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Music: New Goats, Winters, Black, YouTube anti-stars

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Several of my favorites have new albums out:

  • Leading the pack, the Mountain Goats’ latest, Get Lonely, lives up to its title via a series of hushed, introspective tracks that create a landscape of desolation. Through headphones, these songs — many delivered in a fragile falsetto that might be echoing over a Martian moraine — feel almost unbearably intimate. This album has none of the rollicking word-party spirit that propelled its triptych of predecessors — Tallahassee, We Shall All Be Healed and The Sunset Tree — and as such it is far less immediately winning. (For a hit of the more uptempo Goats spirit, there’s “Babylon Springs,” a superb five-song EP the Goats released last winter.) But it’s powerful and memorable. John Darnielle (whose writing and singing leads the band of two) plainly had no interest in repeating any kind of formula, so instead of trying to build on the considerable success of Sunset Tree, he’s decided to take us down a dark road in winter. It’s a bleakly moving trip.

    At an in-store show last week at Amoeba in the Haight, down the street from my old Cole Valley home, Darnielle talked about his difficulties writing this new batch of songs, which started out as a song-cycle about monsters before evolving inward. He elaborates in this L.A. Times piece about the making of the new album:

    There had been something in the personal responses of audiences and correspondents that made a total return to older styles seem dishonest. These songs did not feel dishonest. They came from some sad and frightened place, and felt like natural heirs to their predecessors…

    Writing with these priorities in mind is a new thing for me because I used to put all my focus on just telling a good story and trust any issues of tone to resolve themselves. New priorities replacing old ones is the constant process of writing for me; maybe this time next year I’ll want to write about imaginary kingdoms under the Earth instead of flesh-and-blood people walking desperately across its surface.

  • Then there is the new disc from The Long Winters, Putting the Days to Bed — a more consistently, rockingly upbeat set of songs than its wonderfully motley predecessor, When I Pretend to Fall. Warmly, tunefully distorted guitar clothes the bones of John Roderick’s opaquely bitter songs; this time out, though, the pop spring overpowers the resentment, and even when he’s snarling out the “Positively Fourth Street”-esque put-downs of “Rich Wife,” he sounds like he’s having a blast:

now tell me is your high horse
getting a little hard to ride?
And your little bit on the side
getting harder to find?

When you get restless at night
but it’s too late to start
and there’s nothing left to eat in this house
but your heart

I’m thoroughly enjoying Putting the Days to Bed, even though it’s less musically adventurous than both When I Pretend and the wonderful Ultimatum EP.

  • The prolific Frank Black is back with more Nashville recordings. I wasn’t in love with Black’s first Nashville batch, last year’s Honeycomb; it’s not that I don’t like Black turning to country — it’s just that Honeycomb sounded a bit listless, and Black’s singing was strangely restrained, in some places entirely numbed-out. On the new double-CD, Fast Man/Raider Man, Black sounds more engaged again, and the whole set has more crackle. (Rolling Stone talks to Black here.) It’s a lot of music, and I can’t say I’ve yet found any of it as immediately great as the long run of Frank Black and the Catholics albums. But I’ll give it time.

This process of influence, imitation and inspiration may bedevil the those who despair at the future of copyright but is heartening to connoisseurs of classical music. Peter Robles, a composer who also manages classical musicians, points out that the process of online dissemination — players watching one another’s videos, recording their own — multiplies the channels by which musical innovation has always circulated. Baroque music, after all, was meant to be performed and enjoyed in private rooms, at close range, where others could observe the musicians’ technique. “That’s how people learned how to play Bach,” Mr. Robles said. “The music wasn’t written down. You just picked it up from other musicians.”

…That educational imperative is a big part of the “Canon Rock” phenomenon. When guitarists upload their renditions, they often ask that viewers be blunt: What are they doing wrong? How can they improve? When I asked Mr. Lim the reason he didn’t show his face on his video, he wrote, “Main purpose of my recording is to hear the other’s suggestions about my playing.” He added, “I think play is more significant than appearance. Therefore I want the others to focus on my fingering and sound. Furthermore I know I’m not that handsome.”

