10 years old, I started to see things - spirits and ghosts."

The three, who call themselves Brooklyn Ghost Investigations, are otherwise unemployed.

Their only client is a Red Hook man who said he had two ghosts in his apartment.

Cicconi and Ocasio went to the man's apartment and waited until 3 a.m. - the witching hour for paranormal activity - to see if they could talk to the ghosts.

"I caught something on camera," Cicconi said.

"It looked like two lights moving around, like the spirits were playing with each other."

"We tried to get them out of there," he said.

The two used a homemade Ouija board to try to coax the ghosts into talking to them - with no luck.

"Sometimes, spirits are afraid to talk or to show themselves to us," he said.

Not surprisingly, the three are big fans of the 1984 classic "Ghostbusters."

Having no formal training, they also watch Sci Fi Channel's "Ghost Hunters" and A&E's "Paranormal State" for tips.

They say business has been a bit slow - but maybe that's not such a bad thing.

sgaskell@nydailynews.com