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"Steady State Funk" [mp3 removed]
I believe this to be a "killer riff." You could probably dance to it!
Enjoyed the first season of HBO's The Wire (thanks, S), but stopped watching Season 2 partway through the DVD box set. Reasons:
1. Ziggy. (Uggh)
2. The Greek and his crew. So many ominous silences, so much meaningful espresso-sipping.
3. Not enough Omar.
4. Too many characters recycling moves from first season.
5. Stevedore makes philosophical speeches about the decline of unions--eloquent but too writerly to be believed.
6. Last but not least--two union guys want to find out more about the chemicals The Greek is smuggling in shipping containers they handle, so they go to the public library and use Microsoft's Live Search.
Kristin Lucas, Travel Advisory, 2007, lightbox. Featured in a show opening in about an hour at Postmasters, 459 W 19th Street, New York, and running through March 17 (Gallery 1: Eva and Franco Mattes [a.k.a. 0100101110101101.ORG] are showing "13 Most Beautiful Avatars," and in Gallery 2 it's Lucas, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, and Wolfgang Staehle). The Creeping Unknown is back, but it's OK, it's been normalized.
Update: this image has not been reBlogged or picked up anywhere that I'm aware of. Possibly because it does not "make people feel good" which is an important part of art practice.
The US Senate is still scared of Bush even though the President's popularity numbers are in the low 30s. They can't even muster the votes for a toothless resolution on the Iraq War escalation, despite the clear will of US voters expressed last November. Supporting the troops means getting them out of there, you numbskulls, not letting Bush kill them. I believe I speak for the majority of Americans in saying, I don't trust Bush, why do you? (Answer: smear merchant Karl Rove has pictures of all of them in their underpants.)
A post from MyDD, minus the links, on the current Balkanized state of American cell phone networks, giving us a glimpse of a what a non-neutral Internet would resemble:
Matt's mentioned Tim Wu's most excellent paper on the American wireless scene twice now, but I don't think this horse is dead yet. Wu paints a nice -- and by "nice," I mean kinda horrifying -- picture of what an Internet missing the fundamental principle of neutrality might look like. Take, for example, the state of innovation in the cellular market. Here in the U.S., wireless carriers rule the roost. They control what phones hook up to their networks. Since equipment developers have to design for particular networks, carriers pretty much control their entry into the market. Carriers lock phones to their networks and cripple [them on] neat technologies like Bluetooth, wi-fi, and even call timers (so as not to have you compare your records to theirs). Couple that with no real standards for software development, and few people bother building exciting new cell phone apps. To get a snazzy new iPhone you have enter into a contract with AT&T/Cingular, which is roughly analogous to Apple telling you that your new MacBook won't go online unless you switch to Comcast. The way wireless works today, innovation is only tolerated if it benefits the carrier, not the consumer.
Wireline (you know, when phones have wires) is of course pretty different. Yeah, the landline phone companies once argued that it was technically necessary for theirs to be "totally unified" systems. But today we can hook up just about any device to a phone line -- like, say, a modem -- because we were smart enough to enshrine the idea of open networks into law.
Over at the Agonist, Ian Welsh has more on the American wireless landscape, written in sort of fairy tale prose. Whatever it takes. In convincing people of the dangers of a carrier-controlled Internet, I think we could do worse than to get them to reflect on their own personal experiences as cell phone consumers.