January 2006 Archives

I haven't talked about it much here, but I am a more-than-casual sports fan -- particularly baseball and college football and hoops.   (As much as I love hockey, I just don't get enough time to follow it to call myself a true fan.)  With that disclosure, here are a couple bizarre notables from the last few weeks...

• I nearly spat my beer across the coffee table at hearing Mike Gminski's color commentary during the Fox Sports ACC Sunday Night men's basketball Sunday night (BC defeating Georgia Tech).  Near the end of the broadcast, Tim Brando and Gminski were talking about other games in the ACC this weekend and the G-Man dropped the following wisdom -- "Wake [Forest] looks like it's in a flat spin headed out to sea."  A Top Gun reference without any warning and (apparently) not intended as a joke -- is this man begging to be mocked in the next Sports Guy mailbag? 
• UPDATE: Could someone please send an intellectual property lawyer to the Washington Post?  It's time for the annual "SUPER BOWL is a protected phrase" marketing and advertising discussion... and the Post miserably confuses trademarks (like SUPER BOWL when used as a source identifier by the NFL and its licensees) and copyrights (which don't attach to short phrases like "super bowl") throughout this year's offering. Of course, I also believe the NFL is taking full advantage of the confusion through its overly aggressive posturing. Anyone at league headquarters care to study up on or debate "nominative fair use" some time?  Here's a signpost to get you started -- New Kids on the Block v. New America Publishing, 971 F.2d 302 (9th Cir. 1992) (nominative use "does not imply sponsorship or endorsement of the product because the mark is used only to describe the thing, rather than to identify its source").
• Looking back to the Rose Bowl, I now have confirmation that I wasn't dreaming when I saw the USC marching band perform Michael Jackson's "Beat It" and mimic the choreographed knife fight from the video.  I can't find video on-line yet, but there are negative reviews from GuideLive, EbJournal, a grudging acceptance at the MEAC-fans marching bands message board, and a surprisingly positive review from TexasGigs.com.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming...

I've come to terms with the issue of collecting more stories than I can reasonably write about -- make it a recurring (but occasional) feature like "Coursing Through The Wires."  Thus, the first formal installment of "Bloghits," after numerous earlier struggles with the concept:

• Engadget offered an excellent three part primer on the world of HDTV and its offshoots... while destined to be out of date within weeks, it's a fine way for the partial luddites like me to make sense of the madness while still resisting the Tivo-lution and "third screen" mania. 
• Engadget and Gizmodo both point to ShinyShiny's excitement about the impending arrival of Nabaztag in the english-speaking portions of the world. I know it's insanely stupid but I'm also intrigued by the device -- especially if it works as a WiFi repeater/access point in addition to its programmable light and kinetic sculpture (and now audio!) mania. 
• "Google Blogoscoped," a critical look at Google, offered a couple interesting sidelights before getting bogged down into the "Google in China" debate -- a way to hack Minesweeper (much to the delight of cubefarm critters everywhere) and the "Google Prejudice Map" that indicates that many parts of the world are believed to be characterized by their alcohol intake (a good reason to consult the Malt & Barley Chronicles, right?).  N.B. You'll have to pass a little quiz on the landing page before getting to the map itself...
• We're getting closer to true wireless integration -- the Register reviews Bluetooth stereo headsets that both play music and take phonecalls.  I'd love to have this kind of device for my commute -- I keep damaging the headphone jack on my Treo 650 when I catch my headphone cords on something. But I'm thinking that a swing-boom microphone that locks to a slim-fit headband would work just fine. I can handle fragility issues better than looking like an extra on the deck of the Death Star.
• And hearkening back to the recent bent of my commentary, BoingBoing offers an excerpt from Teresa Hayden's post/essay on copyright and books.  Hayden basically argues for more concrete limits on the duration of copyright and a loosening of the treatment once works go out of print, e.g. permitting some forms of electronic distribution for deadtree works that have been abandoned by publishers. I think she's on the right path, though there's lots of ground to cover in future discussions...

