I Guess I'm a PC

I started using iTunes recently (mostly because there are two official Frank Zappa albums that are only available through iTunes). I have been somewhat of a luddite about it - part of me likes purchasing physical media (even though CDs appear to be useless for archival purposes - some of my earliest purchases have already corroded). But in general, I like the idea, but the execution doesn't thrill me.

Now, I know there are thousands of people using and enjoying iTunes, so maybe I'm just too stupid to figure out how to solve the problems I ran into. So let me list them, and maybe someone out there can tell me what I'm doing wrong:

• I can buy albums, and look at the albums in my music library. But if I want to burn a CD, I can't just select an album and burn it, I have to first move all the songs on that album to a playlist, and then burn that playlist to CD. Fine if I'm making a "mix tape", but it doesn't seem to have occurred to them that anyone might want to treat an "album" as a unit of music.
  
• After burning, a little chime plays to let you know it's done. Unfortunately, if the burn was unsuccessful for any reason (as happens from time to time with CDs), the same chime plays. There is no error message or any other feedback to let you know the burn failed.
  
• After burning successfully, the selection focus moves to the newly-created CD. When you eject the CD, selection focus returns to the Music library, not the playlist you just burned. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that anyone might want to burn more than a single copy at a time.
  
• There is a nice feature to print CD case inserts. But there are no customization options at all - you either print one of their preset formats, or shove it. Too bad if you wanted to do something like print an album name above the track list (see first point above).
  
• The software doesn't recognize my (non-iPod) MP3 player at all, which means I have to manually convert all my songs to MP3 (since it doesn't play their proprietary format), and then manually move them to the player.
  
• When you export songs to MP3, it puts them all in the same directory. By default, the list doesn't show file types (though it can be made to do so), so in the default configuration, every song you've converted is listed twice, with no indication of which is which.
  
• After moving the MP3 files to the player, I don't care about having that format in my iTunes folder on my PC hard drive, so I delete them. The iTunes software can, if you tell it to, detect that some of the files it thought were there are now gone, but it isn't smart enough to just remove them from the list automatically, you have to select and delete them from the iTunes list by hand.
  

It's almost as if they've deliberately designed the software to be as inconvenient as possible for anyone who hasn't purchased one of their iPods. And more generally, it seems like everything is fine and works great as long as you stay inside the little box of things they want you to do, but you start running into problems as soon as you get outside that box. Keep in mind, too, that this list came out of using iTunes basically over only two weekends. And that has been my experience generally with Apple products. Thinking back over the years, it seems like every interaction with any Apple product I've ever had has been dissatisfying in one way or another. From the locked-down feeling from the ancient Macs I had to deal with one semester in college, to the way Quicktime just never really "fit" well into a Windows environment, to this latest bit with iTunes, none of it has ever really felt right to me.

Upbeat Happy-Time Music

I'm finding lately that I am more and more impressed with musicians who can produce upbeat music. I think it has something to do with that Bart Simpson quote: "Depressing teenagers is like shooting fish in a barrel" - the sort of angsty-young-person vibe is too easy. Happy music takes some effort.

For example, this:


Or this (and yeah, I know, it the song of theirs you always hear). And to me, I can even hear some pain behind here, but transformed into a cry of joy at the world:

Movie Review

Across the Universe - Easily the best [fictional movie musical focused on other people performing Beatles' music] ever made. Of course, since the only other entry in that particular genre is Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the bar is set kind of low. Across the Universe makes it over that bar merely by not being an atrocity against man and nature.

It's... not great. The part where an Uncle Sam recruiting poster sings "I Want You", followed by American troops carrying the Statue of Liberty through plastic Vietnam jungles singing "She's So Heavy"... yeah, that's taking the symbolism a bit too far. The scenes in the bowling alley, with shots pretty much cribbed directly from The Big Lebowski were bad enough, but then to later call back those scenes with ten Vietnamese women painted white, falling over... I had to pause the TiVo long enough to exclaim: "Did I really just watch a metaphorical representation of a Vietnam war atrocity as bowling?" Um, wow.