And if you’re tired of Pachelbel, there’s always this amazing “While My Ukulele Gently Weeps” (courtesy Gary Wolf).

Links: Games, open systems, premature Democratic obituary

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  • Greg Costikyan’s Manifesto Games is now live. It’s offering a catalogue of independently produced and distributed downloadable computer games, curated by smart people who clearly love playing them and writing about them and sharing their pleasure.
  • James Boyle writes in the Financial Times that human beings seem to be inherently biased against open systems: “We still do not intuitively grasp the kind of property that cannot be exhausted by overuse (think of a piece of software) and that can become more valuable to us the more it is used by others (think of a communications standard).”
  • Amusing to stumble on a bit of dated GOP triumphalism — “The Democratic Party is Toast,” Grover Norquist in the Washington Monthly, Sept. 04: “Without effective control of the government, the Democratic Party is like a fish out of water…” Only the fish seems to have survived — even evolved a bit — and in November, it’s increasingly looking like a lot of Republicans in Congress will be left gill-less and gasping.

[tags]gaming, open source, democratic party[/tags]

Job titles for the new millennium

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Each wave of Web development brings with it a new crop of confounding job titles. Consider the Vertical Keyword Analyst, which appears to have something to do with picking keywords that will be valuable on Google in certain market segments that the media business refers to as “verticals.”

Is the vertical keyword analyst someone versed in the lore of vertical keywords but unfamilar with, or utterly bored by, horizontal keywords? Or are we talking about a keyword analyst who happens to work standing up? Can a vertical keyword analyst still live up to the job title after the fifth margarita? Or is this in fact a shrink who uses a novel variation on the old Rorschach technique, asking patients to fill in the DOWN rows of a crossword and then studying their revealing choices?

Most useful hardware tool no one tells you about

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Today I sing the praises of my IDE to USB adapter kit, a generic bit of hardware that makes life easier and cheaper for those of us in the PC world that have accumulated spare bits of hardware over the years.

IDE to USB kit This little tool allows you to take any IDE device (mostly hard drives and optical CD/DVD drives) designed for internal use in a PC and run it externally. It’s just a power supply with the right sort of four-pins-in-a-line connector for internal drives, and a cable with a standard IDE connector on one end and a USB connector on the other. Presto! That old hard drive you’ve still got lying around from your generic PC that died four years ago can now be used for backup or moving files or whatever you need. You don’t have to pay the considerable premium for an external hard drive.

This thing came to my rescue this week in another way: I use an ultralight Thinkpad laptop without a CD drive. Every now and then I use an external drive to load software. My drive is an old one; it plugs in via a PCMCIA card. Somehow, the card is now missing. The drive is useless. How do I load software? Ahh: just pop out an old internal CD drive from a dead computer and use the IDE to USB kit. Problem solved.

These things start at about $15. (Here’s some from NewEgg.) You can spend more if you also want an enclosure or you want something that will work with newer SATA hard drives. For long term use, an enclosure probably makes sense. But if you do occasional backups on loose hard drives, and you’re reasonably careful about static and handling, then the kit is all you need.

There are some gadgets you hear about because someone stands to make a big profit. This is one that, I think, you may not have heard about because, really, it just cuts into somebody’s profits.
[tags]tips, lifehacks, hardware, adapters, howto[/tags]

Bush as Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog

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Billmon reminds us of Isaiah Berlin’s ever-useful concept, drawn from Archilochus, of the hedgehog and the fox — “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” — and applies it witheringly to the twilight of the Bush era:

At this point, I would say Shrub is acting like a hedgehog on hallucinogens. His one big integrative idea — exporting American-style “democracy” to Iraq at the point of a gun — has proven fatally, disastrously wrong, but he can’t let go of it, because it’s the only idea he’s got. He’s fully vested in it, like a ’90s e-trader who decided to throw caution to the wind, empty his retirement account and bet it all on pets.com.

