Atomized Mk ii

Santa of Ames Road

It is time again for my minor key annual event the 2015 Christmas pixel picture. Where I, who cannot draw pin up a postage stamp picture created at pixel size where very little can go wrong.

 

My first idea had been a Santa con (convention) like event that I had witnessed in DC a few years ago. Before I was aware of such tomfoolery and seeing it threw me for a loop at first. So I conceived of a picture of many Santas in random downtown DC lobbyist canyon landscape. I considered tying that to a more elaborate many Santas theory and further thought of bringing in a reference to the great hover-board debacle of 2015 by having one Santa rolling in flames while another chases him with a fire extinguisher. I dropped this idea. It was SNL goofing on hover-boards on the 19th that was the final nail.

I came up with the current idea by noting my long held tendency to come late to the full sentimentality of the Christmas holiday season. Usually I am ready for Christmas about five or six days after New Years when the clock is striking twelve on the twelfth day, and the prospect of three months of winter stretch out like a long weary road before me. Note the full moon I included, this is fairly rare. It happen last in 1977, and won't happen agian until 2034. Also no snow -- there is no snow in DC this year, nor any up through the artic circle along the East Coast. It's nearly beach weather.

This year, last tuesday as it happened, a small event gave me a nudge into the season. The Prince Georges, or more likely Montgomery county fire department (the boundary runs between my building and those across the street) pulled into the neighborhood. Festooned with lights and blaring music. It offloaded a Santa and a crowd soon formed. Parents got their children out of bed (many children in pajamas with a jacket thrown on) held by the hand or in their mothers arms even though it was 9pm and on a school night. The crowd in my neighborhood is entirely Hispanic it is an immigrant neighborhood, so the small talk of the children and explanations of the parents was beyond me. Two of the children stood out in my memory after it was over. One small child was so exited and seeking to have her picture taken at every aspect the fire truck provided, that while she was attempting to skip around the truck, beside it, on it, in front of it. She was actually accomplishing something of a hybrid between a skip and a hop as if there were a trampoline under her feet where ever she went. She simply bounced. Another older girl perhaps ten or eleven, just stood quietly making no sound or movement evenly expressioned until the end when the truck pulled away, when she spun around and broke in the the biggest grin of the evening. A true believer in this particular type of magic.

 

This was a glimpse at the special and enduring joy of Christmas. Which, yes, does escape from adults. This joy isn't complex, it doesn't require special understandings, it is a swarming of the senses, the promise of a special moment. Nothing needs to be explicitly known of the expectations of, and failures of mankind, the need for a Messiah. Only of the perennial return of a comfortably rotund jolly elf Saint and a spirit of generosity.

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Thursday, 24 December 2015 13:15 EST #

Rehoboth Beach Film Festival 2015

I attended the Rehoboth Beach Independent Film Festival again back at the beginning of last month. Through the first weekend (November 6-8) at least. The beach isn't only for summer. This year with far fewer screens the festival ran to a second weekend, with some screenings running midweek. The current set-up has films running at the Cape Henlopen High School (CHHS) available only on the weekend, and the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC). A permanent main site is bought, but is still a work in progress while the building "Dartmouth Plaza" or "Behind the WAWA is renovated towards its new purpose.This years "home tent" hosted at the new restaurant brewpub, the Crooked Hammock, on the Kings highway spur between Rt. 1 and alt 9

Most of the films I did see in that brief span were what you can call small budget indie movies, that is the the point of the festival after all. These are the economy car of motion pictures their special charm: not trying to be all things to all people. Some sublimely don't even try.

 

• In the first film. A Rising Tide A Rising Tide (2015) - IMDb which I have consistently remembered only as the "Atlantic City restaurant Movie" a young man returns home to his families seaside restaurant in Atlantic City after his high-end New York eatery fails. Hurricane Sandy washes that place out and attempts to rebuild it meet difficulties. Fortunately it appears that hope floats -- which could also have been the title of this movie.
• Next was Dough Dough (2015) - IMDb. Veteran actor Jonathan Pryce is the lead in this movie; playing an elderly Jewish baker in London, proprietor of a gently failing store-front business. He takes in the son of his immigrant African cleaning women to be his assistant only later discovering the family is Muslim. The improbability of the movies plot is not the point - its a message comedy. The only enemy is unconcern.
• Richard Gere was the lead of the Benefactor The Benefactor (2015) - IMDb although Theo James (Divergent) does well by this also. A doctor his wife and a wealthy friend are making plans to start-up a children's hospital when they are all in a car accident and the doctor and is wife are killed. Four or five years later Gere (the benefactor) worms his way into their orphaned daughters life now married to young internist Luke (James) showering money influence and obsessive compulsive attention on them. Forget Gin and Tonics Morphine and Diet Soda is your man
• The last Diamond The Last Diamond (2014) - IMDb is a straight forward caper movie. Well, as straight forward as those kinds of things get. Its full of naifs, sympathetic louses, double-crosses, and diamonds. Which are, after all, forever. All the characters are played by French people. Mainly Yves Attal, born in Tel Aviv, and Berenice Bejo, born in Buenos Aires. Prior to the ascendency of the Front National the French were an inclusive people.
• The last film the Adderall Diaries The Adderall Diaries (2015) - IMDb was the film I most wanted to see of the ones I selected going in. Afterwards I wondered why. Not that it was a bad movie -- it wasn't it was a tough movie to be sure, but the performances were all solid. I don't think I've ever liked Ed Harris in a movie better. It was just that it was a film about distinctly unpleasant people. The author of the book the film is taken from, Stephen Elliott (whom James Franco is playing), writing in the gritty chemical-fueled style that is sometimes taken for realism or humanism does not seem to be overly concerned to be consistently taken for a human being. I did like his character's obsession with pour-over preparation coffee.

None of the movies grabbed me as much as ones in previous years. I didn't see any documentaries which is one thing I look for in any film festival. However I only saw first weekend (it had a 2nd weekend and a midweek this year) if I were local or had the week to give it I likely would also have tried to see a few other films. A short list of those might have included Marshland Set in Spain just after the end of the Franco era. A small town in Spain's outlands, some missing girls the search and police investigation. Rams (Hrutar): two estranged brothers and their sheep flocks. Set in Iceland was the theme country of this years festival. And the documentary Crocodile Gennadiy concerning an Ex Soviet soldier turned preacher to the down and out. Also a short about life in North Korea called Pebbles at your door.

 

General Observations about the Festival. It was too spread out geographical and temporally. This was an unavoidable repercussion of the severing of ties with the main (only) Rehoboth movie theatre complex. the Atlantic theaters. This hopefully will be ameliorated by the new site which its built in theatre and screening rooms, and continued relations with the Cape Henlopen High School. The local newspaper, the Cape Gazette, did a read out of the festival afterwards Rehoboth film festival is still about the movies - By Chris Flood - CapeGazette.com. The RBFF will be keeping the nine day format (which was a function of fewer screens) for next year though it will end on Saturday of the second week. They found that people go home on Sunday. Despite attendance seeming down, things went smoothly enough that they expect attendance will recover in the future. They may introduce smart phone ticket purchase next year as well. People thought the Crooked Hammock was a nice setting for the "big tent" but people missed the sociableness lent by walking proximity to the films. The RBFF say they will devote further thought to that.

It's that none of this helps with their real problem. The Festival's demographics are unsustainable and the film selection may not helping. It isn't the appeal the Festival has to the LBGT crowd, it is that the whole proceedings are too old and too white. I was one of the younger people there I'm 56. It was well over 99 percent white. Six movies, 3 days I saw two Asian people (three if I count an Indian person) and one black women. The ratio of men to women was fairly even though. My nephew looked over the schedule and thought there might be a few films he'd like to see, but not enough to miss pre-season wrestling practice.

On the other hand, or at least put in perspective, Coastal Sussex county (the Rehoboth Beach area) is predominantly a retirement community. One would probably see this dynamic in any retirement community. Sun City Arizona or places similar. The Film Festival does draw a lot of locals retirees. Others coming from the main land presumably are empty nesters. My younger sister points out any one who still has school-aged kids in the household can't make it out to events like this. But a younger millennial flavored crowd does come out to lower slower Delaware. You can find these people in numbers every weekend touring the Dogfish Head brewery in Milton. People like that are needed and films that appeal to this demographic, and not just a few, need to be shown (like Searching for SugarMan from a few years ago). Dog Fish Head I note is a major sponsor of the festival. The Rehoboth Beach Film Society has got to start making changes in their program -- for the annual festival --- and over the course of the year. The grey base may seem comfortable and familiar. But its not enough to keep this operation going.

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Satuday, 12 December 2015 20:45 EST #

Migrancy

In the Mediterranean there is a sense of crisis. In the sea and adjacent lands -- An impinging reality northern and western nations try to ignore, but that is quite real for nations on their periphery. People are moving and in vast numbers. It has been occurring and increasing for years. A product of ongoing wars and ignored injustices deemed far off enough and too inconsequential to trouble with. Now with this past summer we see the number of displaced persons refugees and migrating populations reach levels not see in the world since the cataclysm of World War Two The refugee crisis: 9 questions you were too embarrassed to ask - Vox. All this is made ever worse by the fact as the season turns to late Fall and winter the flow of refugees shows no signs of abateing.

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees is one of the international body tasked with tracking such matters. Vox.com's explainers have used various graphics of theirs but helpfully they've collected them all here Refugees/Migrants Emergency Response - Mediterranean - Regional Overview This year alone some 180,000 refugees had attempted a transit of the Mediterranean sea to Europe. This just from January to June, over the summer months it was that number again at least. And this nothing about those moving out of various strife in Africa through Libya and parts of littoral West Africa bringing another 50,000 refugees this year alone.