Not really sure how to get back to the music -- the technogeekery side of this space is generally much easier since I spend so much time at work.  In any event, here's a brief roundup of recentish pickups...

Arcade Fire -- Funeral (Merge, 2004)

Yes, I was late to the game when I finally purchased this back in November (quasi-cutout bin -- "2 for $22" at a local Borders).  I'd heard about half the record over on XMU, however, so I had some understanding of what I was getting into.  I'm officially sick of tall-poppy syndrome (a/k/a "we hate it when our friends become successful" -- and look how well that worked out for the old Moz).  Yes, it's been going on since the beginning of time, but that doesn't mean it's either justified or appropriate.  I'm happy that Arcade Fire got a Grammy nod -- not because "the Man validated our music/scene/existence" but because the record does deserve broad recognition for its accomplishments. The triumph of this album isn't the number of people on stage or the back-story -- it's the skill of sonic composition.  It's rare to find disparate pieces of sound that fit together organically, as illustrated by the vast majority of mashups and samplefests.  Funeral is the only album I've purchased in the last 3-4 years that I kept playing over and over even after having mentally processed it -- there's a thrill in the chiming guitar harmonics, a thorny slash in the nasal vocals,  a propulsive charge when tension builds and releases without resorting to the mid-90s "dynarock" sound.  It's great to find a complete, cohesive effort that doesn't resort to the pretension of a "concept album."

Gorillaz -- Demon Days (EMI, 2005)

The other half of my "2 for $22" purchase -- everyone's favorite cartoon band.  Again, I'd heard enough on XMU to overcome the "As Heard in the iPod Commercial" sticker on the front. The truly revelatory moment came a couple months after I'd bought this when I heard a broadcast of the Gorillaz concert at the Manchester Opera House in November 2005.  I was prepared for Gorillaz to be little more than a studio construct, especially with DJ Dangermouse's involvement -- but the performance captured an energy and depth that I never expected.  Assembling nearly every source from the record for the night was an unprecedented logistical feat, never mind getting them all to fit together aurally on what was undoubtedly a limited practice schedule.  Sly and slinky beats meet fey vocals and bewildering production skills that translate remarkably well to the live setting.

The Stranglers -- Peaches -- The Very Best Of... (EMI,  2002)

Despite the title, only about half of this compilation is listenable.  In trying to capture the full range of Stranglers expressions, you wind up with dreck like "Always the Sun" slotted adjacent to "Something Better Change" and "Skin Deep" sandwiched by "No More Heroes" and "Hanging Around."  The half that is worth listening to, of course, is pretty stellar and therefore mitigates some of the frustration.  Your mileage WILL vary with the Stranglers -- I tend to like the snottier moments (plus, oddly enough, "Golden Brown") but others jonesing for a late 80s fix will also get what they need.  I think the only way to explain this band is to see them as a bunch of dilletantes slipping and sliding through the broad boundaries of "rock music."

Helium -- "The American Jean" b/w "Termite Tree" (Warped, 1992)

I got to thinking about this song around the time I started Coursing #5, when I heard some sad news about an old friend and the original bloofga-wrangler, Liz Clayton.  Some time after the Indie-List had gotten rolling, we met up in Boston -- Liz was working on the first issue of Wind Up Toy (senior project, if I recall correctly) and I was home from school on spring break.  She'd arranged an interview with the former members of Boston's late (but not-so-lamented) Dumptruck, who were then backing Mary Timony in a new band called Helium.  We spent a good part of the afternoon cruising around Brookline and Brighton in the back of a delivery van.  Anyway, "The American Jean" is likely the best pop song Mary Timony's ever been a part of... including Autoclave and her current solo efforts in druidry.  It's bitter and uplifting all at once, and if you hurry you might be able to hear it over at Shake Your Fist and then make a commitment to organ donation in honor of Liz and her dear, departed husband Jeff.

