Glow in the dark cat

Speaking of cats, a Korean scientist has successfully cloned a cat after modifying the gene for skin color. The picture at the head of the article is rather striking; it's not every day that you see a cat that glows under ultraviolet light.

This cat represents a proof-of-concept for a process that they will use to clone tigers and other animals that are in danger of extinction. Unlike with stem cells, a virus is inserted into the ova of one cat and then the ova is implanted into the womb of a donor cat. It is unfortunate that we are coming to the point where genetic engineering will be necessary to preserve these species.

Cats, Cats, Cats!

My dad and his wife recently visited and took some pictures of my cats. Tucker is the little black-and-white cat; I adopted him about six months back and he has assimilated into the pride nicely.

Romance and Cigarettes

I just got back from seeing this movie and wow, was I surprised. I honestly didn't expect too much from John Turturro's first film. He's a great actor but that skill doesn't necessarily carry over to the other side of the camera. Originally released in 2005 in a limited fashion, the movie is only now being shown to a wider audience. The tag line: A Savage Musical could not be more appropriate. If Bob Fosse, Joel Coen, Lena Horne and Matthew Barney all met at a singing, dancing, cinematic orgy this is what their illegitimate spawn might look like.

To say that this movie is ambitious would be an understatement. When you feature with Mr. Soprano himself, James Gandolfini belting out torch songs you know that you're talking about a movie outside of the status quo. In fact, within the first ten minutes this movie kills the status quo, buries it and pisses on its grave.

The remarkable thing is that with the exception of some pacing issues in the third act this movie works perfectly. The cast is incredible from top to bottom. Gandolfini plays the hapless lout, Nick Murder and Susan Sarandon his wife and foil, Kitty. Kate Winslet has a hilariously over-the-top turn as Nick's fowl-mouthed mistress, Tula, complete with a ridiculously affected Anglo-accent. Mandy Moore and Mary-Louise Parker (of Weeds fame) are Nick's daughters, Constance and Baby who along with Aida Turturro have formed a terrificly-bad rock band. Steve Buscemi has a great cameo as Angelo, Nick's warped coworker whose love advice is comedy gold. Eddie Izzard has a small but perfect role as Gene Vincent the leader of the church choir and the aforementioned Christopher Walken practically steals the movie as Kitty's neurotic Cousin Bo.

This movie is all over the map: one minute it hits you with a serious scene (Kitty has just discovered poems that prove Nick's infidelity) and the next second characters are bursting out with a song. Normally this sort of haphazard transitioning would be a recipe for disaster but when Nick joins the neighborhood garbage men for a song and dance number in the middle of the street the results are too spontaneous, too absurd to argue with.

For two acts, the movie never lets up; bouncing along, like a kid in a candy store eager to sample the next yummy treat. We're introduced to Fryburg (Bobby Cannavale) - probably the most ridiculous character in the movie - whose infatuation with Baby proves introspective impetus for Kitty and Nick. Having Kitty alternate between bitterly singing love songs to warning Baby of the fleeting impermanence of love is part of this movie's charm. Credit goes to Turturro for the guts to so recklessly mix this fantastical stew of song, dance and emotions.

The casting could not be more perfect. When Christopher Walken (who was born to be in this movie) says without irony, "She was my first love; I traced her name in cow shit", the whole weight of how funny this movie truly is comes crashing down like a wave. More than any movie in recent memory, this movie is fun; when I wasn't laughing my ass off I was grinning like the Cheshire cat.

The only blemish on this otherwise perfect monster of a movie is the final act. Things take a sudden serious turn and the movie just seems to skip a beat. It's not that the seriousness seems out of place when the emotion has been red-lining for half the movie, there is just something jarring about the transition from the silly antics of this truly dysfunctional tribe into sadness at the fate of the patriarch. But to fault the final act is to quibble; this movie is so wonderfully outrageous from beginning to end that you cannot help but love it.

Bill Gates wants your right arm

I just stumbled across this awesome quote; it has often been attributed to Bill Gates but was actually part of a fictional interview conducted by the satire website Pointless Waste of Time:

I have 100 billion dollars... You realize I could spend 3 million dollars a day, every day, for the next 100 years? And that's if I don't make another dime. Tell you what-I'll buy your right arm for a million dollars. I give you a million bucks, and I get to sever your arm right here.

As effective as this quote is for satire, it really made me stop and think. It is mind boggling to conceive of someone so wealthy that every day for the rest of their life they can spend more than I'll make in my lifetime and they would still have billions of dollars left when they die. With that kind of money just think about what can be done to improve this world. I hope that The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation lives up to this tremendous potential. The above quote reminds me of one of my favorite lines from William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy:

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

Excercise Helps Fight Depression, Dukkha

Ars has a writeup of an article in the journal Nature about new research into the effects of exercise on depression. Essentially exercise stimulates the expression of certain genes that help prevent the symptoms of depression (or its nearest equivalent) in mice. I've always felt a certain serenity after a hard workout and it's good to see scientists working to ascertain the cause of this phenomenon.

This makes me mindful of how inefficient our reactive society is at dealing with many problems. Instead of exercise and a sensible diet, we stuff ourselves with junk food and then turn to diet pills to make us thin. Instead of living a more balanced life we complicate everything and burden ourselves with stress only to turn to Prozac and other "mood-altering" medications as a panacea. It seems like America wants to solve all of our problems by simply consuming more. More food, more booze, more drugs, more sex, more oil.

We focus on the perceived lack in our life and convince ourselves that only by filling those voids will we be happy. Hinduism uses a Pali word to describe this: dukkha. This word does not have a direct translation into English but it can best be described in terms of an allegory. Dukkha describes our life as a cart being pulled along a country road, but the cart has a wheel with a broken spoke. At times the road is smooth and so we do not notice the broken spoke and think that all is well. Other times the road gets rough and so we notice the one wheel which does not turn quite right. Until we attain personal enlightenment, we are on this journey with a cart that does not quite move correctly. We can change the load of the cart, pull it from the front, push it from behind, but until we fix the broken spoke our journey will be a painful one, particularly when the road is roughest and we are most in need of four well-balanced wheels. The world is filled with snake oil salesmen who will gladly provide us with all manner of "solutions" to make our cart ride more smoothly but these are all just distractions.

This holiday season we are faced with numerous opportunities to revel in consumption. After all of the celebrating is over it is the simple things which will truly bring peace and happiness. So when the guilt of all of that holiday gluttony descends upon us, we should take a walk and stimulate the expression of those anti-Dukkha genes.

Learn vocabulary and give rice

I just came across this awesome vocabulary game called FreeRice. The game is simple, you are given a word and a choice of four words from which you must pick the best synonym. If you choose the correct answer your vocabulary level goes up (max is 50) and the site donates 50 grains of rice to the United Nations. An incorrect answer resets your level to 1, but you do learn the correct answer. I've made it to level 43 a couple of times but the words start to get really esoteric at that point and I'm basically just guessing.

