Last year, the music industry reported its highest sales since 1999, driven by digital sales. But even with numbers growing and digital platforms surfacing, live music remains a battlefield when it comes to innovation, especially with live streaming. Bands are spending more time on the road to promote their music, but these efforts remain almost exclusively terrestrial. Most live performances that make it online are shaky and gritty, bootleg shots that show up as YouTube clips. » Read More

ANJELAH JOHNSON would almost always show up late to Bachrodt Elementary School in San Jose even though her house sat literally about 100 feet away. Blame it on Live With Regis and Kelly, which started at 9am, just 15 minutes before the first bell. The second bell would send her shuffling across to school, reluctant to take an early bow from family ritual and the hypnotic pull of her favorite talk-show personalities. » Read More

Tim Slater spent the better part of his career inventing micromachines, like retinal implants that give sight to the blind and thermal switches to control satellite temperatures. The Silicon Valley engineer claims 27 patents, some of which garnered major media attention. But when the dotcom bust in 2003 left him unemployed, he actually welcomed the reprieve. » Read More

All we want is an answer. One way or the other. We'll be fine. But just make a decision already. That bitter beer face you make when one of us asks—you know, the one that looks like an old catcher's mitt wearing a toupee—no longer flies. We've been patient, but now we want an answer from you, the man who leached the sanctity out of our national pastime; a commissioner who sat silent and collected nine figures in salary while team owners made millions and the steroid era rendered all of baseball's records irrelevant. » Read More

When Shane Smith, one of the founders of Vice Media, pitched a television show to MTV in 2010, it seemed unimaginable that the company that came out of Vice magazine could establish itself as a respected informational source about, well, anything (other than how to decorate your heroin stash). And yet the network bit, and The Vice Guide to Everything ran for eight episodes, balancing ridiculous segments against heavier fare. » Read More

While much attention has been focused on admitted gambling addict George Shirakawa Jr.'s flamboyant excesses, questions remain about who knew of, enabled and failed to stop his criminal activity. Interviews and newly uncovered documents show that decisions made by the county's top finance officials were key to facilitating and covering up Shirakawa's misdeeds. » Read More

Take one of the world's greatest concentrations of wealth and brainpower, add in a few hundred ethnic traditions, mix well, bake in 300 days of sunshine a year and you're bound to get something interesting. With some of the country's highest incomes—second only to the nation's capital, thanks to recession-proof Beltway lawyers' salaries-Silicon Valley has bragging rights to great fortunes. » Read More

The one and only time I met Allen Ginsberg, I wasted the moment talking about the 1991 movie of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch. Ginsberg started the conversation, though, by asking me what I thought of David Cronenberg's work. I replied that I thought it was expurgated. Ginsberg responded in about these many words: "The movie didn't ruin the book. The book's still on the shelf. Next customer!" » Read More

On the one hand, some proud moms may be watching their sons on the big screen this Thursday (Feb. 7), when the locally shot Shoot the Moon plays at Camera 12 for one night only. On the other hand, how are these moms going to be able to look? "My mom doesn't watch my films," says 26-year-old Bay Area director Chris Taylor. A former skater who got injured one too many times, Taylor went to film school at CSU Fullerton. He returned to make Shoot the Moon as a project for local clothing brand Breezy Excursion. » Read More

The second week in October of 1901 brought sweltering Indian summer days to the Santa Clara Valley. Forest fires throughout Central California cast a smoky haze over the region as the final push of the valley's annual fruit harvest was well underway. Nationally, the country was still mourning the shocking assassination of President William McKinley and coming to terms with the unanticipated ascension of his young vice-president, Theodore Roosevelt, to the highest office in the land. » Read More

At first, I feel surrounded by wedding rings. They seem to spin in front and on both sides of me, these countless numbers of interlocking ring patterns stitched into quilts. Double wedding ring quilts, it turns out, figure highly in the first room of "Milestones: Textiles of Transition," a new show at the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles that explores themes of birth, marriage and death. » Read More

Nolan Bushnell and ZERO1 are putting the "rad" back in radical. So much so that Bushnell has now written a user's guide for conventional Silicon Valley managers hopelessly trying to operate in a rigid and hierarchical structure without creativity. Published via NetMinds, a service empowering authors to publish smarter by building invested, quality teams around their books, Finding the Next Steve Jobs is a glorious, unapologetic paean to creativity and eccentricity in the workplace. » Read More

Just in time for Free Comic Book Day, one of San Jose's legendary underground bastions of zonked-out jazz, Tiki culture and graphic-novel insanity shall revive itself anew on Race Street, just off The Alameda. The circus begins this Saturday afternoon. For a decade or more, Slave Labor Graphics (SLG) and its own Siamese Twin (a la Basket Case), Art Boutiki, operated on Market Street near Metro's offices. » Read More

Puerto Rican composer Desmar Guevara will not give away any ritualistic processes instilled in him by the St. Cecile Lodge #568 of Free and Accepted Masons. Instead, listeners at the MACLA performances (with pianist Nelson Ojeda) will have to study the score or listen to the music for clues. Masonic codes are indeed embedded in Grados Inefables (Ineffable Degrees), Guevara's new 50-minute chamber work for piano and string quartet. The title references specific degrees of the Masonic path. » Read More

San Jose State University professor Cathleen Miller spent 10 years crisscrossing the globe to write Champion of Choice, her 500-page biography of women's advocate Nafis Sadik, and lived to tell about it. In fact, "crisscrossing" doesn't even do Miller justice. Her path more resembled a 3D model of string art, navigating impoverished slum after slum, from the Third World to the First, and back again—all to chronicle Sadik's career as one of the 20th century's most powerful and tireless warriors for women's rights. » Read More