THE NEXT BIG THING?
Television viewers might have the impression that Channel 4 is promoting the frankly antisocial habit of sticking earphones into random strangers’ heads. But no, its ads are all about the new music arm of its website that is designed to help you to discover new artists.

It is jam-packed with features, news, gossip, blogs and music videos and an online diary. Every leading media operation wants to discover new talent, and Channel 4 is no different. Its “My Music Section” implores musicians to upload their material and set up pages stating why they are the greatest thing since the electric guitar. Yep, sounds a bit like Myspace, but nevertheless it is a smooth and impressive operation.
www.channel4.com/music

OUTDOOR ART
In the UK, it seems, if you leave a bronze sculpture outside, it’ll be gone before you can say “scrap metal”. Surprisingly, in New Jersey, home of The Sopranos, things are decidedly more civilised. Here, the 73-year-old artist

J. Seward Johnson Jr has started up the Grounds for Sculpture, a 35-acre outdoor museum dotted with 200 pieces, including the Impressionist masterpiece- inspired Beyond the Frame series, which recreates Manet’s Déjeuner Sur l’Herbe in glorious 3-D. Johnson’s flashy personal website tells you all about this kitsch and oddly fascinating project with pictures (see below) and information galore, and shows off his other hyper-realist bronze painted sculptures.
www.sewardjohnson.com www.groundsforsculpture.org

PODCAST OF THE WEEK
Back in the mid-1990s, Murray Lachlan Young was given £1 million to make poetry vital, interesting and popular again. Sadly, he failed — and poetry remained in a state of apparent rigor mortis. However, podcasts are a brilliant vehicle for reinvention and have married perfectly with the spoken word, thanks to immediacy, cheapness and no lack of worthy material. One shining example is the US’s weekly Cloudy Day Art podcast, which recently clocked up its 50th show. It includes poems, poems with music, discussion, interviews and ruminative voxpops. It is a simple and obvious format, but done so brilliantly that it can only enthuse all who listen to it.
www.cloudydayart.com

BLOG OF THE WEEK
To be a music critic on The New Yorker you must ally knowledge of your Bruckners and Bruchs with a playful sense of humour and razor- sharp analytical skills. Alex Ross flashes all of these faculties on his blog and “book-in-progress”, The Rest is Noise. Thankfully, he is not oneof those critics who spends his downtime pumping out endless diatribes, butinstead writes posts that are short enough to grab the attention.

Funniest of all the entries, however, are his attempts to get to grips with the Pandora website, where “you enter the name of an artist or song, and it suggests more music in the same vein”. When he types in Mahler, it says: “We found several. Which Mahler did you mean? Madner by Underworld or Madder by Groove Armada. The composer Debussy fares no better: “Do you want Debussie by Daphne Loves Derby?”. “Not right now,” he writes.
www.therestisnoise.com