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Awaking from my long winter's nap
Wednesday, 12 Mar 2008, 1:24 AM (permalink).
Well, neither I nor Donut Age are dead, I am pleased to report. I have just been hibernating, if you can call spending several hours a day on an MMORPG for three and a half months (more on that later) hibernating, which, I suppose, you really can't. But that, along with working and, occasionally, sleeping is basically how I have been riding out the cold, dark winter months.
I have not been completely absent from the blogosphere during this time, however. I've continued to twitter pretty steadily. I've also become the the proprietor of a small blog farm running on a Leopard Server for a large project at work. Most of the content there is for internal use only, but one of the recent fruits of this labor is publicly accessible. I can't think of much else to say for myself at this point. I am going to try to get back into the habit of blogging here, but I know better than to make any grand promises.
File under: Metablogging, Ego.
Heavy Rotation: Oct. 29-Nov. 4, 2007
Saturday, 17 Nov 2007, 2:19 PM (permalink).
Here's installment number two of of my new format for music-logging. One thing that is already clear is that given my listening habits, which are structured around the monthly cycle of my eMusic subscription, the weekly "top artists" lists are going to have a fair amount repetition in them from one week to the next. I don't know if that's a problem per se—in fact it might be interesting to see if my enthusiasm for a brand new acquisition sustains for several weeks or fades after the first blush—but I'll go ahead an apologize in advance for entries along the lines of "Still listening to [insert album name] a lot. Still rocks." - Golem! - Still listening to Fresh off the Boat a lot. Still rocks (in its manic, klezmer way).
- Beat Happening - Still working through the six-month echo of my complete retrospective of the Beat Happening catalog. The only album of theirs I do not have in iTunes is their final one, You Turn me On (1992), which is sitting in vinyl purgatory. If I had to pick only one to have, though, it would be Jamboree (1988), nearly every song of which belongs on my imaginary Beat Happening Greatest Hits list, and one of which, "The This Many Boyfriends Club," has earned one of my very rare 5-star ratings. This last is Beat Happening distilled down to their "twee as fuck" essence: out of tune singing accompanied by nothing but meandering feedback and what sounds like distant screams, willfully childish lyrics suffused by anger and desire, all alchemically combined into something miraculous, so that when Calvin delivers the final line—the banal "And there's one thing, I forgot: / I love Lori... a lot!"—you believe this is one of the most romantic songs ever written.
- Tom Zé - Apparently a legend of the Brazilian music scene, I'd never heard of Tom Zé until noticing that Robert Christgau had given Brazil Classics 4: The Best of Tom Zé (1990) one of his coveted A+ grades. Even then, I did nothing with that knowledge until last July when I found that album on eMusic and downloaded it. I'm not sure I agree with Christgau on the A+ part, but the mixing of traditional Latin flavors with an avant-garde sensibility was intriguing enough for me to include the much newer Danç-Êh-Sá (2006) among my October eMusic downloads, which is how he appears on this list. Danç-Êh-Sá takes the experimentalism considerably further than his earlier work. I like it well enough, but it hasn't made me passionate yet.
- Sonic Youth - As with last week's appearance, this is an echo effect from bingeing on Sonic Youth this summer. This week was heavy on Daydream Nation (1988), which many consider to be their masterwork. I've always been more partial to its predecessor, Sister (1987), and successor and major-label debut, Goo (1990), but I've slowly come around to considering Daydream Nation the equal of those two. Certainly, considered as a 1-2-3 punch, I'd put them up with just about any other set of consecutive albums, except maybe Al Green's triumvirate of Call Me (1973), Livin' for You (1973), and Al Green Explores Your Mind (1974).
- Louis Armstrong - As previously reported, I downloaded the massive Hot Fives and Sevens compilation after a sudden windfall of eMusic bonus downloads last fall. That sudden injection of Satchmo has not distributed itself through my musical library, so I keep hitting patches where he seems to be the only thing in my playlists. Which is fine because he is, of course, a genius, but I don't think I could be blamed for saying that it all tends to be one big, jazzy blur to me.
