Citizen Cope at the Fillmore

Here I am at the Fillmore, at the Citizen Cope show I've been vicariously anticipating for over a month. And you know what? Disappointing! This guy is good--real good. Good songs, good musicianship, good stage presence (but for the obvious medicinal assistance). But for a New Year's show, he kind of dropped the vall. You have a captive, rapturous audience, just waiting for you to entrall them. And you deliver, but in the kind of offhanded manner that much stronger artists would consider a risk. I dunno. Maybe I'm a snob.


But I think he could've done better.

Habs 4, Penguins 3 (SO)

That's me at 0:42. Great outing with the boys in Pittsburgh!

The Hip, for the first time

My roommate Matt and I recently had an interesting conversation. He, it turns out, is also an avid and passionate music fan, and in the process of exchanging stories about our favourite albums and artists, the thought occurred that it'd be nice to hear certain albums or certain artists for the first time again.

I remember very well the first time I heard Pink Floyd's "The Wall" and The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band". The summer of 1988 was a musical awakening for me; it's the summer I first understood the concept of an album as a thematically-linked suite of songs, rather than a series of standalone stories.

But there's one band I can't remember the first time I heard: The Tragically Hip. I don't know why, nor do I remember which song would have been the first I heard. I have vague memories of hearing "Three Pistols" in a bar, but by then I was already familiar with the music and the band. But when I heard it first, and what my first impression was, I don't remember.

Lest you wonder why this is a big deal, you have to understand that The Hip (as they are referred to back home) are a Canadian institution. They are passionately loved in the great white north, with a fervor reserved for only the biggest of the world's touring acts. And yet they are supremely unknown if you stray more than 50 miles south of the border.

So an interesting opportunity is now presenting itself: The Hip will be performing at the Fillmore in Philly next week, on the 24th. I intend on bringing my girlfriend to see them, in what will be her first live exposure to this music that, for some unknown reason, seems to resonate most strongly if you were born in or withing sight of the land of hockey pucks and softwood lumber. What will be her first impression?

I personally seldom like anything upon first listen; in point of fact, I remember thinking Radiohead's "Kid A" was a joke the first time I heard it, despite being a big fan of the band. There's also a strong social component to music, which undoubtedly played a part in my musical education, as most of it came during those summers spent at camp, where you were either a fan of AC/DC, or you were the kid with no friends who played tetherball alone.

So, in order to make sure the experience isn't completely lost on her, I've made a compilation CD of some carefully chosen songs:

- Ahead by a Century
- At The Hundredth Meridian
- Bobcaygeon
- Cordelia
- Courage (For Hugh Maclennan)
- Fiddler's Green
- Fifty-Mission Cap
- Fully Completely
- Grace, Too
- Little Bones
- Locked In The Trunk Of A Car
- Long Time Running
- Nautical Disaster
- New Orleans is Sinking
- Scared
- Something On
- Three Pistols
- Wheat Kings
- 38 Years Old

Have I missed anything?

Personal relationship with the enemy

I recently had a conversation with one of the "normal" people, i.e. the ones that aren't cursed with thoughts on what will happen in the future of the web—in this case, my girlfriend. She's a great person to talk to because, to put it mildly, she doesn't give a damn about the philosophical implications of the web—she just cares about getting too much junk mail, greedy advertisers with a hand in her pocket (and a database full of her purchasing behaviour), and how much Amazon knows about her. In this sense, she's like 98% of the US.

So we got to talking about advanced advertising opportunities—on television, the web and with wireless devices. By the way—just because seeing the numbers really drove home the point for me this week—there are roughly 58M broadband households in the US, but there are over 220M wireless devices (mostly phones). Apples to oranges, I know, but seeing those numbers really made it plain to me what all the fuss about the wireless space is about, even though I myself can't imagine watching television on my phone, and I think anyone who does probably spends way too much time in hospital waiting rooms.

