There’s Me….Then There’s….
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008Riffs&Revolutions: Michael Gonzales on Luther Vandross
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008
Recently my friend and fellow critic Amy Linden and I were discussing the joy of finding buried treasures in the closet; which, in our case means discovering music we haven’t listened to in ages. She recently began spinning the brillant 1995 Society of Soul disc Brainchild, and couldn’t be happier.
Gmail Helps End Drunk Emails?
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008
From time to time, all of us have been guilty of sending an email we didn’t mean to send. You know, a gushy love letter to a guy or girl we just met. Or perhaps you sent a piece of “rage mail” to someone who really pissed you off. We really didn’t mean to send it. Or rather, we wish that we hadn’t.
Well, smarty pants Google has invented a sent-to-soon, whoops or drunk email saver. It’s called “Mail Goggles.” What it does is simple and slightly irritating but helpful to those of us prone to sending out emails that we regret. (I can’t be the only one that’s done this before.)
When enabled (read: turned on) “Mail Goggles” requires the sender to solve a couple of math problems before the email is sent. And according to Gmail’s blog, this method will help verify you’re in the right state of mind. Their logic: If you can figure out the answers to math problems, you are probably sober enough to send the email.
I suppose it’s worth a try, especially if you’ve been sending out emails late at night that you find regrettable in the morning. Once activated, you can play with “Mail Goggles” settings but its defaults are auto-on for late nights on the weekends. (How convenient!)
To turn-on Mail Goggles, click on your “settings” tab after signing into your Gmail account. You should see the “Labs” option at the top. Click it and scroll down to “Mail Goggles” and select enable. Now, you are one step closer to ending drunk mailing!
It’s worth noting that although Mail Goggles is a good idea, it’s not the first of its kind. Microsoft Outlook has a feature for drunk emails. It’s called “recall.” And if you’re lucky, your recipient also uses Outlook (Microsoft Exchange Server) and hasn’t viewed your email yet. When recall works, it cleverly returns your email and can place a new one in the recipients mailbox.
All That Jazz
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008
My friend, venerable music critic Michaelangelo Matos, has a good piece in Good magazine, titled, “Who’s A Dilettante?” It’s about how, despite the fact that he likes jazz, and listens to it, he’ll never be an expert on it. Which, for a critic, is sort of like admitting total defeat, because critics are supposed to be all-knowing-know-it-alls. And while Matos does a great job on most genres, he admits when listening to Duke Ellington:
Then I hit a wall. I listen to and like jazz, own a lot of albums.
If I put them on a shelf together, you might think I know something
about it. But I know squat, and listening to all that Ellington just
proved it further. Even allowing myself the luxury of writing about him
was a map so big you could never find its end, where would I begin? I
realized that however much I enjoy jazz, I’ll likely remain a
dilettante about it. And I discovered something else as well: this is
how I prefer it.
That made me laugh out loud. I sort of understand where he’s coming from, but I have a much more extreme relationship with jazz. If you looked at my music shelf, you might think it didn’t exist at all. Because I own no jazz. Purposely.
My father was a jazz musician. He played the bass. At one point he did it professionally, but then he grew up and got a real job in the casinos in Vegas and picked it up in his off hours. It was all the most severe noodlely instrumental stuff. Duke Ellington, who Matos writes about, figured prominently; so did Miles Davis, and some other people who I’ve totally blocked out.
I hated jazz. I hated the timbre of it—I like deep bass sounds (probably the only legacy Dad has left me)—and didn’t find the high-end, treble-centric tonality of it aesthetically pleasing. I didn’t like how it meandered all over the place, and I needed to hear vocals. Listening to jazz was sort of like eating broccoli as a child. You knew it was supposed to be good for you, but you didn’t like it, not one bit.
Of course, it didn’t help that whenever I was playing say, the latest Guns and Roses record, he would wander in and give me a lecture some 20 minutes long about how my music was garbage. He would then list the specifics. We did not have a great relationship. I was 16.
Later, when I had moved to New York, and was writing about dance music for the Village Voice, longtime Voice music critic Greg “Ironman” Tate was sitting nearby and writing on a computer. Somehow we got onto the subject of jazz, and I told him my little story, and he laughed at me. “You listen to today’s jazz,” he pointed out.
This was sort of true. Dance music is mostly instrumental, with long meandering sections that come back together at the end of the piece. I looked sheepishly at the floor and had to admit a certain amount of defeat. The Ironman was right. There was one thing that dance music favored in a way that jazz did not, though—and that was bass. But then, I realized, maybe, I was my father’s daughter after all.
Off the Bus: Marc Cooper on McCain’s Own 60s Radical
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008
The McCain campaign shows no shame in engaging in a tired guilt-by-association tactic as Sarah Palin accuses Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” This desperate calumny derives from Obama once serving on the same non-profit board as former 60’s radical Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the Weather Underground.
But what about McCain’s own associations with former 60’s radicals. Indeed, until just a few years ago, McCain openly boasted not only about his passing friendship but also his deep collaboration with one of the most prominent of Vietnam-era student radicals, David Ifshin. The same David Ifshin who denounced America on Radio Hanoi as McCain sat locked up as a POW.
I met Ifshin about the same time he came into McCain’s life. But under very different circumstances. In 1970, as president of the left-leaning National Student Association, Ifshin traveled to North Vietnam with other anti-war radicals and it was then that he went on Radio Hanoi to denounce his own country’s war effort. That broadcast was piped directly into POW McCain’s cell in the Hanoi Hilton and he was understandably enraged by what he thought was a traitorous act by a fellow American.