The Perfect Sportscar

In the photo, I'm the whelp in the middle. My sister, Beverly, is standing and my younger brother, Michael, is front. He now looks much older than me proving it really is the mileage.

The car was called "The Shingle" by the men who built it. In the Fifties, we lived on Monte Sano Mountain, a hill on the edge of town that once had a resort for the northern wealthy to escape the heat but enjoy the charms of the South. We lived across the street from the site of the hotel long since burned to the ground and then only a chimney remained. The photo was taken down the street a few blocks and the house is still there. We lived in an old rock house that is also still there. The car is in a museum somewhere up north. I don't know where. I was away at college when Dad finally sold his proudest work to make bills.

The Shingle was infamous. It was the second car of two my Dad built with his neighbor and friends who were exceptional ex-Army Missile Command and when the photo was taken, NASA scientists. Dad had customized cars to run 'shine, and these guys got on like a house on fire. They wrapped the engine in special thermal blankets developed for heat shielding. The instructions to the driver was simple: put the pedal to the metal and leave it there. The car was a rolling wing and the air over it held it on the track even in curves. At the experimental track in Courtland, they would infuriate the Europeans who could not believe this 6'5" hillbilly was beating them with a piece of tin junk and a Crosley engine. The secret sauce was the two smiling men at every race wearing coveralls like my Dad and drinking coffee from his special thermos, both of whom would also help send man to the Moon in the next decade. Boys with toys.

Life as a kid was fascinating.

Follow Your Leader! NOT!

Obama makes a speech. Geitner makes a speech. The markets tumble.

Surprise! Why?

Where Ali Baba once had only 40 thieves, now he has 40000 and they are too old to learn new tricks. They want the money. They don't want conditions.

It was the wrong speech. Obama was selling fear and when it gets right down to it, people will be angrier with the man who took their hope than the men who took their money. He is still, when off teleprompter, a bit too much the minority professor who did well and feels entitled to respect because he won. Washington doesn't work that way. Heck, the world doesn't work that way. The big guns in the financial world and the Republican Party are looking at him and saying "Whatcha got? Whatcha gonna do about it?" and they mean in terms of real consequences. Otherwise, they stand back and let him posture.

Did we think this was going to be a Beach Party with Moondoggie making up with Annette and then everyone boogaloos to Dick and The Dervishes? Or does Erick Von Zipper dress in a suit and suddenly his gang becomes civilized? This is the scene in Gone With the Wind where the young men have parties with young women all gaily dressed thinking they are going to a summer lark called The Civil War. This is the beginning. It won't be civil.

Welcome to the reality of what the Kennedy Administration was like, not the rose-colored view in the rearview mirror through the fog of generational wish fulfillment. He was young, brash, occasionally out to lunch and all the world wondered if the kid had any moxie or plans. Enemies moved on us, the markets were a roller coaster, and the social agendas were all pushed at one time. It was scary. Then he was killed and the Beatles came to America to distract us and Johnson dulled us into self-medicating a generation.

By contrast, this isn't that bad. Feel better now?

The Lonely Bull

Odd bits of bull from the bullmeister:

Recommend: Herb Alpert at the Montreux Jazz Festival - 1996. Excellent!!

Don't Recommend: Paul Graham's blog on keeping identity small. Ok, so the Buddha was right: attachment to self is the root cause of suffering. It bears repeating from time to time, but blogs like that get into the Web Mythos as Yet Another Profound Insight but it is more rebranding of ideas best learned from the original master.

Recommend: Write your own funeral music. I'm working on a 'kyrie', or penitent choral piece suitable for the pre-Easter season. I'm using a seven note theme from a Beethoven piano sonata. Anyone who thinks I won't have my own music played at my last gig above ground doesn't know me very well. Why do it? Because as a habitual composer, it rounds out the season for my time here and there is a certain peace in knowing it is done. It doesn't mean I'm taking the A-train soon, but just that when I do, my bags are packed.