People are concerned about security and intrusion of privacy—that's a given. The web is softening some of this, through things like Amazon, Facebook or even Pandora, but these are all contextual instances where people willingly exchange privacy for a practical benefit (i.e. relevant product suggestions from Amazon, expanding social ties on Facebook, and new musical discoveries on Pandora). What most people couldn't digest yet—and I'm one of them—is the idea of one database which would amass ALL of this information centrally. Imagine a scenario where your cable provider feeds you ads during normal broadcasts which are based on your purchasing behaviour as tracked by your credit card activity, or your musical preferences as tracked by Pandora, or a specific social demographic, as derived from your Facebook profile. Creepy, huh? But, at the same time, can you imagine how much this kind of profiling would be worth to advertisers, and how it would begin to do away with seeing ads that have nothing to do with your actual life and interests?

There are efforts underway in the cable industry to start narrowing down and targeting ads at audiences based on specific attributes. We're nowhere near the scenario described above, for many reasons (some of them regulatory), but advertisers (who pay for television, after all) are starting to demand more bang for their buck. So what about giving them access to the whole you, but only on an invitational basis?

The way I think about it is to envision a "bubble" around myself. This bubble contains all that I am—quite literally in this metaphor. Remember, this is a metaphor—I'll explain what it means later, but for the purposes of explaining this, just bear with the metaphor. I live in this bubble, and I control this bubble. I can poke holes in it to let the outside world in, but only I control how big the holes are, and where they are. This is important, because the world I live in is a torrent of information. Not all of it is relevant to me, and I certainly don't want to let it all in. At the same time, I don't want to completely isolate myself, and there's plenty of stuff out there that I don't know about, but would most definitely be interested in learning about. So I want to make sure other people are allowed inside, but again, I want to make sure I control who comes in, and what they're allowed to see. This could be family, friends, colleagues, etc. In time, when I've established a relationship with them, I can trust them to create very small holes in my bubble on my behalf—through trust-based recommendations. This way, I get to discover new ideas, thoughts, and yes, even products and services.

The key to all this is that I own and control my information. In the real world, this would be akin to having all this information hosted on a physical device that I own—my PC, my phone and my set top box. In this scenario, I own my set top box; i.e. it's not rented from my service provider. Better yet, the information is shared directly with my television from my PC, bypassing the set top box altogether. These devices share a detailed profile of me, but it stays hosted locally on the devices themselves or on a home network—in other words, my profile doesn't go out to the world unless I allow parts of it to (the equivalent of poking holes in my bubble).

Think of this as a sort of identity portfolio, but in this context it's not hosted and managed on some sort of "personality portfolio" website (like Facebook or MySpace). And here's the beauty--it doesn't compete with Facebook, LinkedIn or any other such site. Think of it as an application like Outlook. Outlook has my email, contacts and calendar. It's all hosted locally on my PC, and all of the data contained can be synched with other devices (my Blackberry, for instance). What if I add social content to it? Stuff like my friends by degree of closeness, my resume, colleagues, pictures, my blog, my to do list, my amazon wish list, etc. All of this is hosted on my machine, and all of it is entirely mine to share—if, where and when I choose to do so.

By way of example, if I log on to Facebook, I can "synch" my Facebook profile with the information on my machine that I want to share. Imagine a page on Facebook where it basically says "here's the information you have on your machine (broad categories, mind you—not the details). What do you want to make visible to the Facebook community?" Same for Amazon. Same for Joost. You check a few boxes, and you're off to the races. The site knows whatever information about you that you chose to share, that enhances your experience in some meaningful way, but no more.

There's more, but that's enough for now.

Writing without an agenda

I'm always surprised when someone reminds me of how long it's been since I last updated this blog. It's happened twice recently (before the recent guilt-induced spate of less-than-riveting postings), and though I don't think for a minute that I have a vast and breathless audience, such comments always invariably remind me of the central reason that it's so difficult to maintain this blog current.

It's not for lack of time—well, not entirely at least. It's not for lack of interesting things happening in my life that I could comment on—though everyone's definition of interesting is different. At the heart of it, it's an issue of topicality: I'm writing without an agenda.