After World War Two the Displaced Persons Act - Wikipedia of 1948 was designed to provide 200.000 VISAs for refugees in just the first two years of the bill. This was to deal with the 11 to 22 million people estimated to be displaced at the end of the war. Many of these, I imagine, would have like the orphan boy (played by Dean Stockwell) in the 1949 movie the Boy with Green Hair. for anyone who has seen that movie.

The primary movement this year has been from Syria and its multifaceted civil war with subsidiary movements from Iraq and Afghanistan, and their wars.

As these wars were tolerated even encouraged by other nations as though they solved other problems the out flow of people who wanted no part of it became untenable.

It is a crisis in that tremendous numbers of human lives are being lost in this unnecessarily perilous transit. They die singularly and in unfathomable groups 800 dead in a un-seaworthy wreck of a boat, packed into a box truck and left abandoned along a highway swept forward by the currents of the criminal human smuggling trade, the conscienceless traffickers. Washed ashore with the Greek island tides.

Early in the season it was seen as merely a matter of the funding from the EU to their Navies and Coast Guards in the Mediterranean. In particular Operation Mare Nostrum "Our Sea" marked the Italian Governments decision to plunge in and try to restore order to the chaos. Using an historically freighted term echoing Italian Nationalism in doing so.

The European nations have set up the agency Frontex to administrate the oversee the borders of the broader Schengen area within which there are no interior passport or visa checks. At the world level in addition to the High Commission for Refugees (not migrants, much of the debate turns on making much of that distinction. There is also an International Organization for Migration (a European originating organization that grew out of the dislocations of World War two). This agency is dedicated to tracking and attempting an orderly movement of migrants in the wake of natural and man-made disasters MIGRATION FLOWS - EUROPE. The type of population movements no state generally desires to deal with or even acknowledge.

Refugee camps in Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt -- which have absorbed these populations for years. Five years for some. These camps are over capacity. There is no work no livelihoods there, and they are no longer safe havens or places where any kind of new life can be started.

Further Lebanon is no longer allowing UNHCR to register refugees lebanon, Turkey is restricting day work opportunities outside the camps Turkey. Both of these events are indications that the idea of temporary solutions and any near-term return to a stabilized Syria is over. See particularly 3rd graphic here "Syrian IDP - European commision" Europe's refugee crisis, explained - Vox.

I've tried coming up with a short list of dichotomies which I hope would span the issue here and give some boundary to it.

• Migrant vs. Refugee
• Open Borders vs fences, tall and barbed
• Legal vs. moral regimes of reasoning
• Economic determinism vs. political regulation
• State vs. trans-national governance- Rational Choice vs. criminality

These largely break down into two broad groups: motivations on the personal and societal level

To those who can only see this vast movement as crazy, illegal, illegitimate, or un-reasoned I would say is that it rather represents rational choice. Further I believe there is a natural human right to mobility. There is no law that chains us to where we were born.

At some point in the late spring and early summer I began seeing pieces advocating radically open borders The case for open borders | openDemocracy. I was surprised by this, perhaps too much in touch with the perspective of the radically closed U S Borders. That people are going to move and relocate by sources of available work and safe living, I understand. That this ought to be a process left largely uncontrolled I did not. By the Fall these pieces The only real solution to Europe's migrant crisis is to let everyone in - Vox were no longer confined to the progressive margins The Case for Getting Rid of Borders - The Atlantic

Europe, an integral part of the Eurasian land mass, already had a receptive arrangement for population movements -- guest worker programs, programs to settle refugee and asylum seekers. For the latter the Dublin Regulation which required individuals to stop and seek adjudication of their status in the first European country they enter rather than traversing them with some final destination in mind. This seems sensible until one looks at the burden it places on the often poorer peripheral states and the insulation it offers to the prosperous northern European states. It is untenable for the former, and not what the migrants desire, this system is breaking down Dublin is over: the rise of Europe's new migrant prisons | openDemocracy. On the 24th of September 2015 representatives of the European Union met to agree to Quota to resettle 120.000 refugees across the the entire Union. The vote not unanimous and almost immediately political figures within individual countries were making public statements that they would not abide by or comply with this agreement.

The nation state has responsibilities. The leaders are the guardians and guarantors of any set of laws/rights that those who formed and adhere to that social compact (citizens) believe they possess. An essential hallmark of a nation is control of its borders. Its ability to tell its citizens that the set of rights and benefits created within belong to them alone. That to be outside the group or leave the group is to lose them. A government is tasked by its people to protect its purported values wealth and way of life.

An emptying middle east 'Syria is emptying' - The Washington Post creates outsiders of its own people. These leaders in weakened legitimacy hope to simplify their task by reducing their care to only their own tribe or coreligionists.

The underlying drivers of population movements are not so much the practical authority of the state as much as the moral authority of the state. And this against moral authority of human dignity and basic human right. I was reading Francis Fukayama's "End of History" Over the summer and his concerns towards the state and its presumptions of identity with the people. The "Coldest of all cold monsters" a phrase of Frederich Nitchze's from Thus Spake Zarathrusta is his take

A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people." It is a lie! Creators were they who created peoples, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life. Destroyers, are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them. Where there is still a people, there the state is not understood, but hated as the evil eye, and as sin against laws and customs. -ch. 11 the New Idol

The voice of the state is never entirely concomitant with its people, the cultural collection they represent. It always is less, it falls short, missing the fullness of spirit of a people. The state's voice is of section, of faction, of an interest laden overgroup. It is an irony that the leaders of our nations and international markets laud globalism as our transcendent achievement. A boarder-less tariff-less conveyance of goods material and money, but not people.

Moreover when the specific topic is jobs and economic success, it is not encouraged to talk about any nation's economy using an initial disparity to engineer a regional hegemony where wealth and opportunity across a wide geographic range is captured and held within national boundaries. Where thereafter the ever increasing inequality is put to work enforcing a status quo of rich and poor, winners and losers. But it does happens that states lock wealth and power up to organize interstate relations for own benefit. Then use this in quiet propaganda of some supposed innate superiority of their subject-citizens.

The idea that the individual rights bequeathed by the state ought only apply to those belonging is an odd assertion in ways. Implicitly they are recognized as universal rights. Asserting them as a members-only state good is a chauvinism that marks nationalism. The state as a closed system of culture (The expanded sense of culture the Germans like to call Kultur).

There is a deep sense of insecurity Europe's Migration Paralysis by Joschka Fischer - Project Syndicate in Europe in many western nations as well. The great lifting tide of the post-war generations culminating in the seeming victory over communism -- as exemplified in the eastern bloc nations. The homogeneity, the material driven economy has achieved a certain stasis and in now turned to a fear of change. A fear of demographic change, One that would upset balances and over turn privilege.

Against this I am hesitant to point out the assumption of open border adherents that certain common progressive ideals prevail among migrating populations of the world. An acknowledgment of equality, legality, freedom and the democratic principle. This may be true, it may not be true. History does not demand it.

For all that; to a person looking for a better life, borders mean nothing and never have or will. For anyone at any point in history. All pertinent moral authority dignity, and agency rests with the the individual.

The distinction between migrant against refugee, useful for policy makers and politicians alike is in reality one phenomenon on a a sliding scale. A population self defined or otherwise defined believing itself cut off from a fair share in a given society may become critical and opposed to the ruling class and in turn oppressed by the dominant majority (or minority). The difference between looking for a better life and be driven away to it is never that great. A policy built on this distinction will never be fully rational and will never survive practical experience.

The world is not a static place with its peoples locked to land and leaders. This is the case between the European Union and adjacent Africa and Middle East, between United States Central America, and the Caribbean, between the south by south east Asian states and the Rohingya people. And in my lifetime's memory Vietnamese boat people that I saw first hand in 1979 while serving on a aircraft carrier in the South China Sea.

Of course from an American perspective nothing can show this in as sharp a relief as to re-focus the migration question to North America of the 1500 1600's. To those population seeking to leave their situations in Europe. Then at once law is understood to be firmly and unassailably on the side of natural movements and rights of property rested on improvements on improvidently held land; a natural law.

Against all evidence and theory migrants and refugees are seen as a threat The big myth about refugees - The Washington Post:. The threat itself is mutable, it is whatever serves the prevailing prejudice. This play against the promise of populations. The late economist Julian Simeon and those that adhere to his thinking have long been utterly convinced that there is little danger and no need overly preparing for the dangers of overpopulation, environmental degradation, or global warming -- to the extent they admit the latter exists at all. Human ingenuity focused through free market forces would solve all problems in real time: But also, to a startling degree, the decision about whether the overall effect of a child or migrant is positive or negative depends on the values of whoever is making the judgment - Ultimate Resource 1981 Julian Simon - Wikipedia

For the right populations; Social Darwinism's slight return. But things change. Climates change already North America has had a foretaste of what may come Worried About Refugees? Just Wait Until We Dust-Bowlify Mexico And Central America | ThinkProgress . In the last instance while the inclination to bar others from from the door may seem justified no continent is permanent to any people. There is no law natural or un-natural that protects man from change.

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Thursday, 26 November 2015 01:30 EST #

twitter Annoyances

They are plenty of things about twitter that annoy me. But there is a subset of these, especially, which I think of as Twitter Annoyances because they seem deliberate, even official. Designed to nudge me one way or another. This is accounting already for the differences between web browser twitter, IoS twitter and Twitter for Mac (which used to be, what, Tweetie?). The latter I like because they seem to have forgotten about it, It has few of their recent "innovations" and is just very basic. I don't have a problem with their various UI's. All the clickables are well sized and don't shift around. But then I've always been a "its a hammer learn how to swing it" kind of guy. It is that everything you do in browser Twitter seems to set your timeline back to the top. Clicking on a picture, clicking on the notification or profile "tab". Clicking on an embedded tweet (embedded tweets the second round of twitters war on RT). All these actions will reset you to the current moment, often hours and hundreds of tweets away from where you were before curiosity struck.