- Yo La Tengo - I've said it before and I'll say it again: my favorite band ever. This week was dominated by Genius + Love = Yo La Tengo (1996), a compilation of out-takes and obscurities that is really only for the dedicated fan. I like it, of course, and I find even their failed experiments interesting, but this is not really the place to start for newcomers.
- Parliament - It took me years to really appreciate the brilliance of Funkentelechy vs. The Placebo Syndrome (1977), but it now functions for me as the standard by which all funk before and after should be judged ("Flashlight" is a perfect song, and "Bop Gun" is not far behind it). Both that album and Live: P-Funk Earth Tour (also 1977), which is far more uneven but has several highpoints ("Do That Stuff," "Children of Production," and the "Tear the Roof Off the Sucker Medley" would be my top cuts), got a good listen this week. I don't honestly remember why, but does one really need a reason?
- Ornette Coleman - Still working my way through the Beauty Is a Rare Thing box. Still enjoying the Coleman retrospective.
- Funkadelic - Maggot Brain (1971). My appreciation of Parliament has led me to explore other sectors of the George Clinton/P-funk universe, hence the appearance of Maggot Brain, which I downloaded from eMusic a bit over a year ago and which is making its third tour through the rotation. This album is fine, but nowhere near the class of Funkentelechy. I'm not sure if the world need two versions of the 10-minute title track (though I prefer the "alt mix" to the album-opener). I'd also recommend "Can You Get to That" and "Hit It and Quit It."
- Van Morrison - Still listening to Van. He's still The Man.
That's it. Gotta get this out before I start falling as behind with these as I was with the Acquisitions posts.
File under: Music, Ego.
Shopping around
Monday, 12 Nov 2007, 1:02 AM (permalink).
I finally got around to trying Amazon's MP3 Store, the latest attempt to challenge the hegemony of Apple's iTunes Store in the world of digital music sales, and for the first time, there seems to be a legitimate competitor in the market. I bought PJ Harvey's new album, White Chalk (2007). It's available on the ITMS as well, but because her label (Island) is a subsidiary of Universal, it is only available DRM-free from Amazon. That, much more than cost or encoding details, is the main draw of Amazon's store. Other, more punctual reviewers have covered AmazonMP3 in some detail, so I won't dwell on that. It's fine. Aside from having to download and install the Amazon MP3 Downloader before doing any actual downloads, the shopping experience is pretty seamless. The Downloader itself is reminiscent of (in fact, eerily similar to) the eMusic Download Manager, with the nice bonus feature of automatically adding purchases into iTunes. Nothing can quite match the ITMS for integration, since the latter is built right in to iTunes itself, but the browser-based shopping experience has a few advantages of its own, so I'd call it a wash. The prices on Amazon are generally a little better than iTunes (usually 89¢ vs. 99¢ per track with album prices being somewhat variable, but seemingly centered on the $8.99 mark), but if it comes down to price, neither comes close eMusic, which averages only 25¢ per track with a full year subscription (also unprotected MP3s). eMusic's problem is that they have no major labels (including pseudo-indie subsidiaries like Island).