On the other hand, Eddie Izzard was predictably entertaining as Mr. Kite. The actor playing Jude was good, and performed his songs quite well. And I was glad to see they were able to fit Joe Cocker in.

But the story never really coheres. As a film, for the most part, it's basically just a strange hybrid of Moulin Rouge!, Hair, and, for some reason, Dreamgirls. With, yes, just a pinch of the aforementioned Sgt. Pepper. It's really obviously not a depiction of the real 1960s, but rather of some kind of mythic-'60s, where Jimi and Janis were in a band together until they were split up by an evil record producer, only to later get back together for a rooftop concert. Where Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters tripped on a bus to Timothy Leary's home. Where people got high by miming smoking a joint, and where the negative consequences of heavy drinking and drug use are only obliquely hinted at. Where all the young men were drafted, sent to Vietnam to witness horrors, and returned home broken. All of which may have been mythically true, but reality was never that simple.

Oh, and during all the Liverpool scenes, I kept wanting the extras to start singing "Every Sperm is Sacred".

As an aside: Why is it that no movie made since about 1980 seems to be able to get '60s hair right? I'm not even sure exactly what it is, but all of the hair in this film, from Evan Rachel Wood's long-straight-hippy-chick 'do, to her brother's "what is Kurt Cobain doing in 1972" look, is just somehow obviously modern. I don't even know exactly what it is they're doing wrong, but if you look at Woodstock, or other movies actually made at the time, it's just not right somehow.

Audiosurf

Audiosurf - Very cool little game for $10. I heard of it when it was highlighted as one of the PAX 10 indie games this year. Basically, it's cross between Tetris and a racing game: You're piloting a vehicle along a roller-coaster-like track, and hitting blocks to form color-matching sets. There are a bunch of different modes, in three rough groupings of difficulty, including one popular one where you simply try to hit colored blocks, while avoiding gray ones.

But the cool thing about the game is that the shape of the track, and the color and density of blocks, are calculated from some kind of waveform analysis of your own CDs or MP3s, which then play while you run that track. For example:



It should be obvious that one of the joys of this game is plugging obscure, weird, eclectic songs into it to see what it does with them. Each song has its own individual online leaderboard, so you can compare your performance with others. For example, here's an obscure song (from the A Mighty Wind soundtrack album), but not so obscure that I'm the only one ever to play it, where I currently hold the top spot in Pro mode.

Guitar Heroes

This is nothing new - it made the rounds on the internet last year - but just in case anyone reading hasn't seen them, I highly recommend the St Sanders "Shreds" videos. Hy-larious.

For the unaware, these are by a Finnish video artist named Santeri Ojala. What he's done is take video performance clips of various guitar heroes (Van Halen, Clapton, etc.) and dub new guitar solos over the videos. Bad guitar solos. Rather like the "experimental free-form jazz odyssey" Spinal Tap is forced to perform after Nigel quits.

Think of it as sort of like an instrumental music version of a What's Up, Tiger Lily?/J-Men Forever kind of thing. The thing is, he does such a good job simultaneously matching what the video shows them playing (well enough to actually fool some people), but at the same time being so completely out of character... well, really, it's indescribable. Just watch. I particularly recommend the one featuring Ozzy Osbourne on hand-claps.

Steve Vai apparently has a sense of humor*, and loved them. Yngwie Malmsteen, not so much: Rumor has it that he's the one who complained to YouTube about copyright violation**, resulting in the creator having his account banned. Oh well, the videos are still there, so I consider it my civic duty to ensure as many people see them as possible...

Also: The non-music related one is fun, too.

*Probably a necessary survival trait in Frank Zappa's band, where you run the risk of having your groupie exploits immortalized in a song like "Stevie's Spanking".