Don't Recommend: Java The Language. Why? After a decade of the mob beating on Microsoft and ASP.Net, today with the economy shredding, Java programmers are a dime a dozen and ASP.Net programmers cost mucho dinero. The law of supply and demand was not suspended. By limiting the attractiveness to young programmers, they drove up the value of ASP.Net. Karma.

Recommend: More patience with Obama. It takes more than a few weeks to sell a house. It takes a bit more to change Washington's negotiating strategies. Give him time.

Don't Recommend: paying with cash at Wal-Mart or Target. "What's that?" "Well, we call it money." "What's it for?" "Look at the number on the display. Now add the numbers on those green pieces of paper and see if it is the same. Ok, now see those round metallic objects in the drawer. Yes, good, now take out three of the big shiny ones and one of the small shiny ones. That's right. No, you can keep the dull copper one."

Sigh... the life of the lonely bull chasing the red flags of a society cheering for the gore!

Congratulations to T-Bone Burnett

Congratulations to T-Bone Burnett, Allison Krause and Robert Plant who won five Grammys last night with their Raising Sand group. T-Bone is the wise old regular on Jon Taplin's blog, but a veteran survivor of a long career in music. While the DJs will make much of Plant and Krause, the genius is the long-haired blonde fellow on the guitar with the mensch smile. If you don't know who he is, go to your favorite search engine and find out. If you do, go to YouTube and enjoy!

Way to go, T! Of course, this IS what the web and YouTube are good for.

Nothing From Nothing

There are increasing concerns about businesses relying on third parties for services that start out harmlessly, get the reputation for being vital (self-selecting self-promoting self-fulfilling), then change the rules and harm the business. It's the cliche of drug addiction but nevertheless, terms of service, quality of service, and so forth have not been suspended to make Internet wealth possible. Social networks, Twittering, etc., may be the next big bust except for the data mining services. They are fun but vital for business?

I'm not sure when, but somewhere in the next four years, the problems of the self-enamored web punditocracy that grabs any morsel of information from the middle of the long tail, pushes it to the top, then amplifies it as 'newly discovered facts' across the web will come front and center. Not only will overhyped technologies begin to evaporate, but the reputations of the names of those pundits will as well. Then 'cloud' will have meaning; it may become synonymous with 'foolish'.

Jimmy the Greek was a terrible handicapper. He was a great self-promoter. Then he made one prediction too many.

A Fading Geisha

The life of the office geisha is one of popularity and intense interest followed by sudden exile to a pen full of former geishas who once the bloom was off the rose, found they had to work harder than anyone else to justify their office space. Office cultures left to themselves will consume their young geishas like rats consume fresh cheese first and only bother with the aging cheddar when hungry or too lazy to reach the top shelf.

The hard thing to realize is that the geisha not only trades on beauty but trust and these are antithetical goods. Once she trades on the beauty, the trust evaporates particularly among other women. It is not they will hound her out but that they will slowly make her subordinate to them and if she doesn't like that, she has to move on.

It's an old story and most of us who have lived the office life know it. Every year will bring a fresher flower and no matter how hard one tries, pheromones fade in potency. The wise geisha cultivates her inner light at all times because it will grow brighter if she does not surrender to the frustration and disappointment of realizing that many around her who befriended her are fickle. Woe to the one who decides that the office life is the only one worth living. We usually discover these working longer hours for the same money fading and becoming bitter as those that do trust and love them fade into the distance.

If she is wise, she cultivates the inner light and does not break faith with those who did not break faith with her. Faith is not adoration or approval. It is truth, even the one she cannot believe though she heard every word they said. Sometimes the word needed is found not on the billboard of her beliefs but in the wastebasket of her frustrated desire.

Tell It All Brother

In Bay City, Michigan, Marvin E. Schur, a 93 year old widowed war veteran froze to death in his house because an unregulated power utility company sent a worker to put a filter on the man's power meter that cut off his heat if he used too much power. When he was discovered, he was wearing four layers of clothes and had icicles hanging off the blankets. The city expressed its dismay and regret, then raised the electric rates 3%.