OK... has all of the mainstream media now officially jumped on board to talk about network neutrality?  When I wrote a week ago, I thought the New York Times was the last to reach the issue.  Today's Washington Post offers its own op-ed titled The Coming Tug of War Over the Internet.  Although condescending to anyone who's actually heard of the issue in the past few months, the piece covers all the main points -- Whitacre's opening blast, BellSouth's piling-on, Verizon's "high-road" consideration of all the options.  Mr. Stern does offer one interesting point, however:

One of the few conditions that the FCC put on the merged companies was that they abide by the concept of network neutrality for at least two years. But it's not clear if companies would even be in violation of the relatively vague FCC language if BellSouth or AT&T proceeded with their plan to give one company "priority" over others on the Internet. Last week I asked several telecommunications lawyers, including some FCC staffers, if AT&T would be in violation of its merger agreement if it granted "priority" status to some companies for a fee. The consistent response I got was, "That's a really good question."

I remain convinced that the ultimate result will be a "voluntary" industry declaration of neutrality in exchange for a bigger piece of the regulatory concessions in the telecom reform effort.  And the industry trade rags like Communications Daily are suggesting that the insiders see a bill getting through in 2006 -- meaning that all the well-intentioned efforts to support neutrality may just result in a bigger giveaway to the local telcos.  Unfortunately, that may be the price of progress (or at least maintaining the status quo) in an unsettled environment.

I currently spend most of my workdays in downtown Washington DC, smack between two long-gone DC punk/indie bastions. What's now touted as "Penn Quarter" was seriously rundown commercial property just a decade ago (though to call it "blighted" would be a disservice to the truly blighted parts of DC). In this case, the whole area got a major boost when the MCI Center opened (during my 8-year absence from DC).  The FBI fortress and Smithsonian Portrait Gallery / Folk Art collection and Chinatown Arch had always been there, but this part of downtown was ghostly and somewhat creepy by the time the doors would open for yet another show.

This is F Street NW, between 9th and 10th Streets -- and while the name may persist elsewhere in the District, the true heart of the 9:30 Club will always be right here.  Some of the facade of 9:30's old home is being preserved, but a 10-to-12-story office / condo development is going up behind that brick lattice.  Will the infamous "9:30 Club Smell" attach itself to the new subterranean parking and storage structures? And more importantly, did they retain the pole in the middle of the floor?

d.c.space had a far different demise... it's been replaced by a Starbucks.  I can't completely verify, but it feels like the same basic footprint (with the main entrance shifted from mid-block to the corner for easier pedestrian access).  Slightly smaller than I remember, but otherwise consistent with the original space.  (Across the street is another ill-fated site -- in the mid-90s, it was the "Insect Club" but now it's 6+ months delayed in its opening as a Juan Valdez Cafe... Perhaps the mules were delayed on their way up from Colombia.)

Over the last couple months, the alarm bells have started to go off about the future of the Internet, with the phrase "network neutrality" popping up more often.  The risk has finally hit the big time, in a Sunday op-ed from the New York Times titled Hey, Baby Bells: Information Still Wants to Be Free(*).

The issue first came to light last fall when Ed Whitacre, CEO of SBC (now known as the "new" AT&T) had the cojones to argue in a Business Week interview(**) that content providers like Google and Microsoft and Yahoo! should be paying the local telephone carriers to carry traffic.  That's right -- not only should ISPs or direct end users pay SBC/AT&T for access to the Net, but the content providers should also pay the telcos to bring that content to the end users (in addition to the content providers' own costs of getting their information up to the net). 

To varying degrees, the other major local phone companies are also on the bandwagon -- BellSouth with its infamous "Vonage and Google aren't stringing lines in New Orleans" argument, Verizon taking a loftier "we see some significant benefits" approach. Some scattered points on the evolution of the discussion:

• Freedom to Tinker (Ed Felten), Susan Crawford -- October 2005
• Corante's "Moore's Lore" -- November 2005
• Hiawatha Bray (Boston Globe), Michael Geist (a Canadian telco/cable perspective) -- December 2005
• Searchblog (John Battelle), GigaOm (Om Malik), Mark Cuban (surprisingly, in support of ending neutrality) and the Ars Technica rebuttal to Cuban -- January 2006.

