Robert Switzer

Kevin Kelly had a piece in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about the ongoing scanning and digitization of books and what it might mean for the future of publishing, scholarship, and reading.

Scanning is a great idea, both for preservation and for creating a hypertext database for scholarship. The publishing types who are erecting obstacles to scanning and the preservation of orphaned titles are clueless twits as far as I’m concerned.

Will book publishing change in the same way that music, film and now television are changing? Definitely, despite or maybe because of the clueless twits. Will books go away? Probably not. Will hyper-text databases of books that allow annotation, cross-referencing, and other ongoing dialogs with readers detract from scholarship? I can’t imagine how.

Would such a database trample on intellectual property rights? No — any rights-owner who demonstrates ownership of anything in the data base could have it removed if they so desired.

If an author fears piracy, I would urge him to fear obscurity or invisibility instead.

I’m more concerned about who will control the hypertext database, how it will be indexed, and how it will be monetized. If Google wants to scan everything in five major libraries, I say go for it. And if they want to create a search technology on top of the data that generates revenue via advertising, that’s OK too. We all know now that a Google search is in part prioritized based on payments made by advertisers. We’d also be aware of this dynamic if we used a Google book-search product.

However, the raw data needs to be a public resource and available for others to use and access outside of Google products and services so academic, non-profit, and open-source groups could construct alternate search technologies without commercial bias, or perhaps with specialized biases designed for special applications. And it goes without saying that multiple copies — perhaps hundreds of thousands or millions of independant copies — would have to exist.

Kelly estimated that all of music, all of film, and every book that now exists could be digitized into about 50 petabytes of space. Right now I have 60 gigabytes of storage right here in my pocket on an iPod. Twenty years ago I couldn’t imagine enough disk storage to hold a movie. Maybe twenty years from now, we’ll be walking around with devices that can hold an entire multimedia library.

I don’t know who originally coined the phrase ‘obsolete technology becomes art’ — Brian Eno, maybe. I don’t remember. But this idea is at the center of why books won’t go away. Older technologies shrink and (maybe) decrease in importance, but they don’t go away. For the foreseeable future there will be people who want, and are willing to pay for the tactile experience of books. And the advantages of traditional linear scholarship in some contexts will persist, despite hypertext.

So it’s really too bad that luddite publishing companies and clueless authors effectively killed the scanning project. Google has the money, and was willing to do it. It’s everyone’s loss. But sooner or later, it will happen anyway. So I’m going to join Kevin Kelly and urge everyone to Scan That Book!

On vinyl recently: Promotional EP, ‘Hold On To 18′, Black And Blue; ‘Loose Nut’, Black Flag; ‘Paranoid’, Black Sabbath; ‘Autoamerican’, Blondie.

Playing on the iPod right now: ‘Jack The Ripper’, from Heresie by Univers Zero.

Good product and customer service experiences are so few and far between that I feel compelled to give them public mention when they happen.

A couple of weeks ago, my sound card started giving off a loud, low rumbling buzz in the first two channels. I’ve been using this card, an M-Audio Delta 1010, for the audio side of my work for over 7 years. I’ve recorded and mixed hundreds of hours of stuff with it and it’s been great — clean, quiet, and bulletproof under both Linux and MacOS.

Expecting the worst, I went out to Pricegrabber, found the best deal on a new one, and placed the order. A new 1010 cost me a bit less than half of what the first one cost me in 1999.

After the new 1010 arrived, and I installed it, I went out to the M-Audio website and opened a support ticket, on the off-chance that some kind of discount repair/replace deal might be available for older, out-of-warranty units.

M-Audio got back to me a couple of days later and I was delighted to discover that they would repair my 7 year old piece of gear, and return it to me post-paid for the cost of UPS ground shipping to California.

Getting the repaired 1010 back will cut the budget on another project I’m working on significantly.

Three cheers for M-Audio, a company that deserves your business.

On vinyl recently: A 12″ promotional single by a group called ‘Bete Noir’ — ‘Galileo’ b/w ‘Inquisition’; ‘Don’t Let The Bossman Get You Down’ and ‘Big Fun’ by Elvin Bishop; Big Twist and the Mellow Fellows, ‘Live In Chicago’.

Playing right now: ‘Stackalee’ by Frank Hutchison, from ‘Anthology of American Folk Music’.