In New York City, Bernie Madoff who stole the retirements of hundreds of investors is living luxuriously under house arrest. At CitiBank, they are having to explain how they could buy a luxury jet while being bailed out with our retirement money while giving out millions in bonus checks to the very crooks who can't explain where the bailout money is going. Nancy Pelosi stands on camera and blames George Bush but it is Obama's problem now and no one is stepping up.

Is this what we are? Did we get so mad at the crooks that we forgot to look in on the old man next door? Are we so numb and so protective of our jobs that we will hang a note on a door of this man instead of pounding on it until we find out who we are condemming to a slow painful death in the freezing winter?

Is this America?

No bloody wonder the world hates us. I can't get my head around it and I don't want to. Years ago my first fiance and I were walking in the middle of a heat wave when an elderly lady called out to us from behind a screen door. When we opened it, we saw a double amputee from diabetes with a hot jug of water next to her. She wanted us to move her old floor fan closer to her wheelchair. We did that then we called the police. The young officer came and took information, and within the week, a local church came and put in a window unit air conditioner. The lady died a few months later but not from heat stroke.

In Los Angeles this week, a man capped his wife and family because having both lost their jobs, they couldn't envision going on. They lost hope.

Times are hard and getting harder. People are hurting. Others are getting away with their crimes and I can only hope God or karma tends to them. But today I and mine are ok and I can be thankful for that.

But I can't get my head around that old man freezing over an unpaid $1100 power bill.

Don't accept it. Don't. Don't let an old man who went to war and came home to raise his family and lose his wife die alone with an icicle as his last medal. If we want to get back on our feet, we will have to start caring again.

Tell it all, brother, before we fall.

If You Could Read My Mind

Reflecting on the Google deal with publishers of copyright works and digitization, it occurs to me that the change is not simply one of access but form. One wonders if it has the same effect as single outlet systems have had on other media.

There was a time when MTV ruled the music industry when it became the only radio that mattered. In the beginning, it was experimental, fast and very trendy. The fly in the ointment was that instead of being a sound medium, it was a visual medium and popular music was driven straight into the New York fashion houses. Thus the infamous Bo Diddley statement live on camera to Chrissie Hynde, “You ain’t no musician; you a model.”

Anytime a single media outlet dominates a media type, the form of that outlet begins to shape the evolution of the content. Digitization of books will follow the path of online communications: it will shred the language. The pressure to write shorter sentences and use punchier but less evocative words is strong. You see it in the Twits and Tweets. You see it in comments such as “OMG put a period in that sentence”. Pop music publishing first in sheet music, then in radio formats killed the long form composition for any practical commercial uses. TV did irreparable damage to movie structures and topics.

If Google is the only access, expect the quick death of the novel and possibly other forms of print. Once it is on the screen, patience turns into umbrage. Add a high energy drink or two, and it becomes vitriol.

The redeeming thought is that hypermedia systems are multimedia systems and have their own forms of expression such as being able to embed the videos for effect or accentuate a point. That is good for new forms, but older forms do suffer. The consolation is that MTV wasn't able to hang on to its monopoly and today has very little influence. Radios are increasingly irrelevant in the day of the download. Pop music has never recovered but some form of it will return in the pop mashups.

Few can carve in marble as well as some once could two thousand years ago. Themes may be eternal but forms evolve. Still, a couple of nuclear airbursts can wipe out that Google library, so perhaps we are not yet ready to burn books for kindling to make room for new monitors. We aren't becoming Bradbury's Montag having to memorize a book to save it from book burning, but any complex instrument left unattended surrenders to entropy. Evolution is not continual improvement, but it is continous forgetting.

Caveat emptor.

You Know The Economy Is Bad When

You know the economy is bad when the wait staff at IHOP becomes unusually polite.

Bippity Bobbity Boo!

As pointed out elsewhere, the overwhelming choice of those answering Obama's Chicago web site call for votes for the change most desired of the new President was repeal of the Federal laws criminalizing pot. Predictably, Obama's transition team had to issue the terse statement

“President-elect Obama is not in favor of the legalization of marijuana.”

Because in the early campaign, Candidate Obama had hinted that he was for decriminalization, some of his fervent worshippers, umm, supporters, were dismayed. One asked, "What does this all mean?"

