Moldy Peaches on The View

Cultural collision on The View

The Moldy Peaches of antifolk fame were on ABC's The View on Monday. It's a trip to see them on national television, and I must say, a cultural triumph. Without a movie like Juno, this song and this act would never be on mainstream television. I would still guess that the average producer would be perplexed by the performance. They tried their best to get some camera dynamics in there, but it plays odd against Adam and Kimya's placid presence. 

It's nice to see they'll be playing DC tonight at Crooked Beat, one of the last remaining record stores. That store can fit about eight people at a time, so it should be an interesting show. 

It occurs to me, now that the Moldy Peaches are everywhere, that this is a pretty amazing case of trickle-up culture-nomics. Kimya and Adam have been playing for over a decade, and have even been on hiatus for years, but the success of Juno pulled the trigger for them. I imagine there'll be a halo effect, and indie directors will emulate Jason Reitman's selection of unknown artists. It's one thing to do it with a pop-ready sound like the Shins on Garden State — it's another thing to do it with a band that sings "Downloading Porn with Dave-o." 

I imagine Jeffrey Lewis' stuff will pop up in an indie flick next.

Rob Getzschman in Greenwich Village, c. 2000

My friend Vic just pulled this off the shelf, one of my first performances after moving to New York City. This was at the Baggott Inn on West 3rd, at an open mic. The club never had what you'd call a scene around it, but it was a place a lot of antifolkers played when they were new or looking for somewhere to play besides Avenue A. 

I love Victor's summary of the night: "Anti-Folk artist Rob Getzschman delights a young upwardly mobile crowd of middle management execs with his melodic ballads of working man blues." So yeah, cool club. 

The first song is the first off my first album, so it's interesting to see it in context when it was a mainstay in my songlist. The other song, "Manual Labor Pains" was a crowd favorite (clearly), though I only recorded a demo of it. 

Kinda painful to watch.

The shower poof as model of expanding universe

(Fig.1) Negative illustrates

energy at the core.

Now I'm no doctor of physics, and in fact, I wouldn't even consider myself an armchair cosmologist, but there's something about a shower poof that seems ideally suited to modeling the expanding universe. Follow me here, because this blog post will be plagiarized by doctoral candidates, so I need you to bear witness to the genius. It all started here. Or actually, in my shower.

When you buy a shower poof, something amazing happens — people brand you a metrosexual. Your sexuality will be questioned around a theme of health and beauty products. This can be avoided by not telling your male friends that you use a poof instead of a washcloth. But when one experiences the sheer volume of suds that a poof has to offer, no rational being — hetero, homo or asexual — would pass up a shower poof.

That hurdle overcome, you can observe the slow transformation that occurs after you buy a shower poof. Typically they come tightly bound around a central core, where the fabric is gathered in ruffles. After months of use, the fabric pulls away from the core, expanding in folded planes away from the core. 

(Fig.2) The shower poof.

I can only imagine this parallels a model of the universe as it expands. The photos I've attached here resemble something like a big bang, expanding in mathematical planes away from an origin in three dimensions. And imagining the relationships at the atomic level, I can't help but think it would make a perfect fractal of the universe.

I've color corrected these photos so that one can better envision what I'm talking about. Fig.1 is a negative image of my poof as it hangs in the shower. Fig.2 is the same poof against a black backdrop. As in these images, an explosion the size of the big bang wouldn't send matter and energy hurdling away at an equal rate in all directions; rather, waves would form and confront space at different intervals, creating an expanding cloud something like a shower poof. 

Moreover, some of the color intensity seems to illustrate how energy or gases could gather in the folds and toward the core. Perhaps it doesn't relate, but it reminds me that light bends around planets and that some physicists propose that even the laws of physics evolve over time. 

Fig.3 The unbound poof.

What's interesting to me is that a shower poof is actually one long plane, bunched again and again (Fig.3), and as it collapses on itself, it becomes spherical. A priori reasoning leads me to deduce that the universe grows closer to planar as it expands, much as planets share a plane of orbit. (Don't they? Is that typical of solar systems of every kind?)

This post is open to all sorts of criticism, as I have nothing but imagination for credentials. I'd like to say I've read some pop cosmology like A Brief History of Time, but really I'm just riffing. So if you're an expert, feel free to enlighten us with the latest theories. It is my hope that breaking this discussion on the blogosphere will out enough closeted poof users to dissolve the stigma associated with using a shower poof. I don't think Stephen Hawking has to put up it.