Second shift is over. My wife finished her evening assignment on Friday of last week and is now back on her normal schedule, as am I. So I’m bleary and jet-lagged this morning. We got up this morning around 6, after two weeks of staying up late and laying in.

After blowing about a thousand bucks, everyone in the family now has an iPod. Gail bought daughter Jen a 4 gig Nano, and then I bought a new 60 gig model last week and gave the 30 gig Gail got me for my birthday back to her. The iPod itself is a great product, though my enthusiasm doesn’t extend to the iTunes software, or the iTunes Store. More on that later.

Speaking of Jen, right now she’s somewhere in the Mekong Delta taking photos. Her school set up a 3 week tour of Vietnam and Cambodia for art students, and she signed up. I’m jealous — I’ve been to Europe and South America, but I’ve never done this kind of hard-core travel — a slightly risky trip to a truly foreign destination.

As a part of my introduction to blogging and the current state-of-the art, I’ve been checking out the offerings of others, and subscribing if they are feed-enabled. It seems like the focus of most of the feed-enabled blogs I’ve stumbled across is ‘Web 2.0′, whatever that is.

One dude in particular is especially interesting, though I’m not going to mention him by name or track back to him just yet. For now I’ll just call him ‘Clifford Stoll 2.0′.

For anyone who doesn’t remember, in 1996, Clifford Stoll wrote a book called ‘Silicon Snake Oil’ that was thoughtfully critical of the giddy boosterism surrounding the internet boom of the late ’90’s.

Stoll made the point that an enhanced virtual life can’t and won’t fix many of the problems of real life, which is true as far as it goes. And as he said, you can’t snake out a drain by pointing and clicking. What he failed to acknowledge is that if you’ve never snaked a drain before, you can learn how by pointing and clicking.

Stoll 2.0, on the other hand, is concerned that the open, accessible world of internet self-publishing, the many-to-many media paradigm that currently threatens traditional top-down broadcast media, is a grievous threat to what he calls ‘elite culture’.

His position is a variation on ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, a parable created by William Forster Lloyd, that demonstrates how unrestricted access to a resource ultimately dooms the resource because of over-exploitation.

The Commons that Stoll 2.0 is talking about is attention. In his view, the ever-increasing volume of stuff out there, especially stuff generated by amateurs or avocational creators, will overwhelm what he calls ‘elite culture’.

And it seems to me that what he’s calling ‘elite culture’ is the stuff generated by the traditional media outlets — big media, he calls it.

I’m in complete agreement with him on the importance of elite culture, though I don’t think that elite culture is always a product of the existing elites.

Amateur or avocational creators are no threat to elite culture and may in fact contribute to and expand the boundaries of it.

Elite culture isn’t the result of discovery and marketing by a large media company but rather the result of extraordinary talent or even genius.

Extraordinary talent and genius are self-evident, even to people on MySpace.

I always liked Austin City Limits, and the formula of putting a band or two in a live context, and then capturing the performance appealed to me.

I hadn’t seen the show for a long time. And I was interested in seeing what the media powers-that-be were currently flogging. So a week or two ago, I set up the TiVo with a season pass for Austin City Limits.

Last night after we finished with ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘Big Love’ there was still an hour or so left before bedtime, and there was a recent Austin City Limits on the TiVo ‘Now Playing’ list.

The show had aired in the last couple of weeks and featured two bands, The Killers and Spoon.

I had no idea who either were, though I was more than a little curious about The Killers because I’m a big fan of their namesake, Jerry Lee Lewis.

Spoon were billed as an Austin band, and I had an immediate flash of earnest, very un-Texas looking young men in earth-tones doing wordy songs for sensitive, introverted boys and girls to puzzle over in their well-appointed suburban bedrooms.

As it turns out, I wasn’t far wrong but first, The Killers.

All of a sudden, it’s 1983 again and I’m in a dingy, hot, crowded strip-mall night-club at the height of the new-wave suburban dispersion.

Back then thousands of bands like The Killers were knockin’ it out and makin’ ‘em sweat in towns small, medium, and large all across the USA. And none of those bands were much good, either.

Two seconds into The Killer’s set, I had them pegged, right on the Joy Division/New Order border but blander instrumentally, with a big dash of early U2, and, dare I say it, Freddy Mercury thrown in.

