Archive for September, 2008 The newest completed piece in The Leaving and the Left series
 October 6 is the deadline to register to vote in Montana. Late registration begins on the 7th. I’m beginning to use the “filter messages like this” rule much more in my email. Uninvited republican hate in my inbox is unwelcome. Attempting to have a discussion with a close minded republican over email is like trying to teach a pig to sing. So I’ve just been filtering it out. If I seek it out voluntarily, that’s another thing, but don’t force feed it to me. Also, don’t forget that in Montana, Monday, October 6 is the last day of regular voter registration. Late and same-day registrants can ONLY vote at the elections office located in the Missoula county courthouse, and cannot vote at their local precinct. In the meantime, I ran across the below article passed on from MoveOn’s Laura Dawn via Obey Giant.
 Apologies all around for the unintentional mass email recently Today I had some problems with my desktop email client, which resulted in an old email being sent to a number of folks. If you were in that target audience, please accept my apologies. Thanks.
 iTunes 8 - Your Big Brother is Genius Apple released iTunes 8 on Tuesday, which probably has many bells and whistles included, many of which I’ll never use because I don’t have an iPhone or an Apple TV. What interested me was the feature Genius. I’m a huge fan of Pandora, and one of the things I like about it is that it exposes me to new music I might not have otherwise heard, which, being the consumer that I am If users enable Genius, Apple collects info about users’ habits. Get out the tin foil hats. From the privacy statement: When you opt-in to the Genius feature by checking the box below, Apple will, from time to time, automatically collect information that can be used to identify media in your iTunes library on this computer, such as your play history and play lists. This includes media purchased through iTunes and media obtained from other sources. This information will be stored anonymously and not associated with your name or iTunes account. When you use the Genius feature, Apple will use this information and the contents of your iTunes library, as well as other information, to give personalized recommendations to you. Read the entire privacy statement here if you like. After thinking about it for a minute, I decided to enable the feature. Upon enabling, users are asked to sign into the iTunes Music Store, or create an account if they don’t already have one. (Yeah, you have to provide a credit card number). Once logged in, iTunes connects to the ITMS and analyzes your entire music library (that is enabled in iTunes). I have almost 5,000 songs enabled in my iTunes library, so it took a minute for the ITMS to process them all. Once they were processed, I turned Genius on and selected David Bowie’s “Breaking Glass” as the song around which I wanted my playlist to be built. below is the playlist that Genius generated.  CONSUME @ the ITMS
The playlist is a good one, if a little heavy on the Eno. And how did the Cocteau Twins and Squeeze end up in there? It’s interesting that for some of the songs, the band members are listed. Sometimes, the list is incomplete. Yeah, I know that it all depends upon the metadata that was added to the song when it was ripped (assuming that the music was obtained somewhere other than ITMS. If adding all of the metadata was a standard, this would not be an issue, but not all artists care/are that savvy. I’ll be playing around with Genius a little more. It’s definitely better than the Shuffle feature in iTunes. The down side, of course is that Big Brother Apple collects info from your machine. They say that it is anonymous, but who can you trust?
 In Search of the Hobo Railroad Artist Last night Monday night at the Zootown Arts Community Center, Debby Florence brought in an amazing filmaker,Bill Daniel, who screened his short film that was 16 years in the making. We were lucky to have him, as his biodiesel van had broken down at the Orange Street exit, and he had to hoof it over to the ZACC for the screening. Who is Bozo Texino? chronicles the search for the source of a ubiquitous and mythic rail graffiti– a simple sketch of a character with an infinity-shaped hat and the scrawled moniker, “Bozo Texino”– a drawing seen on railcars for over 80 years. Daniel’s gritty black and white film uncovers a secret society and it’s underground universe of hobo and railworker graffiti, and includes interviews with legendary boxcar artists, Coaltrain, Herby, Colossus of Roads, and The Rambler. Shooting over a 16-year period, Daniel rode freights across the West carrying a Super-8 sound camera and a 16mm Bolex. During his quest he discovered the roots of a folkloric tradition that has gone mostly unnoticed for a century. Taking inspiration from Beat artists Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac, the film functions as both a sub-cultural documentary and a stylized fable on wanderlust and outsider identity.  Unilever Marketing Brilliance by Marc Moss (If only they were cool enough to hire me)  marcmoss.net as a Wordle