If you build it, trolls will come...

I've alluded in the past to my utter disdain for forum comments but reading some particularly egregious abuses of the human intellect today inspired me to sum up my feelings on the matter with a little graph. The thing about the internet, particularly this whole web 2.0 thing, is that you find yourself confronted with undeniable proof of human stupidity on a daily basis. Sure you could just ignore the comments but it is very difficult not to be a cyber-rubbernecker. Forum comments, particularly those related to any complex or particularly subtle issue, are like a car wreck happening in real-time in your peripheral vision; you can't help but stop and stare at all of the carnage with a look of fascination and horror.

The information age has provided humanity with the remarkable ability to communicate incredible amounts of knowledge across vast distances nearly instantaneously. Millions of years of evolution have led up to this wondrous invention, a river of light upon which all the goods of human dreams may be transported. Or we could just say, "first post" and leave it at that.

Network

I've been contemplating switching my desktop system from Windows XP to KUbuntu for many reasons, security among them. Needless to say, this xkcd comic seemed especially timely:

Slicethepie: Music and Economics Collide on the Internet

I came across a new site called Slicethepie which has an interesting take on the marketing and distribution of music for up-and-coming bands. It has some of the elements that I mentioned in my post about artist collectives, most notably a community-centric model that helps fans connect to artists (including a Facebook plug-in to foster the word-of-mouth advertising that is essential for a new band). The site also holds contests for bands to win studio time to produce their albums. This should help some with the catch-22 that bands face where it takes money to cut an album so that you can make money. None of these concepts are particularly new; sites like Last.fm already provide many of these tools. What makes Slicethepie most unique is its use of a basic concept of economics to look at music in a different way.

In additional to fans and artists, Slicethepie defines the role of a music trader. This is not a trader in the traditional sense of one who trades music files with their friends but rather in the same sense as a stock trader. Music traders on Slicethepie are essentially replacing the role that record labels have traditionally played. The basic unit of trade on Slicethepie is known as a contract unit. These units can be purchased for $3 each (or $1/ea. with the purchase of an artist's album in digital form for $10). As with traditional stock dividends, if a band is successful the stock holders see a share of the profits.

Users rate how much they like an album and Slicethepie pays back dividends at regular intervals to those holding contract units for artists in the top 2% of popularity. This is an ingenious use of the concepts of economics to help bands get over that critical first hurdle. By creating a pressure for people to find the next big thing Slicethepie is focusing the diffuse energies on the internet on a specific task. Not only is the goal to discover the artists that are worthy of funding but, more importantly, to have the community fund them.

If they can make this model work, it truly is a win-win situation. Bands get much needed exposure and (if they're good enough) the funding to establish themselves. Fans can use the internet to provide a more direct feedback about the music that they like - much more so than listening to the radio or buying CDs from retailers ever allowed them. Last but not least, Slicethepie takes their cut from the contract units that fans purchase, some of which they reinvest in the community to ensure its continued vibrancy.

The only unfortunate (though necessary) aspect of this model is its slavish devotion to the whims of the masses. A band's value is based solely on the reviews of users; Slicethepie does not have experts adding input to the system and everyone's vote counts equally. Ideally this democracy is laudable, but the risk is that Slicethepie becomes yet another online niche for the boom-to-bust fads that already plague the online community on a macro-scale. In the end, the community is all about serving the users but I can't help worrying that this will lead to the same kind of one-hit-wonder pop outfits that the labels have been foisting on us for so long.

In any case, I can absolutely see the potential in this idea and it excites me to see other people using the internet to think up new business models. At the end of the day, it can only be good to have more power in the hands of music fans and artists and less power in the hands of the big four and their RIAA attack dogs. When I get a chance, I plan on digging deeper into Slicethepie and I'll be sure to post my findings.

Creep Animated Music Video

Animator Laith Bahrani created a fantastic animated music video for the Radiohead song "Creep". The video has over one million key frames of animation with an attention to detail that is quite impressive.

Microsoft To Get Seven Extra Armies Per Turn

In a move that has alarmed the North American Federation, the European Union and the Co-Prosperity League of the Southern Hemisphere, Microsoft today announced that they have established a base of operations in Irkutsk. This development has world leaders troubled as the Redmond giant now needs only conquer Ural and Yakutsk to have complete control of Asia and a commanding seven additional armies per turn. Representatives met late last night in an emergency session to discuss what is seen as an imminent threat to world stability. Jude Finisterra, a representative of the European Union allayed the fears of many when he revealed that Europe holds a wild card and plans on mobilizing its considerable resources early in the next fiscal year to ensure that the software giant's hold on Asia is not complete:

"We figure we'll slip in and take Afghanistan right before Microsoft announces earnings and their whole land-grab in Asia will only garner a pittance - besides now they have a soft underbelly in China that leaves them vulnerable to incursion from the People's Republican Army of New Guinea"

Representatives from PRANG would not comment on any plans for taking advantage of this perceived weakness instead insisting that they "prefer to sit back and let everyone else kill each other".

Beowulf Killed The Movie Star

After seeing the Robert Zemeckis film Beowulf last night I was left with the sinking feeling that I witnessed a sad milestone for popular cinema. When purchasing tickets I failed to notice that the theater near me had 2D and 3D showings of the movie so I ended up seeing the movie in boring-old 2D. Incidentally, I did really appreciate the creative tweak that Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary put on the plot of this traditional heroic tale.

Seeing the movie presented in 2D did not (as so many reviewers have claimed) ruin the movie for me. In fact, I found the visual effects to be quite impressive without any added illusion of depth or "holy crap the dragon is flying right at me!" moments. The quality of computer rendered animation continues its inexorable crawl toward the holy grail of truly life-like. That said, I have not seen the movie "as it was intended" so I will leave a critique of the multi-dimensional visual spectacle for others to write. The problem that I have with this movie is not the visual effects but rather with a cognitive dissonance that this style of animation causes me to experience.

There is a palpable unease that I experience watching an eerily life-like representation of a well-known actor. Let me be clear, I do not just mean that the representation is life-like in the general sense, I mean that the representation is a dead reckoning of the actor in question (perhaps aged or in period-specific garb but unmistakable nonetheless). Anthony Hopkins as Hrothgar is the most obvious example as his character is rendered as a jovial and rotund Danish doppleganger of the actor. This decision to render the characters as near-exact likenesses of the actors makes sense on multiple levels: not only do realistic renderings naturally follow from the motion-capture technology used to record the actor's movements but the movie is, like all Hollywood vehicles, banking on the marketability of it's stars. I understand this decision but it significantly detracts from the movie.