The real considerations between the two is selection, and to be specific: it comes down to Amazon MP3 vs. iTunes Plus, but the important decisions in this arena don't seem to be in either company's hands. Of the four major labels, Warner and Sony-BMG are still holding out and refusing to sell non-DRMed music anywhere. EMI is available on both iTunes and Amazon. That leaves Universal Music Group, which is pursuing its strange vendetta against Apple by releasing unprotected music only through Amazon, while forcing ITMS to continue selling DRMed tracks. For the moment, this gives Amazon a big edge in DRM-free selection, but I'm not sure what Universal thinks they can accomplish with this strategy. If the Amazon store fails (which seems unlikely), they'll be forced to go back to Apple with their tail between their legs and have even less say in the pricing of music. If the Amazon store somehow wins and forces Apple to shut down the ITMS (which seems virtually impossible), they'll only have succeeded in creating a new market giant, and one that it is already committed to selling only DRM-free tracks. If they just want to create competition, fine, but competition generally pushes prices down, as evidenced by Amazon's starting with a price point marginally below Apple's, and Apple's responding by dropping the 30¢ markup for iTunes Plus tracks. All Universal gets out of their current policy is a reduced opportunity to make sales and possibly smaller margins on the sales they do make (I'm speculating here. As far as I know, the details of the revenue sharing between Amazon and the labels has not been released. However, based on a pricing document [dug up by John Gruber] from a company that offers to "place" songs at the various major digital stores for labels, it appears that Apple only keeps about 29¢ on each single sale. For Amazon to undercut Apple by 10¢/track and offer higher payments to labels, they'd have to make almost nothing on each track sold). One thing I will fault Apple for, however, is their heel-dragging in getting DRM-free independent-label music onto the ITMS. Despite the recent announcement that they were adding independent labels to the iTunes Plus program, there is still not a single one of my 475 pre-iTunes Plus purchases that has been made available without DRM. (I have made exactly one iTunes Plus purchase, The Decembrists' The Crane Wife [2007], which turned out to be a rather disappointing album.) While some of these are tracks the major labels won't let Apple release DRM-free, a significant portion of the list is indie stuff that has been available for years on eMusic, and which is now showing up on Amazon as well: The Gothic Archies (Merge Records), Interpol (Matador Records), The Magnetic Fields (Merge), The New Pornographers (Matador), Pretty Girls Make Graves (Matador), The Shins (Sub Pop), and Sufjan Stevens (Asthmatic Kitty), to name only the full album purchases on the list. I don't want to get all Cory Doctorow about this issue, but seeing as there is obviously no objection by these labels to releasing unprotected music, it would be in Apple's best interest to get them onto iTunes Plus as fast as possible, if only to avoid giving Amazon any more bragging rights than they already have. As for where I'll be doing my shopping in the meantime, eMusic is still my number one source for music. Most of what I like is on indie labels anyway, and the 40 downloads a month I have subscribed for keeps me more than busy enough with digesting new music. However, I'll be checking in on AmazonMP3 from time to time, particularly when some of my semi-major label faves (like PJ Harvey or Sonic Youth) come out with something new. ITMS comes in last now, since the unprotected songs they do have are very likely to be available on either eMusic or Amazon, and the content they have from the remaining DRM loyalists, even if it did interest me, I would probably hold off in the expectation that they will eventually succumb to reason and drop their insistence on DRM (or, if I really could not wait, buy the physical CD). Oddly enough, while I never had any great objection to Apple's FairPlay DRM (and I still believe it's the least offensive of existing DRM schemes), now that there are some real alternatives, I find it hard to justify buying anything that's still DRMed. This is why i suspect Sony and Warner will cave in eventually. DRM is only tolerable when it's the only game in town (aside from actively stealing content). Once there's a choice, it is exposed for crappy arrangement that it is.
File under: Music, Grouses.
Heavy Rotation: Oct. 21-28, 2007
Wednesday, 7 Nov 2007, 10:20 PM (permalink).
