As I write this, I am listening to Pandora’s generic “funk” station. “What is Pandora?” you may ask. It’s pandora.com where you can create your own “radio” stations based on artist, title or you can pick from a number of generic stations like the one I’m playing now. (Funk, not only is it danceable, you can keyboard to it as well — though probably not at the same time.)
Since we started back in 2000, we have been hard at work on the Music Genome Project. It’s the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken. Together our team of fifty musician-analysts has been listening to music, one song at a time, studying and collecting literally hundreds of musical details on every song. It takes 20-30 minutes per song to capture all of the little details that give each recording its magical sound - melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics … and more - close to 400 attributes! We continue this work every day to keep up with the incredible flow of great new music coming from studios, stadiums and garages around the country.
With Pandora you can explore this vast trove of music to your heart’s content. Just drop the name of one of your favorite songs or artists into Pandora and let the Genome Project go. It will quickly scan its entire world of analyzed music, almost a century of popular recordings - new and old, well known and completely obscure - to find songs with interesting musical similarities to your choice. Then sit back and enjoy as it creates a listening experience full of current and soon-to-be favorite songs for you.
You can create as many “stations” as you want. And you can even refine them. If it’s not quite right you can tell it so and it will get better for you.
Check it out here. And now to shift the soundtrack, inflect the mood — a little reggae? Or maybe some Bach?
Want to see who’s leading in the all important Electoral College vote count rather than the headline of the moment “national polls?” Visit Pollster.com for a visual presentation of what is perhaps the most sophisticated interpretation of polling data available. If you do, check out their FAQ where they explain how they interpret and present the polling results.
Whether we live in the best of times or the worst of times (or both), no doubt we do live in both the blessing and curse of exceedingly interesting times. At the “worst of times” end of the scale, we find the “shock doctrine” and the rise of “disaster capitalism” as promulgated by Naomi Klein. Her book The Shock Doctrine is now out in paperback. If you’re not familiar with this, check out the first video below and/or the book at Amazon. The film is gritty, definitely polemical, but can open a worthwhile space for reflection on the history of the last 30 years as well as the current administration’s responses to the economic “shocks” of the failure of capital markets and the rapid rise of oil prices.
The third video presents Hawken elaborating his story of blessed unrest for an hour at Authors@Google.
Both interpretations lie on the margins of the usual narratives about our times. The interesting stuff usually does. While I have issues with both, I’m happy to have them helping me in constructing an understanding of our world and in navigating in it.
It’s a pharmaceutical Twilight Zone — you’re not sure what’s there, and what is there may not be a pleasant surprise. This clip from a commercial for Abilify is about as good (or as bad) as it gets. Alternative treatment modalities anyone?
Has your reading changed since spending 10 years with the Web? Mine has. Age? Or the Age of Google? Oddly, I read more books now than I have in the past few years. Giving up cable TV helps. But I admit that long, dense reads are a tougher go. In any event, the article below attempts to come to grips with the effect of the Web on reading and “thinking.”
“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr from The Atlantic Magazine
“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. Read the rest of this entry »
I guess it had to happen: prefabricated, easily personalized digital ads. And it’s happened for political as well as commercial ads. Check out this video from SlateV.
Why a landslide for Obama? That can be a long conversation, and I write short posts. So I point, first, to Frank Rich’s column in last Sunday’s NY Times. He provides a good and readable analysis for the forthcoming tsunami (switching to an oceanic metaphor). Rich also notes the mainstream media will not cover this interpretation of the election: It’s bad for business. A close race sells more advertising than a blowout. Click here for Rich’s article.
For my second illustration, I offer the video below which as of this writing has 2,353,851 views on youTube. If John Kerry was a “flip flopper” in the last election, worlds fail me in an attempt to characterize John McCain based on the evidence below. youTube + demographics = electoral nightmare for Arizona’s senior senator. Even if the major media continue their infatuation with the “maverick,” the web will show the world a different McCain.
Obama has achieved the nomination, “presumptively” of course. And Clinton, after her evening of “deranged narcissism,”* saw the handwriting all over the wall of the Media and Internet saying that her historic run had ended. What a bummer to go from candidate assured of being anointed to also ran…and also ran to such an upstart.
So it can be in life and in history. I remember a college professor of mine saying that the future can never be known because we cannot account in advance for “the genius, the prophet, the random event.”**
So while I do not claim to know the future (how could I if I can still remember that quote?), I will predict an Obama victory in November. Obama and David Axelrod, his head strategist, have laid out the emotionally compelling narratives for the campaign. Obama is telling some of them them now, as I write, in North Carolina, putting it into play for a Democrat for the first time in (almost) living memory.
Not only will Obama win, but he will win in an electoral landslide. The shouting-headed punditry will be as one shouting, “not since Ronald Reagan in 1980…”
These are changing times.
