My friend Josh Kornbluth, in Philadelphia to perform his great Ben Franklin solo show as part of the city’s celebration of the Franklin birthday tercentenary, got robbed — but that didn’t stop him from posting this moving little story and tribute to Franklin, the power of song, and more. Go read it.
Random links (yearend clearance dept.)
## The Dynamic of a Bush Scandal: Peter Daou’s cynical but depressingly accurate precis of how the Bush administration and its allies shrug off and spin away scandal after scandal. Peter predicts the current cycle of outrage over the government’s flagrantly illegal domestic spying will pass like each previous cycle. He might well be right.
## David Edelstein says Munich is the best film of the year: “Today, saying our enemy is ‘evil’ is like saying a preventable tragedy is ‘God’s will’: It’s a way of letting ourselves off the hook for crimes committed in our name. Not incidentally, it’s also a way for our enemies to let themselves off the hook.” Guess I’ll have to see it now!
## Doc Searls continues to advance the conversation on the “unbundling” of media (my small contribution, on the unbundling of the newspaper, was here):
| What will happen, I wondered, when Toyota does the math, realizes how inefficient local TV advertising is, and drops its dealer advertising co-op program? Is this not inevitable? Why don’t we have better ways for sellers and buyers to inform each other? Terry puts the onus on advertisers, who are on the supply side; but why not equip demand to notify markets about what it desires? Why should I not be able to publish, selectively, and in a private yet usefully exposed way, that I would like to rent a 4+ bedroom house on Younameit Beach for the last week in April? Why should I have to go hunting among sellers for the same thing, ignoring all the promotional crap that goes with the seller-controlled nonconversation we call marketing? |
## Salon readers know Laura Miller as a co-founder of the site, our one-time books editor and longtime book critic, who has shone a bright and steady light in all her work. Years ago she recommended Philip Pullman’s magnificent “His Dark Materials” trilogy to my wife and me, and they were the only books I can remember being able to finish — indeed, being compelled to finish — in the months of harrowing sleep deprivation I experienced during my twin sons’ infancy. Now Laura has written a beautiful profile of Pullman for the New Yorker, “Far From Narnia” — which his work truly is, in the best possible way.
Meanwhile, The Guardian also has an interesting profile of Ursula Le Guin, another great fantasist of our time.
Hots for the smarts
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.
Programmers and cuisine
I’ve spent a lot of time attempting to fathom the mindset and thought patterns of software engineers in the course of my labors on my book. Two sites that reflect the collision of programmers and cuisine are fascinating in their own right: First, there’s Cooking for Engineers, which applies an analytical mindset to techniques for cooking bacon or making Rice Krispies treats. (Shades of the Twinkies Project!) After indulging in such fare, you can have a look at the Hacker’s Diet, in which Autodesk founder John Walker explains the essential similarities between computing systems and the human body (garbage in, garbage out; calories in, calories out).
Crunch, fuzz, twang
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:
| The holy grail in lo-fi is often how to produce distortion, how to get low levels of distortion that are complicated and beautiful, distortions to balance out the beauty of western harmonic music. Distortion to my mind equals sex and violence, and if you don’t have sex and violence in rock ‘n’ roll then you’re totally done for. It might be the kind that’s on an Eno-Fripp record, but it’s still there — there has to be a dangerous quality to it somewhere. It may be supersubtle but it has to be there. |
Josh Kornbluth’s new show
A long long time ago, I saw Spalding Gray perform Swimming To Cambodia and many of his other monologues. One favorite bit was his account of being rejected for a part on some hack TV show. As the casting agent told him, there was one problem — a moment when a certain look passed over his face that could only be described as…thought.
If you like to see the expression of thought on TV, I think you’re going to like The Josh Kornbluth Show. I watched my old friend’s new interview show on KQED TV for the first time tonight. (If, like me, you missed the debut show Monday night, with Rita Moreno, they’re replaying it Friday at 10:30 p.m., and apparently a bunch of other times.)
As we watched Josh talk with Sen. Barbara Boxer about her new novel, my wife said, “Look, he’s still got the notebook in his back pocket!” Sure enough, the spine of a reporter’s pad was plainly, if minutely, visible on screen.