The erudite and eloquent David Lynch iPhone ad

There's something so pleasing about seeing David Lynch curse judiciously at the evolving mores of media culture. I love the clip of him summarizing product placement in movies as, "Bullshit ... total fucking bullshit." The way he builds to a personally offended conclusion in this clip is only topped by the addition of the twinkly iPhone music. 

Eight days til Macworld

And I hope they'll be announcing this rumored product: an iMac display that is actually a docking station for an ultra-slim MacBook Pro.

Wow. Sometimes Apple's innovations are so simple, they could be the work of a child. And by the look of the patent drawings, maybe this one was:

Figure 1B features a liger pawing fancifully at it. Maybe this is just a cleverly crafted rumor — it wouldn't be too hard to have faked a patent application to build some buzz. But I have to say, if this is a hoax, it's a seductive one.

Justified By Academia Re: "Under The Bus"

Having academia independently confirm one's own findings is so validating:

... 19 words or phrases ... appear in Lake Superior State University's annual List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness. The school in Michigan's Upper Peninsula released its 33rd list Monday, selecting from about 2,000 nominations.

The list ... included "waterboarding," "perfect storm," "under the bus" and "organic." Also: "It is what it is," which Jeffrey Skrenes of St. Paul, Minn., said "accomplishes the dual feat of adding nothing to the conversation while also being phonetically and thematically redundant." (Link.)

"Perfect storm" is another I've had on my personal blacklist as well. People love to say that one, even if it's regarding a momentary traffic jam in a mall parking lot. Watching the shelf-life of words is a beautiful thing. It's now five hours into 2008, and it's nice to see these selections officially deemed defunct.

2Wire Error Message Seems To Filter Content (UPDATE)

UPDATE 8/08: After many variations of workarounds, a user over at IMLocation found what would seem to be a definitive solution:

First, go into the Management Console of your 2Wire at the address: 

http://gateway.2wire.net/management

Now, in the Advanced tab, click Configure Services. Once you are there, de-check the boxes for all “notifications” about connections or the like.

Thanks to SeanStreiff for the update and majestico for the solution.

Useless 2Wire error message.

I'm working from St. Louis on holiday, using my parents' ISP, SBC Global. Parsing their service is a 2Wire modem/router that fancies itself an intelligent component, sending error messages and blocking traffic where it should be acting as an open gateway. Ironically, all these messages come from the local url gateway.2wire.net, even as it stops your communications.

As Vincent Gable explored here, there are so many problems with this error, it's hard to know where to begin.

First, it's an error message that leads with a "Success" headline, telling the user, "The error has been successfully resolved." If that's the case, why can't I reach the page I navigated to?

Second, the message urges you to quit in order to continue: "Please close down your browser and restart it to continue browsing online." So apparently the error hasn't been successfully resolved, because I have to restart. That would indicate there's still a problem.

Third, the "masthead.gif" at the top contains confusing directions and grammatical errors. It tells the user, "Internet Explorer may display a security message that is prevents [sic] the file download needed to proceed with AT&T Yahoo! Registration." What? a) This gif shows up in both Firefox and Safari; b) "that is presents..." may as well read "all your bases are belong to us..."; c) "file download" is redundant; and d) I didn't navigate towards anything resembling AT&T or Yahoo! registration. Oh, and the arrow icon points to the current tab, as if an error message will be popping up there for some reason.

Fourth, beneath that line, another message tells you, "If you see the message, click the message bar [file icon] and select 'Download file...' to continue." Hmmm. a) no message ever appears; and b) why would I want to download a file to complete a registration I didn't navigate to?

Fifth and finally, this success/error message pops up at random and seems to act more like a content filter than anything like to a technical resolution. It seems to happen on certain pages, while others load normally. The only bug is the page itself, declaring it has resolved a bug. It also eats your url, so you can't click "Back" to return to your page. Most infuriatingly, why is my modem sending me messages? It should be a portal, not an autonomous component arbitrating the data passing through it. This makes me especially uneasy because it's AT&T, who is complicit with delivering personal information to the NSA.

