Jimmy Guterman’s post (also here) about the Gates/Jobs show at D is worth reading. I like his thinking out loud here:

They do have so much in common. When Gates said, “Neither of us have anything to complain about” and “We’re two of the luckiest guys on the planet,” and Jobs quoted The Beatles’ “Two Of Us” to express his affection for Gates, it didn’t seem like a put-on. Indeed, one can think of Gates and Jobs (as opposed to Gates and Allen, or Jobs and Wozniak) as the Lennon and McCartney of the PC era. They worked together for a long time and they fought for a long time, but the two of them experienced extremes that no one else in their business ever faced. For all their differences, they’re two of a kind, unlike anyone else anywhere.

Nicely put. But I think the Lennon/McCartney comparison goes too far, because, after all, these guys are and always have been primarily rivals, not collaborators, and they have done their best work apart, not together — which was not really the John-and-Paul story at all.

Perhaps — as someone else pointed out this week (can’t remember now where I read this!) — a Beatles/Stones comparison would be more apt? Elvis/Dylan? Clash/Sex Pistols?

Regular readers here know that I count Josh Kornbluth among my very oldest friends. (”Oldest” as in long-term, of course; Josh is only a month or so older than me. Why is English so balky around this?) I’m proud to say I knew Josh before he was “Josh the incredibly funny monologuist” and “Josh the guy who creates those monologues by improvising in front of live audiences” and “Josh the great interviewer on KQED.” I am one of a tiny group of people who is qualified to say, based on personal experience, that Josh is, beyond those things, also a really great copy editor. Or at least he was, way back when; who knows what the decades have done to his punctuation?

Last weekend I attended the opening of Kornbluth’s new show, “Citizen Josh,” at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. All Kornbluth’s work is autobiographical, but the new piece goes even further than its predecessors, “Love and Taxes” and “Ben Franklin Unplugged,” in making a visceral connection with public life and the political moment.

The theme is, how can a passive, inward-turning citizen find it in himself to become engaged? The tale includes, among many other things, a college thesis that is a quarter-century overdue; a prematurely born baby rescued by a father’s determination and insight; and a misshapen play structure in a Berkeley park that offers good cell-phone reception, lessons in modern art and a hidden history of radical democracy.

“Citizen Josh” has got all the stuff Kornbluth’s fans have come to expect from one of his performances: stories that loop and twist through what seem like hopelessly overextended digressions only to pull themselves together into beautiful perfect knots; veins of playful, offbeat humor running the length of the 80-minute performance, submerging for a few minutes, then popping back into the light; and a passion for trying to understand just what we are all doing together on this planet. The show is a great chance to see a great talent contending with a great issue. You should see it!

This seems to have been my “interview very smart people” month. A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to spend an hour talking with David Weinberger about his fascinating new book, Everything Is Miscellaneous. The full interview with Weinberger is now up at Salon.

I highly recommend the book: it’s a sophisticated, deep discussion of one of the issues that the Chandler developers in Dreaming in Code were grappling with, as they tried to break personal digital information out of application-based “silos” to create the sort of “miscellaneous soup” that Weinberger celebrates.

If I have any disagreement with Weinberger, it’s that I think he is so enthusiastic about the manifold opportunities digital organization presents — and so gifted at explaining them to us — that he is a little dismissive of the frictional drag created by practical implementation details. He makes a compelling theoretical case for “third order” systems that let us try out multiple organizational schemas. But in practice I think a lot of this stuff remains out of reach and will continue to do so for a long while. In my and I think many users’ experiences, the sheer difficulty of creating good software means that the digital realm remains far less responsive to our changing needs than is modeled in Everything is Miscellaneous. To paraphrase the great William Gibson line, the miscellaneous is here — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

Following the break, a relevant chunk of the interview which didn’t make the cut for Salon (pretty high geek quotient).
(more…)

