Bellatrix: Jediwannabe (1.3M mp3)  

A solidly interesting album with one eminently iconic pop anthem ought to be enough to earn you a few more albums, or at least a few more years. Bellatrix got neither. Please pause for 2:46 today to reflect on the tragic insufficiency of genius.  

(While reflecting, you may wish to jump around.)

Several years ago, when the Orange Line in Boston was moved underground, the MBTA solicited poems from grade-school kids about where they would go on the new line, and had them printed on the walls in various stations. While going through some old notebooks today I found the one that I copied down, verbatim, from a wall in Haymarket station:  

I took the Orange Line to the stone age family
The colors are white in the land
Their houses were made with stone
They have only Rock 'n' Roll music
They have bald heads
When it rains it breaks the city
The food tastes awful
I don't want to go there again.

 

No attribution was provided. If you wrote this when you were 8, I hope you're still writing now.

Puressence: "Traffic Jam in Memory Lane" (1.5M mp3)  

I don't know why this came to mind today, but I had an album-length drive to make, so I grabbed the CD as I went out the door. The trip ended up lasting longer than the album, so I played this song two extra times as I neared home. I liked the world a little better when there were more people who sang like this.

If you find statistical decomposition and recomposition of music-critic polls interesting (and I'm not saying you should), here's what I have to offer you:  

Critical alignment ratings:
2006 Jackin' Pop
2006 Pazz & Jop
Merged  

Album clusters:
2006 Jackin' Pop
2006 Pazz & Jop
Merged  

Leaderboards:
2006 Jackin' Pop
2006 Pazz & Jop
Merged

I don't know appreciably more about the state or history of Latin pop than I did a couple months ago when I came back from Puerto Rico feeling curious. But I've found some things I like. Here, if you're curious about my curiosity, is a short summary so far:  

(follow along in my Latin Intro iMix if you're iTunes inclined...)  
 

1-3. Belinda: "Lo Siento (I'm Sorry)" from Belinda, "Bella Traición" & "¿Quién Es Feliz?" from Utopía  

Shameless teen-pop, but either the language disarms me somehow (they can't pander to you half as easily if you don't know what they're saying), or else the production is just far enough behind the domestic state of the art to sound like somebody actually loves what they're invoking, or else it's just catchy and for once I'm not overthinking it. (Or I'm over-overthinking it...)  

4-5. David Bisbal: "Silencio" & "Torre de Babel (Reggaeton Mix)" from Premonición  

Big and sentimental and soaring, but I like Meat Loaf in English, so I can't blame this on the language. Reggaeton is definitively tedious (a whole genre based on 4 bars from one song!?), but used sparingly as a cross-genre remix-affectation its twitchy insistence hasn't totally alienated me yet.  

6-7. Ha-Ash: "Me Entrego a Ti" & "Ya No" from Mundos Opuestos  

Mexican pop-country? It's like Shania Twain for the other border. "Ya No" tosses in a little quasi-hip-hop reggaetonality, just in case there weren't enough elements already. The iTunes "partial album" inexplicably includes everything except "Pobre Diabla", which is actually my favorite track on the album.  

8-9. La 5a Estación: "El Sol No Regresa" from Flores De Alquiler & "Tu Peor Error" from El Mundo Se Equivoca  

A Mexican T'Pau! Or, actually, a Spanish T'Pau transplanted to Mexico City, but whatever. Florid and electrifying. Both albums are terrific, the first a little less self-conscious about it.  

10-11. LU: "La Vida Despues de Ti" & "Maria" from Album  

Quivery balladry, but then, I like the slow Roxette songs, too.  

12-13. Lucybell: "Eternidad" & "A Perderse" from Comiendo Fuego  

Alternately menacing and bouncy Chilean semi-goth, like a version of HIM from a hemisphere where they haven't perfected mascara or slow-motion yet.  

14-15. Osé: "Serás" & "No Digas" from Serás  

Kinda like boy-band refugees trying to prove that they can actually play instruments and write songs themselves. But succeeding, I think.  