One of their past innovations the red-lined conversation threads that don't always (or frankly, often) locate all of a conversation are useless with still on going conversations leave me doubtful of Twitters ability to to take their basic unwinding of the world in real time and spin it around into easily digestible chunks Again this is a swimming-against-the-stream issue that crops up under the surface of many twitter annoyances.

Another thing that Twitter is loathe to let you do is walk away from it and expect you can pick up where you left off. There is an ever shrinking back-end to your time-line. It seems to be around four hours or 300 tweets which ever comes first. During the recent GOP debate it was well under one hour. With Twitter the past is a forgotten country; you either have keep up or break with your chosen timeline.

In mobile Twitter clicking on the interstitial spaces to load the next erg of one hundred tweets or so leaves you on the wrong side of them. Generally this is scarcely an hour. Forcing you to scroll down a dozen or more screens trying to remember the tweet you were looking at when you clicked. Twitter is designed in reverse chronological order. The present is always at the top. They would rather you consumed itthat way, and not deeply. I can only imagine that many people like myself typically scroll upwards surfacing towards that present moment. The "new tweets" notice in iOS mobile is another red flag that twitter desperately wants you to abandon any close reading of those you follow, and only think about that last newest shiny tweet. The "While you were out" feature, a sop to any guilt you might have.

This, Whether they or I are misguided here, is obnoxious behavior for a (pseudo) service product. And I say that because I don't doubt that it's intentional. I've heard others reference it, Its not a technical glitch hung on a platform. The question is what does it mean? They want you to stay at the shallow end of the pool. They don't really want you to view twitter from wherever you left off to the present. If they ever did, they've lost faith in it now. They don't really believe you actually follow all those people you say you follow.

The reasons for this are manifold. Promoted items and advertisements appear at the top, They are invested in you refreshing the page as often as possible, not scrolling. This is why you have Jack Dorsey making comments about "value at the top" Twitter Q2 earnings: How Jack Dorsey is reinventing the company.. But it betrays their not really conceiving twitter as a fully fledged social media communication media or news aggregator (despite much bad faith commentary to that end).

Rather what they believe they have is something that feeds you a short sharp shock a high voltage buzz. They think of it as some kind of drug, to alleviate boredom to be dipped into until sated. They will try (and claim) to arrange for the top of the feed to be a place that will do all that you think twitter does: Connect you to the news, timely events, your friends, celebrities.

What they will do for you. They will write an algorithm. Your own personnel echo chamber. Your previous: (1) politics (2) products (3) places. The danger of algorithms or downside for the techno optimists among you; They are a process of gradualism, shaping slowly into place a reflection of prior predilections biased towards eudemonic feelings and comfort zones The Web of Relationships We Have to Save - The Message - Medium. They are hard, if not impossible to shake if your needs change (your interests are no longer your concern). You are not even aware of events you might react too - if you knew of them. Utterly confirmed, the outside world becomes a mere buzzing in the distance.

Among the names this goes by is the Filter Bubble popularized in that form by Eli Parser Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles" | TED Talk | TED.com:. In the consumption of information it is a matter of challenge vs comfort amidst multiple frames of relevancy and immediacy (gratification).

Some feel that if technology is a problem let technology be the fix. One article describes a proposed algorithm which would parse your algorithm and deploy an anti algorithm to inject the opposite into your cocoon of information How to Burst the "Filter Bubble" that Protects Us from Opposing Views | MIT Technology Review:

Much of the problem with this algorithmic approach is that it is not just a computation rule-set delivering up an obvious answer. It is agency and the question is: whose benefit it is working towards. Zeynep Tufecki author of the above Medium piece has an academic and deeper dive on that here Tufekci-final.pdf. It is a matter of transparency and control, and whether allowing challenges to ones existing views is to be valued, or even tolerated.

Everyone seems to agree that Twitter has problems. Most - if there is any consensus on this -- seem to feel that Twitter has not achieved the necessary critical mass of a true social network. Growing the user-base is the mission and the problem is its perceived difficulty of use, the learning curve, Twitter is seen to have. All this despite the modest success of the current low key advertising model Twitter Revenue Up 61%, but User Growth Lags - The New York Times:.

No one doubts the level of engagement of the core users, they just doubt the fortune a service in sync with these users will make. This keeps Twitters management trying to imagine a different twitter than what is.

Pressure from shareholders is driving much of this. And by shareholders I mean Wall Street in general -- the class and mindset of people who would inform a shareholder what they ought to be valuing.

In turn this pressure has forced leadership changes as they attempt to be whatever business wisdom wants them to be. Jack Dorsey, board member and one of Twitters four creator and launchers only gave the read out of the 2nd quarter earnings statement because Dick Costello CEO since 2010, had stepped down in June because Wall Street no longer had confidence in him.

Wall Street's conception goes little further than Ideas when wrung hard ought to puddle money. Twitters users are not idiots, though. There is a core of highly engaged users, content providers that they can't afford to jettison to keep a larger but less engaged gathering happy. "Be Facebook", they plead. But Facebook already exists. Twitter cannot chase Facebook and expect to catch them, make Facebooks money, or make Facebook disappear by trying to be them. Wall street's barking is repetitive and predictable quantity, though. Is it possible that the desire to massively cash out with a big ill conceived IPO is inconsistent with stable management free of impatient and uncomprehending interference?

Most of the changes in the pipeline point to a retrograde motion from a sharp but tricky instrument to a comfortable but dull one. The more astute have pointed out the real problem is that Twitter is boring Making Twitter relevant : without bullshit. The primary content movement is peer to peer among the masses. It is not a broadcast model People are on their "A' game only as often as Anthony Rendon. Who is very good, but at best only 3 out of every 10 at-bats. There are many people, at that, who don't even have an 'A' game. Twitter is CB radio with 300 million 10-forty-4s for you good buddy.

Twitter's management seem poised on the brink of whole-sale changes of unknown consequence This Is Twitter's Top Secret Project Lightning - BuzzFeed News, where smaller iterated changes might tweak them to where they want to be. Time is what they feel is at a premium.

There is little need to reinvent the wheel here, though. Existing tools, lists primarily, are good for nearly everything Twitter would do for you. Topics, High importance follows, catch up reading. Lists can do this. I would like lists to do even more -- respond to commands like block mute button. List that would populate a Direct Message group -- currently these have to be populated each time, or simply kept open like a text message convo. Hash tags are nice if one exists and people are using it, but a fuzzy keyword approach that could be impelled into being, made permanent or used temporarily would be better.

Expanding on the idea of hashtag like function might be auto event streams. Twitter is testing out a breaking news tab in its mobile apps | The Verge:. Even with existing hashtag follows extra tools to fine tune or winnow the out flow would be useful. Following the America's cup races last fall was OK. Trying to follow World cup soccer games was a miserable experience. When a hash will pour sixty to one hundred tweets per minute onto your it serves no realistic purpose. Better conversation handling ought to be a Twitter priority as well. currently there is no platform where twitter is able to present a conversation unfolding in a natural way. Part of this is that cannot decide which way they want people to read Twitter (or let them decide for themselves), but they also fail by whatever method they're using to capture all of the voices and comments in a conversation.

I've always though tweet length ought be raised from 140 to 250 characters. The size of a compound complex sentence. or two simple sentences. It would get twitter past the struggle to communicate a thought. 140 can communicate an dull affinity (or dissaffinity), but little more. It regularly fails to establish the parameters of an idea for further discussion.

Ideally there could be two parallel twitters: an original twitter RVO (Reverse Chronological Order), manual RT's MTs and all that; and a follower-loaded algorithmic-button-hamburger-menu twitter able to follow events and create list-like objects on the fly. An easy to use twitter for mass appeal.

There is a glimpse of this perhaps in the new browser log-in page. I think they would like to have users to have a landing page of cards and columns that users would come to read with little scrolling and refresh for new content. This also shades towards Facebook envy and underscores twitters identity crisis. Will Facebook envy wreck Twitter? | Computerworld:. Part of the pressure to change twitter & the reason for public resistance is the need to find a way to rake out the dross. Auto play video and embedded tweets won't help that. A certain minimalism! was always twitter's key attribute.

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Friday, 04 September 2015 08:45 EDT #

the Fallen Giant

Along my daily bicycle ride to and from work. The particular portion where I transition from the Northwest Branch bike and hiking trail, I ride on a brief section that parallels a major power-line.

The Northwest Branch trail is one part of the Anacostia river tributary park and trail system, this also includes neighboring Sligo creek. Rock Creek one minor water shed to the a few miles to the west like the Anacostia is a direct tributary of the Potomac river.

This is an area of abundant vegetation, verdant and full through most of the year, and the path along the deep cut of the creek through the numerous small hills, forming small wooded canyons along the line the creek has carved out for a thousand years. Which scarcely changes when one gets out onto the road. Here in this corner of mid-Atlantic east coast the land has not yet made up its mind and is always going either up or down.

This is the point along the seaboard where the bedrock of the continent gives way to the sandy gradual slope of the coastline. The point varying between ten and one hundred miles inland where there are always drops to all the streams and rivers -- waterfalls -- and generations of small and large industry formed to capture that energy. Such as the Adelphi Mill scarcely a quarter mile behind.

