Listening to the stunning voice of Beth Gibbons, lead singer of phenom-band Portishead, on her new album called Out of Season, I’m also reading Arianna Huffington’s piece in Salon called America’s Final Wakeup Call.
First, the good. Gibbons, while no longer straining to sound more passionate than she already is, has put together with former Talk Talk (you read that correctly) bassist Paul Webb, aka Rustin Mann. Their album together is alternative rock put to blues with a huge and haunting dose of 1920s-era musical nostalgia and references to a more choral moment. Most impressive are the backing vocals which make a soft heart ache.
Next, the bad. Huffington reviews former CEO of Alcoa’s incredible revelations about the Bush administration in the new book The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind. It turns out that you don’t need a progressive voice to note how fanatical Bush, who is again revealed to truly be a Cheney puppet, and his friends are. I actually think I could stomach the book itself.
Is there a relationship between the new album and book? No.
Monthly Archives: January 2004
Pant
I’ve solved a lot of my problems with Panther, and I’m now quite thrilled with the results. Althought I went from A to D by going by W and X first, the system is pretty stunning. I realize that one unforeseen benefit of creating an entirely new login for myself is that I started afresh – all old caches, files, and preferences that I no longer treasured are gone. For the record (and this will be the last time I talk about it for a while):
– All my apps launch and work more quickly under Panther.
– The updated printer and scanner drivers (from Epson) are much more professional and clearly designed for lots of use. Same goes with the print dialog boxes one finds throughout every app now.
– The overall visual framework of the system is much smoother, more elegant, and importantly, clearer. Text renders better everywhere though I question the much higher contrast that was seemingly ordained by Apple in order to achieve this effect.
– I’m impressed that every app, except for Suitcase (Extensis are you listening?), had zero problems with the new system. Apple did its homework in this regard. Even Microsoft Office runs better on Panther.
– Logging a user in and out (and watching the respective desktop spin in and out of place) is not as cool as people think. Nor is the highlighted aura that goes around desktop files when you select them. Nor is the new Finder window, though I appreciate the fact that you can actually Find files in this window now.
– Safari is still awesome. But I am definitely going to play with Camino, thanks to many readers’ recommendations. That is, once I feel confident again behind the ol’ keyboard again.
More Safari Fun
This from an email to my technically smarter friend. Warning: not interesting at all unless you’re using Apple’s new Panther and Extensis Suitcase X1.
I updated to 10.3.2 first. No problems with Safari. (I checked Safari all along the way as it’s kind of the canary in the coalmine.) Because I’ve been cautious about Suitcase and Panther for the past three months, I’ve also taken care to make sure my files and fonts are in order.
Then, I opened and reregistered Suitcase X1. NO problems. Then, I moved the com.extensis.Suitcase.plist Preference from the old archived user to the new one. Again no problems with Safari.
I somehow intuited that the next thing might be problematic. I moved the folder Suitcase Preferences from the old to the new user Preferences folder and voila, Safari hung, hung, hung. It was fascinating and horrifying at the same time – as I saw my two day old problems come back.
This is what I did next, for what it’s worth. I noticed that all the fonts in Suitcase were pointing to my old user — there’s a great “Reveal in Finder” function in X1. So, I deleted all of the fonts from X1 completely. Quit and relaunched X1 — and then added all fonts to X1 from a new copied folder in the new directory. These are the same exact fonts, same order, but importantly, this time the index of fonts in X1 point directly to the actual fonts in the new directory, not the old.
I quit and relaunched Suitcase and it was fine. I opened Safari — fine. System — fine. Me — fine.
Now, I just have to move all those old files and preferences one by one to the new login, which sucks a lot.
Still
Thanks for all the help I’ve received over the past 1.5 days re: Safari and Panther and other Apple apps. You can see my tepid reply to posters today.
Got to get some work done and pretend my system isn’t wacked.
Safari's Panther
I bit the proverbial bullet, installed the new Panther on my G4 machine, and everything works well except:
1. Safari. I get nada. That sucks because I love Safari and I can’t find, for the life of me, a fix. The application opens but it’s as if there is no Web to connect with it’s little, beating heart.
