So here's a little mystery. This lo-fi recording of a swinging jazz instrumental was ripped from what sounds like a VHS tape by some nerd on the Internet. It's taken from an obscure British comedy called "30 Is A Dangerous Age, Cynthia," which was co-written by Dudley Moore. Moore also starred as a love-starved musician and composer, and in one scene he and his (real-life) trio play a date at a nightclub and perform this great little three-minute number. But it doesn't appear on the film's soundtrack recording, and nobody appears to know anything about it, even a title. Does it ring any bells for you? Does anybody know anything about it?

Unknown_Tune.mp3 Listen on Posterous

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

...from Minneapolis, MN. They basically went nowhere over the course of three albums in the late '90s. This song is just gorgeous. Every time it comes up on shuffle play I sort of... sigh. Too bad.

What's_It_All_About.mp3 Listen on Posterous

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

And remember, Merv Griffin loves you.

Have_A_Nice_Trip.mp3 Listen on Posterous

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

So I don't know what weird crossing of wires occurred to make this happen -- I just thank God that it did. This is an unedited recording of some cold-calling telemarketer douchebag calling my home today and somehow ending up broadcasting whatever was happening around him right into my voicemail box... for three whole glorious minutes.

All I know about the caller is that he was located somewhere in Orange County, CA and claimed to represent a contractor "working in the area." (My particular "area" is about two hours away from where he was sitting in his horrible soup-stained slacks and sweater vest.) You can hear him laughing hysterically at God knows what. You can hear him, I think, practicing phrases from an English phrasebook in the idle moments while the autodialer was doing its thing. You can hear him get giddy with excitement at the prospect of break time, actually shouting BREAKY BREAKY like Jeri Blank on acid, because who wouldn't if he worked eighteen hours a day in some squalid boiler room, endlessly talking to people who hate him, as they are absolutely right to do? It's weird, it's surreal, it's grimly fascinating. Listen if you dare.

Telemarketing_Jerk.mp3 Listen on Posterous

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

We were hurtling down the 405 in the dark, in that section between Mulholland and Sunset where the canyon walls close in on both sides and the only illumination comes from the lights of the cars, when I turned to Jennifer and said: "I’ve been thinking about tweeting my cancer." 

There was a fractional pause. "Really," she said -- the kind of "Really" that implies Holy Mackerel. You have absolutely brought me up short here. Then: "What do you mean, exactly?"

"I’ve been wondering if I want to write about my cancer," I said. "On Twitter." 

She knew that much. What she was asking was: Why? For who? To what end? This was Sunday night. Three days before, on Thursday afternoon, I’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer. The pathology report indicated a focus of cells that was very small and highly treatable. The fact that it was probably the best kind of cancer to be told you have didn’t feel much like good news. It didn’t make me feel like I’d won an eBay auction or dodged a bullet. It made me feel like the bullet had sunk itself softly into my skin while I wasn’t paying attention and now I was standing there watching it protrude from my body, thinking What the hell is this thing? Where did this come from? "I have cancer," I’d been telling myself for three days, walking around the idea, poking it with a stick. "I have cancer." It was still absurdly soon. It had just happened. It was real. It wasn’t real yet. 

"Wow," Jennifer said. "I’m surprised." 

"I am too," I said.

"Why would you do that?" she said.

I’d been wondering that myself, because I've never been the sort of person to air much of my personal life in public. It was a week for all sorts of new things. And so I started to talk, thinking out loud -- about the world of social media I’ve been spending so much time in lately, for both personal and professional reasons. About whether the notion of social media as "community" is a dream, or a lie. About what community is for, or ought to be for. About people with whom I’d developed a weird, online-only relationship, and how I’d wondered what the limits of that sort of relationship were.  I talked about Merlin Mann’s essay on "making the clackity noise," and the notion that the quick gag might be easy but what people really respond to in social media is what’s real and true. I talked about writing as a way of making sense of the world, and what it would feel like to leave such rich, authentic material on the table and walk away. "Fraudulent," I said. "It would feel fraudulent." 

"Okay," Jennifer said. "But why Twitter? Why not blog about it?"  

This was tougher to answer, although I was already sure I didn’t want to do something like a single-purpose blog about my cancer. I like Twitter, and it felt like the right venue. It felt appropriate to fold posts about my illness into a stream of material, all kinds of material, of which some was trivial and some was smart-alecky and some was serious. That seemed like the sort of approach that most mirrored what I was already groping toward -- a life that would include, but not be defined by, my cancer. It didn’t only have to do with balance, though. It had to do with authenticity. There was a sense in which some part of the information I was already putting on Twitter was fake; it was heightened for comic effect, or truncated to meet the demands of the medium. But to omit this new fact in my life felt different than that passing kind of fakery, and worse.

Still, things troubled me about the idea. I worried about being seen as a sort of cancer tourist -- a guy with a diagnosis that was highly hopeful, as these things go, slumming in a world of people who were really sick. (I managed to dismiss that idea pretty quickly via a simple mental trick: I pictured a roomful of healthy middle-aged guys, asked how many of them wanted to trade places with me, and counted the number who raised their hands.) I worried about people finding it inappropriate, in poor taste, showy. I could respect any of those positions. For some people, I supposed, it might simply be outside their comfort zones.  I could appreciate that position too, because it was outside mine, as Jennifer pointed out now.