Perfectly OK stuff for rockin’ the secretaries and shoe salesmen down at the strip mall, but despite being one of the latest things being flogged by some big media company or another, totally unremarkable and undeniable proof that the wave of post-punk resurgence is cresting.

Spoon were just what I thought they’d be, a group of earnest, over-funded young men attuned to the coffee shop/bookstore side of town singing wordy songs and playing some of the coolest vintage guitars ever.

While The Killers would probably *be* shoe salesmen if they weren’t making music, more than one of Spoon are going to go to law school eventually.

The Killers definitely had the feel of a band — a group effort — despite the flashy frontman, though the group effort was weak in the songwriting department. But the rhythm section rocked hard.

Spoon, on the other hand, were definitely about the singer/songwriter. The rest of the band were probably some non-threatening buddies — OK musicians with no tunes of their own. The drummer had some of the weirdest body-mechanics I’ve ever seen in a percussionist and the bassist was so introverted that he might have imploded at any moment.

Spoon were probably the better band by a nose, but that isn’t saying much. Neither were anything special. And both were definitely big-media productions. Elite culture? Probably not.

You can find bands this good and even better on MySpace.

But hey, if you smoosh the two together taking the rhythmic drive, sweaty energy and feral sexuality of The Killers, getting rid of the brick-dumb songwriting, and pouring in Spoon’s smarty-pants lyrics while leaving out the goin’ to law school vibe and keeping the cool guitars, bingo! You’ve got it — The Spoon Killers.

Meanwhile, if a real band in the neo post-punk mode interests you, I recommend !!! and especially The Rapture.

Playing right now: 99 Problems, DJ Danger Mouse from The Grey Album.

On Vinyl of late: White Album, The Beatles; Blow By Blow and Wired, Jeff Beck; ‘Dance To The Music of Irving Berlin’, uncredited, on SpinORama Records.

Over the last several months or so I’ve watched numerous anti-abortion advocates discussing unplanned pregnancies, abortion, birth control, and sex education on a variety of television news magazines.

It doesn’t seem to me that the issue is abortion at all. If anti-abortion activists were truly interested in reducing the number of abortions, they’d be strong advocates for sex education and easy access to contraception.

But these people, most of whom are evangelical christians, want to criminalize not only abortion, but sex education and contraception for sexually active minors.

The end result of this, of course, will be more unwanted pregnancies, back-alley abortions, neglected children, suffering, and crime.

It’s the sex. Sex bothers these people, and if they had their way, they’d outlaw any sexual activity that didn’t lead to procreation. I think the sex-without-procreation thing is also at the root of the virulent and ugly campaign against homosexuals by the religious right.

iPod Update

If you’re using an iPod with gtkpod on a Linux machine, don’t plug it back into a machine (Mac or PC) with the iTunes software on it. I did this on Sunday, and the damn iTunes software deleted the iTunes database from my ‘pod, making everything I’d tranferred onto it invisible.

Not a big deal really, I just put it all back on. But if I’d had a lot of customized playlists, etc. set up, I would have been pissed.

When I reloaded the iPod this time, I put on a more astringent mix of music, with quite a bit of European free improv, some Japanese noise and a bit of obscure post-punk — Orange Juice, Chrome, and Josef K.

Playing right now: “Two Horn’d Reasoning: Cloven Fiction”, Evan Parker & Paul Lytton
Playing a couple of minutes ago: “Not Great Men”, Gang of Four; “Lost Someone”, James Brown

On vinyl yesterday: “Burning From The Inside”, Bauhaus; The Bears, self-titled.
On vinyl today: “Rubber Soul” by the Beatles.

Who could possibly believe that beating a 14 year old boy to death in the name of rehabilitation is a good idea? Only in the Banana Republic Of Florida, another state, along with Kansas, that I’ll never visit …

Vinyl LP today and yesterday: triple LP by The Band, ‘The Last Waltz’
Playing right now: ‘Jesus Built My Hot Rod’ by Ministry

That congressman from Texas — what was his name??

Thanks to Matt Taibbi for that. I laughed until I cried.