As the land bottoms out past the fall line the path opens out to a great field of tall grass. At times I will startle deer even a fox at this point. Here the path divides and I habitually turn left to head towards Cool Spring road; though I could continue on and get where I am head just the same. It is a false meadow it is kept as a grass land for the sake of the high tension line that runs through here. Still along the power-lines broad right-of-way there are clear vistas in either direction, which otherwise the landscape does not provide. There is; however nothing notable to see. To the south down the line low scattered roof-lines of an unremarkable assortment of buildings along University boulevard. None of them seen in completion through the trees. To the north the land sweeps upward to and over Cool Spring road. The is a fine older house to the west of the line here. Brick, easily a hundred years old. Further on, though I cannot see it, as the rise rounds over the short horizon I know lies Adelphi road and beyond that Metzerott road. At other times I have encountered this same line by turns along these roads

.

What one sees are the Power-line's pylons outlined starkly against white clouds and blue sky. This line actually consists of dual set of towers in parallel about one hundred feet apart.

Until last year the older one was strung on a tower of open angle-iron girders likely dated back fifty or sixty years. Last summer Fall and into the Winter whatever electric authority responsible came through and and replaced them with a octagonal column masts to match the other line. The one pole that went up along the stretch of my brief transit took weeks of preparatory work. Pile-driving and drilling: vertical drilling, slant drilling all using different rigs. Concrete pouring to create the base. Before that the road - Cool Spring road - leading to this portion of the line was rebuilt and repaved in sections to bear the weight of the heavy equipment brought in to accomplish this work. The distance between these new masts is quite large - a thousand feet or more on average. Even at this location one can only see the next two masts in line before the line is obscured.

I do not know the origin point of this line, on maps it seems to go far away off into West Virginia after crossing the Potomac River. Southward the line finally goes to ground just shy of the District of Columbia borderline at a place called the Takoma Substation.

In the end the new mast pole went up very quickly, in a day. I was surprised. I missed it too due to inclement weather which led me to take the bus to work that day. The old tower lay on the ground on its side for a few weeks like a distressed crumpled giant before workers came through and cut it up with acetylene torches.

On certain days some combination of the color of the grass, brush, trees, in the presence of a counterbalancing mass of clouds folded white and grey, the blue of the sky -- when darker especially, I think, more so than shades of green (as it seems to occur in association with the yellow green of early spring as much as the deep green of midsummer). It is when the sky moves from the cornflower blue of a hazy day to a true register of blue. Then I find the scene reminding me of an illustration I once saw in a magazine. A landscape of bicyclers riding by a vaguely similar power-line -- a scene so prosaic I wondered what effect the photographer and graphic designer had been going for. I decided the affection was for an ideal sort of day. Sunny, perfect and without care in appearance, at the same time a common and returning occurence. At once I am struck by the sense of an unchanging ideal day.

Knowing that the sun has come up and lit this scene in the same exact manner for tens of thousand of years. That from certain angles where one allows trees to fully hide the buildings the feeling that among those years here for the last forty years at least, if not forty hundred. There has been rather less change than more.

All this combines to create a sense that removes -- or rather loses one from time. An odd brief but profound sense of dislocation. It often takes the form of an indelible feeling that I have been removed to a previous point in time -- some decades ago the mid sixties or seventies that I lived through but long before I came to or set eyes in this area.

As I gain Cool Spring road I find myself instinctively glancing at the make and model of the parked suburban cars to reassure myself of their recent vintage. That I continue to transit in the correct moment of time.

Of course time has directionality and particularity. All our experience exists in and is locked in the moment with only the imperfection of memory providing recognition of the changed world of the next moment. The idea of directionality to time not only describes it but exhaustively defines it.

This directionality makes itself know to our reason in two ways observing the natural world. By causality -- the observation that change has antecedent, and by thermodynamic entropy -- the notion that systems move over time from higher levels of organization and energy to lower ones.

The British astrophysicist and philosopher Arthur Eddington coined the phrase the Arrow of time" to describe this phenomenon of directionality. About it he said: "[if] more of the random element in the state of the world, then the arrow is pointing towards the future; if the random element decreases the arrow points toward the past." This perception of randomness does not take place in the individual moment as experienced, but in the comparison of one moment with the previous in memory. Eddington's observation was that "time was vividly recognized by the consciousness." This in his 1929 book The nature of the physical world

Eddington's main contributions to knowledge lay in his work to explain and popularize Einsteins General Relativity. His equations demonstrating that the pressure of radiation balanced by gravity kept stars -- our sun -- in their tight contained ball-like shape, his chase after very large numbers to explain everything. And I reflect as I change gears for Cool Spring Road's long climb up to Adlephi Road the Eddington Number: a medium sized number to relate ones bicycle dominance a number n designating the maximum number of miles ridden for the same number of days that milage has been attained. Mine would be six. This seems unreasonable. I have ridden longer: ten but not ten times, eight but not eight times. The six miles I ride though -- my daily commute -- I have accomplished nearly four thousand times since starting work at the universities library.

Thoughts on the passage of time inevitably turn to the quality of living through a day, now or twenty thousand years ago. The possibility of human evolution. Will urban living and mass structured societies change the equation of human living? In a way that changes or evolves human nature? In all the years we can account for our tribal sensibilities seem scarcely diminished.

We have named the epoch of our emergence - from the end of the last ice age when man had already started our spread across the planet: the Holocene and are toying with a further term The Anthropocene to denote the age of ascendence, the era of dominant altering effect. A period variously envisioned as encompassing the nuclear age, industrial age, introduction of agricultural monocultures or our found ability to bring land into food production through schemes of irrigation.

Through all this human nature has seemed the same: the desire to be conforming, to adapt and live harmoniously in a social group. The desire to be extra ordinary, to to live outside the norms of the community, in spite of them. From whatever energy societies are built they are kept together by institutions of control, of passions and ambition. These are like the parallel rails of a train track -- seeming to, destined to merge at some point near the horizon. But what is the time frame for that?

The idea of progress, whatever that might mean, has so thoroughly captured the imagination of the west (at least) that it is commonly taken as an integral function of time. Living in the midst of this rushing stream I have my doubts. They are largely private doubts. Optimists and and pessimists alike share the view that we are all caught in the terrible jaws of a thing called progress.

Some time back in the late winter I picked up an old discarded copy of Francis Fukuyama's book the The End of History and the Last Man - Wikipedia and started to read it. Largely because I could not think why I never had before. I was taken by his concept that human progress -- material and economic progress -- is tied to technological progress -- a slow process but an inevitable one. It is tied to human nature our instinct to reduce the effort of any given task, and will continue always if delayed. And restart if interrupted. This provides a directionality to human affairs and complexity to human societies. He refers to this as the Mechanism. It provides the basis of a universal history. Fukuyama is smart enough to realize this is all that can be said as a first step.

It is Fukayama's particular assertion in this book that a market based consumer economy in a democratic political structure was the stable and final form of human society, free of internal contradiction. These are things that might cause the historical process to continue, to produce further change. His theses seems to admit that adoption of democracy and market economies will spread slowly and be subject to ebbs and flows locally. It is simply that he can't conceive of anything that supplies happiness and autonomy to the individual more than this.

All this is material well-being. It is not and should not be mistaken for moral progress whatever that might mean. Fukuyama is well aware of this addressing it in the introduction (on page six). Returning to it occasionally such as the ending to ch. 11 admitting that moral progress may not track with historical process in an discernible fashion at all. There is an assertion elsewhere that our philosophies will change when our biologically driven psychological knowledge advances Our nature is not fixed our behavior evolves under the environmental pressure of reasoned self awareness. He is less sanguine about the effects of techne in change our essential biology and nature.

Fukuyama's Heglian, through Alexandre Kojeve, take on human nature is that it revolves around the desire to be recognized -- to compel recognition. To feel more deserving for having risked lot and life, and making status demands on this account. A warrior ethos. This alone has saddled the human race with untold generations of parasitic aristocracy, scarcely credible in the first generation nonsensical for the rest. All this is wrapped up in a larger concept he uses the word thymos for. The need, the desire for this recognition, the instinctive indignation for not getting it. The feeling akin to shame for not achieving it.

The End of History written a generation ago. It is becoming increasingly clear that consumer economies are not that stable. There is an incoherence between consumer and wage earner identities as citizens. There is a tendency towards income inequality precluding viable democracy. It has been put forward that the enormous intoxicant use in the US, alcohol and the legal as well as illegal drug trade -- the latter perhaps more destabilizing to production than end-use countries -- point toward submerged contradictions. It was Fukuyama's position on contradiction that problems alone do not necessarily equal contradictions. As long as the solution can be found within the system, history is quiescent.

Francis Fukuyama has amended facets of his thinking over the last 28 years. Democracy is losing its argument to Market Authoritarianism. The right desires (demands) further dismantlement of the regulatory state and unfettered capitalism, the left has nothing to offer beyond the now old new deal and increasingly unaffordable great society ideas. Technology has masked inequality and as its rewards tend to accrue to educated elites it even exacerbates inequality The Future of History | Foreign Affairs. This is perhaps what Jacques Ellul means in part by his term technological tyranny. For every problem solved; new problems. That have to be solved in turn for the human race to survive.

Nature, I suppose, includes everything or at least functions as a synonym for the world: physical and biological nature. This includes human nature, at least partly. Nature, growing and uncontrolled or unimproved which we seek to replace with our built environment the expression of our technological capacity to live on our terms.

