Fly, wastrel!

I just discovered Google Earth, a program that allows users to fly around the world from aerial and horizontal views. Pretend you're walking around London... Beijing... Baltimore... or hell, let's get crazy -- Prospect Street in front of the Rock -


Imagine what this will be in 20 years. Maybe we'll be able to interact with doors and trees, maybe even computers, in some weird pseudo-real, virtual reality kind of world. It reminds me, a bit, of looking across a hall of mirrors at your own reflection, and the one behind that, and the you behind that, and the you behind that you...

Thank you to everyone who welcomed me to the wonderful world of Brown! I still can't wrap my mind around the on-campus, smokeless bar - packed on a Wednesday night. Or the ingenuity of Josh's origami flowers. Or the wealth of porn that Bevan proudly touts. You could decorate the entire house with three of those magazines!!

You stay classy, Providence.

Phonograph cylinders online

You can access some of the first commercially recorded audio material at the website of the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project of UCSB. They have converted 6,000 cakewalks, rags, novelty tunes, racist songs, vaudeville gags, and marches from wax cylinder to digital format. Check out this important and oft-overlooked part of our cultural heritege. One of my favorite tracks is "I'm a Yiddish Cowboy"(1908) by Edward Meeker.

Blogfight, ended.

Yeah, whatever Jenny. My dad can still beat up your dad.

BLOGFIGHT!

Bryan,

You completely missed my point!!! I threw in "my angsty basement writings" in the list as farce, because though they are also from Concord, they in no way compare to the spectabulousness that Henry and Ralph brought to the world.I took offense specifically to your mockery of "little shit town" New England because you of all people are NOT borne of anything resembling shit. Why else would I want to hit you with history?

And Hawthorne was not Concordian, but he moved & lived there for a while, and I would hope that counted for something.

NOW IF YOU'LL EXCUSE ME I HAVE A SHITTY RADIO SHOW TO PUT ON!

OMFGROFLOL and any other linguistic monstrosity you can think of.

Good riddance,
Jenny

p.s. What are you doing Thursday the 23rd? Will you stop for tea or a beer?

In defense of Henry David

Jenny Chang wrote:

"If I could hit you with a thousand copies of Civil Disobedience, Walden, Little Women, The Scarlet Letter, every fascicle of angst-ridden writing I could find out of my basement, and whatever the hell else came out of our 'crazy little shit town', I would. WOW. Guess who's NOT coming to Providence in 9 days to visit Bryan!!!!"

It seems to be in style nowadays to trash Emerson, Thoreau, and all the other authors we were forced to consume in large quanitities for high school American Lit. Even upon reading "Walden" just last year, Alan reported back to say he was unimpressed by the founder of civil disobedience's writings about his oh-so-profound stay in the backwoods of my very own Concord, Massachusetts.

Personally, I remain thoroughly IMpressed by Thoreau's progressive thought at a time when ideas of civil disobedience, vegetarianism, spirituality minus organized religiousity, abolitionism, and general hippie-esque harmony with the natural and social worlds around us, were regarded by the majority as extremist and, frankly, stupid.

I don't speak for Hawthorne (not concordian) or Alcott (embarassingly concordian), but what is angsty or irrelevant about Thoreau and Emerson? Not really into their writing? Fine. But I remain proud of the fact that these guys came from my little town. Guys who understood they didn't have to agree with their government's actions, that people spend so much time worrying about our small little lives that its easy to lose sight of our role in nature, our role as moral human beings. Love 'em or hate 'em, "angsty" seems an insult to a couple of concerned citizens looking for ways to affect positive change in their society and had the courage to write and speak out about it.

Jenny, if you don't like the "angsty," then by all means, read up on the Scarlet Letters of the world as they enforce the beloved puritan status quo. The beauty of New England is that despite the stodgy puritans like Hawthorne that once owned this town, it has now emerged as a hotbed for progressive thought that as often comes from crazy isolated bookworm farmers as the urban intelligentsia. This current state comes from a path blazed by the Emersons and Thoreaus of yesteryear, so please think again before making fun of the pond I've so often used as the site of my own transcendental musings, and that we've both swum in, pissed in, and loved.