Having fallen woefully behind on my "Acquisitions" series, I am trying out a new approach to logging my music habits, namely looking at my Last.fm "weekly top artists" list and commenting on what I find there. This should have two advantages over the Acquisitions approach. First, since it is limited to ten artists, I shouldn't get overwhelmed by sheer volume, as was happening regularly with my monthly acquisitions lists. Second, since this is the music I've listened to the most in a given week (more or less—not everything I listen to manages to get scrobbled to Last.fm, but the vast majority does), I should actually have something to say about it, which was not always the case with the brand-new music covered in my earlier posts. There should actually be some intersection between what comes up with this method and what 's actually new in my library, because the structure of my playlists keeps new arrivals in heavy rotation for about a month after they get added to iTunes. But it will also give me reason to revisit older music that's caught my ear, which appeals to me as well. Obviously, this will not wind up being some perfect log of my listening habits, but I never really set out to do that in the first place. The tougher question will be whether I can keep up with a regular schedule of weekly posts. History would suggest not, but maybe this exercise will be the impetus I needed to get more disciplined about my blogging. Here, then, is my Heavy Rotation list for the week of October 21-28:
- Art Brut - Their Bang Bang Rock & Roll (2005) was one of my October eMusic downloads. It was pretty much a blind purchase in that I had nothing more than the band's appearance in some "find similar artists" result and a Robert Christgau A- to recommend them to me, but I've been very happy with this album. A little hard to categorize: the sound is garage-punk, but with a heavy dose of lyrical irony (notwithstanding Eddie Argos's declaration—in the album's opener, "Formed a Band"—that "yes, this is my singing voice. / It's not irony"). "Emily Kane"—a declaration of devotion to the singer's teenage sweetheart—is probably the album's most fully realized song, but if I had to pick my favorite, I'd go for "Good Weekend," with it's creepy-romantic opening salvo—"First time I saw her / I wanted more than just to hold her / I wanted to bend her and fold her / So I went over and I told her"—and triumphantly inept cri de cœur—"I've seen her naked... twice!"). I can see others finding this stuff to be too smart for its own good, but it's got me hooked.
- The Mekons - Another October eMusic acquisition was the Mekons' The Edge Of the World (1986). I only really became aware of the Mekons about six years ago—by way of a friend's copy of Rock 'n' Roll (1989)—and I've been assembling their catalog in piecemeal fashion ever since (their most recent—Natural—was one of my September downloads). They are an example of a band that I appreciate more on the basis of total output than for particular songs, and Edge of the World is typical in this regard. I like it top to bottom, but outside of the rousing "Big Zombie" (I'm just not human tonight!") I can't really point to any especially great or memorable songs on it.
- Van Morrison - This seems to be a case of my having gone on a big Van Morrison kick about six months ago, creating a cluster of his songs traveling together through my iTunes library rotation system and popping up as group now. I only have Moondance and His Band and His Street Choir (both 1970) in iTunes (a couple others on vinyl and a few that never made it past homemade cassette tape). These albums have a tendency to get played during dinner parties as they are both fundamentally excellent and palatable to a wide audience.
- Beat Happening - Another case of music that was in heavy rotation six months ago and has only now made it through the system again, but in this case, I remember why. Last spring, I was reading Michael Azerrad's chronicle of 80s independent bands, Our Band Could Be Your Life, which featured a chapter on Beat Happening, and as I did with other bands covered in the book, I re-listened to much of the Beat Happening catalog as well as downloading the compilation Music to Climb the Apple Tree To (2003) from eMusic. They were a a fairly critical part of my introduction to the indie world, and I continue to have a soft spot for their defiantly lo-fi, competence-optional, "twee as fuck" approach to music.
- Golem! - This is a new acquisition. I'd had my eye on Fresh Off the Boat (2006) since seeing Christgau's favorable review on MSN Music last April, but I held off for a bit out of concern that I was overdoing the whole Gypsy-Klezmer fusion thing in my enthusiasm for Gogol Bordello. I probably shouldn't have waited, as this is wonderfully inventive and explosive music, more akin to the aforementioned Gogol Bordello's "gypsy punk" than to more traditionalist Klezmer (which I also like, though I am far from well-listened in the genre).
- Sonic Youth - Also featured in Our Band Could Be Your Life, also a critical part of my personal initiation into indie, Sonic Youth got on this list much the same way Beat Happening did, by my doing a heavy-listening session back in the spring, and the magic of smart playlists reprising it half a year later. Sonic Youth are especially interesting because they are about the only band from Azerrad's book to survive the era he chronicles intact, to say nothing of remaining vital and relevant two decades later.
