"The young people downloading music with Kazaa are mostly just mixing their own CDs. Not interested in "Men in Black II"? Netflix will mail you a Dolby DVD version of Bergman's "Wild Strawberries." Silentera.com will direct you to the newly restored 65-piece orchestra version of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" (1927). A satellite radio subscription, offering every imaginable musical genre, lets you bypass the unlistenable hypermass music on nearly every radio station. Thanks to technology, you can now assemble and live on your own cultural island, far from the hypermass din. They don't want us, we don't need them. Perfect. "

A good editorial by Daniel Henninger on OpinionJournal.  The same tools that are increasingly being exploited by cross-market media giants can be used to build your own media world.

"Despite the massive resources of these companies, the underlying cross-platform idea, dependent as it seems to be on bread and circuses, may prove to be another unsustainable dot-com mirage, at least on the scale its purveyors envision. More pertinent, the same digital wonders that Jean-Marie Messier thought would deliver movie trailers to cell phones looks like it's going to allow people to drop out of the whole hypermass culture. "

I took a few days off from blogging.  Saw Robert Walter's 20th Congress twice, once up at the Fox in Boulder, and once down at the new 32 Bleu in Colorado Springs.  Both shows were great, but the 32 Bleu show was pretty empty (it being a Sunday night and all) so we could get right up to the stage and it felt almost like they were playing just for us.  Don't miss the Congress if they come through your town, since with Will Bernard sitting in, they have a whole new sound that challenges some of the criticism they've received for just rehashing the same old stuff.