“It is, isn't it,” I said. 

“Yeah,” she said. “In a good way. That’s an argument to do it.” There were arguments for everything now, and against everything -- writing about it, not writing about it, one treatment, another treatment. I was living in a world of arguments.  They were individually compelling, and when you added them up they formed an exquisitely balanced universe of contradictions.

There was even an argument to be made that I was lucky. It went something like this: I had an early diagnosis, a good prognosis, excellent health care and a supportive spouse. All true, every word. But I didn’t believe, as a friend had already suggested, that my cancer was somehow a good thing wrapped in a bad thing. It wasn’t. It would involve, at a minimum, a good deal of fear and worry for me and my family. Whatever intervention I chose would be unpleasant. But at the end of it I’d be somewhere unexpected, my path altered by circumstances I’d never foreseen or chosen. And if that wasn’t worth writing about, what was? Watching the lights streak by us on the pitch-black freeway, red in front of us, bright white to our left, I thought about a scene from William Broyles’ screenplay for “Apollo 13.” Mission commander Jim Lovell, interviewed on TV, recalls piloting a Banshee toward a carrier in the Sea of Japan during the Korean War. His radar jams and there’s a short in the cockpit. He’s flying blind. All my instruments are gone, my lights are gone, I can't even tell now what my altitude is, Lovell says. I know I'm running out of fuel, so I'm thinking about ditching in the ocean. And I look down there and then, in the darkness there's this... there's this green trail, it's like a long carpet that’s just laid out right beneath me. And it was the algae, right? It was that phosphorescent stuff that gets churned up in the wake of a big ship and it was... it was just leading me home. And if my cockpit lights hadn't shorted out, there's no way I would have ever been able to see that. So you... you never know what events are going to transpire to get you home.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Palm Springs by Radio Commercial Listen on Posterous

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Sure, tile pants always seem like a good idea. At first. But then you put 'em on and it's the thousand tiny cuts and the pinching and the chafing and the caustic chemical burns from the tile cement. All I'm saying is, is it worth it? I'm not so sure.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

So I'm thinking my invitation to speak at TED this year got lost in the mail or something, but you know. Whatever. It's like the third year in a row and honestly, the mail's not that bad around here, you know? The LA County Clerk always manages to put the summons in my hand when it's time to go sit in the jury box cooling my heels for a day, but, you know: Fine. Whatever. Because I really don't mind at all. You know why. It's because I got my own pretty damn sweet international confab of edgy, out-of-the-box Big Thinkers happening right here in my carport in Santa Monica. I had to shove some bags of charcoal and dog food out of the way and get creative with the wife's car, but it was totally worth it because I got the best damn multinational gathering of unconventional, thought-provoking thought leaders in the world right in my own backyard, baby, or right next to it. It's accessible from the yard, anyway, if you prop open the gate (it's been sticking since we had all that rain). Who have I got? Oh, nobody. Nobody very famous or thought-provoking or conventional-wisdom-challenging. Just a few very good friends. Does the name BONO mean anything to you? No? How about a little guy I like to call MISTER STEVE JOBS. How about that. Plus I got Buffy Sainte-Marie and that guy who invented the Snuggie and 1976 Nobel Prize winner Dr. Baruch S. Blumberg, and they're all mixing and cross-pollinating and whatnot out in the carport, and then after they're tired from altering each other's fundamental assumptions about the world and stuff we all kinda take a break and chillax and crack some Red Bulls. And baby, you HAVE NOT LIVED until you've argued semiotics with Kevin Garnett after he's gotten a few Bullies under his belt. What's that? It sounds all cross-disciplinary and stuff? Oh, we get cross-disciplinary up in my carport, and if you don't believe that, you should just ask MY VERY GOOD FRIENDS NOAM CHOMSKY AND DR. OZ. Yeah, it's pretty sweet, even if shit gets real once we have to find a place for everybody to bed down for the night, what with Brewster Kahle refusing to sleep on the air mattress and the sexual tension between Sarah McLachlan and Atul Gawande. But it all works out, and when we straggle out to the yard for coffee and donut holes the next morning, you can just tell it's gonna be another day of MAD CRAZY ASSUMPTION-CHALLENGING, BAYBEE. Look, if you work for TED, just read this part: Please invite me next year. I'll sit in the back and be very quiet and not bother anybody. I swear it. Just put me on the list for next year and I'll be there on time and look sharp. I'll even drive myself there, although I'm gonna have to have some work done on the Gremlin because somebody sat on the fender and dented it, I'm not naming names STEVE WOZNIAK. So call me, okay? Please. Please please please. I won't beg, though.

Originally published over at the HuffPo, there.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Thanks to my super-thoughtful across-the-alley neighbors, I can be reminded well into February of the joy that Christmas brings. The dead, brown joy. Salud! 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table's order, designing the house and organising the party.

Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people's perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn't a price worth paying to have a computer that isn't frightening anymore.

Frasier Speirs

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

(The Optimism of Uncertainty: The Nation, 9/20/2004)

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Lujon (Remastered - 1993) by Henry Mancini;Henry Mancini & His Orchestra Listen on Posterous

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Look Of Love by Lesley Gore Listen on Posterous

Permalink | Leave a comment  »