My personal take is that the telcos are really just creating a huge bargaining chip. They know the idea sounds completely ridiculous, but they can create enormous value for themselves simply by toeing the line and occasionally lighting off a firecracker or two.  I see a magnanimous "statement of network principles" emerging as part of a concession to Congress or the FCC or FTC -- with something less visible to the average consumer, but far more valuable to the big players, being granted as a concession to win AT&T and Verizon concurrence.(***) 

Some additional evidence: Ars Technica recently reported on a policy statement from the FTC supporting neutrality.  Similarly, end-of-2005 interviews with FCC Chairman Kevin Martin (LA Times) also suggest that his opening position is one of continued neutrality.  Congress has mostly been silent, but one would hope that even the spectre of "homeland security" isn't enough to get them to back an abandonment of open access.

Chairman Martin has also made noise (CNet) about a slightly different form of network neutrality -- even-handed taxation with respect to the Federal Universal Service Fund. Today, Vonage and Skype and the cable companies don't make the same payments into the fund that the telcos always have -- creating a real, government-mandated price differential that the telcos desperately want removed. 

In the upcoming reform of the Telecommunications Act, there will be lots of horse-trading, with some unusual coalitions built along the way.  Network neutrality won't be the only bargaining point, but it will be one of the most widely-reported (if not the most significant) in the end.

One of the primary recurring topics these days in the convergence of technology and media distribution (music, video, etc.) is Digital Rights Management (DRM) and its impact on technology, law, and markets.  I don't have the most complete, most well-considered, or most clear-cut approach to the issue, but I can say this much... unless and until DRM is light-weight, widely interoperable, and generally a non-issue (for reasons OTHER than mass-market coercion), it is doomed.  In the meantime, the unholy alliance is merely trying to recapture something that they may not have been entitled to receive in the first place.

The Sony/BMG CD-protection-rootkit kerfuffle (as previously noted) seems headed toward resolution, though it's unclear exactly how the less-sophisticated purchasers will be notified and provided with the necessary patches and de-installers to secure their computers once again. 

The latest example, however, is also a doozy... Verizon Wireless has announced its entry into the U.S. over-the-air music downloading game, matching Sprint's existing service with dual downloads (PC and phone) but moving the per-unit pricing down closer to  the iTunes Music Store.  As reported in numerous sources (PCS Intel, The Register, Engadget, CNET), there's a little catch to the VCast solution... the phones will read only WMA files.  The phones with over-the-air downloading will lose their native MP3 support. 

For those with Windows XP boxes, Verizon Wireless' software will upload MP3s to the phone but only after an automagical conversion to WMA.  The software doesn't exist yet for Mac and Linux, so those users are on their own to convert MP3 to WMA and then upload to the phone -- and it's apparently an open question whether the dual-download strategy will work on Mac and Linux.  The Verizon Wireless press team has quite the tin ear, contending (in the CNET article) that users get to exercise choice -- they can have native MP3 or the VCast Store.  PCS Intel is also reporting on a hack to restore native MP3 capability (that may void warranties, of course). 

I'm not one to say that all content must be free... I've known and respected far too many musicians and artists to think that I should enjoy their output without compensation.  At the same time, I'm hard-pressed to see how the competing, generally ineffective, almost-always ham-fisted attempts to lock down content (often cloaked in the name of "choice" and "enhanced user experience") are a net benefit to the consuming public.

There's a much longer dialogue welling up in my brain about how DRM breaks the basic compromise of copyright law, but that will have to wait (gotta run to work). 

[Apologies for those who already read through -- but I decided this was too good to bury as a continuation of my earlier post.]

I received the following via e-mail many years back -- it purports to be a translation of the Nazi government's ban on jazz music. I can neither confirm nor debunk its accuracy, but I did find a couple references to it through Google.  Thanks to WFMU (of course) for posting MP3s of the official "Nazi Swing Band" (available at these separate links).