Yesterday’s vinyl was ‘Joan’ by Joan Baez and ‘Dimensions’ by James Bailey.
Spiced up the iPod shuffle with ‘Anthology of American Folk Music’ curated by Harry Smith

Playing right now: ‘Rob A Bank’ by The Pop Group

There are people out there who actually expect the world to function to their convenience. I discovered this soon after I started paying the bills doing PC support fifteen or sixteen years ago. I was dumbstruck by it.

My experience had been, well, different than that. I grew up adjusting to things that didn’t work to my convenience. Having to flex around weird, ungainly, unexpected and maybe dangerous situations. Making do with things that maybe worked once and still worked once in a while, but couldn’t really be counted on to deliver all the time. Piece of shit cars that ran most of the time, but that had chronic ailments that you had to work around with jumper cables and big screwdrivers. Cars that wouldn’t start or did unusual things when it rained or when you tried to drive up a steep hill. Appliances with missing buttons that made sinister noises and that might burst apart, but never did. Weird, unsavory heating devices that smoked or threatened to electrocute you. Thumping, grunting washing machines that danced across the floor. Windows that wouldn’t open, wouldn’t close, or stuck somewhere between. Toilets that required handle-jiggling and big buckets of water to stop running, start running, or flush properly.

In short, life as I knew it didn’t work and living was an ongoing improvisation and problem solving exercise.

Working with computers, and technology in general was and still is fucked up, arbitrary, and inconsistent. And that was OK with me. I felt right at home.

But some people just couldn’t deal. They were reasonably intelligent people but they were used to secretaries they could order around, and then poof! The secretaries were gone and in their place they had a chunk of dumb metal with a tube on top and a keyboard.

The secret is simple. Flexibility. Computers and technology in general are totally inflexible in the human sense, at least for now. So all the flexibility in the situation has to come from you-know-who. And you have to improvise. If you can’t do it one way, you have to come up with a dozen other ways to do it and try each one ’till you find one that works.

Then I discovered that the people who didn’t have this ability, didn’t have it because they’d never needed it. They didn’t need it because they had always done what they were doing now — calling someone. And the someone they were calling was me.

Soon after I graduated from college, I found myself, a newly minted Bachelor of Arts, working in a poultry slaughterhouse cutting whole chicken carcasses into pieces. My immediate supervisor was someone from the Special Ed classes at the high school I’d attended. My first day on the line, I looked around and noted that most of the people around me were missing teeth. And then I noticed that the people right around me were missing fingers too. I was issued three razor-sharp knives and a stainless-steel mesh glove like a knight’s gauntlet for my other hand. The gloves were a recent development as the digitally challenged would attest. Right across from me, 18 inches away were three other guys, heavily tatooed, with the same sharp knives. They were there on work release.

If I could have called someone to change that situation, I would have. Really. But since there was no one to call and I needed the money, I had to figure out a way to deal and dealing took flexibility and improvisation.

My first serious PC support gig was with a magazine publisher who specialized in small, niche magazines about special interests — hobbies of the rich, I used to call them. It took me about a day and a half on the job to figure out that the people who actually wrote the stuff in the magazines — aside from the ads, that is — were the least important people there. Consequently, they didn’t make much money. And because they didn’t make much money, they tended to be the wives or children of successful men. People with allowances.

They also got the absolute shittiest computers. The real trash. Of course, this didn’t mesh very well with the sense of entitlement you get from an allowance and seeing your name in print.

What they all wanted was a Macintosh. But at $4000, it wasn’t going to happen, at least for an editor.

Specialty magazine production is boilerplate. The titles are created by entrepreneurs who sell out and move on. By the time the magazines reach a specialty publisher, they are in the market exploitation phase. The physical layout and appearance of each title are predetermined. The bulk of editorial items recur each month, and feature article thematics recur on a seasonal basis to support the sale of advertising. Features are purchased from freelancers, at about $300 each.

You don’t have to be HL Mencken to put these titles out — it’s a paint-by-numbers proposition.

Meanwhile, as a PC support person, I solved unique problems all the time, often with wildly varying resource and time constraints.

When the issue of Macintosh versus PC came up, these paragons of letters told me that I didn’t understand their need for Macintosh computers because I wasn’t a ‘creative person’. Uh huh. Ok.

So, as PC support person, I became the the foil for their dissatisfaction. I found myself cast as an apologist for the plodding, proletarian, bean-counting PC versus the dashing, aristocratic, creative Macintosh.