It means the current pipelines become stronger and if Obama changes his mind, they become the new suppliers of a bigger tax base. According to CNBC, California and the Federal government are already collecting millions in taxes from "product" grown in the Emerald Triangle openly and without fear. With ten more states having decriminalized, this only made the trade more interstate than intrastate. When dry counties go wet, bootleggers become distillers.

And the idea that these Mendocino farmers, the hippie's kids who figured out how to turn outlaw into entrepeneur botanists by increasing the potency a dozen times, who recruited the truck drivers and fishermen, who turned a poor region profitable, might be the new money on the block, well, that isn't acceptable in Chicago and Washington DC. If big money is to be made, the old Lords of the City will be the ones to make it.

And they don't know how to grow righteous reefer. Yet.

This is one where the wisdom of crowds or plain common sense loses to the political expediency of ensuring the lustre does not wear off the New Spiel before other agenda items are safely tucked into the Speaker's pocket. The herb goes under the bus with the gays just as it has with every election before when they dared to hope for common consideration.

No change but then, no surprise either. I get the distinct impression now as I did before the election that some people who work their hearts out for these candidates should take a job in the Beltway for six months to get the cold dash of reality that it brings. The day after the election, voters go back to being mice and pumpkins while Cinderella goes to live in the castle.

The Weight

A lot of needs are expressed, a lot of hands are out and all of them are real. The man tells us it is in ours to do and most of our problems are self-made or of the last administration, and quotes Corinithians telling us in effect to grow up.

There are words of hope in that speech, but the beginning of political cover as well.

Now comes the test. As Truman said, "the buck stops here". The mettle of Obama and his team will be determined not by the words but by the deeds and further than that, by what they do if they fail.

Some will say that means we have all failed but failure in politics is never a shared commodity. The man who holds the title holds the ring and if he cannot wield it, he either accepts that or he casts about for others to take the blame.

Obama will be held both to his ideals and to his promises. Let's see how those priorities stack up to the realities of diminishing supply and increasing demand.

The weight has moved on and the stakes couldn't be higher.

Birds Do It

There is considerable discussion about copyrights, intellectual property, and how all of that works in the brave new digital world on the web. Here is an article describing research into the evolution of bird songs.

Note where imitation, near neighbors, migration and competition for sex are strong determininants of the evolution of songs. Note where it is better to get one style and stick with it versus constantly having to hunt for the next new thing. Note that the preferences vary but how little the songwriter actually controls the environment in which they work, but rather have to adapt to it or find one where they fit.

Nothing about copyright impedes creativity. Territory can.

Apropos of the Daily News

Crediting my friend, David Blalock, for this one:

Who knew when this financial crisis began that 'bonus' was two words?

I can't improve on that.

Q-Bits

Odd bits that show up in my world:

Get a drawing of Akhenaten, father of Tutankhamen and the first monotheist, and put it next to a picture of Barack Obama. Spoooooky. Of course, put a picture of Nefertiti next to Michelle Obama and there is no comparison. A good friend of mine, David Blalock, pointed this one out.

We've been having a very long thread at Jon Taplin's blog on DRM, copyrights, and so on. What if all you had to do to copyright a song was to fill out a form and upload an mp3 on the web? Wouldn't that be cheaper? What if we treated songs like software and released alpha, beta versions and updates? Some of us (me included) do, but then I'm not part of the industry where rights to first recording and publication are a very big deal. One thing is certain, we get a lot of advice and criticism from people who don't do any of this for a living; they just want free music anyway they can get it. And yes, that includes Kevin Kelly.

Is it better to be good than lucky? Only if you want to get lucky twice.

So the manager tells him, "I'm sure the next person doing your job won't be as good as you are. Six people have had your job so far and every one of them was worse than the one before them.

The story of Noah and the Ark always seemed cruel when I was a kid. As an adult, I found out that the Bible was a heavily edited book and the parts of the story that would have made sense were in a banned book, The Book of Enoch. Oddly enough, it was an informative and possibly normative text in its day because even Jesus quotes from it. But he wasn't an authority then.... anywho, the flood not only got rid of the bad people, but several species of demons roaming the Earth in those days because wicked angels knocked up willing human women and their offspring were chips off the old block.