For me, the worst example of this visual friction is the character of Unferth (voiced by John Malkovich). Every time Unferth's mouth opens and Malkovich's unmistakable voice comes out I am struck by just how wrong everything looks. To be sure, the animation is still a bit wooden at times but this is not the cause of my uneasiness. The problem is not that Unferth is too wooden in his mannerisms as Malkovich is talking; in fact the animators have done a very good job of making the character come to life (certainly much-improved from Zemeckis' past attempts such as The Polar Express).

The problem with Unferth in particular, and all of the characters with recognizable voice actors in general, is not that he is poorly animated, it is that his mannerisms don't match those of the actor. It is as if they have bottled John Malkovich's voice and are uncorking it from some other actor's mouth. As a big fan of anime I had never thought that it would be an issue for a character to be voiced by an actor that looked vastly different, or more importantly one that emotes in a vastly different way. Indeed some of my favorite Miyazaki films feature characters that are voiced by actors that look and perform much differently than their on-screen counterparts.

There is a fundamental difference between an animated character in a Miyazaki film and the characters in Beowulf. In Miyazaki films (and traditional animated films as a whole) the animators are not trying to make the character look like the actor. An obvious example would be the Witch of the Waste from Howl's Moving Castle (voiced by the great Lauren Bacall). The animators are not trying to evoke images of Lauren Bacall (either as ingenue opposite Humphrey Bogart or as the wise matronly persona that she inhabited in her later performances). Instead they rendered The Witch of the Waste as well, a witch. When the witch speaks I may recognize Bacall's unmistakably deep timbre but my mind is not locked into thinking of the character as Lauren Bacall because the character looks so different.

The same cannot be said for Unferth or many of the other main characters in Beowulf (Hrothgar, Wealthow and Grendel's Mother among them). When I see an actor's likeness (or close enough for my mind to chunk it as their likeness) and I hear their voice I am subconsciously going to expect their mannerisms, their gesticulations. All of the subtle visual symbols that come with an actor's years of training and experience. These visual queues are what makes an actor unique, what separates them from all of the other nameless faces trying to make it in Hollywood. Incidentally, these characteristics are also precisely why it is so hard to do a really good impression of someone - it's not just the voice you have to mimic, it's is the entire visual presentation. This visual expectation is happening for the viewer on an a subconscious level. It is not something that one can simply turn off, no more than one could chose to forget the countless times you've seen Anthony Hopkins or John Malkovich on screen.

This is one of the primary reasons that hand-drawn animation has eschewed rendering characters in the actor's likeness. In order to pull this off an animator would essentially have to be able to impersonate all of the voice actors that will be performing. In any case, since the animation is created before the voice acting is even recording this is literally impossible in traditional animation. I believe that this represents a constraint that has served animation well over the years because it frees the animator (and thus the viewer) to use their imagination and not get stuck on the instinctual need to match a face with a voice

Bold claims are being made about the 3D version of this film ushering in a new kind of cinema. In all cases I believe that there is a better alternative, whether it be the blue-screen approach used in movies like Sin City (where the actor's image is cut into digital sets), traditional animation like Howl's Moving Castle (where the actor is completely divorced from their character's representation, often to a comic degree) or in more recent techniques such as the rotoscoping used in A Scanner Darkly (where the actor's likeness is computer-rendered but their mannerisms are left essentially intact). Sadly, I believe the success of Beowulf will only convince others to follow Zemeckis' lead to the detriment of cinema as a medium. If the 3D computer-animated picture takes off, and they continue to render characters in the form of their voice actors, I will be content to take my place with the curmudgeons who refused to accept the talkie or the barbarism of Technicolor.

Stephenson interviewed by Reason magazine

While I'm on the topic of Neal Stephenson I might as well link to an interview that Reason magazine conducted (primary via email) with Stephenson in late fall of 2005. It is interesting to hear Stephenson's work discussed in the context of Libertarianism.

The interview includes a fantastic quote about how terrorism encourages statism and government (inadvertently) fosters Libertarianism:

Speaking as an observer who has many friends with libertarian instincts, I would point out that terrorism is a much more formidable opponent of political liberty than government. Government acts almost as a recruiting station for libertarians. Anyone who pays taxes or has to fill out government paperwork develops libertarian impulses almost as a knee-jerk reaction. But terrorism acts as a recruiting station for statists. So it looks to me as though we are headed for a triangular system in which libertarians and statists and terrorists interact with each other in a way that I'm afraid might turn out to be quite stable.

It is frightening to me how right he is. The first thing that really changed after the September 11th attacks was that it became "patriotic" to stand up and say, "safety is more important than liberty". The most bitter irony of all is that this attitude ultimately leads to the kind of totalitarian hegemony that our constitution was designed to avoid. By granting our government more control of our lives in exchange for the illusion of greater safety we are subverting the very principles that our nation was founded on.

Unfortunately the harder the terrorists fight against us the natural reaction for many is to just work that much harder to entrench the existing power structure under the auspices of "national security". Make no mistake, regardless of who is in office in 2009, if another tragedy on the scale of the 9/11 attacks were to occur on American soil the statists would push for legislation that makes the Patriot Act look tame by comparison. An unfortunate truism about liberty is that it is one of those diffuse qualities that is much easier to identify in its absence than when you are enjoying its benefits.

Clooney to turn The Diamond Age into a six-hour miniseries

I was just wiki-wandering and I stumbled across the news that George Clooney is the helping to produce a six-hour miniseries based on Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age. I am so excited about this; I think doing it as a miniseries makes a lot more sense than trying to cram the story into a 2 hour movie. Incidentally Stephenson is working on the adaptation so there is no need to worry about his novel being butchered by hacks.

For those unfamiliar with the book, it is a wonderfully-crafted bildungsroman that follows Nell, a young girl finding her way as a thete (or one without a tribe) in a futuristic "neo-Victorian" world where nanotechnology is pervasive. Wikipedia rather clumsily describes it as a postcyberpunk novel but there are too many themes at play in this work to allow for easy classification.

Like the work of Neil Gaiman, the beauty in this story is how Stephenson takes fairy tales and re-contextualizes them so that we can look at stories that we've heard a hundred times from a fresh perspective. The protagonist is aided in her development by a technologically advanced primer (the full title of the book is "The Diamond Age or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer"). With a nod to Constructivism, the primer is constantly adapting the methods it uses to teach Nell based on the situation that she is in and her current level of experience.

In any case, if you haven't read the book yet I definitely encourage you to do so right away. I have a feeling that even those who aren't fans of the book will enjoy the miniseries when it comes out - George Clooney's name in production credits is becoming a guarantee of quality (except perhaps those Ocean's N movies).

80's music videos, David Fincher and musical taste

FincherFanatic has a chronological list of all of the music videos that David Fincher has ever directed. His video for the Nine Inch Nails track "Only" is definitely worth checking out as well as videos for A Perfect Circle, The Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop and others. There are videos dating back to 1984 with varying degrees of the camp and naïveté of the early age of music videos. For good or ill, these videos stand as testament to how influential Fincher was to the burgeoning medium.