I think if Shrub were ever forced to let go of his vision, his one big idea, it would not only crush his fragile ego, it would leave him completely incapable of making any sense at all out of his presidency, out of America’s role in the Middle East, out of the universe.

So now he’s imitating the hedgehog as literally as any human being can — he’s rolled himself up into a defensive ball, spines out. He has nothing useful to say and absolutely no strategy beyond hunkering down and passively defying reality. Which leaves the generals and the troops no choice but to hunker down with him.

The next two and a half years are going to be very long ones.

Long and painful.

The scourge of Net video: letting no pol hide from his words

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Today I caught up with a very peculiar Times Week in Review piece by Ryan Lizza that perhaps was meant as a covert satire of some kind. How else to explain the thesis of “The YouTube Election” — that the rise of populist Web video might harm the Republic, because more voters will get the chance to see their elected representatives in unguarded moments?

I’m not making this up. Lizza, and the consultant pundits he quotes, seems to think that the problem with George Allen’s “macaca” incident wasn’t that a sitting U.S. senator used a racist epithet on the public stump but rather that technology has empowered the public to witness such revealing incidents.

If campaigns resemble reality television, where any moment of a candidate’s life can be captured on film and posted on the Web, will the last shreds of authenticity be stripped from our public officials? Will candidates be pushed further into a scripted bubble? In short, will YouTube democratize politics, or destroy it?…

Letting voters see and hear what candidates say will strip them of their last shreds of authenticity! We must fight for their right to keep their off-color remarks under wraps! Note that Lizza is suddenly talking about “any moment of a candidate’s life” being exposed — but all the examples he cites from the campaigns of Allen and Joe Lieberman are of public statements in public forums.

“Politicians can’t experiment with messages,” Mr. Dowd said. “They can’t get voter response. Seventy or 80 years ago, a politician could go give a speech in Des Moines and road-test some ideas and then refine it and then test it again in Milwaukee.”

Horrors — now politicians will have a harder time saying different things to different constituencies! They might have to be (gasp) consistent!

Wait, this is the kicker:

Howard Wolfson, a senior adviser to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is not known for her spontaneity, agrees. “It is a continuation of a trend in which politicians have to assume they are on live TV all the time,” Mr. Wolfson said. “You can’t get away with making an offensive or dumb remark and assume it won’t get out.”

All right, it’s time to pack up and emigrate. What good is American democracy if politicians can’t get away with making an offensive or dumb remark? Isn’t there some sort of Bill of Rights codicil granting them that right? If there isn’t, can’t President Bush add one via a signing statement?
[tags]george allen, youtube, new york times[/tags]

Links: DoD PowerPoint, interface combat, David Kaiser

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  • I did not know that the historian David Kaiser, who taught at Harvard when I was a student, has a blog, and a good one, indeed. Most recently he puts Judge Anita Taylor’s recent decision against Bush’s domestic wiretapping program (full text of the ruling) in context:

    I was inspired by her opinion and am distressed that a variety of legal scholars, including some opposing the program, have claimed that it lacked legal sophistication. Certainly it did not focus primarily on recent precedents, although it cited some of them, nor did it, in accepted legal fashion, attempt to decide the question on the narrowest possible grounds. Instead, Judge Taylor reached back to the origin of the Republic and to the text and essential philosophy of the Constitution to point out that a President, once again, was taking advantage of an emergency to disregard both…. to those legal professionals who found fault with Judge Taylor’s opinion, I can only reply that it is clear enough to be understood by any intelligent high school student, much less a grown citizen — and that, like the finest opinions of Justice Black, it relies above all on the simple tactic of arguing that the Constitution means what it says.

