Autoplay for automatons

My first vague memories of music are all associated with my dad. Occassionally I could talk him into singing "My Girl" "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay" or "This Diamond Ring" before I went to bed; if I was really persistent he sang all three. Recalling those moments in the room with blue carpet, a twin bed, and rocking chair has a sweet, daddy's little girl feeling to it. What really stayed with me, though, primed my mind, was sitting in the back of his grey Crown Victoria listening to classic rock on 102.9 WMGK.

Fast forward two decades or so. Long have I scorned radio airwaves. For a brief spell in middle school, attracted by the glittering pop & a sudden awareness of this youth culture, I zombied along to the medocrity of 90s hits on the radio. I sought safety in the marginally better alternative rock station, Y100, no longer in existence. I spent all my money on shitty CDs. The phase had its value. Third Eye Blind has an irrational hold on my heart. But the day illegal downloading began was the day my soul was saved.

After that, I never looked back. Until now. On the whole, I don't regret much. My bookshelves bear the weight of philosophy, Keynes, Thompson, Kerouac, poetry, classic literature, and other iconoclast authors. In undergrad, I met an unhip ragamuffin group of kids who became awesome friends, some of the main characters in a four yr saga of booze, angst, records, dancing, learning so much more of the music I had been missing all along, and chronic unease about our generation. Then I graduated into the so-called Great Recession and into unemployment.

That means I am back in my parents' suburban house waiting to start work in a matter of days, sharing cars with my two brothers who are in high school. That means trusting the local crap stations to distract my frustration from oblivious egomaniacs behind several thousand pounds of would-be shards and stakes and stinky rubber.

The task was assuaged when I found 94.1 WYSP monickered "The Rock You Grew Up With." It's grungy/rock seventies through nineties stuff. Once in a while they mix it up, but they play way too much Pearl Jam. That can ruin any good thing. So my only alternative is the aforementioned 102.9 WMGK, which is lovely but restricted militantly to the most popular songs from an album. Does that mean djs can't stray to a other tracks? Because otherwise it blows my mind.

Why is it that my radio options are two formula rock stations and a handful of gross, tacky hiphop stations--All of which refuse to play anything but hit songs from an artist? (I'm too young to be old&intolerant, aren't I? The stuff is just bad, isn't it?) I hate iShit! I can't afford satellite radio! Why is standard radio so limited in its universal playlist? Why do only gruff dudes call the djs at WYSP?

When I sat down to write this brief diatribe against the Philly/tri-state area airwaves, it was eleven p.m. on Sunday night. My dad (bless him) told me about "Little Steven's Underground Garage," which had started at ten. Why do I have to wait until ten to hear an actual playlist worth hearing? Pimply teens everywhere are still enchanted by mixed tapes! Good radio cares about the finesse of transitions and the detailed choices of a playlist! Is satellite radio any different? Will old school radio be obselete soon? If so, what's to save satellite radio from the same banal fate? The unfortunate masses who resort to isolated earbuds cannot deny the sensation of shared music, the experience of that simultaneous hearing.

So what, who cares? Well, I do. But also this systematic neutralization is spreading. The only unexpected part of a night out is the details of predictably drunk antics. The booze will be the same, the characters & their clothes will look the same, and the dj will play the same set of songs he played last week. All right, it isn't happening everywhere, but enough places to say diversity is dying.

The clock also struck midnight awhile ago now. Like Cinderella's carriage turned back to a pumpkin at midnight, so Little Steven has gone and WMGK has returned to top hit autoplay. And so ends my futile post.

So Many Choices

Idealist.org in tough times

While I have not successfully found employment through Idealist, the positions about which I have gotten the most excited were listed here. As I should start working in a few weeks (!!) I will continue applying through this website for something longer term. At least, I'd like Idealist to be here still, so help em out. The following are excerpts from an Idealist email I recently received:

Very briefly, here's what happened. Over the past ten years, most of our funding has come from the small fees we charge organizations for posting their jobs on Idealist. By September 2008, after years of steady growth, these little drops were covering 70% of our budget.

Then, in October of that year, the financial crisis exploded, many organizations understandably froze their hiring, and from one week to the next our earned income was cut almost in half.

That was 16 months ago, and since then we've survived on faith and fumes, by cutting expenses, and by getting a few large gifts from new and old friends. But now we are about to hit a wall, and this is why I am reaching out to you.

