• Visual design guru Edward Tufte’s new book, Visual Evidence, is out. I haven’t read it yet, but if it is anything like its three predecessors it will not only be eye-opening but will embody the principles it espouses. I wrote at length about Tufte almost a decade ago in Salon, in March ‘97.
• “What happens when you take everything in your house and make one giant chain of dominos?” Some people in Japan find out. It’s on YouTube. I saw it because Doc Searls linked to it back when only 250,000 people had viewed it, and now over 500,000 have, and we should really be shooting for >1,000,000, so I’m doing my part.
• Who knew there was a They Might Be Giants tribute album with covers by the Wrens, Frank Black, and the Long Winters? (The latter two also each have new discs out or on the way.)

I’m knocked out, stunned, by the new Sonic Youth album, Rather Ripped. I’m not one of the band’s cultists. Over the years, from the mid-’80s on, I’d hear, from friends who were, that I was missing out: They’d tell me that whatever their latest album was — “Daydream Nation”! “Goo”! — it was the album that would persuade me to join their ranks. I’d listen, feel respect for the legendary New York art-noise band’s work, but never feel like coming back for more.

So I’ve been out of the Sonic Youth orbit for a while. Maybe I missed some transformation or evolution; “Rather Ripped” is incredibly seductive — just melodic enough to engage you, just experimental enough to keep you hitting “repeat.” The guitars shimmer with lanky Lou Reed/Feelies lines; the lyrics are entirely audible; the incredibly tight rhythm section could do this in their sleep, but they’re wide awake. There is a fundamental joy working its way out in this music, in a fully audible way. I am hooked.

In other musical events, the Mountain Goats are slated to release a new album, Get Lonely, next month. But if you are impatient, there is an EP from their Australian tour titled Babylon Springs that is also a fine piece of work. If some of the chord sequences sound a tad familiar, the full-band arrangements are sparkling, the lyrics sharp, the feelings painfully intense.

I have been preoccupied with work and reviewing the copy edits on my book, a surprisingly lengthy and arduous process. (I thought I’d satisfied the gods of the Serial Comma, but there appear to be other complex negotiations I neglected relating to contractions and the use of “and” and “but” to begin sentences. Who knew? I am drawing the line at a proposed correction in the punctuation of my quotation from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which I think deserves a once and final “stet.”)

But I note with amazement the apparently imminent release of a new album by the New York Dolls. They are probably best known for their glam wear, but it was their proto-punk sound — in particular, the roaring bleating chords of their “Personality Crisis” — that won over my adolescent soul. Three of the original band’s lineup are now dead, including the astounding guitarist Johnny Thunders, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped the surviving two, David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain, from putting out a worthy reunion album, if Rob Levine’s piece in New York is to be believed.

What I am trying to wrap my brain around is their title, One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This. If I am not mistaken, this is a translation of one of the more famous lines from the Aeneid, which I was studying in high school around the time that the Dolls were putting out their second album — one of Aeneas’ rally-the-troops orations, in which he tells his men, chin up, someday you’ll be tickled to remember just how awful what you’re going through right now was.

Are the New York Dolls closet Latin freaks? Is there some actual relationship between these minstrels of our epoch’s imperial city and the epic poet who shaped the imagination of the Roman imperium? If we live long enough, do connections emerge between every single thing we know and love?

I was sorry to read of the passing of Jamaican singer Desmond Dekker, whose hit song “The Israelites” appeared on my musical horizons in 1969 as a strange and alluring message from another world.

As a ten-year-old only just tuning into the world of top 40, I’d never heard anything quite like Dekker’s song, with its off-kilter rhythms, its patois lyrics, and those groaning backup harmonies. Dekker’s voice, a sweet tenor gliding effortlessly to an even sweeter falsetto, spoke of shantytown hardships in scriptural language. But it was the key changes rung by the rhythm guitar between the end of each chorus and the start of each new verse that really hooked me.

Over the years the ska, rock-steady and reggae rhythms would become more familiar, and I’d hear more of Dekker’s music and the sounds of his contemporaries in “The Harder They Come” and later compilations of Jamaican treasures. But the spell of “The Israelites” remains strong to this day.

Cleaning out a reading backlog. Herewith some links, some going back months:

## Fascinating piece from the New York Times last week on the man who wrote the song that became “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”: It started out, in Solomon Linda’s 1939 recording, as “Mbube,” which is pronounced “EEM-boo-bay.” That, in Pete Seeger’s hands, became “Wimoweh.” Then songwriter George Weiss added the “Lion” lyrics. Linda got 10 shillings for the rights in 1952. He died poor in 1962. His family did recently get some money from Disney, which used the song in “The Lion King.” There are over 150 recordings of the song. One is by Brian Eno (I still own a 7-inch single of the 1975 recording, somewhere).

## Writer’s block or creative logjam? Now you don’t have to hunt for a collector’s item edition of Eno’s Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards offering cryptically helpful aphorisms as rut escape strategies. It’s all online. And it’s probably been there forever, but I only found it recently.

