DJ Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album has been on my iPod for a week now, and I’m still feeling conflicted by it. In case you’ve missed the story, executive summary: DJ Danger Mouse has taken Jay-Z’s “The Black Album” and remixed it with samples from the Beatles “White Album.” The results are brilliant, frustrating, obnoxious, beautiful, and an insult to the legacy of the Beatles (though ironically, probably intended as a tribute). If you haven’t heard it, download mirrors are all over the place. And EMI is dispensing cease-and-desist letters like Pez.

Looking at The Grey Album from three angles:

1) As a concept and a piece of technical wizardry
2) As a challenge to copyright law
3) As a piece of artwork

1) Technically, the Grey Album is a remixological wonder. Danger Mouse is a whiz. It’s a trip to hear such familiar strains hashed and rehashed and whipped up and layered back down with this kind of slick wrist expertise. It’s like there was an explosion at the LP factory and somehow all these disparate parts came back down to earth magically hanging together — all wrong, but still somehow totally in sync. While there are long-ish excerpts from The White Album, most of the Beatles you get here are new beats created by twisting and tangling and untangling snippets from familiar songs. Listening to this stuff, half my attention is busy marvelling at Danger Mouse’s skills.

2) It’s funny how this case overlaps with the Ken Light Kerry/Fonda case that’s been front and center for me at work lately - both involve two works by different creators being remixed by a 3rd party. In Light’s case, lawyers are trying to determine whether newspapers can run the composite/collaged image copyright-free or whether royalties are due. Striking parallels to the Danger Mouse project.

Last Tuesday, thousands of web sites mirrored copies of The Gray Album in an all-day protest called Grey Tuesday, the idea being that if enough people participated in the protest, they’d all get away with it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted comments on the legal position of Grey Tuesday participants.

Napsterization wonders what your rights are “if you own the two albums outright already, and simply want the blended version, remixed?” Great question.

At Corante, Ernie Miller wonders whether some kind of remix formula or recipe could be created to allow consumers to recreate the Dangermouse mix from the two original sources, thus sidestepping copyright issues. I respond that the suggestion is similar to the technique used to distribute the lame MP3 encoder, thus bypassing Fraunhofer’s patent. But music is not a computer program, and I am highly doubtful that sufficient notation could be devised, or that anyone could enter in the data in sufficient detail to recreate the artwork.

3) No matter how marvelous the mix or how interesting the copyright questions, you’re still left with a work of art that somehow has to stand on its own, despite leaning so completely on the work of others. Bottom line: Is it a good record? Well, I’ve been listening to it for days, so it must not be a total abomination. But for the most part, I keep listening because I’m fascinated, not because I think it’s a particularly good record. I’m not much of a rap fan to begin with, and Jay-Z’s style doesn’t do much of anything to goose my predilections. As rappers go, his delivery is bland and his lyrics mediocre. It’s not all gangsta, but there’s way too much of this kind of crap (from various tracks):

All my wimmin get tennis bracelets…
Used to deal snowflake by the O.Z….
I like big-body Benzes…
Stay away from ho’s…
I got 99 problems but the bitch ain’t one…

So you get this amazing mix experiment, all these great old Beatles riffs chopped up tossed up chunked up in cruel and unusual (and very cool) ways, all colliding bizarrely with this semi-gangsta crap. The result is as depressing as it is amazing.

Yes, many of the lyrics are better than the ones I quoted, but bottom line is that Jay-Z’s rap is not worthy of The Beatles backing music (even remixed). In fact, it creates the opposite effect: You get the feeling that one of the greatest records of all time by one of the greatest groups of all time has just had mud ladled all over it. You hear these old Beatles samples, and those lyrics start running through your head. Then Jay-Z starts up with his juvenile patter and you just feel kind of robbed. Listening, I go back and forth between digging this whole crazy messed-up adventure on one hand, and feeling like a great chapter in human creativity has been totally desecrated on the other.

My favorite lyric on the album:

“And if you can’t respect that
your whole perspective is whack,
maybe you’ll love me
when I fade to black.”

Well, maybe. I like what Danger Mouse is trying to do from an experimental POV, I like the way he’s challenging copyright, I dig the beats, I enjoy hearing the Beatles in a totally new vein, but the rap pretty much cancels out any positive net effect. Not entirely, but pretty much. All told, I guess I just feel kind of grey about it.

When I was living in Boston a bunch of years ago, friend Pagan Kennedy used to implore me to get down to the protests where Vermin Supreme was hanging out. Now she is digging his shpiel in the Boston Globe.