Or so the stories go. The power of text over time is one of the true wonders of life among the mammals... at least until blogging was invented and the power meter went sub-db. Copyright everything. Cheap tricks are the essence of the market when the customer wants it for free and you have to make a living off of volume instead of quality and originality.

The Mama Bear

Most of you know I am a musician by choice and once upon a time, career. To be specific, I am an acoustic guitar player. Although I can play other instruments and electric, I pretty much suck on most except acoustics.

Anywho...

I came across something acoustic guitarist should have: The D-TAR Mama Bear. It is a pre-amp for acoustic guitars. On stage, acoustic guitars are hard to make work right particularly in loud venues or rock bands. One reason is the guitar acts like a microphone and that means its internal pick-ups have to be turned down. Another is most guitars, particularly inexpensive ones, use a piezo pickup on the bridge and that is a very thin sound without reinforcement. As a result, guitarists have different combinations of pickups and live mics to get That Wooden Sound. It is all a compromise and can be a pain to manage in different rooms.

Also, an acoustic guitar, depending on the wood used, the design and the talent of the luthier (guitar maker, don't bother looking it up), only makes a limited variety of sounds.

Enter Mama Bear. This pre-amp not only enables a much quieter live sound, it acts like an emulator, software/hardware to make one guitar sound like another. These beasties are usually very pricey. The Mama Bear is right in that sweet spot between $300 and $400 that a weekend warrior can afford.

Go to the D-TAR page and watch the video with John Jorgensen if you are into this. It is well worth it.

Ave Maria (Gounod/Bach)

This is my musical gift to my friends this year.

It is a vocal, guitar, string arrangement of Gounod/Bach's Ave Maria.

UPDATE: This is the choral version (lots of voices).

Merry Christmas! I love you all very much.

len

Pickin' At Dads

Christmas is for music. Americana in the back bedroom without prose or professionals. Real folk is real folk. :-)

Jon Taplin's America 3.0 Presentation

Below I've embedded the You Tube presentation by Jon Taplin of his ideas on America 3.0. I recommend it for understanding the economic crises and some potential approaches to resolving these crises. I differ with Tap on some of the details.

1. Innovation is bred not invented. It is a cultural change problem to pick the right cultures at the right time and it is a funding issue as to what conditions must be met to receive funding. In my opinion, California is emblematic of the culture of consumerism and politically lacks the will to adjust its own lifestyle enough to warrant massive block grants. In short, if the automakers have to drive to DC with a plan in hand, California's governor will have to do the same and he shouldn't drive a Hummer. Tap is an unconditional cheerleader for the California Culture. I admit the need for lobbying for one's own but do be do be doo.

2. While the ideas of bottom-up open source America Needs A New Operating system are attractive to the geek in me, I am mistrustful of such metaphors in the details. Policies have to see to details or we will quickly devolve into another Spy Vs Spy episode where one power elite is substituted for a power elite. Nothing changes but the flow of wealth among two competing classes at the same level. In short, meet the new boss.

Let me give you one example. Standards are one of the means by which innovation is shared, but too often, covertly or openly, one of the means by which companies dominate and deny the commons what it needs to sustain itself: access to market.

How does that work? Company A receives a PAS standard for a platform with licensable plugins. Company A then requires all companies submitting the information for applying for the license to include relevant standards used to create the plugin. Company B submits required information including the fact that the plugin is based on standards approved by the same standards organization that provided the PAS. Company A rejects the license application renewal for an application that was approved one year prior minus the information about the standard used by the plugin citing that the plugin implements a technology that is competitive with Company A's technology in the same market.

One year earlier, that was Ok. One year later with the additional information, it is not.

That's cynical? It won't happen.

It did in a soon to be famous case where a proprietary specification was allowed to become an international standard. A very powerful company (NO, it wasn't Microsoft) then denied licenses exactly as described.

