Bloom on the verse of Obama: "Meh."

Rebecca Mead reveals in the current (July 2) issue of The New Yorker that a young Barack Obama wrote poetry - is there anything he can't do? She has Yale lit prof and cultural commentator Harold Bloom take a look-see. His take? Not bad, but not exactly good, either. One piece, he says, shows "a kind of humane and sad wit."

Imagine having a president with wit of any kind - humane, even! Although, Bill had a sharp enough mind and look how that went. Obama, though, back in the day, was riffing on underwater ape colonies and things of that nature, which suggests to me a depth of imagination that previous presidents could only dream of.

On a related note, Ronald Reagan's diaries came out recently. Reads like the dutiful log entries of a somewhat literate - but not at all reflective - and mature teenager, with the barest, most basic descriptions and details.

new video:Longwave Dub Intercept

One of the most common comments I get on GarageBand is "This would make a great soundtrack to something." So I've started making these goofy little videos. This one uses footage taken from various open source and public domain collections found on Archive.org - they also have live shows and music from various acts. I once found a Soulive show posted there just a few days after the fact, and if you've never seen Soulive in the flesh, do so now. It's like being run over by a funky freight train.

So anyway, the video - yeah. Go check it out.

new song @ MySpace

I kind of hate MySpace. It's like some giant global high-school cafeteria, except at my high school, I didn't get messages from strippers and amateur porn models who wanted to be my friends. As a musician, however, I can't ignore its awesome power as a music sharing tool and promotional platform.

So there's a new track up at MySpace called Longwave Dub Intercept - it's my usual pastiche of cut-up, Moog noise, and dub bass. There's also a slightly longer version over at my "real" web site. Enjoy.

YouTube, on your phone, dude!

The link above takes you to proof that we have cured hunger, banished war, united the faiths, isolated the Higgs-Boson particle, and halted the irrevocable march to the grave.

Why, you say?

Because if we hadn't done all those things, we wouldn't have the time and the resources necessary to develop a way to watch a goddam dog ride a skateboard on a $600 phone!!

Time for some disclosure - I want an iPhone real bad. I would love to have one. But A) I'm on Verizon for another two years, and secondly: it's $600!! Granted, it may be a harbinger to how we're all going to connect to the Net one day, the herald of the death of the desktop, but c'mon y'all. We've got much bigger fish to fry. If I can afford a $600 phone, maybe I need to think about Doctors without Borders, or One, and about how they might use that money.

Now, if there's a way to run Reason on it...

Your next computer...

...will be a big-assed table. The VO is parody, but the footage appears to be of from an actual MS demo video.

Hillary locks in the Kathy Griffin vote

I was disturbed enough by the prospect of Clinton 2: Electric Bugaloo, but now I'm really freaked out.

Samples, licensing, copyright, &c. &c.

Being an electronic musician of sorts, I will cop to using uncleared samples in my work. Usually, I jack a beat from somewhere and then manipulate it until it's no longer recognizable. Still, it's uncleared and, therefore, illegal.

Apparently, even back in the olden days, record companies were aware of the possibilities of illegal use of their recorded sounds, and released records with appropriately restrictive licensing. This post describes the EULA-like language on a Victor Talking Machine Co. release from sometime around 1906. Not only does it stipulate a minimum price for the record, but it grants a very limited license to the user.

Trent Lott smells the talk radio coffee

The GOP devolution continues - Lott turns a corner on the daily nutjobbery that is AM radio. You know, he didin't really have a problem with our static-shrouded overlords when they were on his side...

From the NYT, discussing the pending immigration bill:

The Republican whip, Trent Lott of Mississippi, who supports the bill, said: “Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.”

Get Some NUTS!

AICPL: Safari for WIndows goes Kerplooey

Whodathunk that the second Safari for Windows came out, somebody would find a big gaping whole to drive an exploit through - and a good one too! Unfiltered commands invoking cmd.exe? Through the IFRAME tag? Go read TFA (linked above) and wonder at the folly of it all.

tay0 site re-redesign, new video

The official tay0 site has been completely redesigned yet again, and the pesky image alignment problems are gone. I've also got a new video posted on the images page.

That is all.

AICPL: Browser madness and web design

I've been working on an update to my site for the last couple of days. I was really pleased with the rsults until I finally cranked up the old XP box and checked the site in IE7. As always, something didn't look right - namely, there was a nasty gap in one of my sliced images (using a table-based layout - I know, I know, CSS blah blah blah). Everything's peachy in Firefox and Safari, and even IE5 for the Mac. I went back and re-checked all my table settings and everything's as it should be.

Take a look here and let me know A) what browser you're running, and B) how it looks.

Formative moments relived (thanks, YouTube!)

This performance by King Crimson blew my little prepubescent mind when I saw it live on TV. It's the song "Elephant Talk" from the album Discipline, which came out in 1981. I saw them on the ABC comedy show Fridays, and begged my mom to take me to the record store the next day. Adrian Belew and Robert Fripp redefined rock music for me, right then and there. And God bless 'em for it.