I smiled. Ages ago, when Josh was starting out in comedy and solo performance, I’d suggested that he carry a pad around so he could capture random ideas. (It’s a good idea for anyone who expects to create stuff.) Reporter’s notebooks are the best combination of capacity and pocket-fit. I became Josh’s supplier for many years. I don’t know where he gets them now; in the old days they were hard to find outside of newsrooms, but they seem more generally available today, online and from office-supplies warehouses. (The Long Tail delivers access to the Long Notebook!)
I can imagine virtually any TV producer I’ve ever met advising the host of the show: Lose the notebook! Maybe its presence on screen was an oversight, but I’d like to think that it is instead an indication of the show’s determination to present Josh, and his guests, in all the happy untidiness of our real lives.
If I remember correctly, I offered my “carry a notebook” advice to Josh around the same time that I had the enormously fun (though also nail-biting, for reasons that will become clear) experience of performing on a live radio show with him, broadcast regularly on the MIT station, WMBR. The show, titled The Urban Happiness Radio Hour, was an eclectic combination of humor, skits and music, loosely inspired by The Prairie Home Companion but with a Josh spin of mid-80s indie hip, Red Diaper Babyism, insane puns and self-deprecating neurosis. I was one anchor of a small voice-acting troupe. Our job of enacting Josh’s skits was complicated by Josh’s habit of writing the scripts, literally, up to the last few minutes before we went on the air. In certain cases, our performances had the spontaneity and verve of first readings because…they were first readings.
From what I’m reading on the blog for Josh’s new show, his current producer is running a much tighter ship. But one of the cool things about the Josh Kornbluth Show is that Josh and KQED clearly want it to feel a little raw, a bit rough; there’s nothing amateurish about it, but it’s utterly un-slick. It’s a world away from Urban Happiness — but not a galaxy away.
Friends like these…
Some of my friends are up to good things.
Chad Dickerson, who was the chief force behind moving Salon into the modern age of computing back in 1998-99, and from whom I learned a great deal about technology and its management, is leaving his gig as InfoWorld’s CTO to take up a position at Yahoo, which is apparently opening a new research enterprise of some kind right here in Berkeley. Many congratulations to him.
Greg Costikyan, who I knew long before there was a Web, has posted the slides to a recent talk he gave titled “Death to the Games Industry. (Long Live Games.)” It’s a tour of the debased state of game development in an era of ballooning production budgets and distribution chokeholds, along with a call for a new model for developing games and a new “Indie Gaming” aesthetic. I have zilch time these days to keep up with the world of gaming, but reading Greg keeps me feeling at least a little clued in.
David Edelstein, a movie critic whose work has dazzled, provoked and enlightened me since we hung out together in the (long since renovated but then delightfully dingy) halls of the Harvard Crimson, is interviewed here on rockcritics.com. You can read David’s stuff all the time in Slate, and you can hear him every week on Fresh Air, but this is a more rambling personal conversation that feels a little like having a beer with David, something I don’t get to do often enough now that we live on opposite ends of the continent.
And, finally, Josh Kornbluth — hilarious monologist, oboist, mathematician manque and my former bandmate — will be hosting his very own interview show on KQED public television here in San Francisco starting this September 12. I might actually need to turn on the TV. (One of these years I will actually need to buy a new set; the one I’m using now was purchased 20 years ago with “scrip” from my job at the Boston Phoenix, which was an odd program the little paper had of letting employees take their pay in the form of heavy discounts on advertisers’ merchandise. Something tells me the technology has advanced since then.)
Of maps and Mountain Goats
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.
They Might Be Giants’ “Bloodmobile”
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.
Force to farce
I’m keeping my head down to work on my book, most of the time, but Kerry Lauerman asked for contributions to a package about “Star Wars,” and, well, I couldn’t resist. You can read my thoughts on why I, as a passionate teenage science fiction fan in the 1970s, was never a fan of George Lucas’s epic, here.
On a related subject, I watched “Spaceballs” for the first time during my last vacation, in the company of my family, and while it was as, well, slight as I expected, there was something about the notion of “The Schwartz” (Mel Brooks’ answer to the Force) that really seemed to charm my five-year-old boys, who took up the concept as a rallying cry and did not let it go.