• Tipped off by a positive NY Times review by Kelefa Sanneh, I got “The Body, the Blood, the Machine,” the new album by the Thermals, a Portland band, and it has been steadily knocking me out. Musically it’s relatively simple — flawlessly executed classic pop-punk in the Buzzcocks-to-Green Day tradition. Lyrically it appears to be a narrative song cycle. At first I thought its Biblically infused verses (full of Noah’s ark references and titles like “Pillar of Salt”) might be about a Heaven’s Gate-style cult, but I read on the band’s Web site that “the album tells the story of a young couple who must flee a United States governed by fascist faux-Christians,” which makes things a little clearer. It’s as if someone took American Idiot, subtracted the teen anomie and the Tommy-style riffs on celebrity, and injected it with a little bit of the acid from the Dead Kennedys’ “Holiday in Cambodia.” I’m finding it irresistible.
• I’m also enjoying the new Mother Hips release, Kiss the Crystal Flake. This Northern California band’s sound — straying over the years from jam-band to country rock to folk and now neo-psychedelia — has always hovered on the edge of derivative cliche only to be rescued by great vocal harmonies, smart lyrics and a devotion to the sheer sonic pleasure of a well-played guitar well recorded.
• We got a piano for my sons to learn on a while back, which means I can pursue my half-baked musical noodling on multiple instruments now. The other day I started playing the old Eno chestnut “St. Elmo’s Fire” — the kids love it! — and realized, in a flash, that its chord progression is almost identical to that of Elvis’s “Burning Love.” This is the sort of realization you are in an especially good position to experience if your piano-playing, like mine, consists of sounding out simple triads, because you are stripping the music down to its chordal essence (a nice way of saying that you make most of what you play sound the same).

Wired has a remarkable story this month — a cloak-and-dagger saga about the rescue of a handful of Americans from Tehran during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979-80. This group had slipped out of the U.S. embassy as it was overrun and taken refuge underground; a CIA operative rescued them by masquerading as a film producer and manufacturing new identities for the Americans as his crew.

The story is a great yarn in itself. But one little tidbit really stood out for me: the movie the producer was pretending to make was a film adaptation of a science fiction novel that was one of my absolute youthful favorites — Roger Zelazny’s 1968 Lord of Light.

The original book is set among human exiles from a lost earth — a spaceship crew stranded on a new home planet, where they have used technology to set themselves up as the gods of the Hindu pantheon. Ironically, given its use by the CIA during the chaos following Iran’s overthrow of the Shah, it’s a tale of revolution: the “gods” maintain a monopoly on the body-swapping technology that makes them immortal, keeping the masses in a backward state; the hero, Sam, is a populist who sparks a war against the oligarchy. (In the novel’s parallel world, Christianity is represented by the original ship’s chaplain, who has become the menacing leader of a zombie army. It was the ’60s, remember?)

Here you can see all sorts of information about the CIA/Lord of Light connection, including the screenplay, designs by comic-book-art legend Jack Kirby, and an article by the CIA agent who led the rescue mission.

I don’t know that Lord of Light would ever have made a great movie; then again, who’d have thought that The Lord of the Rings ever would, either?

Steven Levy’s book about the iPod, The Perfect Thing, describes a transcendent moment the author experiences: In a funk one day in post-9/11 New York, with his iPod in shuffle mode, Levy hears the glorious opening chimes of the Byrds’ version of “My Back Pages,” and he has a Perfect Moment.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always loved that song, and would rather not wait for shuffle mode to surface it from my thousands of other songs. I continue to hand-pick my music, relying on shuffle only occasionally for novelty or distraction.

Still, iPod-fueled transcendence remains available even to us control freaks. This morning, for instance, I relieved a BART commute’s tedium by listening to the splendid live recording a fan made of a memorable Mountain Goats show I attended last month. (It’s posted here at the Internet Archive.) The set begins pensively with “Wild Sage’s” ruminations, makes its way to the equally melancholy “Get Lonely,” and then bursts into “Quito” — a defiant anthem of aspiring redemption and half-glimpsed rebirth. The song reached its visionary climax at the precise instant my train emerged from the tunnel into the morning Bay Area sun. Perfection! A film-editing wizard couldn’t have better synced sound and vision. I beamed; it made my morning.

It’s been a quarter century since the Walkman’s advent introduced us to the notion of provisioning our daily wanderings with a soundtrack of our choice. The iPod kicks this dynamic into a higher gear. (Levy ponders this and much else in his book; I covered his talk in Berkeley here.)