I still remember the first time that I saw Guns N' Roses on MTV. I thought that there was no one on the planet as cool as Axl Rose. My how tastes change. Don't get me wrong, I still turn up the radio and throw up the horns when "Paradise City" comes on it's just not exactly the zenith of my musical taste anymore. In this regard I think that one's taste in music is much like our palate. As children we have a very narrow range of what tastes good; anything outside of that range we will simply refuse to eat. As we grow older and (hopefully) are exposed to a wider variety of food, we learn that there are many different kinds of food that we enjoy.

In some cases it is foods that we've never tried before that give us that olfactory epiphany (like the first time I heard R.E.M.). Other times it is simply the dish that we never really liked but we give it a chance years later and come to find that we really appreciate it now (I never really liked The Beatles later work as a kid, now my tastes have matured so I can see the flavors that I was missing before). Changing taste is a natural part of human development and should be encouraged (parent's who tell their children "oh, you don't like that" when a child asks to try something are probably doing the child a disservice).

In talking to people about music I find that some people are confused at the extreme range of my personal taste. The implication that I get from some people is that it somehow detracts from one style of music (e.g. post-feminist culturally conscious riot grrrl rock a la Sleater-Kinney) that you are a fan of another, seemingly opposed style (e.g. beer guzzling, mullet-wearing rock a la Guns N' Roses). To me this assertion is as absurd as the notion that one cannot both enjoy a glass of lemonade on a hot summer day and a rich cheesecake as the culmination of a seven course gourmet meal.

Music is many things, and like any art it has a viral influence on the audience. The more that you enjoy music of many different styles the more that you will find styles of music that you never knew you liked. This is not to say that you will not find things that you don't like (I loathe pea soup and Creed songs in equal measure) but even having a bad meal helps you define the boundaries of your taste (just try to avoid the Insane Clown Posse platter, it's been under those heat lamps for a bit too long).

So take a minute to stroll down memory lane and enjoy the bittersweet taste of 80's popular music. You never know, it might remind you of your favorite forgotten video from the time of neon, leg warmers and big hair.

Drawing Way Outside The Lines

I saw Tool at the Frank Erwin Center last night and it exceeded all expectations. For them to sound this good seventeen years into making music is a testament to their dedication. As with their tours for Lateralus and Ænima the light show was in full effect with many songs accompanied by their respective music videos and some new material. Maynard's voice sounded great and the acoustics of the venue were perfect for Tool's expansive sound.

Following them through the years it has been interesting to see their evolving sound and the way that it informs their live performances. I know that there are some fans that feel that Ænima is the high water mark of their career; as good as that album is, I have to disagree with this sentiment. Last night was undeniable proof that Tool's transition from alt-rock vitriolics to prog-rock epics has been one for the better. Don't get me wrong, I love Ænima, along with OK Computer, it is one of the few true masterpieces of post-Nirvana 90's rock. The difference is one of cohesion.

One can certainly make the case that, taken individually, tracks on Ænima are better than tracks on their more recent albums but I believe that this is failing to see the forest from the trees. Tool albums are no longer about individual tracks, this is especially telling when one looks at which tracks are played on the radio. The radio format is all about three to four minute time slots for listeners with short attention spans and it has become increasingly difficult for their label to get Tool tracks on the air. When even the shortest Tool songs (excluding segues) often stretch to six or seven minutes the only option for radio play is to chose on of the shorter songs and hack it down into a four minute "radio-edit". The reality is that Tool has long since left the land of easily packaged, radio-friendly "popular rock" music. Tool's more recent work is not about tracks, but concepts.

Take, for example the "Wings for Marie (Pt 1)" and "10,000 Days (Wings Pt 2)" song cycle from their latest album. What starts slowly with a quiet brooding over the course of seventeen minutes builds into a cathartic release that to experience live borders on some kind of religious epiphany. This is not about seeing your favorite band crank out rock songs so that you can sing along and wave your lighter. At the risk of sounding maudlin, this is about the experience of seeing a group of dedicated artists create something positive and beautiful. This is all the more powerful from being made in a medium that so often is just used to sell iPods and Volkswagens.

It's been a few years since I've gone to a big stadium rock concert and there is a new trend that has become disturbingly pervasive. Three of the people sitting in the row in front of me spent most of the night alternatively texting their friends (presumably about being at the Tool show) and taking video clips and picture snapshots with their camera-phones. Did I miss a meeting? Since when is it not sufficient to just experience something? I can understand the juvenile need to show off the fact that you were at a big rock show, but to spend the whole evening watching the show through the blurry two megapixel lens of your phone just boggles my mind. I must say the irony was certainly delicious to look out over a stadium thronged with thousands of fans, cell phones held aloft to capture the moment, singing along:

Cause I need to watch things die
From a distance
Vicariously, I
Live while the whole world dies
You all need it too - don't lie.

Vending Machines + Facial Recognition = One More Reason Why Japan Is Awesome

Yesterday a cigarette vending machine was released in Japan that can tell whether or not someone is an adult based on facial recognition. The machine uses a complex system of heuristics to make this determination, including on the bone structure, wrinkles, and the way that the skin sags (or doesn't) on a person's face. In the cases where the machine is unable to determine definitively that a person is 20 years old (the legal age to buy cigarettes in Japan) they can insert their drivers license as an alternate form of identification. This is some crazy science fiction that could only come from the land of the rising sun.

When I visited Japan I made a point of using the beer vending machines, because well, it's beer in a freaking machine! What more reason do you need?! Incidentally an awesome drinking game is to wander the streets of Tokyo aimlessly and buy a biru from each vending machine you stumble across. One thing that I quickly learned was that I was not able to buy beer after 8pm (different machines seemed to have different times but 8pm seemed to be the norm). This was their solution for preventing minors from purchasing beer or cigarettes from the vending machines that blanket metropolitan areas. These machines were equipped with card readers so that locals could use their driver's license as proof of age after 8pm but of course my gaijin passport was not supported. In any case I'm sure they'll start using these for biru and I can't wait to go back to test them. With any luck they will be calibrated to also handle funny-looking white guys...

Ambiguity Made In America

My thoughts on the series finale of The Sopranos

**WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS**


I finally had a chance to watch the series finale of the Sopranos over the weekend. Long gone are the hype that preceded its airing and hysteria that followed. The sheer volume of critical attention given to this one event is staggering. In the end, this is just a TV show and as much as viewers of the show are outraged about the ambiguous and anti-climatic ending there are more important things in life worth getting upset about (one of them, the Iraq war, is even an underlying theme of the last season of the Sopranos).

Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, what is the meaning of this abrupt conclusion to the series? Does Tony get shot? What about his family? Does he escape with his life only to be indicted? So many questions left unanswered, and what does it all mean? Bob Harris has an excellent, and exhaustive, analysis of the religious symbolism in the final scene (along with some fascinating ties to the Godfather trilogy). No doubt many others have mined the rich depths of symbolism in this episode so I will leave it as an exercise to those with curiosity (and time) to look into this further. Rather than simply rehash others' analysis I want to focus on what for many was the main point of contention with the finale. The lack of a definite conclusion, of not knowing Tony's fate is the single biggest criticism being leveled by fans and critics alike.

It seems almost laughable to me that anyone would be surprised when the conclusion to the single most morally ambiguous show on television is itself ambiguous. Like the show, the protagonist Tony Soprano, one of the greatest anti-heroes ever created, is a melting pot of conflicted emotions and paradoxical motivations. A merciless killer who can suffocate his self-described "son" and heir apparent with his bare hands. A family man brought to tears when a family of ducks that was living in his pool flies away. Over the course of seven seasons the show paints these two (along with many other) completely contradictory pictures of the same man. Far from the stereotypical one-dimensional mafioso, Soprano is so multi-faceted it is at times hard to keep track of which Tony we are seeing. In fact the way that Tony can switch from one persona to another at a moment's notice leads to some of the show's funniest and most dramatic moments.

The show does not shy away from the implications of such a conflicted existence. Over the seven years Tony's faces everything from marital estrangement, assassination attempts and nervous breakdowns. Through it all the viewer is brought to a place where we understand Tony (as much as anyone can), where we simultaneously empathize with him for his human foibles and revile him for his monstrous acts. That we can exist in such a moral limbo about the show's main character is ultimately what makes The Sopranos so successful (both commercially and artistically).

The connection between plot and abstract concepts is very tight in The Sopranos, more so that most other shows. Everything from the music playing, background images and the colors of key props is intentional and often has some deeper symbolism. In order to represent such a complex family of characters the show must make full use of the more complex aspects of art. It is only fitting then, that such a complicated and multi-layered show would be concluded in a similarly inscrutable fashion. The creators could have easily created the Godfather-esque bloodbath that so many fans anticipated (nay even hungered for), or the fairy-tale "everyone escapes to live another day" ending. But both of these would be the wrong choice, both would be an absurd oversimplification of what deserves better. To cut to black when he did, David Chase is not abdicating his responsibility as so many have claimed, he is letting his show die the way it lived, in the messy moral gray area where one man can be both a sinner and a saint (sometimes both at the same time). That the creators chose to wrap this faux-climax in religious trappings and leave the final answer on the tip of the tongue is only fitting when none of the answers in this show ever came easily. Indeed the difficult questions in life never truly get answered, at least not forever. That is, after all, what makes these questions interesting, and what makes the process of finding the answers worth while. Only a fool seeks an easy answer to a difficult question and I can't help but see the hubbub over the Sopranos finale as just a bunch of foolishness.

187 On The Album

Ars reports that Jay-Z will not be offering his latest album, American Gangster on the iTunes Store. His reason is an interesting one: he doesn't want the album broken down and sold as individual tracks (something that iTunes requires but many other online music stores do not). From what I can tell, the general consensus is that he should just offer the album as individual tracks and be happy that people want to buy his music. This issue lies at an increasingly busy intersection of technology and art that I am fascinated by so I want to dig a bit deeper into the details.

In reading many of the responses to this announcement I was struck with how strong the sense of entitlement is among many on the internet. Granted the quasi-anonymity that the internet provides can certainly skew people towards the whiny end of the scale it still seems like many people feel that artists owe them something. It is telling that people who, by their own admission, are not Jay-Z fans are indignantly demanding that he "get with the program" and just offer his tracks up on iTunes like everyone else. Even many Jay-Z fans are using this as further rationalization for their use of peer-to-peer networks. There is a wonderful irony to someone saying, "why don't you offer your music the way I want it" out of one side of their mouth and "I don't actually pay for your music" out of the other. So where does this sense of entitlement come from?

Like many of the problems plaguing the embattled music industry, I think much of the responsibility lies at the feet of the record labels and the RIAA. Their policies have been driven solely by greed for so long that they don't know any other way to operate. This is an industry that routinely sells CDs (which cost pennies to manufacture) for $18 while giving the artist an average of less than a dollar per CD sold. Ask them why and they will spew a river of garbage to put Cuyahoga to shame. The reality is that the relationship between labels and artists has always been one-sided which is why many established artists are looking at abandoning their labels entirely. So the label's greed has hurt the artists they claim to promote and has alienated the fans that they claim to serve.

Before the internet there wasn't much that a disgruntled music fan could do. You either paid the exorbitant cost of a CD or you listened to the homogenized sound-gelatin of the radio. The emergence of the internet, along with completely destroying the traditional distribution model for digital media, has provided a forum for the disenfranchised music fans. It is appropriate that an industry enslaved to the economic principle of maximizing profit would be blindsided by a technology that trumps its strongest suit. Manufacturers spent years perfecting CDs to the point that they cost almost nothing to produce. Labels hired armies of lawyers to craft contracts that would turn artists into indentured servants. Then Napster came along and the whole game changed. The cost of distribution shrunk to almost nothing and now all of the music fans, sick of being overcharged for mediocre product, revolted en masse.

So now there are myriad P2P tools that allow anyone to easily get their favorite music for free and music fans (for the most part) are gruntled. Like any revolution, the digital revolution of the early 21st century has left some behind. The artist, long at the mercy of the labels, can now see a way out of bondage but the internet has not yet fulfilled that promise. As in many revolutions, some of the P2P revolutionaries have taken things too far. What started as a rebellion against the records labels has transformed into a culture of entitlement. The motto of "free music from corporate tyranny" has been perverted into "I deserve free music".

To be honest, I'm not a fan of Jay-Z but I do support his decision to not allow his album to be split apart. Technology has dramatically changed the landscape of music, mostly for the better, but music is still a creative endeavor. A painter is (usually) given input into how their paintings are displayed in a gallery. This is because the gallery owner is not solely driven by a desire to sell paintings, they have tempered that with a desire to respect the artist's intent and creative sensibilities. In this context I think that Jay-Z's request that his album be appreciated as a whole and not as individual tracks is completely reasonable. In fact I would argue that anyone selling his album has a mandate, just like a gallery owner, to respect his creative intent. Napster and its mutant offspring may have demolished the distribution model for music but this does not destroy the relationship that an artist has with their work.