In a nod to our long held habit of concentricism - of enclosing the world in various levels of spheres like the entirely modern term Biosphere: the global ecological system of all living beings and their relationships - I would call this world of man the Ratiosphere. The sphere of human thought, and deliberate action.The human condition. I realize this is similar to the concept called the NooSphere and some may doubt the necessity of a new term. But the Noosphere "is the sphere of human thought." and often seems to function in its descriptions as an all encompassing collective conscious, like Al Farabi's active intellect. I see what I have as the sphere of Racination; the willingness to understand the world through deliberate (process of) reason alone, and place it just inside the Noosphere.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest long form pieces of writing human-kind has. I've always found it striking that one of its key parts - the friendship between Gilgamish the king of Uruk and Enkidu the wild man of the plains modeling the dichotomy between civilized and natural order. Antipathy for the wilderness, hubris for the gates and walls of our cities, but also regret for our break from the nature Fueled by speculation of what that was. A theme in place now for more than four thousand years. It seems that man is always rehearsing this divide. Cutting the grass along the the powerlines right of way done for purely pragmatic reasons creates the appearance of a broad meadow, and this is how it is received by both the people and animals that frequent it. The half-mastered spring Cool Spring Road is named after used to roll on charmingly alongside the road. Nothing special was done for its sake (nothing at all really).

But when the trucks came to build the pylons, parts of it had to be channeled and moved underground.

All built environments suffer from decay. Some age ungracefully like University blvd. In the flats where power-line crosses it. Like Framingham in the 1970s, The big downtown near the town I grew up in, in Massachusetts suffering from an irresolute sprawl . Milford, to the other side, possesed a compact downtown, which; however, seemed unable to fully leave the 1930's. This happens within cycles of relative renewal and decay. Some built quickly and un-thoroughly thought-out fade quickly once the energy of their newness is dissipated. Others; though, as time passes grow on towards the incomplete ideal of their construction.

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Thursday, 30 July 2015 23:10 EST #

verum Sceleri

In light of the pathological resistance to change demonstrated upon the body of this nation by the adherents of the lost cause, I thought I'd offer a small argument of my own on its meaning. It is by far the lesser argument, but one in practical terms for the practical-minded. When I say lesser argument that is than in comparison to subjugation of peoples, racism - concepts of racial-supremacy, than of humanity objectified. Man as property of men. The contempt for, or deliberate disbelief in, human dignity. This is an argument for the thick headed and house proud.

What slavery represented was theft, shorty-on-the-corner with a ugly 9mm glock theft (you know: big plastic second-hand with its cracked grip duck-taped up). But structural theft, systematic, and organized crime. Across multiple generations, across a whole population of people, and across an entire land -- the south land.

This is not a new or even uncommon argument. Its usually seen paired with various arguments for reparation The Case for Reparations - The Atlantic. Here presented separately for illustrative and orientating effect and as an anodyne for all those that say the peculiar institution was a just a thing, justified in the context of its time, and a small part of history besides. We should just forget about it -- except of the heritage and glory of the war fought to keep it. But. It is as though everyday after work after being paid, cash across the barrel head, black men women and children were robbed in the street at gun point and threat of savage violence for all of it. The value of their labor, all they had, all expropriated -- stolen from them. Somewhere between 6 and 24 trillion Dollars as this abstract posits: Estimating Slavery Reparations: Present Value Comparisons of Historical Multigenerational Reparations Policies - Craemer - 2015 - Social Science Quarterly - Wiley Online Library:. You could get yourself set up quite nice with that kind of money.

All of this covered by the sham riposte that "this was(is) our law". A corruption of law and justice that stripped any possible legitimacy, nobility stained if that's your notion, from that regime and it's people. A tremulous stand on relativistic legitimacy that was and will be tossed aside for the psuedo-universal "Because God (according to me) said..." the moment they think they have cover for it.

The regime that perpetrated this needs to understand that they constitute the largest criminal class in the history of mankind. That they were thieves and this true crime is their permanent defining legacy.

A postScript. The Washington Post illustrated a story today with a photograph of a $5 bill with a rubber stamp of the confederate battle flag stamped in red across Lincoln's face. Years ago I had a a similar $5 bill with the letters CSA (again in red) written across Lincoln's fore head. Even at the time I wondered to myself is this a thing; This confederate negation of Abraham Lincoln? Yes apparently it is, and it tells you everything you need to know about the grudge they still hold.

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Sunday, 28 June 2015 18:15 EDT #

Vietnam/40

I wrote a post about this time last year on the fall of Saigon and the final end of the Vietnam War. This was on the 39th anniversary, deliberately so I would not be tempted to say any thing more this year. I was still in high school at the time so I wasn't directly involved. It was one of those shaping events; though, that I've felt and seen affecting this country through my entire adult life.

I felt I said everything I had to say at the time, but now two related things have forced a small reconsideration.

First is the documentary film Last Days in Vietnam - American Experience - WGBH | PBS that is out this year, and was shown on PBS the week of April 28th. It approaches the event from a particular perspective -- an American one. An American problem, the Ameircan problem. Eclipsing the Southeast Asian reality.

The second was my friend Hoa tweeting a link to some commentary on the film saying just this. I confess I was writing the previous post at the time and lost track of the specific article.

 

However, the point of this piece was that the author felt the documentary had a major flaw. That of America only seeing Vietnam through the prism of the war. The lost and publicly dividing war, the marker of social upheaval -- a sigil of the sixties. The grey cloud of the "Vietnam" syndrome that some perceived hanging over the next 20 years.

The actual run of the documentary when I watched it wasn't that one dimensional. The director, Rory Kennedy a 1991 graduate of Brown university, and her production company, Moxie Firecracker, were invited into this project by the PBS program American Experience to make use of archival footage they had because the producers were impressed by her previous documentary "Ghosts of Abu Gharab". Noted in passing her father, Robert Kennedy, was a member of a reasonably well known Massachusetts political family.

I know two (and only two) Vietnamese persons, both named Nguyen. Both women of roughly the same generation: Hoa and Tran. Hoa was born in Vietnam, but mostly raised in Garrett Park Maryland from the mid seventies on. As an aside (that amuses me) Garrett Park is barely a mile from where my youngest sister Susan (we were New England kids) has raised her two boys, my nephews Grant and Raine, in a tree filled suburb just off Beach Drive in the Kennsington-Parkwood neighborhood. I Knew Hoa in college in the mid eighties at the University of Maryland. This is in fact where I still am, a clerk at McKeldin Library. A large red brick building with white columns. This is where I know Tran from who works at a desk adjacent to me on the seconf floor in the copy-cataloging department.

Tran was also born in Vietnam and raised there as well. In Vinh Long and HCMC (Saigon) not emigrating until she was in her early twenties in 1995, with most but not all of her family.

She came to this country on a plane not a boat, as she explains, into LAX, to Garden Grove then on to Silver Spring. Where her family made their home. America is a free land, where one can be as Catholic as one desires (and she desires to be very Catholic), but it is a cold and strange place and no one here speaks Tieng Viet.

She doesn't really talk about it much. But no part of growing up in a communist country was a good experience. Her father was away being re-educated for many years. The first ten years were especially harsh softened only by her being too young - still a babe in her mother's arms in 1975 really - to have much sense of it beyond the hunger. This is more than balanced by a still traceable bitterness of her teenage and young adult years when she did.

 

Despite independence and unification Vietnam is far from being a post colonial society. The south is a colony. Maybe the "War is over if you want", but only if it's Ho Chi Minh City and all eyes look north for instruction. All the shots, all the investment decisions run through Hanoi's elite. The Guardian otherwise excellent story Vietnam 40 years on: how a communist victory gave way to capitalist corruption | News | The Guardian carried one odd assertion; that north south divide of the war was just a temporary historical artifact of imperialism and cold war maneuver. This does not capture Vietnam's 700 yr history precisely and this feature's geographically-driven persistence.

The sheer number of the late '70s early 80s boat people shades the notion that only a tiny Saigon minority were affected and they brought their own trouble on themselves. Currently Vietnam's Draconian press and social media control points to a fragile and corrupt governance. Vietnam ranks 174 out of 180 in the Reporters Without Borders World press freedom index 2014. A recent slight lessening of strictness seems to be in evidence, no longer will a single expressed criticism land you in jail. The Atlantic's article Saigon Anniversary: How Young Vietnamese View the Vietnam War - The Atlantic speculates this may owe to massive involvement population youth in internet.

I never had much truck with the '75ers, as I guess you could call them. Those that held that a little more money or a little more bombing would have turned Hanoi from its goal. This was always the flip side of the anti-war movement. That the war could could either be won or ended without ill effect, decided on how Americans alone felt about things.

I've generally held the idea since I was in high school that little if anything after 1963 would've changed things, and accepted the idea that the war was always headed towards its tragic conclusion. Greater compromises earlier in the 1950's before US foreign policy became fixed upon its course might have changed things. Knowing Tran; though, has changed my view from that of the "American War" - doomed in place and being an expression of the contradictions of our own western capitalistic society. To something more nuanced. Seeing the Viet in the Vietnamese war.

Now forty years on the transition to industrial and even post industrial economy is taking place Forty Years After the War, Vietnam Welcomes the U.S. | Foreign Policy Blogs. The past is ground away ill-relevant, leaving an only vaguely traceable arc of history as Vietnam opens to a Beijing styled managed free market. None of that had occurred by the time Tran left Vietnam in the mid 1990s when she was in her twenties. When her family went back to visit, in the mid 2000's Saigon was changed beyond recognition. Andrew Pham's book, Catfish and Mandala : a two-wheeled voyage through the landscape and memory of Vietnam, which I read eight or so years ago gave a glimpse into the opening phases of new economy. Beyond that I have little that gives me any insight to a place I have no direct knowledge of. It is worth noting in passing that the United States did everything it could to stymie economic development in Vietnam until the opening of relations in 1995.

