Moby, Coldplay, Walter Cronkite

20090719 Blog

I’m wrapping up day one of a three day weekend. Spent rather a lot of time online today, in a fairly idle way. Listened to Moby’s new album, “Wait for Me.” If you’re on Facebook, you can listen to it at http://apps.facebook.com/mobydownloads/. I thought it was kinda blah, actually. I liked Moby’s “18.” This is way inferior to that.

And then I downloaded, free, Coldplay’s live album. Only listened to the first song of that, so far, which was OK. That one you can get at http://bit.ly/WTgiP. It’s a zip file, but it’s OK. It’s definitely from Coldplay.

I also listened to all of a CD that had two old 1965 Peter & Gordon albums, “I Go to Pieces” and “True Love Ways.” Here’s the thing: when P&G are good, they are very good. When they are bad, they are just awful. Their cover of Elvis’ “All Shook Up” is about the lamest recording I’ve ever heard. But that “I Go to Pieces” is sweet! They were one uneven act. And fairly often, Gordon’s singing was just absurd.

This has been kind of a 60s day. The whole of CBS Sunday Morning was dedicated to Walter Cronkite, the legendary CBS newsman who just died. I wonder if my Brit friends have heard of him? While he was a consistently important and reliable newsman, he is generally famous for three broadcasts, and the reason he is famous for them is precisely because he deviated from his usual, meticulous, factual reporting. People trusted him because of that reporting, but also because they could see he was a real person, with real emotions that came out during the momentous events he reported.

The first, of course, was his reporting of the assassination of JFK. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen all of this. The guy taking the presidential seal off the podium where JFK was supposed to speak... Never saw that before. I was in the 4th grade, and I think I was home for lunch (I lived a few blocks from school and could walk home). I was (seriously) probably watching Bozo the Clown on Chicago’s WGN at the time. They probably interrupted it with a bulletin, which is probably why TV bulletins even now send a chill down my spine. But I really don’t remember anything until the part where I got back to school and the teachers were all crying and they had us watch TV all afternoon.


Couldn’t find a decent clip of his Vietnam speech, but what happened was, he’d been over there and was very troubled by the loss of American lives. It was after the Tet offensive, and he believed he had to editorialize against the war, because the government and the military were simply lying. After his speech, President Johnson famously said, “If we’ve lost Walter Cronkite, we’ve lost America.”

Finally, this is a short clip about his reporting of the lunar landing (which BTW happened 40 years ago today). In it, you can see his famous reaction, taking off his glasses and saying, “Oh, boy!” Overwhelmed:

Classical Music Notes from All Over

I did not set out to write an entire blog about the current classical music scene at all, but one thing led to another:

I’m listening to a CD of Gloria Cheng performing world premieres of late 20th century solo piano works by Steven Stucky (born 1949), Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994), and Esa-Pekka Salonen (born 1958). So right away, for one thing, I am hearing, for possibly the first time, “classical” music written by someone who is younger than me.



Such horror aside, the CD, Piano Music Of Salonen, Stucky, And Lutoslawski, won the 2008 Grammy Award for "Best Instrumental Soloist(s) Performance (without Orchestra)." Stucky and Salonen both studied under the Polish composer Lutoslawski. (Salonen, probably, better known to most as the Music Director of the L.A. Philharmonic & principal conductor of the London Philharmonia). From what I’ve heard of them, modern Polish composers favor the lyrical more than most others, especially more than a lot of 20th century Americans. I think that rubbed off on Stucky and Salonen a little, although some by the latter are more atonal. This piano music is more something I would happily sit down and listen to than some other modern works. Stucky compares it to Debussy, which I can see, and Stravinsky, which, not so much....


Speaking of piano music, the Van Cliburn Foundation has graciously posted on YouTube quite a few (maybe all) performances from the 2009 Van Cliburn competition and, in fact, streamed the whole competition live at http://www.cliburn.tv/, a fact which, sadly, I didn’t learn until just now.

BTW, the winners were announced today: Gold Medalists (tie for first): Nobuyuki Tsujii, 20 (Japan) and Haochen Zhang, 19 (China) and Silver Medalist: Ms. Yeol Eum Son, 23 (South Korea).

The YouTube URL is http://www.youtube.com/user/VanCliburnFoundation

Finally, I think I may have mentioned this performance when I first heard it several months ago on a California radio station. Recently on Performance Today they’ve replayed it: Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov's delightful work, Azul, performed by Yo-Yo Ma with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Jeffrey Kahane.