**Despite this obviously being parody, and therefore falling under the Fair Use exception.

Zappa Plays Zappa

First of all: You know you're in for a treat when any band comes out and opens with "Echidna's Arf (Of You)". I read in a local free left-wing paper that last year's ZPZ tour focused more on the Overnight Sensation/Apostrophe' period, but that for this year, Dweezil wanted to play more of FZ's more "serious" (for lack of a better word) music, and the set list certainly reflected that. They did do some of the expected stuff from those albums, but there was no sign of "Dinah-Moe Humm" at all. Instead, we got to hear a trilogy of "Son of Suzy Creamcheese/Brown Shoes Don't Make It/America Drinks and Goes Home" from Absolutely Free, "Cheepnis" and "Pygmy Twylite", as well as the aforementioned Echidna, from Roxy & Elsewhere, "Carolina Hard-Core Ecstasy", "Advance Romance", and "Muffin Man" from Bongo Fury, and even "G-Spot Tornado" from Jazz From Hell.

There were several songs that used video footage of Frank playing guitar solos, while the band on stage played the rest of the parts. This was used particularly effectively during the encore, when Dweezil traded solos with his father, in which they were both playing the same guitar. And I have to say: Dweezil has grown up into a damn fine guitar player. His soloing style is clearly heavily influenced by Frank, although it is subtly different. Perhaps more conventional, although that's not really a good description for playing that is still so FZ-esque. Great stuff, anyway. And a fine, satisfying concert overall.

I Always Suspected This

A 42-year-old dishwasher in Sweden has had his love of heavy metal music officially declared a mental disability (thus entitling him to government disability benefits).

Pictures here, though you won’t be able to read that article unless you understand Swedish.

Austrian-School Idol

Every year, American Idol has a couple of predictable "controversies", which people somehow manage to be surprised by, even though the same ones happen, as I said, every year. One of them is the mid-season or so ouster of one of the expected favorites (e.g., Jennifer Hudson), which we haven't quite reached yet in the current season. Another is the relatively untalented contestant who ends up lasting much longer than he/she deserves. This season, that is the infamous Sanjaya Malakar.

It occurs to me that this predictable pattern illustrates an argument, first proposed by Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, that socialism cannot work even in principle. The argument is known as the "calculation problem", and what it says is that in a socialist system, capital goods have no prices (since all transfers of such are simply internal transfers within the government-owned system of producers), and that in the absence of the information conveyed by price signals, it is impossible to rationally calculate the most efficient use of those capital goods. To oversimplify a bit: Without prices, one cannot know what goods really are the most in demand.

This is the problem with American Idol: Voting for contestants is virtually costless (there is only the negligible cost of time spent dialing the phone). It therefore conveys no real information about the preferences of consumers. If you really wanted to know which singer people preferred, what you should do is sell singles/mp3s of each contestant's performance every week, and kick off whoever sells the fewest copies of their song. Free votes are not (necessarily) going to translate into actual sales, once money enters the equation. Without a price, those votes tell us nothing about the actual demand for recordings of one singer versus another.

Extrapolating the implications of this line of reasoning as it applies to votes in a political democracy is left as an exercise for the reader. :-)

More Amazement

Here's another great one: Zappa's band covering the Allman Brothers' song, "Whipping Post". Those of you with more "mainstream" musical tastes may enjoy this one more than the other one I posted about:



This footage is from the concert video, "Does Humor Belong In Music?" The album/CD version of "Does Humor Belong In Music?" seems to use a recording of this song from a different performance, but I actually prefer the version from the video.

This is Effin' Amazing

This is Frank Zappa and the (1968 lineup) Mothers performing "King Kong" on what appears to be British television. Try to ignore the cheesy '60s video effects that creep in toward the end and just listen to the glorious awesomeness.

Big Pile of Christmas (Part One)

In preparation for this year's trip to Wisconsin for Hogswatchnight, I have created a DVD filled with MP3s of Chrismahanukwanzakah music, with the intention of letting it play in the background while we open presents, thereby escaping the dismal prison of any particular radio station's playlist, while also avoiding the need to get up periodically and change discs.