One clear sign of the changing Vietnam -- a sign that Vietnam today is less anyone's remembered Vietnam than they think -- lies in its demographics. The percent of Vietnams population under 40 that never knew the war is more than half the population. The Atlantic article states 70 percent. They link out to a Viet demographic report. I looked at a UN demographic report also World Population Prospects, the 2012 Revision and was stunned by the huge percent of the population that is under twenty-five, that grew up under the introduction markets and normalization in 1995: 43.7% under the age of 25. For Viet millennials then -- and that's nearly everyone -- it's their grandparents war. The "Hard but Glorious" struggle in the rote grade school quote of one interviewee [from above cited Atlantic article].

There is a sense I get. that the reasons given for wars -- their absolute necessity and their critical unavoidability -- are largely utter nonsense. The long-standing grievances and incompatibilities of peoples, echoing through the centuries, are little more than a canard covering for present politics. And that ever of factions only. These fade to the memory of others within a generation or two, no longer a controlling idea. They will need to be remade out of whole cloth to be used again. There is a notion, known mostly through Martin Luther Kings tight and elegant formulation of it, about the arc of the moral universe, being long but bending toward justice.

I do not know what is justice here I can only hope that Vietnam in this century enters a phase of prosperity, stability and freedom that leaves the horror behind.

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Thursday, 19 June 2015 23:30 EDT #

post-Obscurity

A few weeks ago I noticed a couple of tweets coming from someone I knew in college. She was displeased with a person I didn't realize she knew - WFMU's Kenny G. That is Kenneth Goldsmith; formerly part of the half-tended anarchy that is Jeresey City's WFMU, now UPenn teacher and poet. A commute which led to his giving up his Wednesday dj spot a few years ago. Both these individuals are poets and I imagine poeism to be a demi monde of sorts so I wasn't overwhelmingly surprised.

It wasn't until a few days later that the background of this dropped into place. Someone on a comment board at WFMU put up a link to the Brown University student newspaper and I realized there had been a literary incident of sorts. It also seemed to me that there had been a pause in UbuWebs tweets over those few days. Ubu web being one of KG's central projects, an unlicensed internet archive of avant garde arcane.

I felt conflicted because I always enjoyed Ken GoldSmith's Wednesday show. His take on radio was beyond even the college radio from which WFMU takes its departure. You can get a sense of the general run of pre-recorded pieces of the program from dipping into the UbuWeb audio-stream that WFMU maintains. The spoken word piece I call the "bubble blower" stands out in memory. At the intersection of art and comedy, a Bob Newhartan style narrative: a person has a broken bubble blower which they are attempting to convince the (retailer/manufacturer?) to fix rather than replace because a new bubble blower would not have the same spirituality of the old bubble blower. I (and many others) also remember Ken as the person who played Chocolate City by Parliament 30 times in a row the day after President Obama won his first election. "Gainin' on Ya."

Other things he did with his weekly three hours teetered on the edge of listen-ability if not originality: Singing the theory hits wherein he would open Derrida or Baudrillard and sing in a faux-operatic fashion through a chapter or lecture. Taking a performance poem by Todd Colby - Cake! a Rant and encouraging people to their own performance or remix of this - something that became an ongoing contest at WFMU. There was the shift-long reading of a year's worth of NYC weather reports, another of traffic, A reading of names from a book of fly-fish lure-tying. Many of these became the works by which Kenneth Goldsmith made a name for himself as a poet. If anything tied these together it was his fondness for half machine lip moves. The difficult odd and perverse, an attachment for certain spoken sounds and repeated utterances detached from meaning.

Now my friend, Hoa, is also a poet. A professional poet. MFA and all that. I knew Hoa years ago in college. Right around the time when she began to contemplate switching majors and processes of thought that would send her down the path to becoming a poet. We were both dj's at the student radio station there. She had a cat named scruffy and a leather jacket.

She currently teaches literature at Ryerson University in Toronto, has published several books and chap books of her own poetry. She runs a weblog called Skanky Possum which is dedicated to her conception of slow poetry.

Kenneth Goldsmith is in the Big Time. Curator-Administator of Ubuweb the previously mentioned archive. University of Pennsylvania adjunct. MoMa poet. White House guest. His infamy is hung on not just on stunts like Printing out the Internet, A project from a year or so ago which succeeded in filling a room in a Mexico city museum with paper after he asked people through social media to -- print out the internet. But on Un-creative writing a high concept take on writing. The state of intellectual property in the digital age. The commas, all the commas and periods, em dashes, of Gertrude Stein.

That would not get me to what I really want to know here. What is it about Ken Goldsmith and his antics that engenders such hostility from my friend, and so many others? I would say first that Agit Prop ain't a game. Its supposed to make people angry, and at each other. The justification for this, why he wants to make people upset I can't answer for.

Beyond this I might point to a problem of my generation. Here I mean the Late Boomers but not Generation X. I had experience of travelling through college with the X cohort after spending four years in the Navy a different sort. I wouldn't put too much stock on generations and their ways of being Your generational identity is a lie - The Washington Post, but there is something to be said about the zeitgeist of the world during ones early years. Shared memories, of pop culture happenings and societal events Even if thinner generational splices, marketing demographics really get at this better. The main run of the Boomers had already spoken and defined themselves by the time we grew up. The space was taken. Among people around my own age (which Goldsmith is) I've always noticed a particular type of Katzenjammer. A disbelief in establishment and progressives, a savage amusement in mocking the credulity (their greatest sin) of both alike. A seeming belief that the game never ends.

Our own credulity is realized in a heavily romanticized iconoclasm. That Chris Burden (RIP since I wrote this sentence) or Joseph Beuys etc, a corner of the counter culture of the preceding generation form an image of art which can never be exceeded.

Ken Goldsmith clearly believes that what he does is art, and highly original at that; which is why he's willing to be such an asshole about it. The creative endeavor of un-creative writing.

Ken Goldsmith's particular vision for his type of conceptual art -- found-writing -- lightly re-configured and re-purposed as art, is in many ways more akin to the plastic arts. He has a few pieces on Harriet if my following gloss fails to give a suitable idea of it: Conceptual Poetics: Kenneth Goldsmith : Kenneth Goldsmith : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation and one at PoetsDotOrg A Brief Guide to Conceptual Poetry | Academy of American Poets

Conceptual poetry is allegorical and post textual. It final meaning relational, but presumably intentional. Possessing some other purpose in some fashion, if not the subject context and narrative of the original. I'm not entirely sure (have not made a study of it) If one needs to declare an intention (voiced or unvoiced, coded or implied in some way). Or be responsible for one at all. Particularly if the literary intent is not related to the text through metaphor, irony or a juxtaposition semantically available to someone with a shared cultural context.

This is critical theory driven (poetry, writing, art). Concrete, so far as it is the Plastic Art facets of the conceptual work that predominate. The reification (of an) image or object of study, and performance.

I've gradually acquired a lessened tolerance for any manner of "great claims" for art. Art for Arts sake. Art, the force of solitary genius, Art a gift to the masses, all that.

I see value in some notion of objectivity or at least lessened subjectivity. In producing new or at least alternate ways of seeing. In photography idea of working with the moment obtained and what it tells rather than what you might be inclined to tell. A camera installation that would take randomly timed photographs, for instance. Various forms of automatic writing strike me as vaguely paralleling such frame-less photography, call that the indecisive moment. A quest for hidden or over-looked meaning. The world in its dark corners. The result is rarely as interesting as the conception of it. Additionally the location and angle chosen already frame that result to a degree, you're not kidding anyone. Moreover; any such enterprise (photography at least) is too soon indistinguishable from surveillance photography and its different obsessions.

There is the possibility that Kenneth Goldsmith has grown too big on such slender conceptions. Here, invited to this Brown University Poetry Seminar. He read Michael Brown's Body; an autopsy report re-purposed as poetry. The nod towards John Brown's Body seems entirely intentional. This pretty much brought proceedings to an end. Disruption is always counted as good, except when it happens to you.

It seems to me that Many people who are especially bothered by Ken Goldsmith were aware of him and his views on writing and art prior to this. Most at that Brown Seminar knew who he was and had a position on him already.

My niece, Nicole, a Brown graduate from last spring had never heard of him or his "un-creative writing". She was not an English major, but a History major rather. Paying attention; though, to Brown related goings-on she had heard about this incident. Her reaction was mixed between bemusement, curiosity, and a large degree of incredulity on the lack of good sense that a poet in Goldsmith's position could show. Otherwise her take on it was largely nonjudgmental. Poetry is its own world, after all.

Those my friend Hoa linked to or at least re-tweeted marshaling arguments against Ken Goldsmith fell into two camps. These shade together somewhat. In the first the argument is against conceptual poetry -- as far as Goldsmith practices it. How can one credit the effect if the intention does not lie in the specific semantic content. It is re-framed, re-contexted. The premise of the form is that a dawning meaning is introduced. I offer quotes from some of these, their own words offering respite from my misconstruing them.