This was one of the best Performance Today shows I’ve heard and it included another finalist in the Van Cliburn Competition, Bulgarian Evgeni Bozhanov, who plays the Third movement from Piano Quintet in F Minor by Cesar Franck. You can hear all of this week’s episode of Performance Today at:

http://performancetoday.publicradio.org/

(I like to show the actual URLs so people know where they’re going.)

Getting back to Golijov’s Azul, if there is one thing I’ve mentioned here that you should listen to, that is it. It is very beautiful, creative, and entertaining! It has a lot of cool percussion that reminded me of one of my all-time favorite jazz pieces, Pharoah Sander’s
"Astral-Travelling," which was on his album, Thembi. Fortunately, this song is on YouTube!

Conan Leno Letterman Ferguson Fallon & Kimmel

I don't think Letterman has to worry about his ratings. Hard to say how Conan will do. I think Leno was very lucky to have Kevin Eubanks as both a very talented band leader and a very likable sidekick of sorts, whereas I can't stand Paul Shaffer. Max Weinberg is a great musician, and they did some funny things with him, but he was not a real sidekick. I like Andy Richter, but they definitely need to tone him down a lot. I thought the cross-country bit was generally pretty funny, though long. I didn't think the monologue was terribly funny....

I like Conan OK, but his monologues have always been very short, and the bits that followed were very uneven. I very seldom watch the guest segments. (And I don't like Will Ferrell, so I turned it off at that point and got back on with Pearl Jam--who were pretty good.) I'll probably watch Conan from time to time, but I may well just tape Leno and watch him then, I dunno.

While I'm on the subject, I still really haven't watched Fallon at all. But from what little I have seen, I wonder if he has a dynamic enough personality to pull it off. From what I've heard, at least the writing is pretty funny. And I still can't believe he got The Roots! But I do like Ferguson best. It amazes me what he does with what little they give him.

I just never got in the habit of thinking about ABC late nights. I don't even know when Jimmy Kimmel is on. I like him, but you can only watch so many talk shows. However, I do think, of all the people I've seen, he would be the best replacement for Regis. I don't know if there would be more money in it for him there or not.

What if they gave a Rapture... and nobody left?

Love + Sex with Robots

If I were me, but a college kid again, starting a psych major, I would--well, OK, I would still be most interested in courses that might explain why I’m such a screwed up individual.... But after that, I would be surely want to take a few courses in the psychology of artificial intelligence. Of course, to paraphrase Alexander Pope, the proper study of robots is man--at least as far as psychology goes.

Anyone reading this already has a fair amount of experience with interacting with computers. Take MySpace. This corporation has chosen to have its users interact with a spokesperson, Tom, even though, for most people, it’s decidedly a one way interaction.

Back when the blogs were down, I actually visited his site, looked at some of his blogs, to see if he had anything to say about the problem. His blog was on the musty side. His bulletins nearly always promote some new service or product.

Wouldn’t we all be better served by an artificial intelligence MySpace friend who communicated with us on a regular basis about what was actually going on?

Eventually, computers will be talking to us a lot more. If there is a MySpace, when we log on, we will probably be greeted by some avatar for Tom. (Hopefully, we’ll be able to disable him if we like!) Maybe, if they’re smart, we can chose it to be a lady avatar. Really, even with the current technology, it’s amazing how unimaginative MySpace is....

Anyway, what brought some of these thoughts on is the book I’ve been reading (up to p. 110 at the moment), David Levy’s Love + Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships (2007).



This does eventually get as creepy as it sounds. Near the end, I’ve noted illustrations of mechanical devices, like the Stallion XL Sex Machine:



Which, actually, is less creepy than the whole plastic fantastic lover notion for men. (I’m sure there are some for women, too.) Frankly, for me, personally, creepy isn’t the word. Silly. Silly is the word.

But as for the sex machines, businesses are making them, people are buying them, with prices generally ranging between $1,000 and $2,000. And as far as the dolls go, once on some HBO show I saw some very expensive ones that were much closer to lifelike than the more familiar ones that look more like something you’d use as a beach raft. Anyway, while I look forward to what Levy has to say on the subject, clearly, such things will always be pretty damn expensive.