 Google Fail I had only four tabs open when this message displayed. I killed the page. I attempted to upload this screenshot to Flickr via Chrome, but it does not play well w/Flickr. Nor does it play well w/Google Reader. I attempted to scroll through my news items using “page down”, as well as the scroll wheel on my trackball, but no love. The same article bounced repeatedly in place. It looked as if it was scrolling, but it was not. Then I killed Chrome.  See if I walk my talk or not Taylor over at Noteworthy* asked if “The Art of the Letter in a Digital Age” is an antiquated concept. The question is one I’ve been turning over in my mind very often in light of my current project, The Leaving and the Left. What follows has no scientific basis, merely observations from what I’ve seen, read, experienced and heard. From a young age, I wrote letters. My best friend lived almost 300 miles away. This was in the days before cellphones and email, before Facebook and Myspace. We wrote letters because it was inexpensive in comparison to long-distance phone charges and we had no other way to talk with one another. Letters take time. One must remove one’s attention from others in one’s life, turn one’s attention away from the television, ignore the radio, and immerse oneself in the emotion trying to be expressed. For some, that is enough, but even that act, in its immersion into the moment, is not enough. Some people are intentional enough to select specific papers and pens with which to express their thoughts. Some adorn their missives with doodles and scrawlings meant to elicit a specific emotion from the reader. Some anoint their letters with a scent meant to revive a memory, an event, a feeling, from the reader. Others are not so thoughtful, merely putting word to paper. Even this act, however, is one of intense intimacy.  I love you with all my heart... It was with a letter, a long one, that I mended a rift between my father and me that had only intensified as I aged. I moved to Montana from Ohio and wanted to connect with him, decided, Hell, we’re both adults, lets deal with this, and wrote him a letter. I expected no response. Instead, I received a handwritten letter from him answering many, though not all, of my questions; a heartfelt letter that I believe would not be possible in a digital age. One that has allowed us to become very good friends to this day. Letters were once our only opportunity to communicate across the miles without great expense. In the United States, for the longest time, the United States Postal Service was the least expensive way to communicate. When I was growing up, long distance phone calls were a great expense, email hadn’t yet been made available to the masses, and cellular phones were a dream in someone’s head. Telegrams were efficient, but somewhat more expensive than letters. Faster? Sure, but speed came with a price. Today, the former largest telegraph service in the US no longer performs this service. From their website, “Effective January 31, 2006, Western Union discontinued all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services.” By the 1990s, email was the choice of economically minded folks to communicate quickly across great distance. Now, many young folks, from what I’ve read, choose Myspace over email. Social directories are visually based, and therefore more attractive to a generation that is constantly bombarded with stimulus from all angles. Other folks having disdain for Myspace, choose a more “mature” version of Myspace, Facebook. Both offer a way to message another member which the user has “become friends” with.  Remember: Fox Interactive Media -->Rupert Murdoch Besides these web-based solutions to communication, there are, of course, instant messaging solutions. IM was once proprietary. Users had to sign into their service of choice, be it Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, mac.com, Gtalk or IRC. Now, there are services that aggregate all of the above listed providers into one client, making communication much easier. Even Facebook and Myspace allow for “chatting”. And that’s only the Internet. What about cellphones? (Or Skype?) I have a plan that allows me a ridiculous amount of minutes and I’m able to call anywhere in the United States for less than $70/month. I remember long distance bills when I was a kid greater than that, when we (my best friend and I) had decided that writing letters was not enough. And what of text messaging (SMS)? I can send a friend a 160 character message in a couple of seconds, saving me cost on my cellphone minutes, and communicate what needs to be communicated within a few minutes. I’ve made the case that communication has become easier, more pervasive and less expensive, but is it still an experience? How many of you remember receiving actual mail? Not just bills and offers for an upgrade on your cable, but actual MAIL from a loved one? It definitely is an experience. A rare one as far as I can tell. The question becomes: is communication denigrated? Implicit in the question is an understanding of the value of the unspoken message in the message. The feeling of a handwritten note is decidly much differnet than an electronic communique of any kind, to be sure. Letters can be long and mellifluous, while most electronic communication is stunted and, to be kind, concise. Telegrams are no longer available. Postage rates are rising. Electronic and cellular communication is becoming more widely available and inexpensive. I would argue that the art of letter writing is dying with my generation. (I was born in the 70s.) Or at lest the generation born in the 80s. It would be interesting for me to see a scientific study to determine how many under the age of 25 write letters regularly. I hope this isn’t the case for a variety of reasons. Taylor asks, “Do you think if we stop writing letters that we will lose some thing [sic] – a way of connecting with one another that forces us to slow the mind and really think about what it is we are trying to say?” I would answer YES to Taylor’s question. What think you? |
, encourages me to buy that music. The premise of Genius seems to be similar, except that the music that plays is chasen from users’ own music libraries.