I experienced first-hand the powerful results of Steve Jobs and his genius for life-style technology marketing.

Of course, these editor-savants would have been equally clueless and demanding with a Macintosh, or any computer for that matter.

Servants are user-friendly. Computers, on the other hand, are tedious and frustrating. But infinitely powerful, as Turing pointed out. A machine that can model and contain any other machine. A prosthesis and lever for the mind.

LP’s on vinyl this morning: ‘Sense and Sensuality’ by the AuPairs, ‘Wild Planet’ by the B-52’s.
Shuffling right now on the iPod: ‘Mr. Lee’ by the Bobbettes

My wife works in Information Technology as a DBA — that’s Data Base Administrator — and as part of an ongoing project, she will be working the second shift for the next several weeks.

As a self-employed person, I have the freedom to arrange my schedule any way I like so I generally arrange things so that I work, eat and sleep at about the same time my wife does, so we can enjoy our time outside of working hours together. So for the next several weeks, I’ll be on second shift, too.

Yesss! I love second shift. Back in the day when I was wage-slaving at whatever boring, dangerous, humiliating and ill-paid labor I could find to sustain myself, I always took a second shift, if I could get it.

Second shift, for the benefit of those effete folk out there who have been spared the indignities of retail, factory and data center, is the shift that starts mid-afternoon and lasts ’till late night, usually 2 or 3 PM until 10 or 11 PM.

It’s great because you get to both sleep in and stay up late, yet you don’t have the surrealistic and profoundly unhealthy schedule inversion of working a deep night shift — third shift — and having to sleep during the day. It was also great during the years when my work wasn’t my job. I could do whatever after I got up … devote the first and freshest part of my day to doing art or whatever else pleased me before going in and putting in whatever time I had to to pay the bills.

Second shift is better on a practical level, too. If there’s a commute, there’s less traffic traveling to and from work in midafternoon and late at night. Supermarkets are less crowded when you shop in the late morning, it’s easier to get a haircut or see a doctor, a mid-week matinee is absolutely the best way to see a film at the multiplex, and all the best TV airs after 11 PM.

So for the next few weeks, Gail and I will be sleeping in ’till mid-morning and staying up ’till 1 or 2 am, a schedule that really suits my body and sleep patterns. And then of course, it will end and we’ll switch back to our typical 6AM to 11PM schedule and stumble through a few days of jet-lag making the shift back to the old schedule.

LP records of the day today were Laurie Anderson’s ‘Strange Angels’ and a promotional vinyl excerpt from her 5 LP ‘United States’.

Meanwhile, my iPod shuffles on down here in the studio as I work. Right now the selection is ‘Miller High Life’ by PiL.

Yesterday I wrote about how much I like the iPod, though my relationship with Apple Computer and their products has seen quite a few ups and downs.

I started shopping for my first personal computer in 1987, and at that time, the Apple Macintosh was the really cool, really expensive computer that I couldn’t have. At almost $4000 1987 dollars for the basic beige toaster with a few kilobytes of memory and a single floppy drive, a Mac just wasn’t going to happen, at least for the rest of us in my neighborhood.

I’d almost resigned myself to a PC clone when I found out about the Commodore Amiga. Wow. Forgot all about the Mac. The Amiga had specialized chips for both graphics and sound production, just the ticket for the kind of thing I had in mind. For twelve hundred bucks, I could get an Amiga 500 with a color monitor, and a bundle of software that included office productivity stuff like a spreadsheet, a database and a word processor, plus a color drawing/paint program. And with both a GUI and a CLI, the Amiga seemed to have all the strengths of both the Mac and the PC compatibles.

On top of it all, the local Amiga dealer had an Amiga 2000 set up in the shop that was playing full motion video. And as part of trumpeting the ‘multimedia capabilities’ of the A500, the shop was running a promotion that included a free VCR with the purchase of the Amiga 500 (completely useless as I was to find out) but as visions of authoring moving pictures with sound in the privacy of my own home danced in my head, I pulled out my checkbook and drained my account of the hard-earned cash I’d scraped together to buy my way into the information age.

After I read the William Gibson cyberpunk trilogy and Stewart Brand’s rah-rah futurist manifesto ‘The Media Lab:Discovering the future at MIT”, I was so hot to get a personal computer and become a part of this new world that it was like hunger, an itch I absolutely had to scratch.