Since this DVD contains 971 songs, I'm hoping we'll be able to get our unwrapping done without the DVD player having to repeat more than the first couple hundred or so...

Is this another "Farewell" tour?

Streisand to heckler: 'Shut the @#&% up'

There was Streisand, enduring a smattering of very loud jeers as she and "George Bush" -- a celebrity impersonator -- muddled through a skit that portrayed the president as a bumbling idiot.

Though most of the crowd offered polite applause during the slightly humorous routine, it got a bit too long, especially for a few in the audience who just wanted to hear Streisand sing like she had been doing for the past hour.

"Come on, be polite!" the well-known liberal implored during the sketch as she and "Bush" exchanged zingers. But one heckler wouldn't let up. And finally, Streisand let him have it.

"Shut the (expletive) up!" Streisand bellowed, drawing wild applause. "Shut up if you can't take a joke!"
[...]
Once the outburst (which Streisand later apologized for) was over, Streisand noted that "the artist's role is to disturb,"

Oh, bullshit, Babs. You just thought your fanbase would all enjoy a little Bush-bashing, and when some of them expressed disapproval, you freaked out. You weren't trying to "disturb" anyone, you were trying to preach to the choir. It just turned out that some of the choir weren't on the same page.

Random Rules

Just because I think it will be fun, I'm doing a "Random Rules", based on the new occasional feature in The Onion. To quote their explanation: "In "Random Rules," we ask our favorite rockers, writers, comedians, or whatevers to set their MP3 players to "shuffle" and comment on the first few tracks that come up—no cheating or skipping allowed."

So, here's mine:

Kronos Quartet/Terry Riley - "Salome and Half-Wolf Descend Through the Gates to the Underworld"
Nice modern/minimalist string quartet. This is from a long work called Salome Dances For Peace. I first heard part of it that was included on one of the Kronos Quartet's albums ("Half-Wolf Dances Mad in Moonlight", on Winter Was Hard). Frenetic, I think would be the word to describe most of it.

Peter McConnell - "Blue Casket Bop"
This is from the soundtrack for the computer game, Grim Fandango. The game is, I think, the closest anyone has ever come to producing Literature in the video game medium, and the musical score is one of the best I've ever heard in a game. This particular bit is a cool jazz number.

Devo - "Booji Boy and General Boy/We're All Devo"
This is basically just a short "filler" track from their best-of anthology, Pioneers Who Got Scalped. Not much to say about that.

Frank Zappa - "Run Home Cues #3"
Some of the incidental music Zappa wrote for the obscure movie, Run Home Slow, which he included on the album The Lost Episodes. I've never seen the movie. The music is somewhat unusual: For some reason the Run Home Slow music reminds me of Mahler more than most of Zappa's other orchestral music, which usually sounds more like Stockhausen.

Frank Zappa - "Stinkfoot"
Well, my MP3 player is pretty heavily loaded with Zappa right now, it's only natural he'd be repeated. This particular track is from a bootleg concert recording - 23 May 1975, El Paso County Coliseum. As always, the musicianship is phenomenal. Decent guitar solo. This is one of Zappa's better band lineups, although my favorite lineup (at least at the moment) is probably the slightly-earlier Ruth Underwood era.

That's the usual five songs, but as an added bonus, here are the next ten that popped up, without comment (along with the album title they come from), just so you can see what a typical playlist would look like on the hypothetical Coolest Radio Station Ever:

nine inch nails - "All The Love In The World" (With Teeth)
Trey Parker - "The Trapper Song" (Cannibal: The Musical - Soundtrack)
Tom Waits - "Tango Till They're Sore" (Rain Dogs)
The Clash - "Police & Thieves" (The Story of The Clash, Volume 1)
Michael Nyman - "While You Here Do Snoring Lie" (Prospero's Books - Soundtrack)
Frank Zappa - "Intro" (Donna You Wanna)
Beastie Boys - "Alright Hear This" (Ill Communication)
The Chieftains w/ Gillian Welch - "Katie Dear"
Frank Zappa - "Muffin Man" (Kreega Bondola)
Frank Zappa - "Montana" (Cuccurullo Brillo Brullo)

Harry Cox Would Be Happy

In addition to Real Gas Music from Jupiter, there is now Real Gas Music from Saturn! In fact, the Gas Music from Saturn has even been set to music.