This blog ostensibly started as a means of keeping my family appraised of my wanderings when I set off for Brussels in the spring of 2006. Whether or not it truly served that purpose, the experiment was compelling enough that I kept it up even after I got back. Through the end of graduate school, I became fascinated by a bunch of things like the formation of social capital, especially in online communities, and because of an obsessive bent, I wanted to incorporate this blog into my existing but long-forgotten website. The result is what you see here: a mishmash of incomplete sections and meandering ruminations—a partial profile of myself.

Case in point: I don't have a tidy ending for this post. I wish I could tie it into a broader storyline, something that would make sense given the overall narrative into which it fits. But I can't.

Pity, ain't it?

New music

It dawned on me recently just how much my musical explorations have slowed down in the past year. I've made a few discoveries, of course, but not as many as I'd become accustomed to during grad school. I became aware of it during a recent conversation with my cousin Christine, whose musical tastes are impeccable and who has long been a great source of new music for me. We played our usual game of exchanging discoveries, except that when it came to me, all I could muster were the same bands I'd mentioned to her last summer. Terribly lame.

So, with renewed vigor, I've recently gone on a campaign to renew my bond with music. The following is a sampling of the good, the awful, and the unforgettable.

Malajube
Yes, I know I'm late to the party for this one, but I recently downloaded Malajube's 2006 album "Trompe-l'oeil" ("Optical Illusion"), and I'm once again reminded of just how great some of the music coming out of Montreal is. It seems every time I open an issue of Rolling Stone there's a new band from Montreal being touted as the next thing.

These guys, however, are truly something special. I'm currently obsessed with "Pâte filo" (playing as I write this), but the album as a whole sounds, for lack of a better term, massive. Great songs, solid playing, and a richness and texture to the music that is just baffling considering how young these guys are. This is the same realization to which I came when I heard Karkwa.

Karkwa
There's no good way to write what I'm about to write, because it sounds as though I think very little of my fellow Quebecois, but I didn't think it possible that such great music could be sung in French. Lately, however, it seems Montreal's carved an enviable spot for itself in the international music scene, and an amazing variety of truly magnificient music is coming out of my hometown, making me at once proud and nostalgic.

The first band that started me thinking along those lines is Karkwa, when I first heard "Les tremblements s'immobilisent" (The Tremors are Quieting), I was captivated immediately (which hardly ever happens to me). I'm indebted to Chake for exposing me to these guys. I still have to pause when I hear "La marche", just because I can't begin to understand how such masterful songs are created from the ether.

Such was my admiration for these guys that I was briefly in touch with their manager, a person named Sandy, to whom I just felt compelled to express my admiration for the band in writing. Unfortunately, Sandy's interest in our conversation dried up when I bluntly asserted that I could in fact do nothing for their career save for writing elogious e-mails about them.

I won't hold my breath for their american tour, but I do hold out hope that they'll eventually write some material in English, if only so that they take the next logical step and come touring down here.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
I attended these guys' show this past Friday, on the recommendation of a friend, at the Fillmore on South street. Though the Fillmore is (like pretty much everything else on South street) pretty inauspicious from the outside, it is in fact a phenomenal venue for live music. This only makes me regret even more the fact that I missed The Hip on their visit to Philly last month, as I realized just how precious the opportunity was to see them in a small and intimate venue—something I would definitely not be able to do anywhere in Canada!

BRMC are a three-piece band from San Francisco that plays a pared-down and intense brand of rock. Nothing complicated—in fact, it's unclear to me whether their music left me relatively unmoved because it's so pared-down, or because of my chronic inability to catch something on the first go-round. But I'm going to follow up on them, so there'll be more to come, I'm sure.

Amy Winehouse
Yes, again, you may say I'm late to the party, but I should note that I've been yearning for someone to make an album like "Back to Black" for a long, long time. Anyone who knows me knows I'm an unabashed musical snob, and many times I've complained that many contemporary female singers were wasting their talent on uninspired, unidimensional R&B (hello there, Christina Aguilera et al), rather than taking a chance and using their magnificient voices to create something truly novel.