What do we want?” “Peace,” the crowd answered. “What do we want?” the guy screamed again. “Peace!” Now the river of people roared the word. The sound boomed through my chest. No one was laughing. “What do we want?” the guy demanded again. And this time, Supreme pointed his megaphone at the sky. “A pony!” he screamed, his amplified voice rising over the roar. Next time around, pretty much everyone in the crowd had defected to Supreme’s chant. “What do we want?” “A pony,” hundreds of people hooted. Some young women near me bobbed up and down. “A pony, a pony,” they squealed.

Torrential rains through the night, woke to the sound of wind whipping our awning, rain pelting through the screen and onto glass. I love to run in the rain, wrapped the iPod in a baggie and took off for two miles in the downpour. I’m in heaven when you smile. On the way out the door to work, discovered that our backyard had overflowed and water was running through the garage, an improvised stream. Fortunately Amy’s murals were up on palettes. At work, found that the normally gentle trickle of Strawberry Creek had turned into a brown, gushing torrent, little creek bursting at the seams. Came back with a camera two hours later and it was already receding. The mashed-down grass shows the creek’s high-water mark. I love these striations of color showing activity of the earth.

Big welcome to all of these recently added birdhouse hosting customers:

napsterization.org, centered around an integrated weblog, is “a resource to understand the napsterization by digital media of analog, old economy institutions, frameworks and media. It is … an opportunity to understand how many people use digital media, a meeting place for people to connect over their experiences with digital media, and a place for others to learn about these issues.”

artefactdesignsalvage.com — promo site for an amazing San Jose garden ornamentation outlet.

livingwiththememory.com “is a multimedia documentary project that combines photographs, sound and text to tell the story of the impact of homicide in the African-American community in Oakland. Like a stone dropping into a pond, each death ripples throughout the community to touch dozens of lives.”

Named for its author’s love of both rock climbing and the game of Go, rockngo.org is written by Xiao Qiang, the Tang Teaching Fellow and the Director of Berkeley China Internet Project at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

As well as several sites whose owners prefer to remain hidden.

What really goes on behind the scenes when you call for tech support? It’s worse than you think.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but children’s programming has become even more cosmic/surreal than the Teletubbies.

The Boohbahs, five magical atoms of power, light and fun travel in their Boohball around the world, from child to child. Fifteen countries are visited throughout the changing title sequence.

In the intro, five balls of light float, squirt, and poot through intensely psychedelic swirls of gelatinous color and sparkles until the Boobahs are magically born into their interstellar travel pods. I have to conclude that the Boobahs are starseed, sent to this galaxy from another to give one-year-olds positronic vibrations.

Needless to say, Miles is transfixed by the Boobahs, even more than he ever was by Teletubbies. Kind of blows my mind that some people are down on Boobah - ummm, lady? The show (as far as I can tell) is for pre-lingual kids, not for eight-year-olds to learn geometry.

Via Fabiani, via Atrios:

“In 1958, nine years before the Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that miscegenation laws were unconstitutional, Gallup polled people about interracial marriages.

_____% of whites opposed them?

no cheating.

…and the winner is… 94%!”

So as appalling as it is that half of our society still has a problem with gay marriage, the big picture offers some comfort. 50 years ago, support for gay marriage would not be anywhere close to where it is today. We may not win this round, but the dialog has been advanced tremendously, and society as a whole is slowly waking up to the parallels between homophobia and racism.

We’ll get there. Someday.

Update: Top twelve reasons homosexual marriage should not be legal

By the time the 21st century runs out, half of all human languages will be extinct, victims of cultural and political forces, the spread of technology, and assimilation in general.

“What is lost when a language is lost is another world,” says Stephen Anderson, of Yale University.

I think there are multiple parallels to globalism and media consolidation here (e.g. the number of owners of TV outlets has decreased by 40% since 1995). Nature teaches us that biodiversity is necessary and good. Whether you’re talking about insect populations, languages, media outlets, or operating systems, there is greater systemic health when there is more diversity. And yet I can’t imagine a way to reduce the rate of language death — it’s simply an aspect of human history I think we will have to accept. And then one day we’ll all wake up speaking fluent TimeWarnerComcast-ese with a Microsoft accent. But at least we’ll all be speaking the same language.

Once I was a valiant warrior against HTML in email, and rallied against it every chance I got. Now I am tired from that fight. There are still lots of reasons not to use it, but I’m not going to argue with the dean, and today modified the Events database to send out formatted announcement emails, rather than plain text. Felt like a traitor to “the good fight” for about five minutes. Then the feeling passed.

PHPMailer enhances the native PHP mail() function with all kinds of goodies, including ability to send 100% standards-compliant HTML emails that work as well in text mailers as they do in Entourage (yes, I pine tested :)

Richard Brenneman of the Berkeley Daily Planet surprised me at work recently with a phone call, wanted to discuss blogging for a piece he was working on. We had a meandering conversation for twenty minutes or so. Talked about blogging as a general phenomenon, about the kinds of sites the J-School is driving out of Movable Type, and about Berkeley blogs in particular. Talked about birdhouse a bit. When the article ran, (mirrored at City of Berkeley) I was amazed to see that he had devoted several column inches (are there such things as column inches on the web? what if you resize the browser window?) to birdhouse.