Actually, there's even Real Gas Music from Earth available. I assume it's just a matter of time before the rest of the solar system is filled in.

Weekend Movie Roundup

Resident Evil: Apocalypse - Yippee, another bad zombie movie. When they're done well, zombies are one of my favorite horror monsters. When they're done poorly, it's amazing how boring they can be. First of all, here's a thought: When the bio-weapon virus your company has created gets loose and starts turning dead people into flesh-eating zombies that can only be stopped by shooting them in the head, and a crowd of people has gathered around the gigantic concrete gate you've just closed to seal them inside the city to contain the virus, (A) is it really all that necessary to disperse the crowd? Are you afraid they'll form a human pyramid and climb over the wall? And (B) if it is necessary to disperse the crowd, perhaps ordering your troops to fire machine guns indiscriminately into the crowd isn't the best way to accomplish this goal, since it will result in a large number of people who are dead as a result of injuries other than a shot to the head. You see where I'm going with this? Here's another thought: When you are surrounded by hordes of flesh-eating zombies, the reanimated corpses of the dead, perhaps the shortcut through the cemetary isn't the best way to go?

House of the Dead - Wow, this one's bad. Way worse than Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Almost bad on an Ed Wood level. As in, the director thought that since it was based on a video game, it would be a good idea to just randomly insert a few frames of footage from the game into the film every few minutes. As in, the "rave of the century" appears to consist of about two dozen people standing aroung talking, rather than dancing to the music. As in, there's a long action setpiece in which we see Matrix-y slo-mo revolve-around shots of every single character, of which there are half a dozen or so remaining at that point. I think there may even have been a couple of characters who got multiple shots like that. They were so generic, and the scene went on for so goddamn long, it was hard to tell after a while. And boy, are there plenty of gratuitous breast shots in this movie. Speaking of which, the zombies in this film are apparently both relatively intelligent and downright mischevious: During one gratuitous breast shot of a random woman/victim skinny-dipping, her boyfriend (who remained ashore) disappears. She goes looking for him, enters the creepy ancient house she wanders to, and finds him, standing there looking dazed with some blood coming out of his mouth, at which point a zombie arm emerges from his abdomen for the Big Scare before she gets eaten. Which means the zombie must have subdued the guy (without actually killing him), dragged him up the beach, through the woods, and into the house, and then stood there waiting for the girlfriend to show up, so that he could stick his arm through the guy and freak her out. I'm just surprised the zombie didn't yell "Boogidy-boogidy-boo!"

Punk: Attitude - This was a documentary on IFC about punk rock and the related "scene". Very well done. One of the things I particularly liked was that the time normally thought of as the core punk period only took up about the middle third of the film. There was a lengthy section at the beginning tracing the roots of punk through the early proto-punk bands, and even back to folks like Little Richard, and then a chunk at the end tracing the influences of punk and things like the brief connection between punk and hip-hop. I liked that, because there is often a tendancy to treat punk as if the entire punk scene had sprung fully-formed from Malcolm McLaren's brow, and it's just not true. I suspect that myth endures largely because of McLaren's gift for self-promotion. My main criticism is that with such a wide domain to cover, the film barely scratches the surface. There's virtually nothing about "new wave", which was closely related to punk in many ways. The film also really glosses over the whole neo-nazi skinhead movement (other than briefly mentioning the Dead Kennedys song "Nazi Punks Fuck Off"), which was a rather unfortunate outgrowth of punk (it sort of evolved from punks wearing swastikas just to piss people off, into punks wearing swastikas because they admired the ideology behind it...). Watching this, I think you could very easily expand the history of punk into a Jazz-like miniseries.