And as usual, it took a Brit to make that leap. Amy Winehouse is, quite simply, the purest expression of raw talent I've heard in a decade. Her phrasing on "Rehab", her choice of words on "Addicted", the prodigious backing section that recasts the Motown sound anew—all of it speaks of a monumentally inspired musical experiment. I still can't believe a waifish white jewish girl from North London is the source of that soulful voice.

Current favourite is "You Know That I'm No Good". Simply stellar.

Mika
If you know Mika and are wincing now, trust me, I'm wincing too. My beloved cousin—the one with the impeccable musical taste—planted this name in my head, and were it not for a freakish ability to recall useless and inane trivia, the name would have been forgotten, since she mentioned it about two weeks before I eventually looked it up online.

Rolling Stone dubbed this "pop that makes you feel guilty in the morning", and the analogy couldn't be more appropriate. This is icky, sticky, sickeningly sweet bubblegum pop, the musical equivalent of an ill-advised Jersey shore hookup after a week-long Whopper binge. This music evokes big-eyed, furry, multicolored cartoon animals traipsing through a field of lollipops and candy-coloured clouds—not unlike what I imagine one sees when one consumes a week's ration of painkillers in one sitting, and washes it down with a six-pack of Red Bull. And because the human mind naturally relates to melody, this perniciously melodic pap attaches itself to your very soul, and from there wages a war to the death with your free will. I battled this for weeks, waking up with one song on the brain in the morning, and never being able to shake it for days.

If you don't know Mika and you're now curious after reading this, proceed with caution. My cousin is family—I love her and am willing to overlook this egregious affront because, well, she's family. You may not owe me the same courtesy, so don't hold it against me if you end up similarly afflicted.

You've been warned.

More to come.

Darwin Day

Wired news informs me that today, February 12th, is Darwin Day, an international celebration of "Darwin, science and humanity". Cool. Even secular humanists, it seems, need to celebrate their beliefs (or lack thereof) in a formal way.

This year marks the fourth celebration of Darwin Day, and I celebrated by attending morning service at the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, on Chestnut street, this past Sunday (Feb. 4th). Actually, that makes it sound like I went there specifically to celebrate Darwin day, which isn't completely true. What actually happened is that I noticed the message board outside announcing "Darwin's Religion" as the title for the February 4th service. Not knowing what Unitarians are (call me ignorant, but it's hard to deny there are a lot of "flavours" of Christianity out there and it's hard to keep up), I went there thinking this would be yet another misguided attack on Darwinism by the fretful pious masses.

Turns out Unitarians are far from fretful. Now, anyone who knows me would know that I'm not confrontational about my beliefs (well, not anymore at least). I didn't go to that service looking to force a collision between faith and science; I went with the honest intent of observing quietly, to try to understand something of what makes this topic so unsettling for so many people. What I encountered couldn't have caught me more off-guard.

The service began with a recitation of the church's mission statement:

Our Mission Statement:

We are an intentionally diverse religious community
Inspired by our historic urban ministry.
We seek to lead meaningful lives,
To love one another without prejudice,
And to build a just and sustainable world.

And right there is when things started to get strange for me. This is a perfectly good mission statement--in point of fact, it sounds like something we should all hold ourselves up to. I suppose what perplexed me was the odd juxtaposition of religious imagery, ritual and ceremonial pomp with resolutely secular concepts. I was happy to see there are people devoted to celebrating knowledge without bias; I suppose I just never expected such people to be of the churchgoing type.

But it's hard to deny the importance of ritual. I would surmise that, for most people nowadays, religious service has a greater purpose as a time for gathering and reflexion, for the reassertion of one's beliefs as part of a broader community. The people gathered in that church that Sunday were there to commune with one another, not in celebration of their exclusion from everyone else, but in celebration of their kinship with one another.

And, on this day, it meant celebrating Darwin Day (from whence the title "Darwin's Religion") by pausing to think about the importance of knowledge and scientific inquiry. So, no duelling worldviews on this day. Just nice, smiling people who came together to celebrate Darwin's legacy. What made it unsettling for me was mostly that it caught me off guard. To have strangers welcome you and encourage you to sit, sing and shake hands with other strangers is a little odd when you've come to see all kind and smiling strangers as salespeople of some sort.