Fundamental text for understanding why people vote (and one reason why I am willing to predict a landslide): The Political Brain by Drew Weston. Click here to check it out at Amazon.
* Jeffrey Toobin. See the video below. Worth it for the triple take that David Gergen makes when the phrase is uttered. Click here for Toobin’s Wikipedia entry.
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Eric Hoffer as quoted n the article that gave this post its title. The article is long, informative, and most readable. Written by George Packer, it can be found in the New Yorker at the link below.
The shouting in and about the Obama and Clinton campaigns continues, but the basic context remains and the quest for the Democratic presidential nomination unfolds within it. All the tactical decisions, the evaluations of those decisions, all the campaign ads, all the surrogates’s advocacy, etc., are subordinate to the larger question of whether a cultural and political shift is occurring - one that as some commentators have noted is at least as profound as the one that gave Ronald Reagan his greatest role.
I continue to espouse that this is the case. The shift, as I noted in an earlier post, is from the everyman and everywoman for his/herself ethos of the greed is good halcyon days of the 80’s to Obama’s gyral return to the cultural ground of “I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper.”
Why do I think this remains the case? Because Hillary’s campaign has indeed thrown the kitchen sink at her opponent, hit him with the garbage disposal, and it has made no difference. Take the Pennsylvania primary, for example. With the flap about Rev. Wright taking stage center in the attack of the sink, the polls (on average and courtesy of RealClearPolitics.com) showed Obama moving from 6 points down to 7. By the time of the election, he was back at 6 points down. He lost by 10 (after having been 20 points down a month before). In the elections thus far where he has started far behind, e.g., Ohio, he has closed the gap and then lost by an additional 4 percent as the late deciders voted for Hillary.
So the net effect of hurling the sink was zero. The rest of the campaign will, I do believe, play out as it has been with Obama getting the nomination on the basis of more superdelegates breaking for what they see as the future rather than the past. The times they are, again, a-changin’.
(As I write this, Rev. Wright is again making news as he defends his career. I predict that the inevitable attacks on Obama will have no lasting impact on his campaign. Time, of course, gets the last word.)
Earlier in these posts I’ve noted the rise of the Creative Commons and Open Source software movements as indications of how the understanding of creativity (and ownership of creative works) is changing in a larger context that I call “the return of the commons.”
For the viewpoint of a well-known novelist, Jonathan Lethem (b. 1964) on creativity and copyright, both delightful reads, see the articles at the links below. The first is to an article in Harper’s, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” from which I cadged the title of this post. The second is to an interview with Lethem in Salon.com where he gives his take on sharing his work, including giving away the film option for his seventh novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet. Both articles were published last year, but are as or more relevant today.
We live in times that are seeing the end of the myth of the lone creator bringing forth work of pure originality.
In the April 7 issue of The New Yorker, Michael Kinsley reflects on aging, both his own and that of his generation. I’ve excerpted a small piece below.
We are born thinking that we’ll live forever. Then death becomes an intermittent reality, as grandparents and parents die, and tragedy of some kind removes one or two from our own age cohort. And then, at some point, death becomes a normal part of life—a faint dirge in the background that gradually gets louder. What is that point? One crude measure would be when you can expect, on average, one person of roughly your age in your family or social circle to die every year. At that point, any given death can still be a terrible and unexpected blow, but the fact that people your age die is no longer a legitimate surprise, and the related fact that you will, too, is no longer avoidable.
With some heroic assumptions, we can come up with an age when death starts to be in-your-face…
Anyway, the answer is sixty-three. If a hundred Americans start the voyage of life together, on average one of them will have died by the time the group turns sixteen. At forty, their lives are half over: further life expectancy at age forty is 39.9. And at age sixty-three the group starts losing an average of one person every year. Then it accelerates. By age seventy-five, sixty-seven of the original hundred are left. By age one hundred, three remain.
The last boomer competition is not just about how long you live. It is also about how you die. This one is a “Mine is shorter than yours”: you want a death that is painless and quick. Even here there are choices. What is “quick”? You might prefer something instantaneous, like walking down Fifth Avenue and being hit by a flower pot that falls off an upper-story windowsill. Or, if you’re the orderly type, you might prefer a brisk but not sudden slide into oblivion…
What I want to highlight here is the distinction Freedman makes of “encore” as a stage of life. Typically, we divide life into three general stages. The ages of before productive engagement (birth through an often prolonged adolescence), productive engagement (maturity) and after productive engagement (retirement/old age/seniordom).
Freedman notes that retirement as we have come to understand it, “The Golden Years,” was invented in the 50’s, mostly by Del Webb, the developer of the first big retirement community — Sun City. In those days people worked until 65 and died within the next 5 years. An overgeneralization, yes, but an apt one.