White Chalk

PJ Harvey's latest album is a rather dramatic departure from her more recent work. A minor-key piano heavy affair; Harvey uses her voice to great effect to create the somber mood of the album. Gone is the throaty growl of her early work, replaced by a ghostly timber that is startling to hear at first but ultimately works remarkably well. It is a testament to PJ Harvey's versatility as an artist that she can execute such a dramatic transformation. Her choice of delivery fits the theme of the music perfectly for ultimately this is an album about loneliness. Not the quiescent solitude of one who chooses to be apart mind you, but the bitter regret of one who has lost, who has been betrayed. She has explored these themes before but never has PJ Harvey's choice of delivery given this particular subject matter such potency.

The opening track "The Devil" along with it's sister track "Silence" underpin the major themes of the album. Both deal with the pain of lost love, they describe the pangs of need that lead one to a shared rendezvous in the vain hope that what is lost will be waiting there. This powerful metaphor runs throughout the work and we are like moths drawn to the light of her revelatory confessions. At different points the lyrics mention nakedness, in the literal sense, but this is only a metaphor for the raw emotional state of Harvey's tragic heroine. To be sure, this is an emotional excision; the feelings of loss, betrayal and blind hope all torn from her breast and laid bare before us.

Between the esoteric instruments (Optigan, broken harp, mellotron and mini-moog) and the antiquated language (ether gets prominent mention) White Chalk feels like a Victorian elegy for a lover lost in some tragic Poe short story. The raw sensuality of Harvey's work, often far more overt, here slowly builds to a roiling boil over the course of the eleven tracks until the dramatic climax on the album's devastating closer, "The Mountain". Repetition is used very effectively to establish a mood early and maintain it throughout the album making it feel more like stanzas of a single Sapphic poem than discrete tracks. Like much of PJ Harvey's other work, White Chalk took multiple listens to scratch the surface and reveal the deeper beauties hidden within but she makes the scratching hurt so right that you can't help yourself.

Patent Extortion v. Innovation

Arstechnica is reporting that Canadian-based company Wi-LAN has filed law suits against 22 different companies over two of its patents. Wi-LAN, which bills itself as "a leading technology licensing company" is part of a new breed of companies that don't actually make anything or offer services of any kind. Essentially all they do is buy and register a portfolio of promising patents and then sit on them in the hopes that someone else creates something that infringes one or more of those patents. I'm sure industry experts have all kinds of technical terms for this business model but for simplicity sake I'm just going to call them a patent leech.

Here is the full list of companies that they are suing:

1. Acer Inc.
2. Apple Inc.
3. Atheros Communications Inc.
4. Belkin International Inc.
5. Best Buy Co. Inc.
6. Broadcom Corporation
7. Buffalo Technology (USA) Inc.
8. Circuit City Stores, Inc.
9. Dell Inc.
10. D-Link Corporation
11. Gateway Inc.
12. Hewlett-Packard Company
13. Infineon Technologies AG
14. Intel Corporation
15. Lenovo Group Ltd.
16. Marvell Semiconductor Inc.
17. Netgear Inc.
18. Sony Corporation
19. Texas Instruments Incorporated
20. Toshiba Corporation
21. Westell Technologies Inc.
22. 2Wire Inc.

They have wisely chosen to file their suit in a patent litigation-friendly district of East Texas where the local laws are essentially structured to favor the plaintiff in these types of cases. This underscores one of the real weaknesses of a legal system based on precedent. They can go to a court system that favors their case and if they emerge victorious they then have the saber of precedent to brandish against all of the other companies that might ever want to use Wi-Fi or power management features in their products even though the case would have been thrown out in a more reasonable court.

This is such a gross perversion of the spirit of patent law it is sickening. From Wikipedia the rationale behind patents has four main components:

1. Provide incentives for research and development
2. Encourage disclosure of innovations into the public domain
3. Protect products for which the cost of commercialization (testing, manufacturing, marketing) is much higher than conception (research and development)
4. Provide an incentive for companies to be creative and work around existing patents thus spurring development of new technologies that might not otherwise exist

The insidious thing about an "intellectual property" company like Wi-LAN is that they reap the benefits of patent law without paying any of the cost:

1. Wi-LAN no longer even does any research and development; they simply hold onto broad patents that they filed back when they were a real company and buy up new patents using the money that they have extorted from others.
2. Wi-LAN does not actually want anyone to know about their patents, the most lucrative scenario for them is when the entire industry unknowingly steps on one of their overly broad patents and establishes a technology that is useful to everyone (e.g. Wi-Fi). They can simply sit back as the technology matures and is brining profit to the companies actually doing the work then swoop in after the value of that technology is well established and extort an entire industry.
3. The whole point of providing an incentive for conception is so that said company then moves on to commercialization! By creating a niche for companies that don't produce anything but lawsuits patent law has actually hurt commercialization more than it helps it. I can not emphasize this enough, the companies actually doing the work are the ones commercializing Wi-Fi products, not the engineers at Wi-LAN that snuck "multiplexing over multiple transceivers" (Patent 5,282,222) past the knuckleheads at the patent submission office. Don't be confused by all of the fancy language in that patent, the concepts that we are talking about are ones that any college graduate of the relevant discipline could scribble on a cocktail napkin while downing Yaeger Bombs and hitting on co-eds at a South Padre Island pool bar. In short, these ideas are neither new nor inventive.
4. By waiting until the technology is ubiquitous "intellectual property" companies totally subvert the concept of fostering creativity. It's a bit too late in the game for us to get creative about Wi-Fi. What are we going to do, shut down the hot spots in every coffee shop and book store in America while we wait for someone to find a creative work around? Obviously making the Wi-Fi cards in everyone's laptops useless while our best engineering minds work out a new way to wirelessly transmit data is really all about creativity.

Lest I be mistaken for a pinko, I am not advocating a total abolition of patents, I simply advocate that we take a long hard look at any legal system that fosters these kind of leeches. After all, the point of the open market is a million financial organisms all competing with each other, not a million financial organisms all being granted their own monopolistic niches based on dubious merits.

Michael Clayton

**WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS**

I caught a late showing of this movie at the Alamo Drafthouse yesterday and I must say, I was very impressed. George Clooney plays the eponymous character, a "fixer" or "janitor" who cleans up messes for a high-powered New York law firm. There are a couple of visually stunning scenes in this movie which do an excellent job of emphasizing Clayton's journey from Faustian tragic hero to his rebirth as the bringer of justice. In one critical scene Clayton dons the mask of Justice, with a check for $80,000 in one hand and the damning evidence for the case against negligent bio-corp U-North. This scene has a quiet power as you can see the wheels turning in Clayton's head.

Clooney is perfect in this role, playing it cool and communicating more with his grim countenance and hundred-mile stare than his trademark wry delivery. In true tragic form, Clayton takes the money; the temptation of relief from a failed business endeavor that has haunted him throughout the film proves to be too great. But ultimately this film is about those exceptional moments when an individual is presented, very clearly, with a choice of doing what is right or "making the problem go away". Clayton having made a career out of doing the latter begins to have doubts when his friend's mental breakdown reveals a more sinister effluence than he has ever had to "fix" before.

