Category: Personal

Pam relates a wonderful Firm Source of Pride, always good to read something so positive.

The art of recording music has been born and revolutionized time after time in just the last century and a bit. One man, with a beautiful heart and a soul that was simply musical, is little known to the lovers of modern music but made undisputable contributions to several of those revolutions and helped give us an amazing amount of many different types of hugely popular music.

Tom Dowd and the Language of Music is a loving biography of that man, made in the months before Dowd passed away, during a time when he was still making new music with modern talent in his mid-70s. He began as a recording engineer when Atlantic Records was founded in the late ’40s, built the first real commercial stereo and multi-track studios and took to the computerized studios of the ’90s and later like he was born to it.

Who did Dowd record? Jazz and R&B artists like John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and Otis Redding. And rockers, man did he work the board magic for rockers: Eric Clapton (both The Cream and Derek and the Dominos), The Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Young Rascals, The Drifters, Bobby Darin, Dusty Springfield, Rod Stewart and Cher. So many more, just an awesome discography.

There isn’t too much detail about the technical aspects of what Dowd did, though he does go back to the original Layla tapes and give a little taste of how the individual tracks fit together in the mix. Some discussion of his pioneering work in stereo and multi-track recording. Lots of interviews with artists he worked with–Clapton talks about believing so much more in Dowd’s musical instincts than his own and Gregg Allman cannot say enough about Dowd as a man. Plus his important partners at Atlantic Records, his boss and company founder Ahmet Ertegun, producer Jerry Wexler and protege Phil Ramone.

A sweet taste of the last half century of music. A portrait of a man who was a key piece of connective tissue across musical eras and genres.

Recommended

Earthquakes will stay in San Jose, at least for 2005, and continue playing their home games in the matchbox that is Spartan Stadium.

Weren’t special charges supposed to go the way of the Dodo with the corporate governance reforms of the last couple of years? Guess not.

Could John Malone be thinking of bidding for News Corp.? Malone is a pretty cagey veteran of the cable TV industry and has more experience building, buying and selling both cable systems and networks and playing the Wall Street game than anyone else. One wonders how he might change the level of political bias at Murdoch’s empire if this comes to pass–I have to admit to being uninformed on Malone’s political leanings.

Captology: What John Kerry was sorely missing! [via Doc]

[A letter to the editors, NY Times]

Michael Denis (Letters, 11/7/4) asks that New Yorkers “consider the opinion of those who feel that abortion is murder and that homosexual marriage is wrong. You may not agree with these positions, but to dismiss our beliefs is to invite further division.” He goes on to ask for “real dialog.”

I do disagree with those positions but would ask him and his fellow believers to explain how to surmount this divide, how to have a real dialog, without simply giving in; deriving one’s life rules from a literal belief in the Bible seems to leave little room for compromise. Further, even if abortion remains legal and gay marriage becomes so, Denis does not need to avail himself of them while under his regime we have no choice. What, I ask, is more the middle ground, allowing individuals to choose for themselves or having one side decide for all?

I’m willing to give Lorne Michaels the benefit of the doubt but really: Reality Contest for ‘Saturday Night Live’ Berth.

There is a concept in animation called the Uncanny Valley, a term coined by Japanese roboticist Doctor Masahiro Mori, which says that the human mind works in such a way that it responds to images or robots or other human-looking objects which are close but not quite close enough to true humans very negatively. As computer-generated animated films (or video games) get better and better at depicting reality, the makers need to take care not to fall in to it.

I bring this up because the visual quality seen in The Incredibles makes it clear that the years remaining until films can jump across the valley is probably measured in single digits. Comparing the images of humans and other objects like trees and ocean waves, I thought that the Pixar staff probably lowered the human characters’ resolution; they certainly seem somewhat more wooden and less detailed.

Even so the film has the highest quality I’ve seen yet in a feature-length animation. And writer-director Brad Bird (previously acclaimed for The Iron Giant) makes superb use of it for the first Pixar film that features only human characters. The basic story is superheroes versus would be supervillain, though with the added fillip of the superheroes being husband and wife with their three kids plus one superhero buddy. Craig T. Nelson was a terrific choice as Bob “Mr. Incredible” Parr, the other outstanding voicework comes from Bird as supercostume designer Edna Mode.