I’d argue that those of us who are not as shuffle-happy as Levy can feel a bit of extra pride: By virtue of our active personal DJ-ing, we become, instead of passive observers of serendipitous moments, more like coauthors of our own pleasurable juxtapositions. But either way, we’re having fun, and that’s what really matters.

One of the more common criticisms of Dreaming in Code is that some people are disappointed the book ends without a clear resolution to the Chandler story (which was still unfolding at the beginning of 2006, as I wrapped up my work on the book, and is still unfolding today). So my ears perked up last week as I listened to NPR’s Weekend Edition and heard its film critic, Elvis Mitchell, defending the David Fincher movie Zodiac (which I haven’t seen and have no opinion about) from Scott Simon’s complaint that it lacked a satisfying wrap-up. Mitchell argued that the whole movie is an homage to the ’70s indie-film aesthetic and that a willingness to tell stories without providing a traditional ends-tying conclusion was a hallmark of that era’s directors.

Here’s the passage:

SIMON: The film doesn’t tie anything together with a pretty — or in this case, since you’re talking about a murder, an ugly — series of bows. I know it’s real life, I know there was no way of avoiding it; but I found tht dramatically unsatisfying — to go through this long movie, and not have that at the end.

MITCHELL: It’s so funny you say that, Scott, because that’s a ’70s movie ethic — they’d say, basically, you can’t say that things are tied up anymore, these aren’t John Wayne movies, these aren’t Jimmy Stewart movies, these aren’t Henry Fonda movies. The real act of creative bravery in Zodiac is to follow with that, and to say that this is what these movies were, these movies that influenced me as a filmmaker, and I’m going to use that here, in a case where people really want that kind of closure, and not give it to them.

I can’t claim that my choice to conclude Dreaming in Code the way I did was any sort of statement of allegiance to authors or auteurs past. More, it was just a belief that, in non-fiction, you’d better let the shape of the story be dictated by reality and not wishful thinking.

I’m reading the otherwise perfectly reasonable New York Times piece on the Viacom/Youtube lawsuit and I encounter this bizarre misrepresentation of recent history:

“In the early 1990s music companies let Web companies build business models on the back of their copyright,” said Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “I think the video industry is being more aggressive for the right reasons, to protect the future value of those assets.”

It’s hard to imagine how one could find more ways to be wrong on this topic.

First, there were no “Web companies” in the early 1990s; the first Web companies emerged in 1994-5 — and aside from some unusual efforts, like Michael Goldberg’s Addicted to Noise zine, there was not a lot of music happening on the Web. The MP3 revolution didn’t begin to roll until late 1997 or early 1998 (here is Andrew Leonard’s early report on the MP3 scene, which I edited).

More important, Mr. Nathanson has the history here precisely inverted. What happened in the Napster era was that music companies refused to allow Web companies to build business models on the back of their copyright. They decided that MP3s were all about piracy and they sued Napster out of existence. They refused to do deals with companies that wanted to distribute their music online, and in fact they failed to offer their music online in any way palatable to consumers until Steve Jobs whacked them on the side of the head — and even then they saddled his whole iTunes enterprise with a cumbersome “digital rights management” scheme that even he is now disowning.

The Viacom suit against YouTube does not represent a break with the way the music industry dealt with its rocky transition to the digital age; it is an instance of history repeating itself. The RIAA strategy of “sue your customers” may have succeeded in driving file-sharing underground, but it didn’t do anything to protect the profits of the music industry, which have been in a tailspin ever since. If the Viacom suit is an indication that the owners of TV shows and movies are going to pursue a similar strategy of I’d-rather-sue-than-deal, they may find themselves in a similar downward spiral.

Google has a pretty good case based on the 1996 Telecommunications Act safe harbor provision. If Viacom fails to win against its corporate opponent, will it start suing all the Jon Stewart fans (and, possibly, the show’s own staff) who are uploading clips to YouTube?

If the TV and film industries look carefully at the music industry’s story, they will see that their danger lies not in being too soft on copyright infringers but rather in missing the tidal wave of a platform shift.