- Bob Dorough - Unsuspecting visitors to my Last.fm profile may be befuddled by the fact that although my "top Artists" list is populated by the likes of Yo la tengo and Sonic Youth, my "Top Tracks" list is dominated by songs from the Schoolhouse Rock series of educational cartoons from the 1970s (they currently hold the top 13 slots in said list). For Americans of my generation, however, Schoolhouse Rock is a cultural touchstone, and I'll freely admit to still being a fan of the series. While there were a few real clunkers, especiallly in the latter days of the series (don't get me started on "Scooter Computer and Mister Chips"), several of the songs are works of genius, and in most cases the genius at work was Bob Dorough, who wrote and sang many of the most memorable of the songs. The real reason these songs rank so highly, however, is because I have successfully conditioned the children to request them pretty much in preference to any other music.
- Tapes 'n Tapes - The Loon (2005) was a fine album that I didn't stumble across until last fall. It seems to be on its second rotation as a block through the library system.
- Ornette Coleman - Mostly a product of the addition of jazz titles to my Mix-o-matic smart playlists. I have a big backload of unrated Coleman tracks from the imposing Beauty is a Rare Thing box set (2005). Compared to other jazz greats, Coleman is something of an acquired taste, but he has a sound that is uniquely his and which is well-represented on this box.
- Jack Sheldon - Another Schoolhouse Rock luminary. Sheldon was the singer for several of my all-time favorite Schoolhouse Rock songs: "I'm Just a Bill" (recollection of which saved my hide during a pop quiz in AP US History in ninth grade), "Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla," and "Conjunction Junction." I only today noticed that the latter had been misattributed to Dorough (who did write it) in my iTunes library, so I've been shortchanging Sheldon in my scrobbling for some time now. Sorry, Jack!
And that's a wrap! Look out for the next Heavy Rotation (covering the week that just ended) in a few days. Or not.
File under: Music, Metablogging, Ego.
New Jersey with palm trees
Thursday, 1 Nov 2007, 4:37 PM (permalink).
That was my first impression of Anaheim, and nothing I saw in the subsequent five-days did much to revise that initial judgment. Granted, I saw only a narrow slice of the area (basically, a two-mile stretch of Harbor Blvd.), but what I did see looked eerily similar (except for the foliage) to the suburban hell in which I grew up and from which I spent my twenties trying to escape.  In making this comparison, however, I'm not just trying to insult smug Southern Californians. South Jersey and Orange County seem both to belong to an emerging class of, for lack of a better word, hyper-suburbs. Superficially, they embody, even perfect, the stereotypical image of suburban sprawl, all seven-lane arteries and generic shopping strips. However, once they reach a certain density, these hyper-suburbs start behaving, if not actually looking, like urban areas, becoming more ethnic (I recall stumbling on a Ukrainian grocery in a Cherry Hill, NJ, strip mall) and just plain weirder (the now-departed Pennsauken Mart). Within a tiny radius of our conference hotel, I managed to find a few hidden treasures: Tokyo Love
Verified to be a real restaurant (with respectable sushi and gyoza) and not a massage parlor.
Harbie
Wig Store
Sorry, wholesale only.
The conventional wisdom is that suburbs are bland and faceless, while small towns remain the bastions of local color and quirky charm. In some places that is no doubt true. Here in Eastern Kentucky, however, most of the individuality of the small towns has been given way to the encroachments of fast food and Wal-Marts. As a result, I find even the above specimens strangely uplifting.
File under: Travel.
California burning
Friday, 26 Oct 2007, 12:42 PM (permalink).