Before the power and credibility of the White House are dragged into the internal marketing politics of these companies and market cartels, policies must be clearer as to what can be claimed and what recourses third parties have in the face of exclusionary actions. If we are to use Federal power to drive innovation, we must first set policy for the intellectual property, how it is shared or licensed, and we must ensure that the elite cultivar chosen can suitably be rehosted or replanted in cultures different from that of the original. Otherwise we are completing the branded homogenization of America into a mall where only the bigger brands compete.

I have a few other minor quibbles with Tap's presentation, but in the main he has done an excellent job of outlining the history of economic collapse and pointing to reasonable actions. The devil is in the details and that is what we should be discussing.

Do take the time to watch his presentation.

Oh Happy Day

When very young, I played at the church coffee house, in the youth choir, and sweated in a too tight tie in an unairconditioned block building that was our church. As the folk-rock movement blended into those sounds, I was a comfortable kid music wise. With the Beatles and the Causes du Jour, I drifted away and then found myself like so many not liking country and not wanting to hang out and sing church music.

I don't think it ironic but strangely twisted that this year I find that in the next week, on Sunday during the traditional service, the choir will perform one of my new choral works (Epiphany), and that night, I'll perform my new contemporary work with the praise band. There are definite pluses. One, church musicians are better trained and nowhere near the level of arrogance of my old nightclub band mates. Two, they work for free so getting three guitars, drums, bass, piano, keyboards and a horn stack with four background screamers (ah, the good old days of the Motown sound) is reasonable without midi. I get to play the 12-string Rickenbacker stopping occasionally to hold my hand over my head and direct the other singers while I close my eyes and do my best Elvis voice with real musicians. Kitsch with class.

So the Byrds Meet Chicago In Memphis is not a bad sound for a praise song (The Gift). They play the arrangement the way I wrote it without complaint, in fact, with a grateful enthusiasm which is a big contrast from the band days. There is my son on horn, my wife leading the screamers, and me up front. Next time I'll write a marimba part for my daughter because asking her to play tambourine after many years of percussion lessons, well, that would be like handling a ukelele to Eric Clapton. He might play it but then he might not tune it first.

In traditional, I get a choir, a wind section with clarinets, flute and french horn, a bass guitar, a classical pianist and a director. They read the contrapuntal parts, comment on the simplicity and young ladies tell me how much they like the part I wrote for their instrument. I am referred to as The Composer instead of the songwriter. All I have to do is watch, listen, then stand up and bow at the end. Big juju.

And for both, the audience is guaranteed.

Next week, as recompense, I will be the "Special Music" at the traditional service, meaning it's just me and a nylon string singing Gounod's Ave Maria in Latin. It's a nice piece because the Ave Maria text fits the Gounod/Bach melody much better than with the Schubert which is a pretty melody but not originally written for the Ave Maria text. It's easy to play and a study in how to use diminished chords to change the tonal center without changing the key. It isn't easy to sing but that's why God gave me a falsetto.

So this is all pretty cool. I get to stretch in every direction but one: I dare not speak for as my daughter tells me and others, "Dad will open his mouth one day and we'll all get thrown out of church." And she's right. My sense of humor has no place in the congregation. "Ya shag one goat, ya know!"

But I'm glad, awfully glad for this week. Maybe it's worth my failure as a performer and after a lifetime of music, only making second rate. At least when I do these gigs, I rate, and at best, it's for a greater glory than my own.

I'm cool with that. Oh happy days.

Dirty Deeds

The scene in Mumbai though terrible is all too familiar to those who live there according to my Indian colleagues. They mourn openly and deeply.

While the pundits analyze and try to make the connections to the usual suspects, I recommend a BBC piece.

As I read some blogs, I find the also familiar comments attempting to tie the attacks back to American foreign policy. Sadly, this makes the critics of those the very people who ensure this attack will be followed by another through providing the exact reactions the killers want and the cycle is guaranteed to continue. I'm not excusing American foreign policy mistakes, but asking if those tieing the attacks to America are completing the attacks?

It’s astonishing to consider an ecosystem of call and response where if they provide the bodies, we’ll provide the reasons. Dirty deeds done dirt cheap.