First off Illya Sizlak wrting in the Huffington Post :

he writes conceptual poetry, a type of poetry in which the poet does not compose an original text, but rather re-frames a pre-existing one... Goldsmith's writing and performance of "The Body of Michael Brown" is problematic, not because he does not have the "right" to use the text, but because his use of it is fundamentally false...he assumes that he can take the language of the autopsy report into his own body. That is to say, he can somehow speak it truthfully, not as an error-filled translation...Had Goldsmith recognized his own limitations and the impossibility of his attempted appropriation, he might have let silence, misspeaking, and heteroglossia play a more active role in his performance. The Body of Michael Brown--A Response to Kenneth Goldsmith | Illya Szilak:

Amy King writing in Vida: women in Literary arts

[Vanessa] Place and Goldsmith are laying claim to working for a very specific and narrowly defined higher order of art and literature that removes responsibility for considering others...your response is your own responsibility, not an intentional effect of their "recontextualized" performances. WHY ARE PEOPLE SO INVESTED IN KENNETH GOLDSMITH? OR, IS COLONIALIST POETRY EASY? | VIDA: Women in Literary Arts:

Then Herberto Yepez writing in Guillermo Para's Venepoetics blog

Goldsmith has transformed into art the kind of appropriations usually conducted by media, corporations and the U.S. government...If Goldsmith wants to be consistent he should let him himself be completely appropriated by the logic of the U.S. government. He should become a subject-concept ruled by neoliberalism and rigorously embrace the brutality, the looting and the total program of capital. Venepoetics: El escándalo del sujeto-concepto: Kenneth Goldsmith / Heriberto Yepez:

Elena Gomez in the Overland Literary Journal

There is a smug, deliberate provocativeness in Goldsmith's choice of title that has fuelled the anger of poets. Whatever conversation the act generated throughout the poetry and conceptual writing communities, it was not a conversation that was Kenneth Goldsmith's to start. His is a white voice, in an area (and world) where black and other non-white voices are routinely silenced. Any critique of race–power structures cannot begin with an act that further silences black poets....There are two important points here. One, a conceptual poet cannot have his cake and eat it too. From his now widely used and influential term 'uncreative writing', we know Goldsmith's advocates a process-oriented 'freedom' from intent, which is also meant to double as a get-out-of-jail-free card...We might then ask: is conceptual poetry racist? Not quite. But Conceptual Poetry, insofar as it is a movement and genre with apparent gatekeepers, is racist. When poetry is white supremacist | Overland literary journal:

Finally The Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo. 'Gringo Poetry' I imagine but I don't know and scarcely hazard to guess. Trying to select quotes wouldn't do here. Duck Duck Go's search engine encapsulation gives: "OUR SIGNATURE: The Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo is to be used by documents, attempts, or gestures that target white supremacy and colonization." The effect is cumulative, and it's all in ALL CAPS. It's better to visit it yourself. The argument is from the position that literature is currently a hot bed of rampant white privilege (and limited academic resources), that poetry properly is a post-colonial struggle against this racial and sexual oppression and expropriation. Its effective, on its own terms. Full of wry humour and inside jokes, but also some wide swings and appropriation, of their own. In addition to their main manifesto page Jennifer Tamayo has a piece up in Harriet on them for April The Gold Star Awards... A message from The Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo : Jennifer Tamayo : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation. There is always the MCAG Twitter feed @AgainstGringpo also.

The main problem with this approach is that if someone were to tell me that the Mongrel Coalition was in fact a Ken Goldsmith conceptual project -- I would have no trouble believing that. I don't think anyone would.

There is a view that Conceptual Poetry is little more than an academic game. An exercise akin to shtick comedy in a way. I see conceptual poetry as being more in the plastic arts than literature. Using language the way others use marble -- more in the form than semantic meaning. It needs its cleverness to succeed. Things that continually need the added degree of outrage or exasperation to have their effect run the risk of being dramaturge more than art. Art approximate.

Still in that it can accomplish what it sets out to do: challenge. Challenging the precepts of ordinary ways of seeing and being. A challenge accepted or declined. Herberto Yepez made a point that stuck with me: What Goldsmith is doing here, and in other works, is essentially an appropriation of the process by which un-assimilated experiences, are transformed into the narratives of the dominate culture by the media. In making that stand up, he becomes inextricably part of that process, part of the dominating culture.

By its nature experimental (conceptual) poetry does not know its ends. It's an experiment (unless that's a metaphor for something else) This is both its strength and its weakness. A career of experimental poetry is a weak thing. It can be read as seeking a pass from judgement, but at end doesn't exclude one from criticism. That white, and male privilege exists and obtains possesses a demonstrable obviousness. One that will be acknowledged for you if you do not acknowledge it first. The further argument; though, that some then stand in such cloistered and guarded position that they have an invalidated viewpoint, is a different one. It takes more away and requires more than chucking stones from your own critical theory redoubt to make.

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Friday, 15 May 2015 08:00 EDT #

blogShare

Several (several) weeks ago now Andrew Sullivan announced he was quitting blogging A Note to My Readers. Everyone hearing of this decides blogging is dead. Dead! Again. Still! My own take is that Andrew left blogging so you (we) don't have to.

In his mea culpa post he cited being fundamentally burnt out and needing to connect back with the real world. A subsequent article on the soon-to-end 'Dish by one of his assistants gave an idea of just how unfathomably immersive and exhausting Andrew Sullivan's approach to covering the Internet really was How To Read The Entire Internet < The Dish:. I can see how he got burnt out by this process.

There were a predictable litany of voices declaiming that blogging as a practice was quite over. No one of consequence was blogging any more. More thoughtful voices amidst this were saying that web logging had just inevitable changed.

Some, I can point here to Ezra Klein and Matthew Ingraham of Vox and Gigom respectively invoking Dave Winer (of Manila/Radio Userland and much else) asked better questions. What is or was blogging? What was the experience of blogging? Was it the format: dated reverse order distinct posts? Was it the link-sharing subculture, the milieu of weblogs, that turned a topic or subject into an ad hoc networked conversation? The The unedited voice of a person in Dave Winers memorable formulation. I would add to these things the operation of the 80/20 power law which describes how inevitably twenty percent of weblogs gained eighty percent of the traffic.

As a result of this, and simply time passing, web logging is undergoing a transition. Those who rose into the twenty percent set about trying to make a living of their online writing. Either by finding ways of monetizing their blogs or joining with existing literary of journalistic entities. For the former it was a matter of scaling: moving beyond small if intense conversations, even if you were the lead voice, to genuine mass media. Where success is measured in tens and hundreds of thousand clicks per story. Ezra Klein and his co-conspirator Matt Yglesias have done both moving from their college blogs, to Slate and the Washington Post then beyond to Vox.

Ezra Klein in particular speaks of the transition from the conversational blogging voice to what he does now

scale means social traffic. Links from other bloggers -- the original currency of the blogosphere, and the one that drove its collaborative, conversational nature; just don't deliver the numbers...If I say something dumb today -- which I do, but hopefully less constantly -- it hurts my writers, and my editors, and my company. My voice needs editing. The cost of being unedited is too high. What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging - Vox

Matthew Ingram while giving a nostalgic nod to the charm of blogging also notes elements of the new professional school. He emphasizes:

the desire to share your thoughts or links or commentary with the world, in something approaching real time. Blogging is very much alive -- we just call it something else now -- Tech News and Analysis

Ingram came back with a second post Ben Thompson: The one-man blog isn't dead, it's better than ever -- Tech News and Analysis a day or so later. The general run of his argument there is that a single person weblog only has a chance of having impact if the person running it has a specialty and expertise. Either you write well and are very knowledgeable (like Andrew Sullivan) or you are a useful source (to journalists) on a particular subject matter. His example here is Ben Thompson who has transformed and extended his weblog Blogging's Bright Future | stratechery by Ben Thompson into a subscription newsletter (financial advisement in the areas of technology and investment) and gets people to sign up and makes a living at it.

One thing about niche weblogs/news letters and others; many of new media runners are not journalists per se. They neither went to J school or spent enough time in in any journalistic institution to absorb the ethos or tradition, for better or worse. They may be more entrepreneurial. They may be what survives (of the fourth estate), but they are doing something different and are chasing different rainbows.

I've been running a weblog for fifteen years now. I lost the 80-20 power-law battle within in the first year. My visitor count now is small but oddly steady. On the other hand this Web site doesn't cost me anything, the server space comes as a general benefit of employment with the University of Maryland, and I'm not worried that what little I do here is taking food off the table of "professional" writers.

Most of the hits Atomized Jr. (the old weblog) gets are for posts about my time in the Navy. Many of them written years ago. I always wanted to write about those days and experiences I like writing these pieces and am pleased they get read. But my time on the Aircraft Carrier was only nine months of my life thirty-six years ago. I have to write about various things as it suits me, and as it might suit the conjectured readers I imagine.

Suppose I want to write about the vaccination issue. I can do that; immediately simply, that's how it works. Since the hook of the story (the recent measles outbreak) has passed for now, I can forgo some journalistic details and look for a general observation. There are two ways to look at this. First from the angle of the fragility or shallowness of scientific knowledge, a certain cynicism -- skepticism if you prefer Understanding the fear of vaccines: an activist explains why he buys a debunked idea - Vox. Or from the Social Compact; that all rights save for a few derive from a society's originating rules and current expectations. The former is the point of engagement for public policy. But the latter is what interests me.

What is singular here is the anti-vaccers presumption of rights. The cult of absolute rights, which is a inheritance of both the nations experience as a country that had an open frontier for hundreds of years, and the notion of "rugged individualism" invoked as pure political nostalgia within the period when that frontier no longer existed. There is a view that there are few rights (conceptions of a right) that do not extend from the needs of the community and its greatest good. The community may be atomistic, but the level of analysis here for human beings is the community. A second notion is that every individual is self-sustaining, sufficient unto themselves, and a veritable fortress of rights.

I recalled a day, years ago, when an undergraduate philosophy class I was in went off on an hour long tangent. It was in a crime and punishment module. The tangent; regulation: what right do the many have to coerce behaviour of the individual. While the deportment of ones own body is the classic boundary of where individual rights are naturally sovereign, communicable diseases and the threat they pose to the larger population are the classic and accepted exception. This includes regimes of inoculations. My recollection is that there was a throwaway reference to this in our text essay that set this discussion off. With Vaccination not only is there an initial free rider problem, but more that the system of prevention for everyone collapses utterly once a certain percentage are allowed to opt out.