    [via Brad DeLong]

[tags]flash, powerpoint, rumsfeld, wiretapping[/tags]

Kiko’s calendar auction and the old “incremental change” song

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Kiko is an Ajax-style Web-based calendar service. (It’s also the title of a fantastic album by Los Lobos.) Kiko’s developers, only a few months after unveiling it, have put it up for sale on Ebay for $50,000. So far, despite wide linkage, no takers.

Robert Scoble says this presages a Web 2.0 shakeout: “There are simply too many companies chasing too few users…. Getting the cool kids to try your technology isn’t the same thing as having a long-term business proposition.”

Could be. With Google’s new calendar gobbling up mindshare in an already crowded space (haven’t you heard that “Google is the New Microsoft“?), Kiko didn’t seem to have much chance.

The problem is that, unlike photo-sharing or video-staring or link-listing or news-rating, activities that have provided grist for successful Web 2.0 mills, calendaring doesn’t easily lend itself to large-scale social interaction and wisdom-of-crowds behavior. Calendars are either personal or apply to small, well-defined workgroups or personal circles. The piece of calendaring that’s most amenable to wide Web networking — the listing and sharing of information about public events — is already being pursued by several ambitious companies (Eventful, Zvents, etc.).

But even if calendars aren’t going to fuel the next Web 2.0 wunder-company, we still need them. The future for calendar software, as Scott Mace keeps reminding us, is more about interoperability than about snazzy Ajax features. Making sophisticated calendar-sharing work, and multi-authoring possible, and import-export painless — these are the things that will matter in this category (as the folks working on Chandler whose work I followed for Dreaming in Code understand so well).

Meanwhile, Justin Kan, a Kiko founder, lists his own set of lessons from the experience. They include the following: “Build incrementally. We tried to build the ultimate AJAX calendar all at once. It took a long time. We could have done it piece by piece. Nuff said.”

But it’s not nuff said, it’s never said ’nuff, it needs to be said over and over until you’re blue in the face and all your coworkers hate you and think you’re a monomaniac who has gotten this word “incremental” implanted in his neurons like some sort of development-process idee fixe. It is an important but counter-intuitive insight. It’s not how businesspeople want things to be. It’s not how developers are used to thinking. So if you actually understand that an incremental process for building an ambitious program or Web site is the best approach, you will have to be insufferable about it.

My friend Josh Kornbluth (who recently recounted some ancient tales from our collaboration 20 years ago on a low-rent radio drama show in the Boston area) once wrote a song titled “Incremental Change.” It was a cappella, it lasted all of 25 seconds and its entire lyric consisted of the following:

I think incremental change is a good thing
I think incremental change is a good thing
Incremental change: good thing!

Software development was almost certainly not on his mind at the time of writing. But the sentiment holds across a surprisingly broad range of fields.

POSTSCRIPT: Paul Graham, whose Y Combinator funded Kiko, says the company spent so little money the failure’s no big deal: “This is not an expensive, acrimonious flameout like used to happen during the Bubble. They tried hard; they made something good; they just happened to get hit by a stray bullet.”
[tags]web 2.0, calendars, software development[/tags]

David Brooks: Muslims’ “search for meaning” means we’re doomed

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New York Times columnist David Brooks often produces fuzzily incoherent and self-contradictory commentary, but his piece this past Sunday (Times Select firewall there, sorry) deserves special note: It takes a bizarre last-paragraph leap from fatuity into boneheaded fatalism, and it suggests that Brooks needs either a tough editor, a long vacation, or both.

Most of the piece represents Brooks’ familiar argument about culture: culture shapes people, and cultures take a long time to change. Apparently this is stop-press news in Brooks’ circle. After an uncharacteristic foray into an idea that conservatives usually consider hogwash relativism — “All cultures have value because they provide coherence” — Brooks finally gets to his point. He cites the work of Lawrence E. Harrison to note that “cultural change can’t be imposed from the outside….cultural change is measured in centuries, not decades… cultures are separated from one another by veils of complexity and difference.”

