See That My Grave is Kept Clean
Another little gem (or at least almost-gem) from the McKenzie Tapes. Differs from the standard version by using the E class of licks instead of the Drop D class of the recorded version. But the most prominent feature is the uneven rhythm, with 5/4 bars alternating with plain 4/4.
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: The Wanderer
I’ve only recently gotten involved in the blog world, and this is one of the blogs I’ve realized I’ve missed. Alex Ross is known in the Dylan world as the author of one of the best recent articles about Dylan, and in the rest of the world as music critic in The New Yorker. His blog (mainly concerned with classical music) is one I frequently check out, and the Dylan article is available there too.
You may have noticed my shameless promotion of Firefox lately. It’s a love relationship that goes a while back, to when it was still called Firebird and was just a test thing. Now — well, it certainly has grown: 25 million downloads since November, a browser share that approaches the 10% which seemed a utopian goal only a couple of months ago (that’s the general share; at some sites it already hovers around 30%), and it seems that nobody who spends some time on the net could have missed seeing it mentioned. (Or am I wrong? If you want to give some feedback on this, I would be quite curious to know how many of you didn’t know there was something called Firefox until I started my “campaign”, how many have installed it now, and are you satisfied with it?)
Here are my top reasons to use Firefox instead of the thing with the blue “e” :
“Don’t be evil!” That’s google’s slogan. Apparently, it sounded better than “Be good!”, and there’s something to it.
Who can be without Google? And why should one?
In the beginning, everything about google seemed nice. I switched from AltaVista mainly because of the many ads that started to show up as the first hits there (as far as I remember). Then everybody said the results were better at google — it was something of a Harry Potter effect. Word of mouth can be a very efficient seller, when it works. And when it does, it’s usually a sign of quality.
So what is wrong?
For one, Google uses a cookie which registers the ip number, search terms, and other session information (“browser type, browser language, the date and time of your query and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browse”, quoted from Google’s Privacy Centre) for every search that is performed. These results are stored, for an indefinite period of time. The cookie itself expires in 2038, which makes this an unprecedented life-span for a delicious delicacy.
Gmail explicitly encourages users not to delete anything. And “even if a message has been deleted or an account is no longer active, messages may remain on our backup systems for some period of time.” quoted from Gmail’s privacy policy page.
There is not automatically anything wrong in this. They do so, so they say, to provide a better service: to be able to target advertisement, sell a better product at a higher price, which in the end is to the benefit of the users. Fine. No humans are involved in handling the information in the emails, and no personal information is disclosed to advertisers or anyone else. Fine.
There are exceptions, though. They can and will disclose such information:
when Google is required by law to do so; and when we are compelled to disclose personal information because we reasonably believe it’s necessary in order to protect the rights, property or safety of Google, its users and the public.
Then consider this: In the USA, email messages lose their status as a protected communication under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act after 180 days. For the first 180 days, a warrant is needed, but after that, a subpoena is enough to get that information out. What was that you wrote about this file-sharing site to your friend at johndoe@gmail.com?
The google-watch website has more information on this, for whoever is interested.
The privacy problems are grave enough, but they don’t bother me that much. After all, anyone who communicates on the Internet should be aware that it may not be “safe”; lines are tapped, hacked, or monitored, and there are things you may whisper in your lover’s ear on a mountain top without a soul in sight, that you should perhaps not disclose in a chat session.
What disturbs me more is the following scenario: Already now, webmasters who want traffic to their sites, need Google. So they send in the link to their site and hope for the best, i.e. that Google will register it, add it to their database, and start generating hits. Wouldn’t it be much easier if Google provided space for the website directly? Surely, they could do that for free as well. The site would get on Google immediately, no more crawling the net to find it, no more hassle — a win-win situation, but in the end google would sit with the internet in the palm of their hands.
Or this: through detailed information about the search preferences of the whole world, both collectively and individually, and good algorithms to interpret it, google can streamline the information they channel out (which today is mostly advertisement, but to an increasing degree also news and whole library collections of books), to fit each individual user’s needs. With the personal informations available through Gmail, Blogger, and the the search engine combined, the possibilities to personalize information are overwhelming. Again, we have what looks lik a win-win situation: in the bewildering mass of information available, each individual gets Google’s help to find the needle in the haystack, the news that are relevant to someone interested in gardening, the Cure, Thai cooking, and calculus.
But what happens to the free press, the instigation to search and aquire new information, information one didn’t know on beforehand would be necessary or interesting, but which widens one’s horizon and therefore alters one’s life?
Do yourselves the favour of considering this scenario, spelt out in this video from the Museum of Media History in the year 2014
I’m not saying that Google is evil, nor that they are good but carry the seeds of evil and that the bleak scenario will come true. What I’m saying is that “with great power comes great responsibility”. I hope that Google is as responsible as they claim, but there is a huge greyzone between “Don’t be evil!” and “Be good!” Most of all, I urge anyone who uses the Internet not to take anything for granted, to be aware and responsible. Spiderman’s motto applies to everyone.
Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
This has now become my start page. One new article daily, in each of three categories (roughly: commentaries on current news, new books, and essays of a wider cultural scope). Just enough to keep the live and thinking person in me well fed and nourished for the rest of the day.
If that should not be enough, a fourth column contains links, to news sites, to book reviews, a selection of good blogs, and towards the bottom of the (long!) page, even some diversions – cartoons, a game of blackjack, Letterman jokes, stuff like that.
Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | Classical music could even become the new rock’n’roll
The death of modernism? Or of classical music? Or just as we know it?
Who are the mourners, and what is there to mourne?
Martin Kettle claims in this article in the Guardian, based on a recent book by the South-African musicologist Peter van der Merwe, that the death of classical music was caused by modernism, but that the classical tradition has now “come up for air, and is asking the right questions”.
The right questions?! What questions?
The questions that fill up concert halls, perhaps. “Certainly, we need something else to attract a commercially viable audience than Stockhausen or Schönberg, those boring, puffed-up — Germans.”
Or the questions that may legitimize the building and maintenance of cultural temples, shrines (or memorials?) of a culture originating in European court circles with a shifting emphasis on enlightenment and despotism, continuated as a bourgeois class marker for a class who wanted the power it signalled but failed to understand its theoretical underpinnings and the consequences of the aesthetics developed by its performers.
Why do we want a popular classical music scene in the first place? Surely, the performers want it, but the audience? Do we need it?
Or to put it differently: if what we need is just what we like, the popularity rate itself is a sign clear enough: the general public apparently needs a whole lot of other genres more than it needs classical music. End of story.
But if what we need is what we may not like to know? Or weren’t aware that we needed? That we may learn something from, gather experiences that are potentially important to us, to lead a better life, a life that is better for ourselves and our fellow human beings?
A music like this may never become popular, but it may be important that it is available, as an option for those who search it out. Modernism, the alleged murderer of classical music, had a goal along these lines: seen as an exploration of the human condition, it has a seriousness about it that is anti-popular, god bless it. It may not have been without flaws in this respect (either), chief among them the preposterous belief that it had answers (instead of just posing questions for the audience itself to find answers to), the air of superiority towards popular music that is so pronounced in many of the main modernist thinkers (and van der Merwe has a point that is more than just rhetorical, saying that the emancipation of the dissonance went hand in hand with a suppression of consonance), and the self-sufficient tendency to lose sight of the role music has or might have outside the world of music itself, which has contributed strongly to the death both of modernism and classical music.
These are serious flaws, and I’m not out to defend modernism. But the solution sounds too simplistic: that classical music needs to become popular — to speak a language the masses understand. That standpoint is not only arrogant and patronizing concerning the judgement and abilities of the people who make up these masses, but in the end it also macdonaldizes instead of leaving to simmer over low heat for two hours to bring out the subtle flavours of a tournedos, enhanced by laurel and sage, tomatoes, carrots, and celery.
Supersize me, Stravinskij!
. . . and so has mine. I have no clear idea what will go here, but a few unclear ones.
One: the “news” header of the main site has now tended to become more of a comments column, as the number of new tabs has diminished and my urge to communicate other things has increased. This is not necessarily wrong or bad, but rather an opportunity.
Another: I write quite a few mails in response to questions or remarks from people, with a character ranging from discussion of Dylan-oriented things to more general culturally oriented ramblings. I figured this would be a way to collect that, and also extend the communicability, and channel it, perhaps in a slightly different direction than the all-outs of the pool or r.m.d.
Three: “There are more important things in life than Dylan”. I said that, about a year ago. I intend for the range of topics to be taken up here to become wider than just Dylan and music. How about typography? Web design? Access databases? Knitting? (I kid you not)
Four: As a maintainer of a fairly well visited site in the world/space/culture that the Internet has become, I feel a growing responsibility towards/for this world/space/culture. “Towards” insofar as it consists of people, who spend large parts of their lives there. “For” insofar as I feel responsible for what I put out there, and for what I don’t. I watch with a mixture of a- and be-musement the obvious ease and naturalness with which my kids interact through the net. As much as I would hate to be the old fart who frowns at every change — for moral reasons (quite likely) or just because he feels left out — I will not either just sit uncritically and watch. In naturalness lies beauty and danger (yeah, the old fart rears his ugly head after all!) — that which glides effortlessly in meets with no resistance, no critique, no urge to overcome hurdles and take in more of the world.
It matters to distinguish between hyphens and dashes, because it has mattered enough to our predecessors to have felt meaningful to invest time and energy to provide for a distinction, and so it has shaped our society and the individuals in it, whether they know it or not; it is important to be aware of the source of our informations — we all know that Microsoft is evil, but what about google? Well, they say they’re not …
