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Keeping Dusty Music Alive

While the RIAA kvetches and whines about how the continuing rise of CD-R technology is supposedly hurting record sales, Smithsonian-Folkways — purveyors of all those crusty old albums by Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie (not to mention mid-century field recordings of Mongolian throat singers) — has seen its sales rise 33% in the past year. How? By using on-demand CD-R burning to keep their massive back-catalog alive. Rather than let important but slow-to-sell music go quietly out of print, they burn CDs whenever customers order from the back catalog: one copy for the current order and four more for future orders. No inventory sitting around, no music forgotten to history, no customers turned away. This makes me smile.

Thanks bIPlog.

Music: Brian Eno :: Compact Forest Proposal, Condition 7
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Frying Spam

WebMonkey has an interesting piece titled Frying Spam — a quick tour of back-end procedures for spam detection and elimination. Doubles as a nice tutorial for anyone wanting to set up procmail recipes or Bayesian filters such as Bogofilter.

Music: Gong :: The Invisible Temple
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Christo Announces New Project

(Reuters) World famous artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have today announced a new project that is slated to be begin immediately. Responding to U.S. Homeland Defense Secretary Ridge’s call for artists to rally the cause through anti-terrorist art, Christo has received permission to wrap the White House in Washington D.C., using duct tape and plastic sheeting. Much like the artist’s 1995 project “Wrapped Reichstag” in Berlin, “Wrapped White House” will, according to the artists plan, seal the building and those inside. Of the project the artists said, “We are very excited to use our art making methods in the international fight against terrorists. By wrapping the White House we hope to help keep terrorism under wraps, so to speak.” Unlike “Wrapped Reichstag” which was a temporary project, “Wrapped White House” will be the artists’ first permanent work of public art.

100,000 square meters (1,076,000 square feet) of clear high-strength polypropylene plastic, and 15,600 meters (51,181 feet) of silver duct tape, 13.2 cm (4 inch) wide, will be used for the wrapping of the White House. The work will be completed in as little as one week. The artists have contacted other artists across the U.S. who are now in-route to Washington D.C. in order to finish this work in record time. Materials have been provided without charge by the German Government. Recalling the “Wrapped Reichstag,” German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder stated, “Wrapping the symbol of German Democracy was a defining moment for the new Germany. Wrapping the White House will likewise be a defining moment as democracy is restored in America.”

Thanks Roger.

Music: Iron Butterfly :: In A Gadda Da Vida
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The Great Firewall of China

Dinner at Great China after work with my boss, several workmates, Orville Schell, and a Chinese student involved in monitoring The Great Firewall of China — various mechanisms of internet censorship exercised by the government. An evening’s worth of conversations about Google and blogging, the slippery nature of the internet, encryption, proxies, obfuscation, and the immense scale of China’s censorship efforts.

The plan is to do something similar to what we did with bIPlog, but on the subject of Chinese internet clampdown techniques and mechanisms/stories of circumvention. We’ll be bringing in CS students to help us find ways to monitor whether and how our site is blocked from within China. We’ll also feed and seed the Western press with info gleaned anonymously from within the continent. Should be a fascinating project, though we likely won’t begin until this summer.

It’s all going to be published in Chinese, which means I’ll need to manage a site in a language I can’t read. Looks like Movable Type handles Unicode well ….

Music: Lennie Tristano/Lee Konitz/Warne Marsh :: Background Music
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Congestion Charge

So London has shown the cojones to do something about the worst traffic congestion problem in Britain: Levy a £5 fee on anyone who wants to drive within the 8-square-mile core of the city during business hours.

Harsh… but the problem isn’t going to clear itself up and medicine can taste pretty nasty. The rest of Great Britain is watching to see how the plan goes, planning to roll out similar plans elsewhere if it makes a difference. Early reports say that downtown London looks “like Christmas day” (i.e. deserted).