But there was no selling on this day. So, happy Darwin Day everyone!

Questionable knowledge

The last time I clicked the random article link on Wikipedia, I was served up an article on Galina Antyufeeva, which led to my discovery of Transnistria. How many people lived their lives in blissful ingorance of these facts, I wonder. Fortunately for my three readers, there are people like me who not only compulsively dig up such facts, but also feel compelled to share them with you.

Yes, you're welcome.

So, in keeping with this unofficial and self-appointed mission, I once again went trolling for knowledge on Wikipedia, with an eye for something truly obscure to enlighten you with. However, I'm sad to report I didn't get far in this respect. Instead of random knowledge, I came across something which now compels me to write more about it.

I was served up an article on what at first seemed an unassuming school located in Toronto, Canada, called the Hawthorn School for Girls. What caught my eye wasn't the fact that it is a private school of the Roman Catholic denomination (I myself went to a Roman Catholic private high school, and then to Notre Dame). Rather, it was the organization with which it is affiliated: Opus Dei.

Opus Dei, as millions now know, was brought unwillingly into the international spotlight by being a prominent plot element in Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code". As unflattering as the portrayal was, a lot of what was shown of their practices has been chronicled by other sources, some of them ex-Opus Dei members. The self-flagellation, use of the silice and, most of all, the rigid adherence to doctrine which underlies the daily activities of its members, all have been amply documented.

But I'm not writing about Opus Dei per se. As far as I'm concerned, it is but one of a great many such organizations, each having more bizarre beliefs than the next, and none amounting to much more than what my father would have called "shovelling clouds".

What I wanted to write about goes beyond this particular example, though I will use this one to make my point. On the Hawthorn School's website is the following statement:

Underlying all the activities of the school is the unquestioned acknowledgement of the existence of God, of knowable objective truth, and of moral absolutes.

And its mission statement:

To assist parents in the integral education of their daughters to become free and responsible women who know and love the truth.

I recently wrote about Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion". In the book, Dawkins makes an argument that calling a child either a Muslim, a Catholic or a Protestant child is as meaningless as calling them a liberal, republican or a fiscalist. To him, tarring a child with such a loaded burden is tantamount to child abuse:

There is no such thing as a Christian child, there is only a child of Christian parents. Whenever you hear the phrase Christian child or Muslim child or Protestant child or Catholic child, the phrase should grate like fingernails on a blackboard.

I suppose I should feel lucky. After all, I was likewise raised in such a biased way. I was never given a choice as to what spiritual path (if any) I wanted to follow. The idea seems ridiculous to most people, so deeply-ingrained is this notion that a child's spirituality is a parent's purview, but that a child should de facto be submitted to the same spiritual strictures as their parents is utter madness. The girls of the Hawthorn school, despite the best intentions of the parents who founded it, will be spiritually stunted, and will likely never even come to realize the blight that this original bias imposed on their ability to think critically.

They will come to understand the existence of god as being 'unquestioned' and, in all likelihood, will indeed never question it. Just so it's clear, I don't care if the belief is in the christian god, Mohammed or even Thor—what bothers me is the fact that children are presumed to be of one faith or another simply by being born in one place rather than another.

Kinda gives the expression "there but by the grace of god go I" another meaning, doesn't it?

Overlooked in the iPhone hype

Well, it finally happened: Apple unveiled what had long been rumoured to be in the works, a true Apple phone (in contrast with the ROKR, the product of that half-hearted collaboration with Motorola last year). And while I wouldn't say that all the excitement about the Apple iPhone over the past week is completely unwarranted, I do believe that Apple's strongest bid for consumers' dollars went by largely unnoticed.

I've been having a lot of discussions about the iPhone, and it seems like everyone has a different take on what it means for Apple strategically, both now and in the future. And it's fun to speculate on where it's all going, but I'm much more interested in another product that Apple introduced last Monday: the Apple TV.