16-17. Reik: "Invierno" & "De Que Sirve" from Secuencia  

Kinda like boy-band non-refugees not trying to prove much beyond the power of the supermodel-macho pout as a vocal timbre. But succeeding, I think.  

18-20. Shakira: "Te Dejo Madrid" from Laundry Service, "La Tortura" from Fijación Oral Vol. 1 and "Don't Bother" from Oral Fixation Vol. 2  

Giving in to Shakira is what really got this started, for me. I liked "Te Dejo Madrid" already, but thought of it as an anomaly. She was playing a show in San Juan the night we were flipping channels on our hotel TV, though, and one of the Puerto Rican music-video stations (which are so primitive they still show music) was broadcasting every third or fourth song. She performs like it matters. Like her music matters, and language matters, and bridging cultures matters, and even her abdomen matters. Like she heard Madonna, Tori Amos and Alanis Morissette and understood not only where they intersect, but where they negate each other and leave a hole.

I've come to the unexpected and disconcerting realization that my period of greatest apparent productivity in user-interface production was, pretty clearly, when I was mainly working in Visual Basic, circa 1994-1997. Ten years later, I'm actually spending much more of my design time repeatedly re-implementing basic mechanics of no inherent interest, and my design work at any given point in time is littered with more unsightly temporary hacks of things I haven't had time to re-implement this time yet. It takes me longer to produce first approximations, and longer to add some of the most common levels of noticeable refinement.  

This would be deeply tragic in several dimensions if it didn't deserve enough qualifying asterisks to make an ASCII-art smiley the size of Nebraska. The genius of Visual Basic was that it allowed you to very quickly produce 90% of a UI that was as good as 90% of everything else. Getting from 90% to 100% of a UI that was as good as 90% of everything else, however, took a large amount of extremely annoying work, some of which had to be constantly rechecked and redone every time you made the tiniest change to anything thereafter. And worse, of course, the standard established by 90% of everything else was not, in objective human terms, actually very good.  

Visual Basic's success, such as it was, relied on two very large simplifications of the underlying human problems. First, technically, VB was both a development and a deployment environment. VB applications were actually configuration data for the VB runtime. There were no platform-matrix issues, because VB itself was the platform. The specific version of VB with which you built the application, even. Unless you started introducing your own external dependencies, you could basically count on the things running the same way for your users as they ran for you.  

Much more significantly, though, VB instantiated a fixed vocabulary and grammar of UI interaction. This made it extremely simple to produce static forms and dialog boxes using standard Windows UI widgets, fairly easy to add a few well-defined kinds of dynamism to them, cumbersomely possible to do a little better, and beyond that you ended up fighting it more than it helped, and so usually didn't bother.  

This is what all well-conceived software projects and all self-aware computer programmers do, of course: we take environments in which a great many things are complicatedly possible, and transform them into environments in which a small subset of those things are significantly easier, and a larger number of things that used to be hard are now so much harder than the easier things that nobody wastes time trying them anymore. We do this by, mainly, an obsessive attention to abstraction and instantiation and packaging and layering. This is why the details of most programming successes are staggeringly boring to non-programmers in rough proportion to their genuine significance: the best programming work usually is not done in directly solving an individual human problem, but in making some tool, ten steps away from the visible problem, that makes it incrementally easier to solve some whole class of abstruse subproblems that factor in some small way into the one you care about. The web page that lets you buy embarrassing personal ointments without having to hand them to a 4'5" woman named Ruthie, who reads every package label aloud in megaphone tones, solves a human problem for you. The good programming work behind that page has nothing to do with ointment or Ruthie, and lots to do with content-management-system staging strategies, database transaction consistency, protocol standards, application-framework meta-programming, and twenty other topics so obscure and tedious that you'd probably rather talk about why you need the ointment.  

The problem with Visual Basic, circa 1994, was that the things it made easy were not important enough. Using it, I was able to produce a lot of UI very quickly, the Windows UI paradigm in which VB thrived was itself the cause of most of that work. I spent most of my time laboriously refining mildly optimized sets of widgetry in order to get the computer to show me something that I already knew. It'd be my guess that seeing and/or editing simple pieces of known data accounts for about 94% of the code ever written for computers, and that seeing and editing more-complex clumps of known data accounts for another 6%. All the stuff that does something with that data, and for which a computer is more than a very expensive and quickly obsolescent filing cabinet, at this level of precision accounts for approximately 0%.  