Consequently, I haven't been able to reach my business webmail and other sites I need to. Thanks for your defective design, 2Wire and AT&T. Your "Success" message has kept me from working all day.

The TSA Is Curiously Akin To DRM

For the holidays, I booked three one-way tickets on three airlines that required negotiating five different airports. And everywhere I go, I see the operations of the TSA as a grand, tired farce on the American public. An op-ed in the Times sums it up pretty well (via BoingBoing):

The truth is, regardless of how many pointy tools and shampoo bottles we confiscate, there shall remain an unlimited number of ways to smuggle dangerous items onto a plane. The precise shape, form and substance of those items is irrelevant. We are not fighting materials, we are fighting the imagination and cleverness of the would-be saboteur.

And thus the TSA's most visual security efforts amount to little more than production value. Theater. Disrobing down to my socks into Rubbermaid bins before a flight is useless and dehumanizing, and makes me feel no more safe than before the almighty 9/11. As the article points out, the agency is a reactive beast, perpetually one step behind the latest plot, taking away pointy things and liquids and scanning shoes years after terrorist plots sought to exploit these means.

In this, there is a curious similarity between the TSA and the purveyors of DRM. The countless man-hours invested in both can be undone in moments, resulting in either a) a fiendish terrorist tragedy, or b) a duplicated DVD. In the case of the TSA, their porous security safeguarding can be broken through the unanticipated breach, rendering all reactive counter-measures for shoes and liquids useless. In the case of DRM, their millions of dollars in development can be defeated by one hacker in a few hours on a home computer.

The Transportation Security Administration and Digital Rights Management both seek to beat insurmountable odds by locking up impossibly porous systems. The trouble is, they can never solve the system for the 0.01% who actually want to break it, and instead present inherently flawed experiences for the other 99.9%. The antics of the TSA don't anticipate the dedicated terrorist, but do inconvenience millions who just want to travel from point a to point b. The efforts of DRM purveyors don't stop the avid hacker, but do inconvenience millions who just want to move their media from device a to device b.

The fundamental difference, of course, is that terrorists want to use public property for nefarious ends, while hackers want to use their private property (or licenses) for private entertainment. The TSA seeks to protect the public, while DRM seeks to restrict the public. Both achieve terrible results.

Solutions diverge as well. In principle, the TSA is a much-needed protective agency. It should, however, be the last line of defense before terrorists reach our transportation systems. Intelligence and immigration should police suspected parties instead of dragnetting the masses moments before boarding. DRM, meanwhile, is a principle of restricting fair use of copyrighted material. The notion is that profits can be maximized by restricting access to content. On the contrary, the free use of such material acts as promotion and creative fuel, encouraging properties far more monetizable than expensive locking mechanisms.

Only the overhaul of the underlying principles will effect any change in these flawed systems. In both cases, the systems are inhibiting the growth of the industries they seek to protect: because of them, I fly as little as possible and buy no media infected with DRM. In other words, the TSA is killing the airline industry. And DRM is killing music.

Radiohead made more on InRainbows than all other albums combined

Here's a mindblower from Thom Yorke in the most recent Wired, where he talks with David Byrne about music:

In terms of digital income, we've made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together, forever — in terms of anything on the Net. And that's nuts. It's partly due to the fact that EMI wasn't giving us any money for digital sales. All the contracts signed in a certain era have none of that stuff.

So InRainbows, released as a cost-optional download, made more for the band in three months than Pablo Honey, The Bends, OK Computer, Kid A, Amnesiac, and Hail To The Thief combined.

The qualifier is "in terms of digital income" of course — and Radiohead isn't on iTunes, the top-selling digital marketplace. It looks like they're on Amazon's, and I'd check Napster and eMusic, but you can't search their titles unless you're a subscriber (a design flaw for their services).

But still, wow. Three months trumping a storied 15-year catalog is pretty amazing. EMI is either doing something wrong or keeping all the money for themselves. I'd guess both.

Vis à vis, the bean pie.

Here's a short doc by a classmate in my masters program. It's about bean pies. Vote for it if you like.

I had a bean pie once, thinking it was pumpkin pie. It was good. I didn't know it was an American Muslim cultural innovation. But now I feel diversificationally validated.

Now I'll say, "Pass the bean pie — my brother. As-salaam alaikum."