Now we both live and stay healthy longer. The vision of retirement stretches on. So Freedman adds a fourth stage, a stage between maturity and seniordom. This he calls the encore age — old enough to leave the conventional career behind, but too young to enjoy a life of idle recreation. And while most boomers will enjoy this gift of more and healthier years, they face the very real possibility of not having saved enough for their 20 plus years of retirement, and thereby stand in danger of outliving their money.
From these historical circumstances comes the encore stage of life and the encore career — work that matters, that contributes to the life of individual and the life of the community.
The encore years — a valuable distinction at an opportune time.
Click here to listen to an interview with Marc Freedman.
Ralph Nader is back running for president. I do not begrudge him taking another shot. I believe in democracy. Let 10,000 flowers (candidates) bloom. And yes, restructure ballot requirements for federal offices making access easier and uniform.
But at this stage of the game, he will have less electoral support than ever. We’re not going to support, let alone follow, a scold. His mood is too dark for our times. And the music of mood is always more persuasive than the lyrics of political proposals — one reason for the Obama phenomenon.
This video pretty much speaks for itself. Clinton is prone to resentment, and while resentment may feel “good” to the one who expresses it, it rarely seduces anyone other than fellow sufferers. First up is Obama setting the levels, so to speak. Watch what happens to the audience responses as Clinton speaks. The video is from SlateV.
After the Texas debate with Hilary testing a gracious exit from her hopes of the presidency, not to mention the delegate totals and the virtual impossibility of her catching Obama, it’s all over but the counting. I predict that Obama will win the Democratic nomination and then the general election.
What’s happening here? The pundits for the most part don’t get it. Obama’s constituency, I believe, does though most could not articulate it in terms other than “hope,” “inspiration,” “change,” with some elaboration.
What we have is a rare moment in American history. Obama’s “mere words” are regenerating an American cultural solidarity not seen since Martin Luther King, Jr.* Forty years after King’s death, his legacy appears in secular form in Obama. This solidarity is, of course, not all encompassing, but it does indicate a major rejection of the predominant social Darwinism of the past 20 plus years.
My first inkling of this arose when Obama starting reprising, “I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper.” A line, a concern, a commitment that could not have been uttered even two years ago. But after almost thirty years of the politics and economics of individual and corporate greed (by both major political parties), we hear again the historical call that the most fundamental, most human ground for society is not economic “rationality,” but, ala King, Christian charity (or Buddhist compassion, or…).
Another sign of the return of the commons.
*For an illuminating and thoroughgoing account of cultural solidarity (and more), see Disclosing New Worlds by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores and Hubert Dreyfus.
We talk about positions and policies and experience, but what matters most about candidates and their political narratives are the emotions they evoke — and it is emotion that propels us to action. Could what we see below in a video from Slate Video called “Hillary’s Inner Tracy Flick” contribute to Hillary Clinton’s high and steady negatives in the polls? Slate introduces it with
Don’t you just hate when some upstart comes along and threatens your best-laid plans? We were struck by how well one of Reese Witherspoon’s monologues from the film Election fits the narrative of Campaign 2008.
More than 20 years ago Ronald Reagan shifted the dominant political discourse in America. Today it looks like it may be Obama’s time. His campaign for president continues on a visionary path. Odd it is to see a communitarian vision poised against the backdrop of the every capitalist for himself theater of the past 20 plus years.
The latest signpost on the what may turn out to be the history road is Obama’s oration At Martin Luther King, Jr.’s old church yesterday marking the anniversary of King’s assassination. The video is below.
As for my political predictions: Wrong on New Hampshire, silent on Nevada, foreseeing an Obama victory in South Carolina. Also predicting that Bill Clinton won’t be able to keep himself (not that I know that he wants to) from another smear (lie) a day or so before the South Carolina vote. It’s the only politics he’s known.
After 20 years in the wilderness, political, that is, it’s good to have called an election, even if it’s only the Iowa Democratic caucuses. Obama won. Given the size of his victory and his flourishing rhetorical skills (see the video below) I predict victory for him in New Hampshire.
In regard to the title of this post, I quote the Wall Street Journal in article posted today
Despite attempting to soften her image, Sen. Clinton left some Iowans feeling cold. She swung through Des Moines’s Lovejoy Elementary School Thursday night to greet caucus-goers. After she shook hands with Rob Moyers and moved on, he remarked: “I looked into Obama’s eyes and he seemed sincere. Now, that looked mechanical. She’s like a robot.”
Another video. This one is by the Obama campaign and is designed for women. It’s “long,” 20 minutes. But with the soundtrack, the editing, and overall production, it’s also easy to watch.
The video is instructive in a couple of ways. One goes to the question of how does a male candidate run against a female candidate and appeal to women. Another is a demonstration of the use of longer videos as campaign “literature.” Good campaign videos create compelling and influential narratives.
As we (or, perhaps better, our children and grandchildren) come increasingly to watch television on computers*, they’ll become increasingly frequent and important to candidates and their campaigns.