Five Vermont towns endorse move to impeach president

Sometimes I'm proud to be a part of crazy little shit town New England.

On Television

There is a family not far from campus I have been babysitting for the past four years, taking care of their kids, their diapers, their dog, and other domestic responsibilities I have grown to appreciate during the most stressful times at the university. When I first started as a freshman, the boys would beg me to play monkey in the middle, catch, tag football, and other exhausting activities I pretended to have the energy for, for their sake. Late at night, we would pretend to be armies, firefighters, or aliens – sometimes all three – until the clock struck 8:30 whereupon I gleefully opened my biochemistry notes and began yet another session of fun.

I hardly noticed time passed between my visits – but then it came. Insidious at first, even modest, the way it lurked underneath that 48” HD-TV screen. A drab gray box, and only one controller, used by the father on those rare afternoons from work. I don’t remember when the gray box was replaced by a bigger, better, black one, but it happened one day. An extra controller showed up. And then another. Pretty soon I got hankerings, a Need for Speed, or Tony Hawk's Skateboard Challenge, and when the kids went to bed I’d push in Halo (rated M for Mature) and pretend to pop off my bosses, professors, and colleagues.

All good fun, until this Christmas, when a smaller, smoother-looking white box arrived under the television. I was in the kitchen, munching away at their leftover chicken wings and pizza, watching the younger child crawl across the living room in search of Need for Speed III.

I squinted. Was the Satellite TV still on? Had they forgotten to switch to the white box? Something wasn’t right. Cingular ads started popping up, and a car flew across the screen, landing in front of a buxom, blonde, real-looking woman.

“Off! Turn it off! I’m not letting you play this.”
“But it’s Need for Speeeeeed, this is the only game you let us playyyyyy.”

This was true. But no longer. Not with Miss Hussy’s too-real (two real?) titties jiggling all over the passenger side. I had morals, dammit, I did.

I thought of this incident as I stared at a microphone yesterday at the radio station I work at in Baltimore. We were on our five-minute NPR news break before the next segment, and I marveled at this microphone, the way the black foam glistened in places, in the dim light of the studio. There were tiny hairs that had settled on it, alternating between white and invisible, depending on how I turned my head.

The engineer of the show, John, heard me thinking out loud. Isn’t it crazy, how real it is. And for five minutes, two college kids responsible for running the Baltimore’s only on-air news station fixated themselves to an insignificant microphone that seemed to have life of its own. We prayed that the boxes beneath our television sets would never get so sophisticated as to replicate what we were looking at and where we were. For art to replicate life would require a rethinking of reality, something we were both too lazy to take on. We prayed, both of us atheists, that the vision beyond Pentium chips and Microsoft would never be fully realized.

What we didn't realize was that our wishes are sixty years too late.

Opening Pandora's Box

In response to Alan's assertion that within a user-preference network, one could simply...

"...divide each probability by the total popularity of the band in question, the Beatles quantity would be greatly diminished relative to the Children of Bodom quantity, and the preference-based Pandora would deliver us Opeth fans the truly similar Children of Bodom and not the merely popular Beatles."

Maybe I'm not fully getting your method, Alan, but it seems that someone really into British bands from the 60s would be penalized for liking such a popular band. Dividing out the total popularity would advantage the more obscure bands of that genre, where someone could conceivably simply know that they generally like the Beatles and want to hear more songs of theirs.

Yes, a program like Pandora is conceived precisely to allow access to music not normally played on the radio or universally known (read: obscure) but to me the beauty of Pandora.com is its relative lack of regard for fads and other artificial, arbitrary, human forms of classification of art. Granted, it has to use some language of classification to run its algorithm, but in this case it limits the subjectivity by breaking things down into what presumably is a more basic and objective level of analysis, ie "features."