I originally got hooked on the music of the Mountain Goats by listening to the first four tracks of the album “We Shall All Be Healed,” late one February night three years ago. The riffage of these low-tech rock songs reminded me of the Velvet Underground songs I grew up with, and formed memorable frames for the mysterious lyrics of John Darnielle — evocative, in songs like “Palmcorder Yajna” and “Letter From Belgium,” of sacred rituals, ancient science fiction plots, and David Lynch movies. (It was only later that I figured out that the whole album is a kind of memorial to doomed meth addicts Darnielle had hung with in his youth.)

As I made my way through the Goats’ voluminous back catalog I came to understand that these full-band song arrangements were the exception to Darnielle’s rule of recording mostly with an acoustic guitar, solo into a boombox mike — and touring, most of the time, as a duo, with bassist Peter Hughes.

All of which is by way of preface to a report from the last two evenings that I spent, enraptured, at the Independent (the venue I knew formerly as the Kennel Club), watching the Mountain Goats metamorphose into a rocking band. Yes, friends, the Mountain Goats are now a power trio, with a drummer joining Hughes and Darnielle and the latter trading in his acoustic for a natural-wood Telecaster after the first few songs of the set.

How did it sound? Wonderful. The last time Darnielle swung through San Francisco he gave a subdued show at the Bottom of the Hill; beset, apparently, by the flu, his set leaned heavily on the hushed falsetto of so many of the tunes on his most recent album, “Get Lonely.” (His voice was so shot he essentially turned over the vocal chores on “No Children” to the sing-along crowd — an event preserved in MP3 and celebrated in the blogosphere as an instance of band/audience bonding.) This week, those songs remained part of his set, but they have assumed their rightful place as the slow songs, serving as mood- and pace-changers rather than centerpieces.

The new full-band mode gave the Goats a chance to rearrange much of their catalog. Songs like “Jaipur,” “The Pigs That Ran…”, “The House that Dripped Blood,” “Quito,” “Lions Teeth,” and “See America Right” all emerged with extra-hard edges and careening speeds. Darnielle performed even more unexpected transformations on “Peacocks,” from Tallahassee (the quiet 6 a.m. song got an infusion of mid-tempo energy); and on “Dance Music,” which traded in some of its bop for some bittersweetness; and on “Dilaudid,” a desperate love song given a tougher bite.

Darnielle is in full-throated form again, moving nimbly from a feather-light whisper to a piercing pleasing bray, never losing grip of the syllables that define each moment of each song as unique. As he bangs away on his electric guitar, jaw dropped open an inch or two to release a goofy “I still can’t believe I’m doing this!” smile, he looks like he has moved through all the pain in his songs, found his own little corner of nirvana and invited us in. (Here’s some good descriptive writing about his performance style.)

John Vanderslice joined the band for the conclusion of both shows, adding to the fun and layering “Palmcorder Yajna,” “Half Dead” and “This Year” with some extra exquisite crunch. Then the young women of Pony Up, the warmup act, trotted out to sing backup on Darnielle’s devotedly straight-faced cover of Thin Lizzy’s ode to vernal rebirth, “The Boys Are Back in Town.”

It’s a great time to see the Mountain Goats. Go if you can. They’re playing again tonight at the Bottom of the Hill. Full tour schedule here.

I don’t read the East Bay Express as much as I used to since it lost its old-style Berkeley individuality and got swallowed up by the big alt-weekly chain that is now known as Village Voice Media. But I stumbled on this very funny interview in it today, in which a hapless music writer quizzes Lou Reed about his soundtrack for a new Tai Chi DVD.

I was in the audience last fall at the Web 2.0 conference when Reed’s iceberg-like self-possession collided with the tanker of the Web industry elite’s smug self-regard — a fiasco set up through the offices of then-AOL honcho Jonathan Miller, who explained that he and Reed met because they study with the same Tai Chi master. So Reed’s martial-arts enthusiasm didn’t come as the surprise to me that it seems to have for the Express writer.

What do you say to the people who can’t reconcile your classic Velvet Underground druggy image with this healthy New Age one?

“That was forty years ago!” he implores. “This is 2006! 2007! My God! I can’t worry about things like that. If I did, I wouldn’t do anything! I can’t live in 1967 for people. That’s crazy. I have a broader palette. Everything I do, I’ve always tried to do the best that I could as honestly as I could from wherever space I was viewing things at the time. I can’t satisfy everyone, and I’m not trying to.”