It’s such a simple solution, really, but so hard to utter without offending car-centric sensibilities: Car use must be disincentived. Not banned. Not punished. Just made less attractive. Cars have taken over the world and it’s going to be hard work to take it back. But it has to happen, one small step at a time. It’s almost impossible to imagine an American politician risking a plan like this — political suicide. But eventually, I think, similar plans will become a virtual inevitability all over the world.

Update: Ongoing reports on how the first days of the charge are actually going.

Music: Devo :: Secret Agent Man
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Miles Davis Documentary

Watched The Miles Davis Story with Amy yesterday, after the march, just because. He’s a complex cat. Really a bad man – so mean to so many, especially to women. Reminded me of Mingus in that respect. Tortured genius poet transformer locked in misogynistic mindset. Lots of conversation with wives and children and people close to him (unfortunately no interview with Betty Davis). But some of the musical footage, from the 50s through the 70s, so amazing and beautiful, especially the early 70s sessions — Bitches Brew, Agartha, On the Corner. Conversations with Dave Holland, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, John McLaughlin, Ron Carter… and on and on. Reminded that Carter had recorded on more than 1,000 records by the late 70s already. “I’ve got blisters on my fingers!”

Music: Wire :: Madman’s Honey
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Bush != Fascist

Although we protested inevitable war on Iraq a month ago, went again today, this time with a group of other new parents. Had a strange feeling this time that I didn’t have last time — questioning the clarity of mind of some protesters and beginning to realize that my opposition to war is not 100%. More like 90%.

The left is often criticized for knee-jerk politics and irrational, emotional responses. I often resist that description, but today I saw it clearly. So much of the group-think at a protest is expressed in signage, and so much of that signage is really clever / creative / cogent / potent. But there’s also an aspect of it that is so extreme and so clouded. Example: At the last protest I saw one sign that compared the Bush Administration to the Third Reich. Today it seemed that meme was all over the place. I saw dozens of signs accusing the present administration of fascism, attaching swastikas to the foreheads of Bush and henchmen/women.

Listen up: No matter how you feel about the idiocy and dangerousness of the present administration, we are NOT living in a fascist state, and our leaders are NOT engaged in ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, Hussein IS a fascist and IS (or has been) engaged in ethnic cleansing.

Somehow it just felt harder to connect with the fervor of the protesters today. In part because so many of them damage their own credibility with poor rhetoric and divisive symbolism, and in part because I no longer think this situation is completely cut-and-dried. Some wars are just. Some fascists are evil and must be removed from power. I question how, by what means, at what cost, and under what hidden agenda. What criteria make a war a just war? Just how much more evil would Hussein have to become for most people to say, “OK, take him out. Do what you can to minimize the damage to innocents … just take him out.”

And then a splinter group put a stain on the march.

Didn’t shoot much today, but here a couple that turned my crank.

guernica_tb.jpg (Click)

mullets_tb.jpg (Click)

To clarify: I still feel that, as weblogsky puts it, “American power [has been] hijacked by a minority of individuals with potentially disastrous results from which it may take decades to recover.”

Music: Can :: Flow Motion
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Chickenfat

When I was in elementary school the teacher would often put a record on the Close-n-Play called “Go You Chicken Fat, Go” and we would get up and dancercise to the lyrics, which instructed us to “Push up / every morning / 10 times / not just / now and then / give that chickenfat back to the chickens / and don’t be chicken again.” After a while this song was completely burned into the faraway nether regions of the brain. Like knowing how to ride a bike, I know this song.

At the time I thought that only our class exercised to this song. But it turns out that the record was actually released by the President’s Council on Fitness and distributed to every classroom in the country! As a result, I’m finding that lots of people roughly my age also have the Chickenfat song indelibly burned in. I played it for Amy the other morning and she knew most of the words too though she grew up in the Midwest.

Wonder why youth obesity is an epidemic today? No Chickenfat song. Thanks Defective Yeti.

Speaking of music permanently etched into the crannies of the brain, I love this animation of The Hustle. The hideous font too. Our time was a good time.

Update 2007: Video version from the archives:

Music: Suba :: Abraso