Hacker runs one the city’s most sophisticated personal blogs …

Whoa! Generous complement, but I’d hardly describe this random, free-for-all braindump style as “sophisticated.” It was weird to see some of the ways that bits of what I thought were casual conversation became factoids in the piece, like my comment on LiveJournal’s largely teen audience still counting as blogging.

My strongest quibble was with definition: I had said that I agree with Rebecca Blood in saying that the only core defining characteristic of the weblog is “reverse chron via automated publishing tools.” Brenneman re-quoted “reverse chron” as “chronological order,” which I felt was a reversal of meaning (he said in a later exchange that he felt that context made the meaning clear).

He did dig up a very nice cross-section of Berkeley Blogs, though one could of course point to lots of great East Bay blogs he missed (and to be accurate, birdhouse isn’t based in Berkeley, despite my workplace).

Snopes.com is my favorite place to send people who send me spurious crap over the wire. Now my J-School officemate Ken Light is featured at snopes, as principal photographer in the recent flap surrounding a supposed image of Kerry speaking with Jane Fonda at a 1970 peace rally.

Update: Strata Lucida sends this damning evidence of Kerry and Fonda working together. Let’s see “the Dems” try and explain this one! Hah! Seriously though, I wasn’t getting why it was supposed to be “damning” to have Kerry connected to Fonda, but this page explains why “Hanoi Jane” is hated by many veterans, even considered treasonous by some. What I find interesting about this is the fact that many hawks claimed that people protesting the Iraq war were as good as traitors too. Some things never change.

Last night Ken was interviewed on MSNBC talking about the growing problem of image doctoring. The Guardian covers the story here.

Update 2: Ken Light writes today:

..check out this web site…the right now says that Jane Fonda was removed from my image..not added…

Amazing what lengths people will go to when reality needs to be distorted to support a distorted position.

In the midst of SF’s last mayoral election, Gavin Newsom looked practically conservative opposite Matt Gonzalez. Newsom’s hair was too shellacked — shiny hair is usually a dead giveaway for a phony — and his musical tastes sounded flat compared to Gonzalez’ (next to hair, musical predilection is the most important barometer of political integrity). Now Newsom is spearheading civil disobedience on a mass scale.

I am an adamant supporter of gay marriage, and feel strongly that anything less than full marriage is a violation of civil rights. To deny full marriage rights to gays is to treat them like second class citizens. Because I feel that current law is morally wrong on this point, civil disobedience becomes an option.

But, unlike a protest, where an individual can go out and lock themselves to a tree or train track, homosexual couples cannot go out and get married to protest the moral bankruptcy of the system that disrespects their humanity. People can’t issue themselves marriage licenses. On the other hand, politicians can, and Newsom has.

But here’s the dilemma: Even though I agree that this act of civil disobedience by a politician is necessary, I also believe, for the most part, in the rule of law. The question is, should a politician be able to disobey the law on a mass scale because s/he disagrees with it?

Look what happens when the shoe is on the other foot, as it has been throughout Bush’s presidency. Start with this statement: “Pre-emptive war is illegal and immoral.” That did not stop Bush from invading Iraq and creating the current quaqmire. Thing is, you can examine examples of politicians not respecting the rule of law left and right and feel differently about each example depending on your own leanings and interpretations.

In my heart, I am bursting with respect for Newsom for taking these steps. He rocks. Gay marriage should not be a curiosity, should not even be an issue. It should simply be normal. It should always have been normal. There is no non-religion-based, rational argument to be made against gay marriage. It is long past time for this change, and if people like Newsom have to lay their figurative bodies across the train tracks to make it happen… I have so much respect for that.

But my head still tells me we need to be cautious of renegade politicians taking the law into their own hands. At the political level, I don’t see how I can reject Bush’s dismissal of the rule of law but simultaneously accept Newsom’s. At the personal level, it’s quite a different matter, because at the personal level we can take intentions and motivations into account, mitigating or overriding strict interpretations of law.

All I know is that right now I am exhilarated to see this issue gaining national momentum, being discussed, chewed on. It’s like a race now, to see whether Bush can amend the Constitution before the rest of the nation realizes that current prohibitions against gay marriage are the segregated South of the current era. Power to the people, right on.

Disney’s Michael Eisner on Steve Jobs:

“He created the computer, or at least Windows, or whatever he created, and did a good job,” Eisner said to peals of laughter from analysts attending the company conference in Orlando, Florida. (Forbes)

In fairness, this may have been meant as a barb rather than abject cluelessness, so the analysts were either laughing at him or with him, not clear. But if meant as a joke… I don’t get it.