If over the past 15 years Idealist has helped you or a friend find a job, an internship or a volunteer opportunity; connect with a person, an idea or a resource; or just feel inspired for a moment, now we need your help. I wouldn't be asking, and not like this, if this were not a critical time.

There are two ways you can help. First, if you can, please make a donation here.

Some people in this community are not in a position to contribute right now, so if you are, please give as generously as you can. Thank you!

Second, please spread the word about this appeal by sharing this message with friends and colleagues who may have benefited from Idealist over the years. Since 1995 Idealist has touched hundreds of thousands of lives. If in the next week or two we can reach everyone who'd give us a hand if they knew we are in trouble, I believe we'll come out of this crisis even stronger than before.

I believe this because while this has been a tough stretch, I've never been more optimistic about the future. The content on Idealist has never been richer, our traffic is surging, we are building a whole new Idealist.org that will be released later this year, and the potential for connecting people, ideas, and resources around the world has never been more urgent or more exciting.

Thanks so much for your support. Idealist has always been a community-driven site, and we can’t do this work without you.

Here is some of the work your donation will help support:

Every day, Idealist helps connect 70,000 people with 90,000 organizations around the world, in English, Spanish, and French. In addition to our work online, every year we also organize a series of events across North America, including 10 Nonprofit Career Fairs, 20 Graduate School Fairs, and 5 Global Volunteering Fairs.

To make all this happen, and to provide the best possible service to our users, we have several teams working in New York, Portland, and Buenos Aires to:

* Maintain the current Idealist.org, Idealistas.org, and Idealiste.org, and make sure they run smoothly (we do all our programming, design, and translations ourselves), while also building a totally new Idealist.org that will be launched later this year.

* Review every new organization that joins Idealist to try to ensure the highest possible quality in our content and listings.

* Reply to every call and email we get (tens of thousands every year).

* Organize, promote, and staff all the events mentioned above (the average fair brings together 1,000 people with 100 organizations or universities).

* Write and publish new resources to help our members, such as the Idealist Guides to Nonprofit Careers and the International Volunteerism Resource Center (you can see the whole list on the right-hand side of our home page).

Fractals: a poetry experiment

Math is beautiful. Fractals make up gorgeous geometric images when an equation goes through endless iteration. Classic Euclidean geometry cannot really describe them. They are infinitely complex.

Similarly, there are endless things to consider when poetry undergoes translation into another language: Maintain the meter? Preserve the phonetic quality? Capture its spirit? What is the best way to represent, or reinterpret, another's thoughts? What if it were done in the original language?

To reinterpret is to explain, present the meaning of, convey, etc., in a new or different way. And so, this experiment endeavors to find the many fractals of a poem through people's reinterpretations of it. I happen to have--happen to have bugged someone for a while for--a poem for this experiment. It is not published or famous. I believe this lack of familiarity and preconceptions gives any reinterpreter greater creative potential.

The first stage of the project is just to collect people's reinterpretations, observe the fractals. The idea is to take your interpretation and work it into a 'new' poem that is still true to the first; to have a bazillion poems that all reinterpret the original. Comments are screened, so anyone interested should say so and I will email them the poem. The goal is to get all variations back in a month by 27 February. So who's in?

This is a fire door never leave open

Consider: blog experience

In college, the "alternative" publication, so cleverly called the paper, offered 1,000 - 1,600 word pieces of in-depth bullshit. For the most part. From this mediocre wonder of cheap photoshop'd images and verbal masturbation, I fled to the other end of the spectrum: a financial reporting internship consolidating news into 300 words or less for the web.

This publication had done the research; readers on the internet tend to scroll down only once before losing interest. If we search blog statistics about how long people read, some sites will disagree. A Problogger entry approximates the average reader's stay at 96 seconds. Someone else says it does not matter, so long as the writing is tight and interesting.

I have to disagree, since the majority of my extensive reading is still limited to print publications. Don't get me wrong: Twitter just seems lazy and useless to me. My own blog entries often surpass 300 words and occasionally broach 700. That is, I appreciate NWO Observer and The Confluence. Their writers have a lot to say, they often say it, and on occasion I am gone without reaching the halfway mark. Granted, the capacity to communicate their ideas and opinions would be severely limited without the limitless internet. But it is still an obnoxious place to have to read them.

And just how effective are they? Or, in different words, what is the pt of blogging? So many people have a blog, if not multiple blogs, and thanks to Google page ranking, adverts, etc., many are lost in a cyber wasteland. Many of them are awful too, it's true. Popularity plays a role, certainly, in the success of a blog. Although popularity is obviously not synonymous with highest quality.