Conditions Governing the Grant of Licenses for Dance Music

NEGROID: Belonging to a Negro race. This includes the African Negroes (and also those living outside of Africa), also Pygmies, Bushmen and Hottentots.

NEGRITO: In the wider sense of the term, the short-statured, curly or frizzy-haired, dark-skinned inhabitants of Southeastern Asia, Melanesia and Central Africa.

1. Music: The Embargo on Negroid and Negrito Factors in dance Music and Music for Entertainments.

2. Introduction: The following regulations are intended to indicate the revival of the European spirit in the music played in this country for dances and amusements, by freeing the latter from the elements of that primitive Negroid and/or Negrito music, which may be justly regarded as being in flagrant conflict with the Europeon conception of music. These regulations constitute a transitory measure born of practical considerations and which must of necessity precede a general revival.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Motorola unveiled some new details about its iRadio service. I first heard about iRadio back in April 2005 at the Future of Music Coalition Policy Day -- Motorola's Dave Ulmer was on a panel and let some details slip (shortly after giving this interview to Engadget). 

Moto is promising 435 channels (music, talk, etc.) at launch, initially served via USB download to the new ROKR E2* (successor to the ROKR E1, a/k/a the iTunes phone) through a Windows XP computer.  This first iRadio-enabled phone will hold six channels at a time and updates the playlist at each sync.  Eventually, Moto will allow live feeds via cellular data service to the phone... with Cingular likely holding the inside track on being iRadio's initial wireless partner, once they get 3G broadband data rolled out across their whole network (as opposed to the current 16 business markets).

The first iRadio promo/commercial is either misguided or clueless. The closing visual says "We got tired of changing stations. So we changed radio." I'll concede that iRadio represents a change (as opposed to claiming false advertising) -- it locks users to only one device manufacturer, presumably only one cellular provider, and only six available program choices at one time.  What's the use of over 400 content sources if you can only get to 1.4% of them before needing to reconnect to the computer?

One of my very few complaints about XM (that likely extends to Sirius as well) is the narrowcasting of its 100 music channels.  Perhaps my tastes are broader than the general public, but I routinely flip among nine music channels just to remain entertained during the workday -- four flavors of independent rock (XMU, Ethel, Fred, Fungus) plus five other "variety" stations (60s, Soul Street [classic R&B], The Joint [reggae], Deep Tracks [lost 60s-70s rock], and The Move [techno-dance]).  Why would I trade 20 presets and access to all 200+ channels (including the critical traffic-weather combos while driving) for six stations that (for now) I'd need to have downloaded in advance using my (non-existent) Windows XP box?  The three-to-four minute dropouts somewhere like the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel are a minor inconvenience -- the current iRadio restrictions are a death-knell.

Honestly, I want to see iRadio work -- I want more diverse content and more creativity on and over the "airwaves."  I want XM to have to innovate further in the face of competition from Sirius and iRadio and whatever else might follow (mobile streaming Internet stations?).  I understand the "first mover" advantage and technology lock-in -- but Moto isn't the first mover in the "FM radio replacement" game (XM was) and Moto doesn't bring enough of a technological advantage to the table (for the time being) to be a serious player in the game.

I'm not sure how much of a value-add it is when one writes a blog entry that consists of links to other blogs, especially when those other blogs are fairly well-known or prominent in their given fields.  At the same time, I found these entries amusing or interesting and wanted to make sure others had a chance to hear about them (on the off-chance we're not all reading the same sources).

Engadget: Turntable with USB outputs, Blowfly alarm clock, "Playlimit" token-based gaming controls, and a true Mosrite Special.

Gizmodo: Mood Radio, CD Burner with integrated turntable, "Teddyphone" cellphone for kids, and the "Electrilite" wind-up flashlight/phone charger.

BoingBoing: God Is A Moog, Population-based Map of the World, MP3s of the official Nazi Jazz Band (see more on this subject), and an animation of western alphabets. 

Miscellaneous: Doogle (mock Irish search site), The Political Graveyard (to see where the skeletons really are buried), Wayfaring (to make one's own annotated maps).