Bird uses the family subplot as counterpoint to the main story though one of my complaints is that the main conflict doesn’t feel hefty enough. If this were, like so many action movies, the first screen version of a well-established comic book and telling the origin story that might not even be worthy of mention but Bird said that he didn’t make Incredibles to launch a series. Over half the movie goes by before we truly meet Syndrome (Jason Lee voicing a credible villain) and I was wondering if there was going to be a single bad guy, or just the story of a man beaten down by modern life.

Because if anything, the script goes all out showing how our litiginous, all victims culture deals with people who stand out from the crowd. Not just by shutting all the superheroes down with lawsuit after lawsuit and the government pushing them into witness relocaiton-like programs but with the small details of the Parrs’ lives. Bob must cram his huge body into a tiny car and drive to work at a tiny job where he is berated by a tiny boss and sit in a tiny cubicle; son Dash must hide his speed instead of even competing in sports and daughter Violet retreats so far into shyness that no one notices her becoming invisible at the least attention.

How good they all feel when forced to confront Buddy “Syndrome” Pine! No problem with lawsuits since the action is off on a tropical island where there are no innocents. Even when the action moves back to the big city, no one stops to think about shutting down and letting Syndrome have his way. I’m tempted to say this is another small flaw but by the last scenes Bird has dialed the action and pace up to where it’s immaterial.

recommended

After what manager Rafa Benitez called their best outing of the season three days ago against Deportivo La Coruna in Champions League play, today saw their worst as the Reds went down 0 – 1 home to Birmingham, though without Gerrard, Cisse and Baros and only Kewell up front as striker one does wonder where the goals were expected to be had.

Cars: When they say teaser trailer, they mean it. Still, next year’s Pixar/Disney release (the last of their collaborations?) looks interesting from this couple of minutes. People are Cars, get it? No plot revealed at all in this clip and no way to even know if the featured cars will be characters in the film.

• Novelist Jane Smiley: Red Staters are willfully ignorant and the answer is not to move right or left but to pound them over the head with Bush Crew mistakes and outrages. Hmm.
• For my homie, America
• What will voters think if we are still at war against terror four years from now, if Osama bin Laden or Zarqawi is still videotaping the occasional taunting message? I’m hardpressed to find exit polling to back this up but I have to think that somewhere between 5-10% of Bush’s votes were won on the don’t change horses in war time reasoning, which was enough to swing the election. If Iraq is semi-stable, real democracy or not, but there are still Islamist terrorists killing people and disrupting economies regularly, will that argument work again?
  
• Not explicitly about the US or the election but an editorial in today’s Times on the murder of Theo Van Gogh by Muslim extremists in the Netherlands raises the issue of managing diverse, even extreme, groups in a multiculural society. Seems applicable to the US as well because I find little difficulty in imagining Red/Blue conflict finding its way to violence in the near term, and not necessarily from the Red side–there are already groups and individuals on the Left here using such abominable tactics. I’d surely love to see the Times editorial board propose some concrete actions that might help solve the problem, or at least start down the path to solution, rather than just taking the easy way out as they have.
• We’re already seeing Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and John Edwards mentioned as early/potential frontrunners for the Dems in 2008 but with no incumbent VP to take the nod (and a Constitutional Amendment that would allow Schwarzenneger to run that soon nearly impossible), who are the likely Republican prospects?
  

• Looking at the more expansive county level voting maps, all the talk of Red and Blue states is wrong: the division is very starkly big city Blues versus everything else Reds.
• The way his supporters seem (to me) to idealize Bush is strangely amusing and scary. All the talk about values and morality being the key to his victory strike me as hypocritical, which is nothing unusual even if the pundits are surprised.
• Lou Dobbs made a very cogent point on TV yesterday. He said there is no such thing as a political mandate, that the phrase was made up by Bill Clinton, and what Bush has is a legislative majority that will enable him to put most of his agenda through Congress. I think Grover Nordquist must be having wide-awake wet dreams the last 24 hours.
• Bush will need an awfully powerful magic wand to fund the financial aspects (Social Security privatization, making permanent the recent tax cuts, eliminating the stub of an inheritance tax still on the books) of his second term agenda.

ROFL: My Springsteen page is number one on Google for bruce springsteen a fucking liberal!