I am in California (Anaheim or to be really precise, Garden Grove) for the Association for Educational Communication and Technology conference. There's an odd disjunction (mentioned by Stephen Downes in his opening keynote Wednesday night) between the sedate academic atmosphere of the conference and the natural disaster taking place all around us. While Anaheim proper has not been hit by the wildfires, you can smell and often see the smoke from them when you are outside. The view flying into John Wayne Airport was even more striking.  It's strange to have that kind of destruction hovering just at the edge of your consciousness while sitting in a presentation on, for example, knowledge life-cycles. For a variety of reasons (ranging from the technical setup of Donut Age to my preference for taking paper notes in conference sessions), I'm not making any kind of attempt to blog the conference per se, but I have been using Twitter to (briefly) log my conference experience and del.icio.us to post interesting URLs from sessions. For these, my iPhone (and especially Hahlo, Twitter "client" for iPhone) has been extremely useful. Much less cumbersome (and less conspicuous) than hauling out my laptop every time something I want to post something. I spent the first two days of the conference dragging my laptop around anyway ("just in case"), but today, it's staying in the room and I'm relying on the iPhone alone to keep me connected. If nothing else, it's making my right shoulder happier. File under: Travel, Academe, Tools.
iWhiners
Saturday, 6 Oct 2007, 6:04 PM (permalink).
I still love my iPhone (and not in an entirely wholesome way, I'm afraid), but I am starting to regret that my purchase puts me into the same class as a bunch of greedy, deluded whiners. The outcry over the iPhone's price-drop was bad enough (note to whiners: you stood in line to buy a phone; of course you got overcharged for it). Now you've got people screaming for Steve Jobs's head on a pike because the latest iPhone software update bricked some unlocked phones and squashed the (unsupported, officially discouraged) third-party apps some hackers had managed to get onto their phones, just like Apple said it would. While I've learned not to begrudge people the right to turn their own stupidity into multimillion-dollar lawsuits, what's especially bizarre about the current crop of iWhiners is that it includes normally sensible people like Leo Laporte and the entire staff of MacWorld. I'm not giving links to any of these clowns, but if you want details, try any of the following worthwhile anti-whiners: There's not much to add to the above debunking. I will observe, though, that perhaps the worst thing about the iWhiners is that they add fuel to the usual crowd of Mac-bashers by apparently proving that Mac users really are a cult of brainless morons who snap up whatever Apple hands them. On the other hand, all the whining by Apple "faithful" might at least exonerate Artie MacStrawman from the charge that he delivers death threats to anyone who dares criticize Apple products. File under: Grouses, Tools, Geekery.
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires
Sunday, 30 Sep 2007, 12:10 AM (permalink).
Taking the above Proverb of Hell to heart, I finally acted upon my desires and bought an iPhone this week.  I had held this particular desire pretty much from the moment it was announced, but I don't think I started actually nursing it until the TV ads appeared last spring. Before that, I was prepared to be very reasonable: "it's a new product, it will have bugs, better to wait until the second generation, yadda yadda yadda." The moment I saw the ads, all that went out the window. It was pure "Gimme, gimme, gimme! Mine mine mine!" And there were just too few obstacles. I'd been saying I needed my own phone for over a year, and I was already leaning toward something in the "smartphone" category (as an owner of several Handspring/Palm PDAs, I was seriously considering buying an almost-new Treo off a colleague right about the time the initial iPhone announcement was made.) AT&T is, for better or worse, the only cellular carrier in these parts anyway. Add to that all the glowing reviews, the cool factor, and, finally, the price cut, and my desire had become insatiable. I placed my order a week ago Thursday, and by Monday afternoon, I had the object of that desire, at last, in my hands. And while I admit to having slaked my lust a bit that first night, the next morning I found myself stricken with a nasty gastrointestinal infection that put me in no kind of condition for such dalliances for the next three days, and Friday was spent doing little more than digging out from the load of missed work from my illness. Thus, today was my first "real" day of iPhone use, and I must say it lives up to every bit of hype and praise that has been heaped upon it. The UI is jaw-droppingly beautiful. MobileSafari is terrific (even over EDGE, I find it to be acceptable). Mail works extremely well (I have one IMAP, one traditional POP, and three GMail accounts all on it). The camera and photo features have me suddenly wanting to take pictures (which I otherwise do with some reluctance). I've had to retrain some of my iPod habits to make use of those features, but even that is not really a complaint, just an adjustment (I will say, having the—admittedly tiny—speakers for music playback, is a nice little bonus). I haven't yet dug into every corner of the iPhone, and I know that in time, some of the details like having no text-selection, will start to irritate me, and yes, like everyone else, I'm hoping Apple will open it up to third-party developers, but from what I can see, this really is the revolutionary, industry-changing device that Steve Jobs promised. Bravo, Apple.