In this way, I get to listen to music that isn't weighed down by the baggage of broad musical classifications like "indie rock" or "emo" or "nu-metal." What do these terms mean anyway? If they have quantifiable qualities that turn me on or off to them, then that should be sorted out by my feature-based preferences that I clue Pandora in on. I like not having my musical selections dictated by well worn threads through the contemporary music scene. Each suggestion thus seems that much purer, and has the potential to break down barriers between musical castes that may have been imaginary to begin with.

Some Funny

I found this on "Best of craigslist" while browsing around. It made me lol.
Link : http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/about/best/sea/134426482.html

Screw it, I'm watching Beyond Thunderdome

Here's a link and an excerpt about Mel Gibson's newest movie:

"I wanted to shake up the stale action-adventure genre," Gibson told Time for a story on the magazine's Web site. "So I think we almost had to come up with something utterly different like this."

"Apocalypto" is set in pre-Columbian Mexico and is being shot on the fringe of southern Mexico's rain forests. It addresses the end of civilizations and contains warnings about environmental degradation and political fear-mongering.

Personally, I think that something in Mel Gibson's psyche snapped, and now he's convinced that he can make important films. It's not that I don't like art movies. The problem is that Mel Gibson's idea of an art movie is Mad Max written in a different language, with religious overtones.

In order to make a bad idea seem poignant, Mel Gibson has to make it startling. Granted, I'm only judging based upon the Passion of the Christ, but would anyone have found it meaningful if it wasn't basically Mortal Kombat in Aramaic? Hell, Tarantino (sort of) released the same movie over winter break this year. It was called Hostel, and critics weren't exactly thrilled with it - "Silly, bloody nonsense that should appeal to hormonally challenged teens," according to Boo Allen of the illustrious Denton Record Chronicle. Stick Jesus and Pontius Pilate into it though, and you have a Baptist blockbuster flick.

Mel Gibson isn't alone in his methods. Go into any fiction class, or for that matter read some bad fiction in general. Even when a bad author has a good idea, the story will invariably end in murder, or rape, or torture (or alternately the story is about boy-girl college relationships, take your pick). Uncreative people go for bombast, always. The thing is, you need to be able to tie your themes together or else you've wasted a good idea. And, using bombast or shock-tactics as a crutch prevents you from actually tying anything together.

Example: so, you've got a story. A young German mysteriously becomes a gigantic beetle. And you've got a killer twist - it's because his mother was sexually assaulted, and as a young boy he had to watch! Guess what, Kafka, your reader is going to say, "Wow, never saw that one coming," and then he's never going to think about it again.

This isn't to say that you can't write a good murder story, of course. It's just that when you tackle ideas like that, you need a delicate touch, something bad writers and Mel Gibson both lack. And adding to it, Mel Gibson has taken the whole "what a shock!" idea to a new level, in which the entirety of his story is fraught with violence and dark import. And thus we have the Passion of the Christ, a 3 hour paean to masochism itself.

But hey, who knows. Maybe Apocalypto will bring Mel Gibson back to the heights he reached with Lethal Weapon, or at least The Patriot. And I doubt it can be worse than What Women Want.

Baby Teeth Music

Guys and Gals, here is a link to a great new song by Baby Teeth. They hale from Chicago and the frontman, Pearly Sweets (not his real name), is the brother of my friend in New York, Ben. Some info from lujorecords.com: They made the EP on a dare, with each member working in complete isolation at home, the only rule being that the title had to be "Heather." In a way these three songs are broader than a regular album 'cause you get to witness all the chops that usually get left on the editing floor. Jim Cooper made sparkles gallop across the horizon; Peter Andreadis made a slinky cowboy, umbrella-drink jam; and frontman Pearly Sweets composed a deeply mellow, tender experience. As Andreadis says on "Heather," "You know L.A. is fake and New York is crazy as hell"--in the Midwest, we wash behind our ears and do it with the lights on. Their new EP is called "For the Heather's." If this link doesn't work, just go to lujorecords.com and download the mp3 entitled "Heather via JC." Selah.

http://www.lujorecords.com/media/Baby%2520Teeth%2520-%2520Heather%2520via%2520JC.mp3