Blogs tickle our egos. We punch out our indignity, insanity, and suggestions on a keyboard, click a few spots on the screen, and suddenly we have cast our thoughts into the abyss where others cannot deny their existence. Advertising and search engine algorithms can bury their existence, however, which is why we should grow blogs like purple cows apparently. (Click the image from Problogger if you really want to know)

Perhaps blogs are also our way of compromising with the commercial industry. When it began, the Internet spawned gleeful impish ideas of Potential and Global Communication. At first, this seems to be the case. But if you agree with Douglas Rushkoff, author of The Information Arms Race, that communication is a living exchange among equals--that "to be aroused by a pornographic tape is not to make love"--then we are quickly losing the Internet to old school marketing schemes that endeavor to program our behavior and restrict our choices.

We have fewer opportunities and finances to hammer home a pt. We reconcile ourselves to monstrous chain stores, isolated iPod playlists, and an endless shopping spree that won't require us to leave the chair. Gods forbid something be required of us! And just like that we haven't the use time or interest for this outdated idea of "communication" and, besides, what would we talk about?

Communicate this.

Let us be wary of Archie’s offspring

Google has only been around for little over a decade. From the way the search engine has turned into a regularly-used verb, though, you'd think we had been wandering cyberspace futilely for yrs before Google. Nowadays, this internet behemoth has its codes and platforms in nearly everything it seems.

Universal access to centralized information is the next goal toward optimum convenience. That is, rather than have to carry a specific, physical computer, many people want access to their information from any location, with any device, the minute it occurs to them to do so. In response, Google offers us gmail, chat ability, calendar options, Google docs, etc.

These tools make communication and collaboration more practical in many ways--my friend and I plotted out our road trip by sharing & working on a Google map--but the search function still sucks. Although Google "devote[s] more engineering time to search than to any other product at Google," lately Google seems to be organizing users instead of information.

Back in the day, lots of people were using AOL and then some MSN and Yahoo! to search the web. Along came Google, slightly better at the task, and gradually it became the default. Now the corporation has its own browser, a bajillion applications, and the arrogance to amass a global digitized library. Nevermind publishers and copyrights. But it turns out Google flourished because of its timing: late 90s, we all wanted better search results, Google gave them to us, and while other engines caught up, or even surpassed the quality of Google results, Google mushroomed with greater use and capacity. Aaron Wall gives a more thorough account of the history behind search engines at Search Engine History with some intriguing links.

Anyway, nowadays Google wants to give us everything from news to scholarly papers to collaborative tools, and that seems mighty friendly for a giant corporation. A giant corporation is something I do not trust, no matter how convenient it is. Especially given how convenient it is. In reality, search engines that address niches and understanding categorically what sort of search we are running is going to enhance our engine experiences more than Google probably ever will.

Let's not become lazy slaves to Google.

What browsers and search engines do you use?

image from ssqq.com

Swim coach sucks morale

The Moorestown High School boys swim team just lost to their yearly rivals Rancocas Valley by two pts. It was a disappointing loss but nothing compared to this disheartened team that has lost their well-loved coach to the girls team and said farewell to several graduated members.

I've gone to a few meets each season in recent yrs. The boys team, once a welcoming, quirky group of enthusiastic athletes, seemed to love weekend meets not long ago. The boys would bark cheers that filled the pool and made the parents squished together on the benches chuckle. Each season someone would come up with a crazy swimsuit design to sport the black & gold with some pizazz. I would sit, astonished by the shouting parents, and try to avoid seeing the adolescent junk running back & forth before me. And last yr, after many mascot-less seasons, Leslie the mannequin came to one of the seniors in the middle of a neighborhood street.

Moorestown Athletic Director Rosa was not of a fan of Leslie. He has never really been a fan of the boys swim team to begin with, and it is no secret that he dislikes their former swim coach. This yr, the girls swim coach retired. Enter Jeffrey DeNick, newest Rosa minion, to quash the quirky boys team spirit and whip them into shape.

Well, not so much whip the boys into shape. (They were already fairly good and in 2007 won a state sectional title) More like curse them off at practices and ban any behavior that would encourage team comradery. DeNick's mission, he claims, is to push the MHS boys to be even better.

