Bidoun becomes an unlikely home for great contemporary music writing
A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.
The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.
Soundboard's moving -- update your bookmarks
These guys are moving drums to the National Stadium to prepare for the opening ceremony for the Beijing 2008 Olympics Games. Soundboard says piffle to that. We are involved in a much more glorious export: transferring more than a thousand blog posts to our new home on TypePad. Behold our new spiffy design! Our Digg buttons! Our category cloud to the right and so forth! It'll take us a few days to iron out some kinks (yes, we know some posts are missing) but in the meantime, please update your bookmarks and let us know what you think, but only in a nice way because our back hurts from all this heavy lifting.
We are now at: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/soundboard
Those who get us by RSS Feed, use this: http://feeds.latimes.com/Soundboard
--Margaret Wappler
Photo of drums on the go by Deigo Azubel / EPA