I spent every available moment with the Amiga for several years after. I added additional memory, a second floppy drive, a BASIC compiler, an assembler, and a modem. I wrote stuff in BASIC + assembly language, dialed in to BBS’s and even bought a subscription and did some lurking on The Well.

But sadly, the Amiga just wasn’t happening. Or it was, and nobody noticed or cared. The Amiga that I had, with 1 meg of memory and dual floppy drives, was great for doing BBS’s, programming simple graphics + sound in BASIC, and using a drawing/paint program. But to do more, I needed a hard drive, significantly more memory, a genlock, and a MIDI interface. Adding all of this would cost thousands of dollars.

By the early 1990’s, the handwriting was on the wall. The PC compatible platform was winning. I could buy a whole new PC compatible with a 286 processor, a megabyte of memory and a 40 megabyte hard drive for less than the cost of a 40 meg Amiga hard drive alone.

At about the same time, I’d been able to use the database chops that I’d developed playing with the Amiga to talk my way off of the factory floor and into a job that allowed me to go to the bathroom whenever I wanted to.

As soon as I saw an advance copy of Windows 3.0, I knew it was all over for the Amiga. With a GUI, the PC might be OK. You couldn’t beat the low cost of commodity hardware. And the Mac was still a ridiculously expensive computer sold in snotty stores by self-important assholes. So I reluctantly abandoned my Amiga. I continued to use it for all of the stuff I’d always used it for, but I didn’t spend another nickel on it. Instead, I went out and bought a 286 PC.

The PC aesthetics were a letdown versus the snappy Amiga Workbench, but it was a laptop and I loved the form-factor. Having a computer you could carry around with you and use in any room of the house really made the personal computer, well, personal.

I didn’t buy my first Macintosh until 1993, when the consumer line, called Performa, was introduced and sold in mass-market outlets. I had purchased a second PC — a desktop — but I’d run into the dreaded MIDI timing issues inherent to Windows circa the time, and I either had to buy a Mac or learn to live with time drift in MIDI sequences.

By this time, I was out of the factory altogether, working in IT for a publishing company, discovering the Internet, and had downloaded my first Linux distribution — Slackware with a .99p11-14 kernel. But that’s a story for another day.

Playing right now: ‘Look Horizon’ by John Cale from ‘Hobosapiens’.

I hate to gush about products, and especially Apple products, but the 5g iPod my wife gave me for my birthday is, well, fucking great, or Insanely Great as the Apple fanboys like to put it.

The aesthetics are flawless, of course. The only ugly products out of Apple came under the ill-fated regime of Dr. Gil who, truth be told was a bit of an ug himself. Ever since Jobs has been back, the products have been nothing if not pretty.

And it works with Linux. After initializing the thing with the iTunes software on my wife’s WinXP laptop, I plugged it into the usb port on my Fedora 4 desktop machine, mounted it right up as a vfat file system, fired up gtkpod, and I was ready to go.

I quickly uploaded about 100 CD titles from my mp3 collection, plugged the earbuds into my ears and hit shuffle.

The sound quality was pretty good — not the quality of a good set of closed headphones, of course, but decent. And at moderate volume — about half-way up — the music is loud enough to yield up a pretty good level of detail, but because of the open ear bud design ambient sounds are still audible.

So if you like an immersive listening experience, a replacement for the stock earbuds is probably in order. But if you want to use the iPod for listening while out walking or in other settings where being aware of your aural surroundings is important, the stock earbuds work pretty well.

In fact, the blend of ambient and recorded sound can be interesting. I was out walking the other day with the iPod on shuffle, as usual, and a Robert Rich track (can’t remember which one) came up. It was a beautiful spring day out, crystal clear and 68 degrees. Birds were singing. Cars were driving by as I walked, with the windows open and the radios playing. All of this blended in seamlessly with the track I was listening to, and before long the barrier between my experience of the recorded track I was listening to and the ambient sounds in the environment dissolved. Nice.

The ‘pod works pretty well in the car too, though I am far from being a picky automotive audiophile. My wife included one of those little Belkin FM transmitters with the gift, so all I had to do was plug it into the iPod, set it for 88.5, tune my car FM radio to the same station, and hit shuffle.