By most accounts, the Apple TV's introduction was underwhelming. Despite the buzz it created last September when Steve Jobs uncharacteristically introduced a product that was not yet ready for market, this time around it was largely overshadowed by the iPhone. And it really did feel like even Apple wanted to downplay this product. The specs were nothing to get excited about: a mere 40Gb hard drive and support for up to 720p video. Right now, its abilities are pretty much limited to streaming media from up to five household computers and displaying it on a television screen.

But should we expect it to end there? No way.

Back in the fall of 2004, in the context of an introductory marketing class at Notre Dame, I did some research on what could lie ahead for Apple. The result of this research was what I then called the iCore. It was a nondescript grey box equipped with massive onboard storage capacity, wireless capability, and the requisite connectors (phone, cable, internet) to become a sort of central hub through which all household communications flowed. It would be a base station for phone lines, for cable television and for the internet, and through wireless transmission, could enable a host of appliances throughout the home. Media could be shared from a PC to a television, phone calls could be routed through the internet, and recipes could be fetched from the internet and displayed on the microwave oven door, all through this central hub and a simple, ubiquitous interface.

And because Apple was the only company with expertise in both hardware and software, it would be the only one to be able to offer a fully integrated solution, while all others would have to rely on partnerships.

So what is the Apple TV capable of right now, and what could it possibly enable in the future? More importantly, why would Apple choose to release such an uninspiring product now if its true promise lies in the future? The answer, I believe, has to do with something Steve Jobs himself said: that, given enough intrinsic flexibility, a product can remain relevant through upgrades rather than overhauls. The Apple TV, as introduced last week, already features HDMI, component video/audio and ethernet connectivity, though the latter isn't explicitly useful in its current incarnation.

One of the strongest arguments in favour of the touchscreen for the iPhone was that, by avoiding a physical interface (like a multi-function keyboard), the iPhone could perform any task imaginable, because it was all just a matter of displaying an appropriate interface. Every function of the phone could have its own custom interface without being wedded to a multi-function keyboard.

Similarly, the Apple TV can stake a claim in users' homes immediately, and when the dynamics of the converged marketplace change sufficiently (as they will), the full breadth of its capabilities will becomes obvious. Oh, and you can bet that by then Apple will have the 'better' and 'best' versions of the Apple TV on store shelves, possibly offering integration with the iPhone, for instance.

In this respect, the Apple TV is truly a Trojan horse. It is Apple's claim to the home media market, and in iTunes, it has the perfect unifying vehicle to tie all of its wonderful products together. Software, hardware, design, and flawless execution. Can anyone else do that? Not likely.

So for now, the Apple TV will be content to be an unassuming box with unassuming abilities. But the future sure looks promising.

Nic

Some general cultural Babel--er, babble

I saw Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel yesterday, and I already know I'm going to want to see it again. But that's not what moves to write about it now.

I've always liked the story of the Tower of Babel, upon which one of the the main lessons of the film is drawn. It's an interesting story in itself, and it's noteworthy that it was chosen as the title for this beautiful movie. The Tower of Babel, so the story related in chapter 11 of the book of Genesis goes, was man's bold attempt at reaching the heavens. Shocked by mankind's hubris, and to spite them for having the effrontery of trying to reach the heavens, the gods tore down the tower, separated the tribes of the Earth in a multitude of different languages so that they would become incomprehensible to one another, and scattered them about the world. In this way, they would never again achieve the level of coordination required to attempt such an undertaking.

Now, despite the fact that I know the above is a fairy tale, I'm not immune to a good story, and being a language nut, the story still has an intrinsic appeal to me. The movie Babel itself isn't so much about people not understanding one another from a purely linguistic perspective. It's not that they can't understand one another, it's that their thoughts and biases are fundamentally expressed differently: they don't understand one another's culture.

And insofar as language encapsulates culture, then the story of the Tower of Babel is in fact not just a tale about the origin of language, but a prosaic account of the origin of the world's cultures.

But that's a whole other topic.