And so, it’s much more likely that people will, in some way, come to love their computers and/or robots than that they will have sex with them physically. Levy explores this in a very persuasive, methodical way, beginning with the psychological theory of attachment, and the way our relationship with the mother extends to other relationships. He talks about the notion of transitional objects, like security blankets or teddy bears, that ease us away from the intensity of that original relationship. And then of course there are pets, and he has a lot of interesting things to say about our relations with them.

I’ll probably back track to some of that in some other blogs, but as for computers and robots, one thing is very clear: even though most all of us understand that the computer is not a human but a machine, very many of us will react to it, in varying degrees, as if it were. For instance, if empathetic responses are programmed in, if the computer provides positive support, and so on, people have much more favorable responses to the computer (or the software), than if everything is conducted in a strictly no-nonsense, unemotional way.

If an avatar is used and given a name and uses empathy--as in the case of “Laura,” a computerized fitness coach, people will be much more inclined to say things like “Laura and I trust one another.”



[Laura, created by MIT’S Tom Bickmore a few years ago]

Nearly all pet owners talk to their animals and some people even talk to their cars and such, so it’s no great stretch at all to predict that as AI develops (and it will, exponentially), we will be interacting with robots in ways that increasingly mirror human relationships.

Eugene Sharp, non-violent revolutionary, and thoughts on the news

In the further downscaling of my life, my newspaper subscription ran out and I told them I wasn’t renewing it. So far, they’re still delivering it....

Aside from the expense, it was getting environmentally embarrassing. Every day I would flip through it and immediately discard about 75% of it. Most of the stuff is online, anyway, and of course I check Reuters several times a day. Clearly, the days of the print newspaper are numbered, although they may last ten years or so. If you look at the financials of any of them, they all have a ton of debt, so they may not last even that long.

I’m not entirely happy about it all, though. I don’t really like reading long articles online. It’s nicer with a newspaper. Perhaps some of the really good papers will hang on longer. So far, for instance, the Wall Street Journal seems more or less undiminished after Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of it. At the moment, I think it’s the best newspaper I’m aware of. Certainly the best in the USA. Its editorials are extremely right wing, but it consistently has these fantastic articles.

Take, for instance, the recent article on Gene Sharp, who is sort of the Saul Alinsky of modern non-violent revolution.



http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122127204268531319.html?mod=hps_us_pageone

It is at the same time a cool story about this obscure yet important 80-year old man and the sort of background journalism that has become all too rare:

“Spread via the Internet, word-of-mouth and seminars, Mr. Sharp's writings on nonviolent resistance have been studied by opposition activists in Zimbabwe, Burma, Russia, Venezuela and Iran, among others. His 1993 guide to unseating despots, From Dictatorship to Democracy, has been translated into at least 28 languages and was used by movements that toppled governments in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan.”

The complete text of From Dictatorship to Democracy is available at:

www.aeinstein.org/organizations/org/FDTD.pdf

Getting back to the subjecet of news in gerneral, up until recently, I had CNN.com on my Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar, but I finally decided that CNN had degenerated into junk / tabloid news. Reuters is fairly decent....

Oil Realities

Every now and then I read something in the paper that accurately describes something when nearly everyone else seems not to even get it. This time it was a column by the Waco Tribune-Harold writer, John Young. Waco as in Texas, where they understand the oil business.

“Hear the drill-at-all-cost chorus and it will tell you that exploration in ANWR is about ‘energy security’ or ‘energy independence.’

“No.... It’s about money. Not a drop of the oil that would be harvest in ANWR is ‘ours.’

“It’s the world’s. It’s as much the dread Russkies’ as yours or mine. That’s the definition of a global market. Any free-market conservative ought to be able to explain it to you. ANWR oil would go in the same collective vat as any other oil.”

He goes on to agree that, sure, it would, in a broad general sense, make some slight improvement in global supply, but it probably would not lower prices as much as reducing supply.

Similarly, just recently, Iraq signed a contract providing $3 billion worth of oil to the Chinese. I bring this up, in particular, because I’ve always found the “No blood for oil” slogan puzzling. It was never explained how our soldiers’ blood was supposed to produce oil for us. It might in fact have been a good idea if somewhere along the line we might have asked for some oil in repayment for ruining our economy over the war. But, while there have been contracts here and there with Western oil companies, obviously, Iraqi oil is even less “ours” than the ANWR oil.

If it were really only or even mainly about oil, obviously the thing to do would have been to simply settle up with Saddam, remove all sanctions, and carry on as before.