File under: Tools, Geekery.
Of beer and bastards
Sunday, 23 Sep 2007, 11:50 PM (permalink).
It wasn't looking good for my chances of getting to the Heartless Bastards show in Lexington last night, but thanks to a last-minute babysitting offer from a friend, Sylvia and I were able to make a date of it. Heading out from Morehead after dinner, we skipped the opening act in favor of making a stop at the obscenely huge Liquor Barn at Hamburg Plaza to indulge in a little frivolous consumerism. Besides such difficult-to-obtain-in-Morehead items as decent bread, cheese, and wine, I picked up a couple of promising seasonal beers— Great Lakes' "Nosferatu" red ale (which I am sampling right now: it's pretty damn good) and Abita's "Pecan Harvest" (I'd had a tiny sample earlier this week and was intrigued)—as well as a couple old standybys: DAB and Staropramen. Thence to downtown Lexington, where we were somewhat surprised to find an actual nightlife in full swing. I recall going into Lexington when we first moved here nine years ago and finding the Main Street area to be depressingly deserted. Well, it seems quite a bit has changed, as there were people all over the place, spilling out of bars and restaurants (granted, the Festival Latino de Lexington a couple blocks away may have boosted the numbers, but these were still people patronizing the bars and restaurants, rather than the festival).
We made it to The Dame just in time for the start of the Heartless Bastards' set. It was, in both quality and content very much like the show they did here last fall, which is to say it was very good, but I don;t have much of anything new to say about it. There was a good-sized and appreciative crowd present, and the band seemed to feed off the reception. For a few songs, they brought up the guitarist from the opening act (Pearlene), and I was digging added depth of the four-piece sound, although I should also say that the final couple songs of the main set as well as the encore, all delivered in their usual three-piece lineup, rocked just as hard, if not harder. After the show, I tried to ask bassist Mike Lamping whether they had anything new coming out, but the Dane's conversion to late-night disco mode more or less drowned out his response. I thought he maybe looked a little apologetic, suggesting (along with the fact that they didn't play any new material) that no, there's no album waiting in the wings, but hopefully I was misinterpreting, 'cause I'll take all the Heartless Bastards I can get.
File under: Music, Local color, Food.
Tweet, tweet
Tuesday, 11 Sep 2007, 9:31 PM (permalink).
So as you can see, I've added a Twitter badge to my sidebar. Seeing all the cool kids doing it, I actually signed on last spring, but it did not especially appeal to me. More recently, however, I downloaded the Twitterific client, which makes both following and posting to Twitter almost infinitely less cumbersome. I also discovered Twitterfeed, which is letting me pipe content into my Twitter page: my Last.fm recently-listened feed, my LibraryThing recently-added feed, and my del.icio.us bookmark feed. I rather like the idea of using Twitter as the glue for my now far-flung empire of social software site participation (though I am not completely happy with the Last.fm feed: it's not really reflective of what is "now playing." Rather, it dumps the five most recent tracks as a block every half hour—the most frequent interval Twitterfeed will allow). Finally, I found a few folks that seemed interesting to follow, notably John Gruber of Daring Fireball and Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems. It is doubtful that any of these developments would hold my interest by itself, but taken together, they are keeping me intrigued with the service. File under: Digital culture, Tools, Ego.