I was invited to attend a recruiting schmooze with nearly a dozen ‘Softies tonight from the US BMO Server Marketing team and, as with so many other things, Microsoft does it differently. Not only was this a very different, interesting way for them to meet candidates (and vice versa), when I spoke with the recruiter managing the event just before leaving to say thanks she asked me how they could do it better next time.

This was three hours in the cafeteria in MSFT’s Mountain View Building 1. The seven top managers of the group plus recruiters flew down for the day (they have a 6:30 AM flight home tomorrow) and about 60 candidates like myself were in attendance. A nice table of finger food was set out and there was an open bar well-stocked with name brand alcohol and wines. A bunch of giveaways were raffled off including an XBox–I won a copy of Office Professional–and everybody got some chatchkis to take home including a 64MB flash drive. My point is, the company spent some meaningful dollars for about 10 current openings.

I was really jazzed by the opportunities. There were three group managers who I spent private time with after an earlier walk around when all the candidates could get a couple of minutes with each of them. All the positions are in Redmond but for an opportunity to work on the major pieces of businesses represented here I’d definitely relocate. Scoble seems to be doing okay after making the move.

Don’t want to say too much about the specifics, the point here is for all the pointing and hatred directed their way, Microsoft seems to know how to do business and not just produce technology and this event is a good example of it.

Keep your fingers crossed.

• Karl: I swiped reused the post title from this disappointed, heavily involved Philly rocker–Morning report–and especially recommend to you his 10 point checklist at the end of this post. For #2 I think that we need to find a way to express ethics and morality without tieing them so closely to (a specific) religion.
• TalkingPointsMemo: Don’t forget the 10 Year Plan to build a Democratic infrastructure to compete at all levels, if we aren’t too late. Will the second term see widespread visible suppression of our First Amendment rights in the name of national security? Don’t count on the Supreme Court to protect us, not unless the Bush Crew makes the kind of mistake Eisenhower did with Earl Warren, and I’m sure in this age of utter scrutiny that’s just not going to happen.
  
• Dan Gillmore: Four More Years asks, as Karl does, where did the center go? How did the Republicans convince so many people to vote against their own economic interests? Especially since Bush comes across to so many of us non-supporters as more talking the talk than walking the walk on the values that supposedly won those votes.
• Andrew Sullivan: Demonizing gays was a (terribly sad, IMO) tactic used in many states but I hear a little voice saying it could end up backfiring if Bush continues to largely ignore the social issues legislatively in favor of War and Corpocracy (two sides of the same coin).
  
• Kristof: Living Poor, Voting Rich has a key point, that “the Democratic Party’s first priority should be to reconnect with the American heartland.” Goes back to Karl’s list.
• Doc: The people spoke, he says, but I wonder about Diebold, Sequoya and ESS in ways that can never be proven.
• Garret: How this Democrat is feeling at the moment is flat on his back in the middle of the road waiting to be run over.
• Matt: Stages, I can’t see most of the people on our side considering the second stage. We have nothing to bargain with except maybe Senate filibusters and Bill Bennett, telegraphing the Administration’s view of the 51-48popular vote split as an overwhelming madate, is already calling for a decimation of the secular Left.

Oh what a beautiful morning indeed!

Man, sitting here watching the election returns, small numbers trickling in. Races here and there going as expected, some surprises. Barama making mush of Keyes in Illinois. Georgia showing true Republican colors. Lines out the door past the closing time in Ohio. Cool NY Times Flash results.

Looks good for Kerry, 77 to 66 on CNN as I write this.

5:35 PST: Bush 87 to 77 but no surprises in the states in so far. Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) will leave polls open an extra 90 minutes to accomodate voters in line, PA is still too close to call.

6:21 PST: Dewey Beats Truman! Oops, that was the wrong headline 56 years ago. Mongiardo is eating The Bun. The South looks solid for Bush, if Kerry wins do we move closer to a Second Civil War?

8:47 PST: Gay marriage is going down in flames all over, which is stupid and sucks. FL for Bush is same as last time. Polls, schmolls. Ohio, we count on you to keep us from four more years.

10:22 PST: Sad, sad, sad. Ohio went red and even if Kerry takes every electoral vote left, that would only throw the decision to the House. So four more years. Thanks a bunch, Ohio and Florida. People have said that if Bush was re-elected they’d hit the road to Canada, Europe or wherever but I wonder where you can go to get away from the effects of this outcome.

Kottke: How’d your vote go?