Weekend Movie Roundup

Another light week for movie watching.

Team America: World Police (Extended/Unrated Version): Still as funny as it was in theaters, but with more puppet sex (I didn't notice any other major additions). Probably not quite as good as South Park (the movie or the series), but still plenty entertaining. No commentary, unfortunately, but the making-of extras are interesting.

Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns): Your basic story-of rock band documentary, nothing outstandingly good or bad about it. Recommended for those who like They Might Be Giants. I assume it probably wouldn't convince anyone who doesn't already listen to them.

Van Helsing: I don't know how this Dracula keeps his fangs sharp, with all the scenery-chewing he does. Overacting aside, there's really nothing much to recommend this one, unless you enjoy watching flying vampire babies die by bursting like jelly-filled popcorn kernals. Also, it is fortunate for this movie's PG-13 rating that vampire women are discreetly nipple-less. For those who have seen it, and hopefully without giving too much away, am I the only one who thought they missed an obvious call-back: Van Helsing, at some point at the very end, should have said, "I will see you again." I suppose that would have come dangerously close to showing character development and growth.

On a related note, I see that Time Magazine has published their critics' list of the All-Time 100 Best Films. Kudos on some unconventional choices, like Brazil and Miller's Crossing. Interesting decision to include made-for-TV miniseries, like Berlin Alexanderplatz and The Singing Detective. I'm not sure I agree with that decision, and having made it, I'm not sure why Roots isn't included in the list. Some other issues: Ikiru and Yojimbo, but not Ran or Seven Samurai? And Drunken Master II? I love Jackie Chan, but I'm not sure I'd rank this among the Greatest Films Of All Time.

Infinite Shelf Space

Here's a really interesting Wired article about a phenomenon that might be the start of a seismic shift in the entertainment industry, away from purely hit-based economics and toward a more niche-based market, as online delivery and ordering eliminate the constraint of physical shelf space. For example, they point out that a Barnes & Noble generally carries about 130,000, but that over half of Amazon's book sales are from titles outside of its top 130,000. Now, there's probably a selection effect going on here - Amazon is selling more of those titles because customers can't just grab them at their local Barnes & Noble, and thanks to Amazon's discounted rates, it's usually advantageous to order from Amazon rather than to place a special order at a local store. So the article may be somewhat overestimating the size of the market for niche products. But the article does make some very interesting points, and ones that I've made before.

For example, they suggest that video/computer game companies could offer old, outdated games, with no support or guarantees, as, say, 99-cent downloads. I've posted about this before - I believe there is a market for "nostalgia" games that is not currently being served (at least, not legally). It's intellectual property that is currently making its owners absolutely nothing, and (usually) long ago covered the development costs (or else was just written off as a money-loser), so they have nothing to lose by offering it online for a few cents more than the cost of server space and bandwidth. As long as you charge enough to cover those minimal costs, anything above that is pure profit, just sitting there waiting to be grabbed. I'd actually go even further, beyond the "old games" part of the market. I have a feeling there are quite a few people out there who would be willing to pay, say, $50 or $100 for an older, out-of-date, but legal version of something like Maya or 3DS Max. No printed documentation, no technical support, just the software. Production costs are minimal (CD duplication, assuming you don't just offer it as download-only), and it isn't as though old versions of your software are making you any money now. I may have more on this particular subject in the future.

The author of the Wired article does perhaps underplay the distinction between online merchants who sell or rent physical artifacts, like Amazon and Netflix, and those who deal in purely digital information, like iTunes. Still, that distinction will narrow as things progress. With the advancement of things like print-to-order, even those who want physical, bound books will be able to get them without the seller having to spend money on storage space for them.

(And once again, Frank Zappa was way ahead of his time. In his book, he talks about a system he proposed, back before there was even an internet, where people would buy music through some sort of recording device hooked up to the phone. He could never get investors interested in it, though...)