DeNick is a Delran middle school guidance counselor (somehow, gods know how) who previously coached Shawnee's swim team. It is not clear that DeNick has ever swum himself, but he has compelled at least one MHS swim team upperclassman to quit already. His line ups have been whack since the beginning of the season, and at today's all-important meet (MHS has little to no chance of a comeback at this pt) he swam people with longer times in key events. Pushing them to be better and win more?

Seems more like a convenient gig to make a little money at something he may have little actual knowledge about and take out his frustrations on high school kids who just want to swim. Back in November, he told the Burlington County Times, "...The school is two miles from where I work (guidance counselor at Delran Middle School) and the Community Center where they practice is just another two miles. I'll be saving an hour a day in travel."

While DeNick is saving an hr a day, the boys swim team has deteriorated. Its captains are seniors who do not attend practice in favor of their club team practices. This is typical, I guess, but combine the lack of psych parties, the apathy of captains, the unfamiliar underclassmen, DeNick, and Rosa's constant shadow and the MHS boys swim team is essentially ruined.

Good job, Moorestown. Way to suck the spirit out of a few more kids. You're still on your way to pulling off the perfect mindless Pleasantville.

There is no right house. There is no right car.

Four components of the four letter word

In lieu of social struggle with a recovering economy and a disappointing federal government, we sometimes shift focus to more personal matters of inquiry, revise our values. For instance, matters of the heart as we are wont to say.

It's funny, because we know our hearts are just blood-pumping muscles that race faster occasionally when anticipation in the brain sets off signals to do so. Many of us want, not just love, but to be in love and maintain that relationship. Blood circulation is likely never the problem between two people. It is our blasted brains and poor communication that cause the conflicts.

Language can only approximate what we mean, which is frustrating when it comes to feelings and devising definitions. So, without getting too metaphysical, here is a working definition for 'people in love' that has come up in my conversations with four or five people recently:

Such a relationship requires passion, for the relationship and each other. Interest, mutual engagement.

Two people in love are committed to the relationship's success, by communicating and trying to stay on the same page.

This love also requires intimacy, a combination of trust and deep understanding for one another.

Finally, lovers care for each other in a reciprocal fashion. That is, both want health and happiness for the other person and for their connection. Injury to one would do injury to the other.

As I said, just a working definition. What do you think?

True Love

Good conversation v blah blah Sarah Palin blah

A Monday evening. She sat on the couch watching a movie, legs bent up in front of her chest, an attempt to fortress herself off. Aside from the ludicrous big screen in the corner sat her mother, in a recliner reading the paper. Standard.

Every rustle of a page prolonged the anticipation, made her breath more deliberate, her focus on the show more intent. The sound of skin on newspaper smudges like powdered sugar. Then came the ostentatious scoff-or-chuckle. It was a chuckle this time. Because, as her mother announced, Sarah Palin had crossed out the name McCain on her visor with a black sharpie in order to avoid detection from paparazzi while on vacation in Hawaii.

With reluctance, she turned her head toward her mother, who was staring at her and expected an answer. She had already shaken her head, given How Dumb slouch of the mouth. What? demanded her mother sourly. The response came, I don't really care about Sarah Palin... The retort: Well, it's about Sarah Palin's visor. She tried not to lose the plotline on tv. And her response, It's not really newsworthy.

...For which she was called snooty and informed that this little back&forth, well, It's Called Conversation. Severe anger in her mother's voice. Exaggerated rustling of newspaper returned to full upright reading position. She looked at her mother again, or the newspaper in front of her face. Because, as she informed her mother, The conversation was about Sarah Palin's visor. An idiotic woman in a hat. She didn't care and no one owed it to her mother to care about an idiotic woman in a hat. End scene.

Hayakawa would probably say the exchange was an attempt at reaffirmation of social cohesion. Small talk, e.g. mentioning the weather, he claimed, accomplishes this. Chit chat like this does not inherently posess a relevant message. What becomes important is the social feeling of connection and belonging.

But Hayakawa sends us in a complicated semantics direction. Perhaps the situation depicts failure at the so-called art of conversation. There are certainly plenty of books on methods for making good conversation. Some individuals say it is a skill, not an art. Either way, I did not have the interest or time to read about it. So I asked some friends for their thoughts on conversation.

Obviously, conversations happen for various reasons. They involve giving and taking, or even sharing once in a while. It is debateable whether conversation is as important these days, with the growing importance of images; from advertisements, to online video, to the ubiquitous television. One thing conversation still has in its favor is that someone listens to you. Or ought to.