What you get is the best radio station in the world. Since you get to pick the universe of music, nothing will really suck. Yet, since the shuffle option is random, you don’t know what’s coming next. Some of the contextual juxtapositions that happen are surprising and delightful. And there’s no danger of having song-intros greased by an oleo-voiced asshole dj. In fact, there’s no talking at all unless you put some spoken-word or audio book files on there yourself.

On the day I got the ‘pod (my birthday) we both took the day off and hit the road for an early-spring sight-seeing auto-tour through northeastern Pennsylvania anthracite country punctuated with stops for various small-town food specialities.

The ‘pod was loaded with the entire Nick Cave major-label discog, most of the Joy Division in print, a lot of :zoviet*france:, some Tuxedomoon, Coltrane’s Ascension, some Robert Rich, John Cale, KMFDM, Alice In Chains, most of PiL, some Univers Zero, My Bloody Valentine, Kate Bush, Gang Of Four, Art Of Noise, The Rapture, and even Tom Petty’s Damn The Torpedoes, a guilty pleasure. And to top it all off, I put the whole Atlantic Rhythm and Blues collection on. As soon as I rip my black Stax box, that’s going on too.

What a great soundtrack for driving through the beauty and despair of the small towns and blasted anthracite landscape of northeastern Pennsylvania.

I finally got around to trying out the video side of the iPod 5g yesterday, and I was in for another pleasant surprise. The little 2×3 inch screen looks great. I downloaded an Apple commercial from 1977 that featured David Susskind — or Dick Cavett, I don’t remember the difference — to test things out, and it worked great.

It took me most of yesterday afternoon to work out how to encode video for use on an iPod. ffmpeg will do the trick, as long as you compile it with aac support. The format is mpeg4 video with aac audio, 320×240. For those of you who are interested in the process, here’s a good ffmpeg command line.

I encoded and uploaded a video study of mine Study One. Even though this video was designed for high-resolution projection and nearly every frame is different , the compressed version played on a ‘pod conveys quite a bit of the original. I also encoded and downloaded a great abstract film by Harry Smith ‘Court Metrage 7th Degree (cocaine)’. This also looked great though the soundtrack was in mono — not necessarily a bad thing as the soundtrack on the version I have is made up of Beatle tunes.

I had a couple of cheap imitation Walkmen back in the day, and I even bought one of the first Creative Labs mp3 players back at the end of the last century. But the iPod is something else again. A new and intriguing way to listen to music.

I contrast this with my tradition-bound listening habits. Being a 51 year old baby-boomer, I came up in the day of the 45 single, but more than that, I came of age when the LP was ascendant. Track order and pacing of the work as a whole was at least as important as the individual songs. Lifting the tone arm after the record started to spin and cherry-picking tracks was a heresy. Listening to sides was OK, maybe. But really, immersing yourself in the (capital A) artist’s complete vision — the LP — was the only acceptable way to listen.

Recently, I’ve started listening through my collection of vinyl LP’s, a collection that spans the 25 years from 1965 to 1990. I’m workng through alphabetically. One or two albums a day before/during breakfast and before I start the day’s work. This morning’s listening was ‘Only Human’ by Amon Duul II and ‘Mister Heartbreak’ by Laurie Anderson.

LP listening is different than the random-track heresy of the iPod. You do the LP ritual — pulling it out of it’s sleeve, putting it on the turntable, preparing the discwasher brush and cleaning the surface, then setting the needle into the groove of the first track and settling into a comfy chair to peruse the jacket and liner notes while the first side plays. Then, in 20 or so minutes, you get up to flip to the other side.

Yet, the iPod is better in a lot of ways, I think. As comforting as the LP ritual is, the sedentary contemplation of jacket and liner notes while listening leads to the fetish for lyrics and the persona of the creator that is the handmaiden of commodification. Listening on the go with the iPod strips all that away. The intended context is gone, there’s no artifact to finger and nothing to read. So all you’re left with is the pure experience of the music in the moment, as if that isn’t enough.

So Apple has a hit with the iPod, though everyone but me knew that a long time ago. My love-hate relationship with Apple swings back to love, at least for a while. But more on that later.

Playing right now: Nick Cave’s ‘Stagger Lee’