Recommendation engine
Tuesday, 11 Sep 2007, 8:44 PM (permalink).
The following is a real-life email exchange between myself and a colleague regarding Belle & Sebastian: [Colleague]: _______ is listening to an album now, and I'm thinking, this sounds like the Kinks, but happy.
[Me]: I think that must be the newest album (The Life Pursuit). If it were earlier stuff, you'd be thinking, "This sounds like Nick Drake, but not quite as suicidally depressed."
[Colleague]: Oh, I need to listen to the earlier stuff too, then. Thanks.
(
Private email (9/10/2007).
)
I'm not sure what to make of the above except that it means that Stuart Murdoch owes me more money. File under: Music, Ego.
LibraryThing turns 2
Monday, 3 Sep 2007, 2:08 PM (permalink).
Since I last wrote about it some 21 months ago, LibraryThing, the bibliocentric social software site, has been chugging past major milestones (its first birthday, its 10 millionth book, passing Harvard to become the second-largest "library" in the United States), and each time it has, I've meant to take that as an opportunity do a follow-up post on the service. But each time, I have dragged my heels about actually writing anything, and the moment has passed. Well last week, LT celebrated its second birthday, and I have pledged to myself to mark this anniversary whatever the cost. At over a quarter-million members and 18 million catalog entries, I think it is fair to say that LT has been pretty successful. They've gotten some good press, they've internationalized into 23 other languages, and they've even hired a few more employees. What's interesting to me, though, is how badly, for all my enthusiasm about the site, I misunderstood and underestimated what LibraryThing was all about. When I first signed up for it, I thought of LT as del.icio.us for books, and I wondered publicly whether such a concept could really work given the inherent differences in cataloging books vs. cataloging websites. By fixating on LibraryThing as a catalog, I was ignoring the other important part of the site: its social component. Nowadays, "social networking" and "social software" have become such buzzwords that it is hard to find a website that does not trumpet some "social" feature or another. LT, however, has really put some substance behind the buzz and developed in some interesting directions. A striking example of LibraryThing's approach is how it addressed the question I'd fretted so much about when I last wrote about the site: namely, how to deal with the proliferation of editions, translations, etc. that complicate our idea of what constitutes a "book." A couple months after I posted those concerns, Tim Spalding unveiled LT's "works" feature, which let members decide which books belonged together for the purpose of aggregating ratings, comments, owners, etc. It was an elegant solution to a thorny problem (which LT has gone on to apply to authors and tags as well) that hinges on the social nature of books:
The purpose of works is social. Books that a library catalog considers distinct can nevertheless be a single LibraryThing "work." A work brings together all different copies of a book, regardless of edition, title variation, or language. This works system will provide improved shared cataloging, recommendations and more. For example, if you wanted to discuss M. I. Findley's The Ancient Economy, you wouldn't really care whether someone else had the US or the British edition, the first edition or the second.
There's an interesting symmetry here: books are connected if they can, in turn, be used to connect people. This basic idea of connecting people through books informs almost everything LibraryThing has been doing these last two years: group pages, partnerships with swap sites, library recommendations, " connections", and others. This stands in contrast to a site like del.icio.us, where the social component, though by no means unimportant (see my previous effusions on del.icio.us's second birthday), is much more impersonal. Yes, you can subscribe to another person's links or recommend links to another user, but you really aren't going to forge a relationship with that person through del.icio.us. I don't want to privilege one approach over the other. I love both del.icio.us and LibraryThing, and I am not sure either would work nearly as well as it does if it adopted the other's methods. The point I am tryong to make, I guess, is that LT has done a good job of building its own coherent and, I would say, compelling identity and, in the process, expanded my ideas of what a "social" website can be. So, happy birthday, LT, and many happy returns.
File under: Books, Digital culture.
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