Might’ve been worth knowing all this before we invaded Iraq. But never mind. This is simply a “duh” moment; the “huh?” comes next:

If Harrison is right, it is no wonder that young Muslim men in Britain might decide to renounce freedom and prosperity for midair martyrdom. They are driven by a deep cultural need for meaning. But it is also foolish to think we can address the root causes of their toxic desires. We’ll just have to fight the symptoms of a disease we can neither cure nor understand.

There are probably too many layers of lunacy here to grasp in one pass. I think Brooks is saying: Muslims are “driven by a deep cultural need for meaning,” and that need for meaning cannot be changed very quickly — we can’t turn them into non-meaning-seekers without centuries of effort! Which would be fine, except apparently their “need for meaning” is also the “root cause” of their “toxic desire” to blow up airplanes. Since we can’t change them, we must — what? “Fight them” as a sympton of a “disease we can neither cure nor understand”? That sounds pretty hopeless.

Brooks here is shooting himself so far into the stratosphere beyond earthly events and social cause-and-effect that I think his brain has shut down from oxygen lack. Absent from his picture is the possibility that the would-be midair-martyr Muslims, however criminal their intent, might actually be motivated by real-world factors that lie somewhat within our control — like the occupation of Iraq, or the festering of the Palestinian problem, or the indefinite detention and occasional torture of prisoners in American custody. No, the problem is so huge and intractable that we don’t need to bother thinking about the messes on the ground that we’ve helped make; all we can do is “fight the symptoms.”

It is worth pointing out that this analysis is not only detached from reality; it represents a sort of despair. It assumes there is nothing Americans can do to stem the tide of would-be terrorists and make our nation safer. That might require hard, slow work (like the painstaking labors of British intelligence in identifying the bomb plot), whereas Brooks, and the Bush supporters he is channeling, are much happier to cast themselves in a titanic global fight between good and evil — even if the good guys are, as Brooks would have it, likely to lose.

At a moment when Republicans are tossing around labels like “Defeatocrats” to denigrate anyone who dares to suggest we not throw more lives down the Iraqi rabbit-hole, this sort of reasoning is the real defeatism. Why does it appeal to Brooks? One hesitates to stride too far into the thickets of his unreason, but perhaps the “we can’t change them, only fight them” rationale is a way of excusing the manifold failures of Bush’s war-on-terror policy: To Brooks, it’s not that Bush picked the wrong strategic framework and tactics, it’s simply that the foe is too strong.
[tags]David Brooks, war on terror, new york times[/tags]

Firefox leak plugged — open browser tabs spared

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Opera is my primary browser, but I increasingly use Firefox because some Ajax-y sites work better in it, and because sometimes (for testing and such) you need multiple browsers. Anyway, my Firefox, I found, kept getting awfully slow, and sometimes would seem to put a drag on my system. That didn’t make sense.

It turned out not to be the fault of the browser itself but instead of a memory leak in a plug-in called Session Saver that I’d installed so I could shut down and restart Firefox with the same set of open browser tabs. Thanks to the invaluable Lifehacker I discovered that (a) Session Saver was the culprit, and (b) I could replace it with a different plugin called Tab Mix Plus that offered more options and no memory leak.

Of course, Opera is the original session-saving champion. Since Opera stabilized this feature several years ago I have never lost my open tab set to a program crash or system freeze. And I’m afraid my work habits involve some pretty serious open tabbing. At the moment, for instance, I’ve got seven separate Opera windows with a total of 79 open tabs. The open tabs represent my “to read” queue, my “maybe I’ll blog about this” pile, and sometimes just my “gee, forgot to close that search” residue. In other words, the current browser session is my work, in progress. Losing it is not an option. Thankfully, I never need to think about that any more.
[tags]browsers, opera, firefox, open tabs[/tags]