By far the most striking scene of the movie is Clayton's rebirth as a bringer of justice. An early morning stop at a remote upstate hilltop quickly transforms from a rare moment of somber reflection into a sudden and violent epiphany that his old life is, quite literally, destroyed. There is a beautiful finality when he realizes what is happening and throws his wallet, cell phone and watch - all tainted symbols of his complicity - into the burning wreckage of his old life and runs into the wilderness of danger and possibility that lies beyond.

The name of Shiva the Hindu god of destruction is evoked twice in this movie and appropriately so, for theme of destruction runs through it on multiple levels. There destruction of the self as Clayton's old life is sacrificed so that he can topple the corrupt hegemony that U-North represents. This is powerful stuff, but it should not come as too much of a surprise as the production list reads like an auteur who's who: Steven Soderbergh, Anthony Minghella and Syndney Pollack (who also takes a turn in front of the camera) were all involved in brining this movie into being. This movie is tightly wound, with understated performances and excellent pacing. Needless to say, I highly recommend it.

Great quote by Nicholas Gurewitch

Ion magazine has a great interview with Nicholas Gurewitch, the creator of The Perry Bible Fellowship web comic. This quote in particular struck me as insightful:

"I think there's a distinct type of person that feels the need to broadcast their feelings online. And the more I think, those people who want to make their opinions known, or who shout the loudest, are probably the ones you should listen to the least. In most cases."

Anyone who has had the misfortune of spending time reading online fora can sympathize with this. I think it is safe to say that, taken as a whole, Youtube comments represent the single greatest concentration of human bigotry and ignorance ever assembled.

Food Fight!

I just stumbled across this really cool music video over at Discobelle.net. The band is Jape and the name of the track is "Floating".

A post-mortem of the OiNK memeplex

On Tuesday the music sharing site OiNK was shut down by Interpol, IFPI, BPI and other organizations. As with seemingly all cases involving Big Content , much of the reporting on this incident by major news sources has ranged from inaccurate to totally falacious. For those not familiar, OiNK was a web site which provided a torrent tracker (software that helps users of P2P software search for and download shared files) that focused mainly on music files. It facilitated music sharing for almost 180,000 members and served as much as two terabytes of data each day. Superficially there is nothing unique about OiNK, indeed there are thousands of torrent tracker sites on the internet that offer the exact same service that OiNK did. OiNK only becomes unique when you look into particular rules that governed the use of the web site and in turn shaped the community that formed around it.

Much has already been said about OiNK so I encourage those interested to read more elsewhere. I want to set aside any discussion of legality for a moment and look at OiNK in terms of the memeplex that it created. If we look at memetic replication in terms of longevity, fidelity and fecundity we can see how OiNK was able to grow to 180,000 users without devolving into the chaotic mess that typifies most torrent trackers.

Memberships were available on an invitation-only basis. In fact one of the most strictly enforced terms of service was that anyone offering or accepting money for a membership invitation would immediately have their account terminated. This helped ensure the fidelity of memes because only users with a history of good P2P citizenship would be invited to join. For example a known "leech" could not fake being a good P2P neighbor by simply buying an invitation.

Incomplete or inaccurately tagged albums were not allowed. Users who continued to share incomplete or incorrectly tagged albums would have their accounts terminated. This again contributed to the fidelity of the music in

Leeching was not allowed. Leeching is the P2P term for downloading files without allowing others to download from you. The success of the P2P architecture is predicated on the concept of reciprosity. By terminating account of users who downloaded files but did not share their files with others OiNK ensured the fecundity of all memes in the system. So not only did OiNK's invitation system prevent most leeches from making it in, once in a leech would quickly be identified and have their account terminated.

A request system was offered so that members could communicate the music that they were looking for. This helped ensure the longevity of the system as members would be ensured that as their collections were filled out and their tastes changed OiNK would still be able to provide them the music that they were looking for.

Files could only be high-quality copies of CDs or LPs - no cassettes, live recordings, etc. In fact many of the files available on OiNK were lossless meaning that a user could download an album from OiNK and burn it to a CD that would be of identical quality to the original recoding. Other than the obvious preservation of fidelity that this represents it also contributed greatly to the fecundity of music as a members could upload to a lossless format (say FLAC) which other members could download and re-encode to lossy formats (like MP3) for purposes of storing on their portable audio player. Converting of audio files is less likely to happen in a system that only shares lossy files because the process of transcoding from one lossy format to another (say converting an OGG file into an MP3 file so that you can load it onto your iPod) often leads to an unacceptable loss of fidelity. This ability to transcode without a loss in quality means that a lossless file shared on OiNK is more likely to be downloaded than a lossy file and is thus more likely to replicate (it has higher fecundity).

Membership was free. This is the most misreported fact about OiNK - members were not required to pay a fee. Members were welcome to donate to offset the cost of running the site but OiNK was not run as a pay-for-service venture. From the beginning the emphasis on OiNK was on being a fan of music that you uploaded/downloaded. Rather than script kiddies who just want to steal the latest pop album (some merely for the sake of stealing), this community was about fans sharing music that they cared deeply about with other fans.

The size of the community and the overall quality of its offerings have led some to declare that OiNK represented the greatest collection of music ever assembled. There can be no doubt in my mind that OiNK's impressive achievement is due to the understanding (implicit or otherwise) of the principals of memetics which underlies their terms of use. Rumors are already rampant about what will be "the next OiNK" and no doubt orphaned members of the OiNK community are hard at work at picking up the pieces.

The pea soup of acronymic organizations that worked to shut OiNK down will tout this as another victory in the "War On Piracy" but they continue to miss the point. In the short history of the internet we have seen time and again that communities of like-minded individuals create communities that are far more robust than what is on offer commercially - in fact this is probably the best was to answer the question of "what is Web 2.0?". Contrast Napster with the traditional retail CD model or OiNK with the iTunes Music Store, there is a reason why the illegal options continue to be more popular than the legal ones and it's not as simple as monetary cost. Big Content is so obsessed with the criminal aspect of file-sharing that they totally fail to recognize that these communities are providing a better service.

With Apple and other stores finally offering DRM-free music the lumbering giants have at least opened their eyes. There is still a long way to go before the content providers can offer a legal service with the kind of features that OiNK offered. Music labels love to talk about their need to staunch the blood after plummeting CD sales and they use this as an excuse to encumber legitimate online stores with DRM, low bit rates and onerous licensing terms. This is like pissing on a dying man; CDs are going to die because the internet provides less friction and making legal online offerings worse is only going to encourage piracy which further hurts CD sales. Until commercial offerings embody the principles of a robust community they will continue to be outsmarted by the little piggies of cyberspace.