2. Help Viewer. This sucks because when I need help from the desktop, there is none.
3. Internet Preferences. Can’t find it. Doesn’t exist. Where’d it go?
I guess I should be happy that things print, scan, and fonts work, thanks to Extensis. And the whole system works more speedily, apps loading quicker, and programs like Dreamweaver stalling very little now. But cheese and crackers, why is it so hard to solve these little app issues?
Apple's Garage
Although Apple is advertising its new iLife media package as “Microsoft Office for the rest of your life,” thus both giving the nod to the importance of Microsoft and marketing its own non-office-like products, I’m very excited about the new iLife package called GarageBand.
For years, SoundEdit 16, named after its 16-bit audio, was a great and inexpensive application for creating complex audio. It allowed for multiple tracks and effects and it had a great interface but Macromedia dropped support of it years ago. I wrote about 12 songs on it about 5 years ago and, sadly, I can no longer find them.
GarageBand looks even better as Apple figured out a way to allow Joe Schmoes like me to make original music from sampled tracks, microphone input, and other audio recordings. I have both the app and a new microphone on order. Apple’s mind-reading capabilities have become very sharp.
P.S. I like the metaphor of the Garage, where music and software are mythically developed, though a garage is mostly where its alliterative cousin garbage sits.
Bush in 30
Just when I thought that MoveOn.org was moving on and video advertising was becoming increasingly a parody of itself, take a look at these relatively well-crafted political videos at Bush in 30 Seconds. The first, third and fourth ones are the best.
It's All True
This week’s Village Voice horoscope says that I should sing or chant the following 10 times per day for the next two weeks. I’m relying on my readers to do this for me.
“All I ever wanted in life was to make a difference, be worshipped like a god, conquer the universe, travel the world, meet interesting people, find the missing link, fight the good fight, live for the moment, seize each day, make a fortune, know what really matters, end world hunger, vanquish the dragon, be super-popular but too cool to care, be master of my own fate, embrace my destiny, feel as much as I can feel, give too much, and love everything.”
Cushmeme
I did not realize that Jake at Gothamist posted a better-written piece about Cushman on the last day of the year 2003.
I still hold that Spondizo “found” this site “first” as he emailed me about it in early December. The real question is how do memes truly work such that cultural knowledge is transferred over semi-hidden pathways?
I’m a strong believer in ethnic memory, for instance, which, according to me, states that the as a descendent of Eastern European Jewry, my ability to speak Yiddish fluently is more innate than, say, a native Cambodian’s. It’s not Lamarckian theory here — rather, I believe that the context and syntax of language passed down from my grandparents to my parents to me was consistent with the way my great-grandparents spoke in the old country. I thus have a kind of proclivity to speak Yiddish, which I daresay I don’t really. Is this akin to memes? Probably.
Oh, this is cool: Deckchairs made blog of the day today.
Cushman Archives
I was introduced recently to a phenomenal historical collection of photographs by Charles W. Cushman (thanks to the upcoming Spondizo blog). Hours could easily be spent perusing this site, which contains the diverse, difficult, and romantic imagery of a man who witnessed what the website describes as “a dying landscape” — America before the technology years, before the suburban residential expansions and before the mass integration of commercial life into our daily habits. Strangely, or not so strangely perhaps, his work is mainly in COLOR, a rich color that is separate from our digitally rendered world yet looks oddly good rendered by it.
Cushman is apparently up there with the likes of other great photographers like Walker Evans, and his vision, sensibility, and techniques are truly unique. Cushman traveled this country shooting small towns and large cities. But because of the color (o, the color!), the inhabitants in these photographs look as if they still walking among us, dressed in their workclothes and Sunday finest and ready to go to work. And the landscapes sing.
Look at this one of a woman and child, this one of Fulton Market in 1941, this one on the Lower East Side of New York in 1941, this photo of the Rockies melts my heart.