Listening is just plain integral to life. It aids us in information gathering, enables us to make reasonable decisions, and gives us time to understand. It makes day to day events and interaction with people easier. After a couple decades, listeners would probably pick up on which conversation topics wouldn't work with certain people-- like idiotic women in hats.

Another suggested characteristic of good conversation was asking good questions. In other words, useful questions that engage everyone* involved. The conversation progresses agreeably (not necessarily happily) for most or all participants.

Additionally, I think good intent is necessary. Which is to say that a person who insists on being heard, demands attention, and expects to be agreed with is not likely to have many great conversations. What a person like that wants is not real conversation so much as something like external validation of themselves. Yes, a bit of genuine interest and regard probably go a long way to make conversations more pleasant.

*The word 'conversation' comes from a Latin verb 'to turn around [to]' and 'colloquium' derives from the Latin verb 'to talk with.'

(Image frm Jerkmag.wordpress.com)

We take up the task eternal, and the burden &the lesson

History books might eventually say that in 2008 masses of people went to the polls to take a stand and demand a new direction for America. (Only one of four people in my apartment voted) But, my, Camus's straight-shot observation that "we should like, at the same time, to cease being guilty and yet not make the effort of cleansing ourselves" would certainly put that claim into perspective.

Not two yrs later, many voters feel used and ignored. People balk at health care, unemployment, increased military deployment, and a failing education system. And they lack, according to David Brooks, The Faith. Starbucks offers shitty coffee every few miles and Netflix will deliver movies that Blockbuster probably never carried straight to the mailbox and Google will attempt with a generally accepted degree of accuracy to answer any vaguely formulated question-- To summarize: instant gratification. No great shocker when Brooks wrote in his NYTimes op-ed column:

The U.S. now has an economy shifted too much toward consumption, debt and imports and too little toward production, innovation and exports. It now has a mounting federal debt that creates present indulgence and future hardship.

The top income brackets have rested on their laurels long enough and everyone seems to have forgotten that once a nation peaks, it often declines. The motivation to go above and beyond, defy limitations, and commence all those energizing wordy ideas has faded with all the superficial success of the last several yrs. Investments in futurity and progress have shrunk. The spurious victors now simmer in self-pity. Somehow, Americans have gotta find The Faith:

It may seem like an ephemeral thing, but this eschatological faith in the future has motivated generations of Americans... . Pioneers and immigrants endured hardship in the present because of their confidence in future plenty. Entrepreneurs start up companies with an exaggerated sense of their chances of success. The faith is the molten core of the country’s dynamism.

Present hardship: check. Confidence: nope. Pioneers: questionable. Commercialization of the idea: check.

For its Go Forth ad campaign, the Levi's brand produced commercials of half-dressed youths roaming outdoors to voiceover readings of Walt Whitman poems--

Much to the chagrin of viewers objecting to the homosexual content, fascist undertones, andor bastardization of Art. These viewers were obviously too busy complaining to notice it was a fairly stunning piece of work in its own right. (Sometimes, I don't even mute it like every other commercial) Whitman might have been pleased with Levi's rendition of his Pioneers! O Pioneers!.

While marketing, sales, and entertainment departments might have just honed in on adventure for the sake of profit, the concepts of expedition and discovery do carry merit. Life is not scripted, proscribed by bureaucratic forms, or determined by one's CV. A pioneer strikes out, advances first. The word 'pioneer' itself derives from French & Latin words for 'foot soldier', the root of which is pes, pedis (m) in Latin for 'foot' (1). Pioneers are about moving forward boldly and openly, something Americans have fallen behind at.

To reference a recent adventure-oriented film, Pirate Radio was fucking phenomenal. Apparently disappointed critics wanted wanton sex, drugs, drags, and rock'n'roll. Instead they got an awesome cast of ludicrous fellas with a genuine love of their favorite music. Limited by the stuffy British Parliament from broadcasting their tunes in town, the crew took music to the sea. Just like that, in an honest and rebellious endeavor to share Jimi Hendrix, the Troggs, and the Kinks with London in the 1960s.

Today, it seems like the only remaining frontiers to be explored involve science and technology, ie special effects, medical advances, social networking, etc. Not so! Pioneering and innovation are about surpassing limitations, breaking the mold, seizing on what is Meaningful. Research constantly strives to surpass limitations, although research funding is likely just a mess. Education is meaningful, but no one has figured out how to fix the public edu system. Yet. So. Let the wild rumpus start! Or as this guy says, engage.

(1) frm Merriam Webster and The New College Latin & English Dictionary