Artist Collectives

So early estimates are that Radiohead has made from six to ten million dollars on sales of their new album, 'In Rainbows'. This is significant because Radiohead eschewed the the traditional model of releasing through a record label and instead offered their album for download on their own website at a price of the individual's choosing. That's right, many of the 1.2 million people who downloaded the album from the official site chose to pay absolutely nothing. Most estimates have the average price paid at between $5 and $8 so obviously many people who have downloaded the album are paying for it.

Also telling is the fact that 500,000 people chose to skip the official website altogether and downloaded the album via P2P file sharing software. For these people having to register their email address on the site was too high a cost, or (less likely) they simply where not aware of the web site's existence. For some this could also represent complacency as they have simply grown accustomed to getting all of their music through the black market, unhappy with the high prices ($15-18 retail) and low quality of much of the music on offer.

What does all of this mean for the recording industry? Well the math is pretty simple, when the typical recording contract offers an artist pennies for each album sold even if Radiohead is only making $5 per album via this new distribution model they are still coming out way ahead in the bargain. Sadly Radiohead has decided that they will also release "In Rainbows" with a record label some time next year. Apparently they do not want to exclude the less tech-savvy among their fans from hearing the album. I have a feeling that the percentage of Radiohead fans that don't know how to download and play MP3's is pretty slim. We may end up looking back on this album as a lungfish in the evolutionary process towards a better model for music distribution but the great leap is certainly underway.

Recently other bands such as Nine In Nails, Oasis and Jamiroquai announced that they will be joining Radiohead in using the internet to cut out the middle man and connect directly to their fans. Individual band members from established bands have also started to use the internet as a way to test the waters of solo work. The technology, and more importantly culture have reached a maturation point where it is possible for an artist to communicate directly with their fans on a worldwide scale. If Andy Warhol were alive today I'm sure that he would be smiling.

Pundits have been quick to point out that this only works because Radiohead is already at the top. They rightly point out that a new band could never do something like this because no one has heard of them and thus the demand does not already exist. Certainly the record labels have used their vast marketing armies to great effect beating the market into submission. The reality is that the internet has changed all of the rules of the game, not just on the distribution side but on the marketing side as well. Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook have proven that the simple point-to-point communication of word-of-mouth is every bit as effective as the labels' shotgun approach.

The internet is young enough that methodologies have not yet even be invented to measure the true impact of this new form of marketing. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the millions of emails, blogs, forum posts, reviews and interviews have a greater impact on a band's album sales than that glossy full-page ad in Rolling Stone magazine. Anyone who doubts that the internet is the future of marketing need only look at the latest stock quote for Google.

To be sure a band with no recognition at all will have a hard time recouping their cost to make an album in the first place. In fact the initial barrier to entry into the music business is probably the single biggest reason why the record label's have survived this long. The adage that you have to spend money to make money applies to music just as it applies to any other business.

The solution, I contend, has been sitting right in front of us all this time. Established bands such as Radiohead can utilize the memetic power of the internet to create artist collectives. Using their websites and social networks as a sort of wellspring, established bands can start a stable of like-minded artists and use the low cost of distribution as a way of helping up-and-coming bands establish themselves. Seed money for studio time can come from the more established acts and the the up and coming bands can get exposure both on-line via recommendations and in real life by appearing as the opening acts for their patron bands.

Doesn't this you just turn established bands into record labels themselves? Yes and no. True, in this model established bands would fulfill many of the same roles as traditional record labels but the difference is one of scale and locality. A good metaphor would be the difference between letting the parishes of Louisiana manage relief resources versus letting FEMA try to manage them for all of the people affected by Katrina. One of these models is obviously more efficient and less susceptible to corruption than the other.

The internet obviates the bands and their affiliates of many of the responsibilities formerly held by the major labels. Instead of a worldwide distribution network consisting of shipping, routing and retail channels you can simply hire a hosting company to run your website. Instead of a global marketing department that spends millions of dollars on a few specially placed ads you can use the legion of internet users to help spread your message. Sites like Youtube and MySpace has already proven the power of the meme; if you make something that people want to watch/listen to/interact with and you lower the barrier to entry they will come to you in droves. The internet has lowered the barrier of entry tremendously, if the established bands can just help talented newcomers get over that first hill then the momentum of the internet is ready to carry them the rest of the way.

There is one essential ingredient for all of this to work. You have to make music that people actually want to listen to. If this model is less amenable to the kind of slick, marketing-manufactured pop bands that have become the label's raison d'être of late then we will be all the better for it. There will certainly still be fads, the near-zero barrier of communication means that fads are born, grow into huge phenomena and die out all with the blink of an eye. As many traditional marketing firms have learned the hard way, the marketing that the internet provides is more diffuse, more mercurial and thus more susceptible to the vicissitudes of culture.

Picture it, instead of a few dozen local radio stations cramming the same tired shlock down our ear canals we have the endless array of streaming radio stations, podcasts and ad-hoc downloads all a click away. Instead of walking into a big-box retailer on a Tuesday afternoon and choosing among the new releases of a few bands that are targeted at our demographic we can go to the portal of our favorite art collective any time, night or day, and immediately download music from groups of our choosing. The future truly is wide open.

This haiku was approved by the legal department

Two tires fly. Two wail.
A Bamboo grove, all chopped down.
From it, warring songs.
--Bobby Shaftoe's first Haiku from "Cryptonomicon"

It seems only fitting to open my blog with this poem, given that my blog title so blatantly co-opts Stephenson's masterpiece. Suffice it to say, if you have not read this book, go do it now and come back here when you really don't have anything better to do with your time.

So this post represents my first timid steps into the murky waters of electronic ego gratification, or as the hip kids call it, blogging. I'm currently on contract writing software for a very large (Fortune 50) American corporation. Last week they laid off 10% of their workforce or about 8,000 people. Being a contractor in this situation is something akin to being a mercenary in a reserve branch of the Roman army as elephants crest over the hill. I sense with an instinctual certainty that some of those poor saps on the front line are going to get squashed but watch from the side secure in the knowledge that I will not be a member of that ignominious group. Far more likely is that I will be part of the lackey crew impressed into cleaning up the mess of swords, trunks, blood and elephant dung that is the battle's aftermath.

Tortured metaphors aside, there is something a bit twisted about a system where the lowly contractors can go about their business with not a care in the world while the regular employees get to endure (for weeks in advance) the anguish of wondering whether they will wake up tomorrow unemployed. This post could easily devolve into a simple-minded rant about the ills of capitalism (of which there are certainly many). Alternatively I could assume the role of devil's advocate and argue that regular layoffs merely represent a selection pressure to ensure the overall health of the global business ecosystem. Instead, in the spirit of Bobby Shaftoe, and all of the (far more) poetic grunts that came before me, I will distill my thoughts on the issue into a Haiku.

Early fall, leaves shed.
Red victims of ritual,
Broken underfoot.