Flosstradamus- Portland, Oregon from Austin Will on Vimeo.

Flosstradamus video shot by the fine young men of StudioNemo.

Nicole Atkins and the Sea came to town last night and Briana and Justin Lowe held a gathering so that we could eat and drink and hang out prior to their show. Melanie from Tender Forever showed up too.

As CNet reports today, Hollywood and YouTube may be edging towards their own version of Pax Romana. Meanwhile, beyond the learned walls of the law courts and Google’s battle with Viacom, we here at Social Cache have been scratching our heads over Viacom’s position.

Obviously Viacom is up in arms over what it argues is copyright infringement whenever one of its artists’ songs are used in a user-generated video. Their lawyers are even arguing that in most cases they want to set aside the notion of fair use. That in itself is ridiculous as in a lot of circumstances Viacom has stepped over the edge of copyright boundaries. In 2007 Viacom sent YouTube 100,000 takedown notices! And as this video from the EFF points out, many of those videos that Viacom had asked YouTube to remove, were not infringing anyone’s copyright.

Click image to watch

We ourselves received a takedown notice and had a video removed from YouTube. The video was of one of our numerous snowboarding expeditions to Mt Hood and it included a clip of a song by the group White Zombie. Click here to read the rest of this post.

Just in case you think that we are too serious here at the Moose, blathering on about music and the end of the world etc…our friends across the hall, Nemo, ensure that we have a daily quotient of fun and games. Here you will see one of Nemo’s owners, Jeff Bartel, with a home made blow gun forcing Steve Hoskins to literally take a dart in his ass. [Insert crude joke/comment here.] Steve was last seen filing a grievance over at our Human Resources dept. Meanwhile my business partner Ned and I are wondering whether we should be in business with these mad men….See all the Nemo madness here.

Chanteuse Nicole Atkins, along with her compatriots known as The Sea, play tonight at Portland’s Doug Fir and thanks to Justin and Briana Bononcini Lowe we will be gathering at their home to eat and make merry with Nicole before the show. We need to do more of this kind of thing - the last one was at my house for a Cut Copy pre-show dinner. So any of you touring bands out there need a pre-show dinner just holler and we’ll see what we can do. And any Portland folks who want to offer up their homes for a bash like this holler too. Let’s call it social networking in the “real” world…

I just got word that Portland band, The Prids, rolled their van while on tour. This is bad news. The picture above is from the scene. Apparently Prids singer/guitarist David Frederickson was on a stretcher and appeared to be the most seriously injured. The Portland Mercury has the full story. There are updates at the Prids site and a Paypal account for donations.

Mr Jarman is on the right….

Casey is obviously too humble to post the news himself but the chatter around town here in Portland is that he has been promoted to Music Editor at Portland’s biggest alt-weekly newspaper the Willamette Week. Luciana Lopez over at the Oregonian broke the news first. [I would link to Luciana's story but I can't find it in the epic tangle that is OregonLive.com] I emailed Casey yesterday and he confirmed his ascension to the ranks of long, sleepless nights writing about bands and music, hanging around in clubs and generally being harangued for not covering enough of the Portland neu-Metal scene…I forgot to ask if he’s still going to run the LocalCut blog too.
Anyway Casey, congrats and I’ll buy you a beer next week in Pendleton at Rock Camp as we try and teach those kids about the Rock!

Nilina Mason-Campbell posts:

At ten to seven, more than half the band had yet to arrive at the vacant lot on Belmont designated for the Starfucker Lost Gospel guerilla gig. At seven pm there were twenty or so people milling about on the sidewalk and green tile. So what did it look like at 7:30? 200 people surrounding Starfucker with a couple of people watching from their apartment windows. Safe to say the second installment in the Lost Gospel concert series was a success! While Starfucker couldn’t quite fit in the plastic kiddie pool that sat in the corner of the lot, two thirds of the trio did adorn goggles in homage to the pool party theme. The band ran through a 40-ish minute set that included the first ever live performances of “Florida” and MTV-gracing “Pop Song.”

After a quick heads-up that they had seven inches for sale, the gig was over, magic still in the air. Don’t even ask me to guess-timate how many cameras and phones caught the action as it happened, but regardless there was definitely a vibe that the magical feeling would live on - documentation or not. A man (presumably from the Thai restaurant next door) soon appeared to inform all us revelers that the police had been called, but they never arrived. However, that semi-irate tip-off seemed to dissipate a good portion of the crowd. Still, many hung around to chat over a soundtrack of Ratatat remixes, which was an occurrence definitely in tune with the community building goals of Lost Gospel. Not until 9:45 was the lot - now decorated with intricate chalk designs - vacant once again.