Just completed a major rewrite of my Adding Multimedia to Web Pages tutorial (six pages), covering a variety of techniques for compressing, linking to, and embedding QuickTime audio and video. This is part of our ever-growing Multimedia and Convergence course work and tutorial collections.

Just learned the nifty .qtl trick recently — also, just found out that QuickTime can take a palindrome parameter (wiggy!), and that you can use Apple’s JavaScript library to jump the user to an arbitrary point in a movie. Works equally well with http and rtsp (with the obvious advantage that teh user won’t have to download intermediate material via rtsp).

Type in a few words — the more generic the better — could be words from songs, or from textbooks or from the newspaper, it doesn’t matter — and the whole history of pop music will come rushing back at you, one word at a time. If any of the words you entered are not in the Let Them database, you can point them to a song from which the word in question can be excavated. Freaky and wonderful.

Miles-the-hipster likes the music of toy-piano-band Twink. He bops his head up and down and giggles when I play them. The new Twink album comes with a picture book (no words) featuring Twink the rabbit going out to play his toy piano in the forest, then being joined by other animals with their own toy instruments. Is this music for kids that grownups can also enjoy, or the other way ’round? Be sure to check out Twink’s gallery of toy instruments, as well as the FAQ where they list other bands that have the same name as previously existing bands (I wrote to ask them to add old Air and new Air).

Installed ClamAV virus definition scanner — an open source virus detection module to be used in conjunction with mail transfer agents. cgpav provides the glue to use clamd in conjunction with CommuniGate Pro. freshclam updates the virus definition tables hourly.

Attention! You sent an infected message with the
VIRUS: Eicar-Test-Signature
It was rejected for delivery.

With the addition of Razor, very little spam is getting through my gateway — Razor made an incredible difference (as I expected it would, since it’s human/collaborative). The remaining gravel in the shoe is all of the autoresponder fallout from MyDoom.

Dumped Red Hat for Mandrake …
(more…)

Walking the gauntlet of ideological booths and stands that line the main footpath through UC Berkeley and passed a card table draped with a painted sign reading “Informal Debate Society.” The woman behind the card table was holding up a piece of looseleaf notebook paper, on which was scrawled in crude ballpoint ink: “Debate Me Now!” No indication what topics she might be prepared to debate, which made the prospect all the more intriguing. If I had had more time I might have taken her up on the offer. Another day.

Attended an event at Zellerbach tonight with Amy: Former Secretary of State Robert McNamara and filmmaker Error Morris talking about Morris’ new film Fog of War, which is about McNamara’s role in some of the largest U.S. involvements of the 20th century: WWII, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam (and more) and how his thinking has changed over the years. They showed a truncated version of the movie, and then had a sit-down with Mark Danner.

The film excerpts were incredible — new windows onto 20th century history, beautifully rendered. In one segment, McNamara talked about how Americans had already killed around a million Japanese civilians with conventional firebombs before dropping the big one on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — proportionally equivalent to destroying 40% of New York, 50% of LA, 57% of Chicago, and so on for 60 American cities, raising the question of whether nukes were really necessary to end WWII. And even though McNamara was part of the machinery that made it happen, he says that he and others in the administration asked themselves whether they were behaving like war criminals at the time. And he asks whether they would have been tried as war criminals if we had lost, rather than won… and what it is about winning that lets leaders get away with things for which the loser gets punished.

Human beings killed 160 million fellow human beings during the course of the 20th century. McNamara hopes we can do better in the 21st. While careful not to allow himself to make statements about Iraq and the current administration, he did recently come down hard on the war in Iraq in an interview with The Globe and Mail.

The post-screening conversation was a bit rambling. McNamara is getting older, Morris too, and Danner is… Danner. But still, a moving evening. Webcast will be online here.

Japanese screensaver Hotel Magritte, simply stunning if only because it’s so non-computer-y. 2-D woodcut images juxtaposed in some kind of orderly random fashion into black and white surrealist indoor landscapes. The point of view then transported through these as if entering hotel room doors into other people’s dreams. Difficult to describe.

Thanks Simon.

It has whistling on it.

A ruddy trail was forming in our front lawn from people walking from curb to front porch, so Amy and I went yesterday to load up a cart full of flagstone. Took a couple of hours to lay it out, then started digging a slight depression for each stone, to make it flush with the earth so we can still mow. Didn’t quite finish, but made good progress. Also transplanted a lemon tree we saved from a weak and dying sapling a couple of years ago, which has been living in a pot all along, into a permanent home in the front yard. We hope the tree and the path will find mutual feng shui. Today tried my hand at making buffalo wings for the first time. They came out very well, but did not hold a candle to Roger’s short ribs.