Despite her strident protestations this was a settled matter by Typhoid Mary's time Typhoid Mary - Wikipedia. She eventually spent the reminder of her life locked away by the man on North Brother Island for the indiscretion of contagion. The crisis of communicable disease is also Foucault's prime example of the movement of state control to and over the body of the individual in Discipline and punish : the birth of the prison (Book, 1977)

An ideology of absolute rights posits a class of rights immutable inalienable absolute, and possessing the critical attribute that they are irreducting of the rights of others. This ideology maintains the deliberate misbelief that this is even possible. As if these rights were like air rights above our property (the property of our being) rising infinitely without affecting those beside us.

Rather, and I think I've run through this before, I ascribe to what I call the soap bubble metaphor of rights. Imagine a closed container, a glass carafe filled with small amount of water and soap, shaken. The interior is filled with bubbles and between each on all sides a boundary plane where they meet and balance against each other in defining adjudication.

Rights are a the result of a practical process of justice that recognizes each and constrains all. By this only does the individual, libertarian and anarchist alike, come into being.

An addendum is in order here.

In the first part of this post I referred to (Several times actually) and quoted from Matthew Ingram's columns for Om Malik's news site Gigom. A position he left a job at Toronto's Globe and Mail for only a few years ago. While kicking completion of this post relentlessly down the road something happened to Gigom. It went away, blip, gone in a single afternoon. Something about venture capital loans, and a loosely conceived business plan. One involving a wrap of media news around a core of tech news and a spec. research service. All of which needed to be pulling freight. Mr. Ingram More financial details re: Gigaom's unwieldy debt | mathewingram.com/work and others Gigaom: The Life and Death of a Venture Funded Media Startup -- Medium can tell you more about that. And currently from the vantage point of a man with only a blog to his name: Some thoughts on media business models | mathewingram.com/work.

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Friday, 20 March 2015 12:14 EST #

Crank it, a top ten of twenty fourteen

I don't know any of the "New" stuff the kids are listening to. I cobble together the list I do here from car commercials, evidence processing scenes in CBS police procedurals the few radio stations I'm still willing to listen to, and various other bricolage.

I need to put a moments thought in on this. I'm not hearing any of the new stuff the kids are listening to. As I think about it; you don't (over) hear anything people are listening to these days. The 20-30 year march of the walkman ipod, and smartphone earbud revolution has changed the pop music listening experience. To be sure this is not just a mere technological wrinkle. Something has changed in the way we related to, experience interpret and share musical culture. It isn't likely that this is an isolated phenomenon either. One confined to to the sphere of pop music or stemming from pop music, but to other interactions within the milieu of pop culture and general evolving societal norms as well. The boundary infringing communal [listening] experience is disappearing. Living off of New Hampshire ave I can attest even the vivid late night sharing by the cars-that-go-boom is not what it once was. Ubiquitous prestige component stereos no longer push musical tastes across dorm floors, or suburban neighborhoods. Nor boom boxes across street and park (or Aircraft Carrier mess lines).

My initial take on this was of the nature that the kids ain't cranking it like we used to, hence the title of this piece. But I guess it's not that youngs are listening to their musics all mannered and quiet; judging at least by the every increasing size of the headphones my nephew buys. At the same time, I can only imagine the sentiment of the Buzzcocks song "Noise Annoys" just being a puzzle to modern youth, not even arising to the level of incomprehensible archaic. I'm not even sure how music culture information and opinion is communicated these days. Perhaps a momentary cosmic intersection in the vibrations of spotify and pandora, briefly the unheard beats of separate headphones conjoin and unify. A glance is exchanged a nod "trap lord", and nothing more.

the List

1. Boogerins "Lucifernandis" As Plantas Que Curam (2013)
   • Boogarins | Music Biography, Streaming Radio and Discography | AllMusic
   • Boogarins - Lucifernandis (Official Video) - YouTube
   • Bunch of teenage kids from Brazil, at least they were when they started. They played at SxSW last year on the strength of this lp. Some original and powerful Tropicalia inspired modern psych.
2. Lee Ranaldo and Dust "Black't out" Acoustic Dust (2014)
   • Lee Ranaldo - Wikipedia
   • Lee got his start in the little known 80's band Ciccone Youth and is known to confuse the guitar for drums at times (certainly understandable). He can still mix it up though, it's nice to see the old guard kicking it.
     
3. Brendan Benson "Swallow you whole" You were right (2013)
   • Brendan Benson - Wikipedia
   • Bensons infamous side project of course is playing with Jack White in the Raconteurs. I earmarked this one without knowing who it was on the strength of the song's presence alone.
4. Thao and the GDSD "The Feeling Kind" We the Common (2013)
   • Thao & The Get Down Stay Down - Wikipedia
   • Thao & The Get Down Stay Down - The Feeling Kind (Official Video)
   • I knew that she had a new album out from a year or so ago and had heard one song "We the Common" but going back for a catch-up listen it was "the Feeling Kind" that grabbed me most. For some reason WFMU dos not play Thao Nguyen's stuff. There is also, if you desire, a four minute cartoon version of her life: California Inspires Me: Thao Nguyen made by California Sunday Magazine a few months ago.
5. Laura Cantrell "Starry Skies" No Way There From Here (2014)
   • Laura Cantrell - Wikipedia
   • Laura Cantrell - "Starry Skies" Live at WFUV
   • One of the loveliest song I've heard in long time From part of the extended WFMU DJ family. "All the girls are complicated" is a good song also.
6. the Both - "Milwaukee" the Both (2014)
   • The Both - Wikipedia
   • The Both - Milwaukee video
   • Aimee Mann and Ted Leo's incredibly catchy song from the eponymous lp. They have a music video for this, which features Ted doubling as his irrepressible "uncle" Ed Leo.
7. Ogre You Asshole - "Yori no fune" 100 nengo (2012) "Race no Course" Ukareteiru Hito (2010) Papercraft (2014)
   • Ogre You Asshole - Wikipedia
   • Ogre You Asshole.com
   • The songs I noted are from their 2012 and 2010 releases; though, they had a new record out last year. from which "Rule invisible" is good
   • Since I've opened the door for it I should add the dream pop (I guess) band Mi-Gu A two piece with Hirotaka Shimizu. One of many projects for Yuko Araki. She and "Shimmy" play in one of Mike Watts' bands also. Mi Gu - "From Space" From Space (2006).
8. Wild Billy Chyldish and CTFM "Punk Rock Enough For Me" Acorn Man (2014)
   • Billy Childish - Wikipedia,
   • Billy Childish, currently he seems to be calling himself Wild Billy Chyldish, I always consider him in conjunction with Mark E. Smith, for some reason. Standard bearers of all things British for me. I know not a particularly sensible comparison and arguably the Fall has had more influence on alternative, but Childish resonates with my own sensibilities more. CTFM: I think it stands for Chatham Forts c.f. "All our forts are with you" a 2013 cut
9. Neil Young - "Plastic Flowers" Storytone (2104)
   • Neil Young - Wikipedia
   • Neil Young put two records out this year; A Letter Home and StoryTone. The former with Jack White's 1940's artifact, a rebuilt instant vinyl recording booth, The latter his "orchestral music" outing. The Voice-o-Graph is the sort of nonsense I usually fall for, but this lp did very little for me. I did like *plastic flowers" off Story Tone, not the big arranged one, but the minimalist version that appears on an extended track lp.
10. Marlena Shaw - "California Soul" Spice of Life (1969)
    • Marlena Shaw - Wikipedia,
    • An Ashford and Simpson Song she picked up second hand. I can't believe a beautiful classically-framed pop song like this could have eluded me for all these years but I don't think I had ever heard it before.
11. His Name is Alive - "Wish I had a wishing ring" Fort Lake (1998)
    • His Name Is Alive - Wikipedia,
    • Every so often, when I'm in the mood I push into the back catalogues of bands I believe I like but am only somewhat familiar with. There are three versions of this song, the one I would recommend, I suppose, is from 1998's Fort Lake Lp, but it's the 19 minute version you can find on YouTube that I think really captures and brings home the essence of the song. One of their first songs with Lovetta Pippen on lead vocal.
12. Bevis Frond - "Stain on the Sun" New River Head (1991)
    • The Bevis Frond - Wikipedia , The Bevis Frond - All Music.com
    • The Bevis Frond - Stain on the Sun
    • Epitome of the things Nick Saloman and band do well and above. I'm pretty sure I heard this one on Matts show on 'ZBC rather than WFMU. I should listen to more of the weekend shows on WFMU.

• Grateful Dead - "Baby Blue" (1966)
  • Grateful Dead / It's All Over Now,Baby Blue
  • An addendum. I can't believe I'm saying this, but. At one point this summer on a whim I listened to all the versions of Dylan's Baby Blue I could find on YouTube (and there are so very very many). I came to the eventual conclusion that the best version was the one done by the Grateful Dead. Dylan's various versions are fine, Baez's version did nothing for me. Best that can be said of Van Morrison's with Them is that he did the Rolling Stones cover for them. The Byrds 3rd attempt (the one that made it on the Easy Ryder soundtrack) I predict will one day turn up on a Big Star box set mis-credited to Chilton/Bell. Not that that's a bad thing. Animals cover? Why is Eric shouting? Seriously why? Its not that kind of song. I do like the piano break. Don't talk to me about Bad Finger that's how this got started.

Pretty boys pretty girls, did you ever hear your mother say: Noise Annoys? -- Buzzcocks

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Sunday, 25 January 2015 23:10 EST #