## This interview with Ray Ozzie from ACM Queue from a few months ago is a great read. It’s especially insightful about the disparity today between individuals and small businesses and large enterprises — like Microsoft, where Ozzie is now a CTO. Little guys are free to adapt to the newest and most flexible technologies; big enterprises find themselves hogtied not only by the money they’ve already spent on older technologies, but by fear and turf-wars and regulations that make it almost impossible for them to embrace openness and change. Choice quote:

(For the non-Unix geeks out there, a “Unix pipe” is a fast, simple way in that operating system to connect the output of one program to the input of another.)

## Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos provides a crystal clear explanation of what Moore’s Law is and isn’t (it’s not about chips doubling in speed or halving in cost, it’s about doubling the number of transistors you can fit on a chip).

## Find yourself checking for new e-mail every five minutes? You might be a victim of continuous partial attention, but Rands in Repose has a slightly different take on the idea — he calls it Repetitive Information Injury. And a Discover column from Steven Johnson offers some novel ideas for new approaches to computer interfaces that are designed to help us focus more and multitask less when that’s what we want.

## Meanwhile, Paul Graham suggests that procrastination isn’t really a problem if you’re forsaking some dull work that you have to do in order to explore something you love. This advice is easier to act upon after you have sold your startup company, as Graham once did — those in need of a steady income may have greater trouble following his recommendations.

I’ve always found that the music I love best, the music that stays with me through the years, is music that takes a little time to warm to. Songs that are instantaneously ingratiating are often quick to pale into boredom, but those complex enough to be initially off-putting reveal their appeal on third or fourth or fifth listen and become long-term infatuations.

Unfortunately, my life as a working parent these days does not leave as much room as it once had for third or fourth or fifth listens. And so sometimes I’ll check out a new band’s music and, if my auditory fancy is not instantly seized, I’ll put the CD or the files aside for months, even years. Frequently, this means I’ll miss the boat for an unconscionable length of time.

I certainly missed The Blueberry Boat. This album by the Fiery Furnaces was an indie-critical sensation when it came out in 2004. But the spectral nautical rambling of the album’s 10-minute opener, “Quay Cur,” didn’t grab me quickly when I brought it home, so it languished at the bottom of my pile, and I am only falling in love with it now.

It’s a collection of long story-suites (the band’s brother-and-sister creators, Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger, have cited Who pop suites like “Rael” and “A Quick One While He’s Away” as influences) that hop restlessly from theme to theme, spitting off throwaway melodies and opaquely allusive, effusively articulate lyrics. The title track features an assault by pirates; “Chris Michaels” seems to tune onto the wavelength of a suburban gossip; “Mason City” takes snapshots of the 19th-century midwest from formal correspondence and railway company files; “Chief Inspector Blancheflower” seems to be a sort of Victorian policier unfolding in the mind of a bored typewriter-repairperson manque.

I hear fragments of everything from Phil Spector to Philip Glass in the mix; there are snarly-catchy guitar solos and even gospel flourishes (in the frantic “I Lost My Dog”). Some of Matthew Friedberger’s sound treatments hark back to the heyday of early Eno. (The fanfare at the start of “Mason City” sounds a lot like a sped-up outtake from Another Green World. And both Blueberry and Here Come the Warm Jets feature songs with “Paw-Paw” in their titles!) Other synthesizer flourishes fondly recall the bombast of the prog-rock era, though that label is one the Furnaces understandably do not embrace. One evening, when I turned up Blueberry Boat in my office, my wife shouted incredulously from the next room, “Wow — Emerson, Lake and Palmer?” Not exactly — but not crazy, either.

The followup to Blueberry, apparently a tribute to the Friedbergers’ grandmother titled Rehearsing My Choir, has gotten a colder critical reception. But before making up my own mind, I’m going to listen to it at least a half dozen times — as soon as I get the chance.

I schlepped through two hours of rush hour traffic last night to drive down to Saratoga and hear Richard Thompson play at the rustic, remote Villa Montalvo, a mansion in the Santa Cruz mountains converted into an arts center. It’s hard for me to believe it’s been almost ten years since I interviewed Thompson for the then new-born Salon; it’s almost as hard to believe that, this far into a career that stretches back to the late ’60s, he has continued to grow as a musician and songwriter.

Last night, he mixed up timeless, heartache-filled classics like “Genesis Hall,” “Down Where the Drunkards Roll,” and “The Great Valerio” with newer material split between boisterous upbeat love-songs (”Cooksferry Queen,” “Bathsheba Smiles”) and wry, punning novelties like a ditty in praise of Alexander Graham Bell (”Edison, he was a thief / And Tesla nuts beyond belief
/ But Alexander was a gent / So philanthropic, so well meant”).

