River

Hancock Herbie Hancock’s tribute to Joni Mitchell “River” is gorgeous in every way, and wholly deserving of its recent grammy (one of only two jazz records to have won Album of the Year in the past 50 years, yeesh). Tina Turner, Leonard Cohen, Norah Jones, Joni herself, Hancock’s lush keyboards, horns by Wayne Shorter… what more could an old Joni head want? The kindling power of the album inspired Salon’s Gary Kamiya to write a moving muse on the duality of rock and jazz in his life

Luckily, around this time the rest of the high-culture spinach on my plate started to taste better, which encouraged me to stick with jazz. I had known, in a dutiful art-history way, that Cézanne’s landscapes were better than pretty ones by some officially accredited hack; now I started to actually see them and like them. As a sophomore in high school I had bought an old 78 rpm set of Debussy’s “Iberia” because I thought it was an antiquarian ticket to cultural gravitas; now I realized that you got an incredible rush out of the end of the first movement. The kicks started getting easier to find. The same thing happened with jazz. The dusty old high-culture drugs kicked in there too. I might have started out listening to jazz because it was good for me, but the more I did, the more I realized that I liked it. Those schmaltzy tunes turned out to conceal beautiful modulations — quieter, less obvious than those in rock, but with a complex logic that grew on you. As I learned to follow the mathematics of jazz, I started to be able to listen without so much interior strain.

Worth a read.

Music: Herbie Hancock :: Solitude

Tahoe 2008


Mileswoods
Took a couple days off to enjoy a long weekend with friends on the west side of Lake Tahoe, in Homewood CA. Spent four days snowboarding and snowshoeing in spectacular shirt-sleeve sunshine, cooking, drinking wine, hiking around, and just enjoying one another. Had a fun session with The Ungame (1973 version), had a few failed geocaching attempts (everything buried under six feet of snow!), Miles and his little friend took their first ski lessons (and did great!)… Returned recharged and ready for anything.

Images from the trip.

Music: Herbie Hancock :: Nefertiti

Shop the Perimeter

J-School professor and Birdhouse Hosting customer Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has a new book titled In Defense of Food – a common-sense manifesto for eaters. Fittingly, Pollan is blogging this month at omnivoracious.com. Don’t have time to read the book? Pollan gives away the kernel:

  • Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
  • Avoid food products with more than five ingredients; with ingredients you can’t pronounce.
  • Don’t eat anything that won’t eventually rot.
  • Shop the perimeter of the supermarket, where the food is least processed.
  • Avoid food products that make health claims.
  • Eat meals and eat them only at tables. (And no, a desk is not a table.)
  • Eat only until you’re 4/5 full. (An ancient Japanese injunction.)
  • Pay more, eat less.
  • Diversify your diet and eat wild foods when you can.
  • Eat slowly, with other people whenever possible, and always with pleasure.
Music: Herbie Hancock :: Solitude

AT&T Shocked by iPhone Usage

Proof of what a good UI can do: Web-enabled phones have been able to use search engines forever. But Apple Insider reports that “Google has seen 50 times more search requests coming from Apple iPhones than any other mobile handset. They were so shocked, in fact, that they suspected that they had made an error tabulating their data.” ZDNet blog:

According to the Financial Times Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations, said that if other handset manufacturers follow in Apple’s footsteps and make Web access easier on their handsets the number of mobile searches could outpace fixed internet search “within the next several years.”

And:

In related news René Obermann, CEO of Deutsche Telekom AG, says iPhone is driving up average wireless data usage as much as 30 times higher than on other phones.

Will be interesting to see whether Google’s own Android will be able to match the iPhone’s search numbers. The gauntlet has been thrown.

Music: Herbie Hancock :: Tea Leaf Prophecy feat Joni Mitchell

Chauncey Bailey Project

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes the Chauncey Bailey Project, investigating the death of, and continuing the work of, journalist Chauncey Bailey, who was recently murdered in the course of his reporting:

Bailey, the editor of the weekly Oakland Post, was murdered on Aug. 2 while reporting on a story regarding the suspicious activities of the Your Black Muslim Bakery. In an unusual collaboration, more than two dozen reporters, photographers and editors from print, broadcast and electronic media, and journalism students are launching the Chauncey Bailey Project – an investigative unit that will continue and expand on the reporting Bailey was pursuing when he was gunned down. Devaughndre Broussard, 19, a handyman for Your Black Muslim Bakery, has confessed to the crime, according to police, but many questions about the possible motive for the killing have yet to be answered.

Music: Robyn Hitchcock :: Shimmering Distant Love

Christian Beliefs vs. Atheist Beliefs

What to do with this information? Christians and atheists really aren’t all that different. But is a list an argument? Perhaps this is just a variant on the Flying Spaghetti Monster approach. But just because we might agree that Angus Og doesn’t exist as a god doesn’t mean that “our” God doesn’t exist. Why have I just capitalized God? Is that a tacit acknowledgement that “God” deserves as much respect as all of these other gods? Is the Christian god as provable as all of the other gods?

Music: Robyn Hitchcock :: Welcome To Earth

Got Your Neti Pot?

Netipot I’ve never used one, but Amazon recommends I give it a shot. Were it not for the “Six Feet Under” marathon Amy and I undertook around this time last year, digesting the entire series in a couple of months, I’d have absolutely no idea what this ad was referring to. What I’m trying to figure out is why this ad came up while purchasing Robyn Hitchcock back-catalog from the Amazon MP3 store. There’s got to be a connection there somewhere… “Heavenly nightshade. It’s where you came from.”

Music: Robyn Hitchcock :: We’re Gonna Live In The Trees

Notes on a Massive WordPress Migration

Cdthome At the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, we use WordPress heavily as a content management system for student and organization publications, knowledge bases, student handbooks, podcast publishing systems, online magazines, etc. Over the past couple of years, I’ve found again and again that WP is not only up to the task of serving as far more than a blogging platform, it’s a great content management system for many types of sites, once you learn a few tricks.

Just wrapped up a marathon coding session, converting one of the J-School’s most popular sites, China Digital Times (CDT), from Movable Type to WordPress. We launched the new site (with a new design by Devigal) a few days ago. This was by far the most complex WordPress installation I’ve worked on, involving around 16,000 posts and 6,000 tags. As with every site launch, I learned a few things in the process. Thought I’d post some notes here for the sake of others going through a similar process.

Nutshell version: Though SixApart (who make Movable Type) claim that their static page generation approach is great for high-performance sites, we’ve reduced the time it takes to publish a new article from almost 15 minutes to a few seconds by moving from Movable Type to WordPress.
Continue reading “Notes on a Massive WordPress Migration”

Highway 2006 Revisited

This week at Stuck Between Stations, Roger Moore finally gets around to releasing his best-of-year list… for 2006.

I can’t complain about multiple poll winner LCD Soundsystem, the brainy dance band that tossed off the best rip I’ve heard on New York’s Michael Bloomberg (“your mild billionaire mayor’s now convinced he’s a king”). I’m also thrilled at the top-ten consensus for M.I.A.’s Kala, which gave a trans-global boom-boom-boom to those of us who have, like the National, spent too long feeling half-awake in a fake empire. Still, there’s a problem in treating lists like these as canons of coolness. They call to mind my favorite 2007 music review, which was so fake it’s real. The Onion reported that Pitchfork gave a rating of 6.8 to “music”—not any one recording or genre, but its entire history. It seems music, while brilliant at times, is weighed down with too many “mid-tempo ballads,” and worse, “the whole medium comes off as derivative of Pavement.”

Music: Esther Lamneck :: Tarogato