Kleinrock: The first word over the Internet, 1969

Los Angeles Magazine featured an article last month by Leonard Kleinrock - best known for leading the group at UCLA that developed the Arpanet - about the past and future of the Internet. There's a lot of kitchen-of-the-future talk about what the Internet will do for us soon and a lot of good trivial history on how the Internet came to be - not the least of which is the fact that the Internet crashed after transmitting two just letters of a word.

On the structure of the first Net, Kleinrock tells us,

UCLA would be the first node. Other nodes would be the Stanford Research Institute, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. Each node would consist of one or more host computers and an Interface Message Processor, or IMP ... [the IMP] was as big as a refrigerator, with a military-hardened gray metal case and a door the full length of it. Inside is was so ugly it was beautiful. Copper, brass, Three rows of lights and rows of toggle switches. A knob with six stops. A headphone like the ones that the early telephone operators used, with an earpiece made of black Bakelite and a little round microphone to speak into at the end of a curved piece of metal.

Sounds like a hell of a modem, worthy of attention from Mark Richards. If only Comcast had to dispatch these to every customer. Kleinrock says he offered it to the Smithsonian, but they couldn't guarantee it would be on display so he kept it, and it'll be on display at the anniversary in October at UCLA.

At 10:30 p.m. on October 29, 1969, Charley Kline, one of my programmers, and I sat down and started to log on from UCLA to SRI ... All we wanted to do was log on. So Charley typed an L. "You get the L?" "Got the L." "Did you get the O?" "Got the O." Typed the G. "Did you get the G?" And crash! The system went down ... There had been a memory overflow at SRI.

I can see why it crashed. They sent at least 24 bits of information over that puppy. That's asking a lot. The end result being that the first word sent over the Internet was "lo" - Kleinrock says, "as in 'Lo and behold.' Truth is, we couldn't have created a better, more concise message. It was prophetic."

The Great Return of the Infidel

Here's the four paintings put together, in lyrical order:

Robots on a Fast!

4 of 4, from "The Great Return of the Infidel."

A wrap-up of all four tomorrow.

Dogs Eating Chocolate!

3 of 4, from "The Return of the Great Infidel."

Raccons in the Trash!

2 of 4, from "The Return of the Great Infidel."

Righteous Indignation!

New art, featuring lyrics from a song I wrote in 2002 or so, called "The Great Return of the Infidel". I only did a demo recording of it, never a proper studio cut. This is the first in a series of four I'll post this week:

The lyrics to the chorus went, 

Righteous indignation! Raccoons in the trash! 

Dogs eating chocolate! Robots on a fast!

But some people never learn

And prophecies might burn you

And this is the great return of the infidel

Someday I'll get around to giving it a proper recording. Until then, just visualizations of the main characters.

Zach Galifianakis' ads for Absolut Vodka

Watch all three of these. I actually watched the last one, at over seven minutes, twice. I think of these, compared to, like, McDonalds' smarmy latte ads, and I think, advertising needs help to get to this level. It's just not there yet.

Christian Lander on CNN

I'm not sure which I love more, Stuff White People Like or its related predecessor, Black People Love Us!

Coppola on Finian's Rainbow

"Films are like haiku; they express a thought or an emotion in very few words and using just the being of the actors to do it."

—Francis Ford Coppola, from the director's commentary of "Finian's Rainbow"

I recently finished Moviemakers' Master Class by Laurent Tirard, a book I picked up in Cannes during the film festival last year. Over the course of reading, I compiled a short list of films I had to watch for homework. One of those films came from this quote by Ethan Coen:

"I remember when we worked with Nicolas Cage on Raising Arizona, we talked about his uncle, Francis Ford Coppola, and told him that  Finian's Rainbow, which hardly anyone has ever seen, was one of our favorite films. He told his uncle, who I think has considered us deranged ever since."

So obviously I put down the book and Netflixed Finian's Rainbow. Have you heard of it? No, no you haven't. No one has. It may as well be a Mystery Science Theater 3000 special, except that would've distinguished it some. So I watched it. Actually, I couldn't finish it. I shut it off about when the creepy male lead Woody is romancing his way into Petula Clark's heart by forcing himself on her in the woods at midnight. (They called that courting back in the day.) But today I put on the commentary by Francis Ford Coppola, and found it to be an excellent experience. Much better than watching the belabored 145 minute musical itself.

In the commentary, Coppola explains how he got the job directing the Warner Brothers musical — Fred Astaire's final pic — at age 29, with only a thesis film under his belt. He also critiques his job as a young director, musing how the young Coppola thought his job was to invent subplots and tell the actors where to go. The experienced Coppola says, rather, it was his job to pare down the film to its essence and help the actors follow their best impulses. His commentary nicely complements Tirard's book, which conspicuously lacks a chapter on Coppola. 

The movie is overlong, though beautiful and swelled with earnest musical naïveté. A leprechaun turns mortal when his pot of gold is stolen. A mute girl dances to communicate what she can't speak. A racist senator is turned into a black man on a magical wish. You know, musical stuff. 

It's an ambitious film, stuck squarely in the tradition of big musicals but with progressive aims and exhausted stereotypes living in awkward coexistence. Coppola tells us what we really want to hear — how his young career dovetailed with the old Hollywood style before departing on a different course of small, personal films, shot on location with handheld cameras, aggressively telling the truth. If nothing else, the movie is worth seeing just for the opening credits, a gorgeous montage of American panoramas from coast to coast. But more to see the curious foundation that launched Coppola's career.

If you missed The Dance Party in LA this weekend...

... you're kidding yourself. Los Angeles was rocked fourfold by my friends from DC, The Dance Party. They demolished a small club east of the 5 called The Airliner Thursday night, flamed the Roxy on Friday, played a raging acoustic set streaming live on Boxeight, and finally tore down a place called Cinespace before leaving Monday morning.

The Dance Party make very good music and put on a very good show, two things many bands fail to do. When they toured with my band and Gist on the Indie Roots tour, they helped make a week of mostly-empty venues feel like a stadium tour. Those are my guitars they're playing, so I'm down from day one, like, tight yo. 

Dig the erotic slow crane up Mick's body at :35. Kinda makes a guy feel uncomfortable.

The Dance Party is the third DC band I've been able to catch out here in DC since moving in 2007. These United States and Le Loup have both crossed the nation too, and both put on great shows. Lots of good music coming out of the nation's capitol. Click here for more Dance Party photos and stay tuned for more HD...