One moment, he was playfully putting the lie to the old Dorothy Parkerism that “Guys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses” with “I’ve Got the Hots for the Smarts,” a jazzy ode to the turn-on of intellectual dames (”I like a girl in satin / who talks dirty in Latin”). Then he turned around to look at the realm of the intellect from the perspective of a Taliban-style fundamentalist, who, in his post-9/11 portrait, “Outside of the Inside,” dismisses the entire record of human civilization: “Shakespeare, Isaac Newton / Small ideas for little boys / Adding to the senseless chatter / Adding to the background noise.”

At this stage of his musicianship, Thompson is entirely capable of impersonating an entire rock ensemble using one acoustic guitar; bass line, rhythm, melody and solo all somehow emerge from a single pair of hands playing a single instrument. His show is a remarkable thing, yet the little house at Montalvo still had empty seats. If there are any more of those, as this three-night engagement continues tonight and tomorrow night, you might want to grab them.

I must have been ten years old or so, and my older brother received a copy of The Who’s “Tommy” as a promotion for starting a new subscription to the then-young and wild new publication out of San Francisco, Rolling Stone. A free double album was something, in those days, and I fell in love with it — in particular, with a thick, crunchy, percussive-yet-harmonious sound that kept recurring on so many of the tracks.

I asked my older brother what instrument this was that sounded so great, and he — always one with great musical taste but less reliable musical knowledge — told me he thought it was a bass guitar. Years later I learned that, no, this was Pete Townshend’s electric guitar, playing what, even later, I learned to call power chords, with an edge of distortion I had come to love in many other songs on many other albums.

Link Wray, who died this weekend, is generally considered the inventor of that sound. To create the menacing yet (to me, at least) joyous chords in his 1958 “Rumble,” he apparently poked a pencil through the speaker cones on his guitar amplifier — a trick that would later be emulated by the young Ray and Dave Davies to obtain the rumbling sound of their first hit, “You Really Got Me.”

I have spent decades, now, in love with this kind of distortion. So RIP, Link Wray, 1929-2005 — thanks for the sound.

In this interview John Vanderslice, singer/songwriter and producer extraordinaire, talks about distortion and why we need it:

Before our holiday weekend begins, a tip of the hat to two recent good experiences:

(1) On Wednesday morning I went off to the O’Reilly “Where 2.0″ conference, which was all about the new world of digital mapping and the mobile technologies and applications built upon them. That stuff is all well and good, but as a map geek from early childhood I was most excited by hearing the keynote from David Rumsey, a cartographic historian and collector of historical maps whose talks I’d heard superlative things about in the past. Rumsey did not disappoint. He put the current frenzy of excitement in stuff like Google Maps into a four-century perspective of the human quest to create maps that are not only useful and accurate but beautiful and meaningful. Then he showed us some simply astonishing techniques by which old maps can first be precisely positioned as overlays to contemporary digital satellite imagery, then transformed into 3D screenscapes — allowing, for instance, a fly-through of San Francisco as it looked a century ago.

As soon as I am off my authorial treadmill (only, aagh, two dozen more books about software to read!) I am sitting down with Rumsey’s book, Cartographica Extraordinaire, for a nice, long journey through time. (If you haven’t visited it already, Rumsey’s Web site is a jaw-droppingly amazing collection of historical maps.)

(2) Last Friday, fresh off the plane from New York, I high-tailed it over to the Bottom of the Hill for my second-ever experience of a Mountain Goats show. I’ve already logged my enthusiasm for the new Sunset Tree album from John Darnielle and his collaborators. It takes a lot, at my advanced mid-40s age, to get me to stand in a dim club until midnight to listen to somebody else’s music. (My five-year-olds will wake me at 6 a.m. regardless, so it’s a self-sentence of sleep deficit.) It was, in this case, utterly worthwhile.

What amazed me was that the set of maybe two dozen plus songs, which featured one catchy, clever, moving song after another, barely overlapped with the equally great set I heard from the Mountain Goats last year at the same venue. The two shows shared, at most, three songs. I can’t think of another artist (except for, you know, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, guys who are, uh, way older than Darnielle) who’s got both the back-catalog depth to pull that off and the will to actually do it, instead of playing the same handful of fan favorites over and over until both band and audience are bored with them. And I got to hear Darnielle play the song that first turned me on to his music, the rollicking downer “Palmcorder Yajna,” with a drummer borrowed from the band that preceded the Goats, and their producer, John Vanderslice, adding a second guitar and harmonizing at the mike on the chorus.

Darnielle established his reputation by recording songs solo on a boombox, accompanied only by a persistent capstan hiss. More often, these days, the Goats play as a duo (Darnielle and bassist Peter Hughes). But for a couple minutes last Friday, they looked like a rock ‘n’ roll band — and like, for those couple minutes, nothing else in the world was quite as much fun.

If you haven’t seen it already — it made the blogosphere rounds a month or two ago — They Might Be Giants’ “Bloodmobile” song and (as animated by Dave Logan) video is a thing of beauty. “A delivery service inside us!” For fans of “Why Does the Sun Shine?”, which definitely includes our household’s younger echelon.