The web, as the new default environment for data applications, is both progress and regress. The literal display of data is generally a little easier than it was in most pre-HTML environments. Simple data editing is about as easy as it ever was, but orchestration of the editing of related bits of data is harder. Managing large sets of data, and managing the social dynamics of shared data environments, are probably slightly easier than before in relative terms, but since the connected world makes them less obviously intractable, they now represent a larger fraction of an increased overall quantity of active difficulty. And if the problem is taking the things you know, and the things I know, and getting to something new we now know together, a disappointing amount of what we've built turns out to be discussion forums where people we've never met can file unverifiable reports on whether the ointment worked for them.  

But the web, as it is now or even as the SPARQL/RDF version of the Semantic Web might make it, is yet another environment that generates a huge amount of the work it requires. This is ultimately the metric by which I think any tool, including software tools, and including meta-tool-sets as big as the web, should be most diligently measured: does it increase or decrease the human-scale meaningfulness of the human work done with it? In the same way that "the economy" should be graded on net human welfare, not gross currency movement, software should be graded on how it allows us to spend our lives, not how industriously it allows us to do new work nobody had to do at all before. It's amazing that it's possible to put a shame-free ointment store online, but absurd how much harder it is to do that than to put a tube of ointment on a metal shelf. And profoundly pathetic that the magnitude of our shame makes the enterprise seem reasonable.  
 

The software-design work I'm doing now won't, directly, even get rid of your rash, let alone reverse global carbon-dioxide trends. Gauging the value of your daily work based on its capacity to increase the welfare of humanity is practically difficult, and theoretically presumptuous if not absurd. But I think it matters whether it matters, and I really do believe that I am working on a part of the solution. If human existence is the stake in a race between shared insight and thermodynamic chaos, chaos has all the big-money sponsors, but shared insight is a power law. I'm trying to build software that does, for networks of highly interconnected shared data, what Excel does for columns of numbers (or, maybe more realistically at first, what Visicalc originally did for columns of numbers). I'm trying to help bring about a new base level of operative abstraction in which data is visible, and its connections traversable, by its very nature, so nobody has to write code to see what we already know. I believe that it should be possible for computers, instead of diligently enforcing dehumanized bureaucracy, to help sustain the transformative illusion that all it takes for you, as a human, to participate in the sharing of human knowledge is one thing nobody else imagined before, or one link between things that nobody else has noticed yet.  

And although global warming is not entirely a data problem, even that might arguably be mostly a data problem. Its key vectors all originate in what are fundamentally data blockages: inadequate education, incomplete understanding, incomprehensible macro-effects of unassessable micro-decisions, misapplications of science or technology, misguided optimizations of local variables at the expense of the overall system, failures of empathy, failures of recognition, and perhaps above all else the way in which untreated ignorance makes it possible to feel safely (and/or alienatingly) isolated from things to which you are really deeply and inextricably connected.  

I'm trying to help make the internet into the place where we know what we know. I'm trying to help make a new place where we go to do human things of which we are collectively proud, not somewhere where we hide among the widgets while we pray that this is the ointment that will make us feel better.

Now available elsewhere: Mine, Bethany's, other people and other people's...

David Bisbal: Silencio (1.6M mp3)  

I know very little about Spanish-language pop, but enough intriguing things bounced past my awareness while we were in Puerto Rico that I've been doing some investigating, and finding some stuff I really like. Bisbal is actually Spanish from Spain, and I came across him just poking around in iTunes, but his new album Premonición has some production work by Puerto Rican reggaeton duo Wisin & Yandel, so there's the connection for you.

If the conditions are exactly right, at least, you can still disappear into the sky. You float on your back in the Bahía Mosquito on a moonless and cloudless night, trailing your arms beside you in the warm Caribbean water. You lift them up and point from Vieques towards Orion, and suddenly the stars are falling along your arms and past you and you are diving up into the sky and away.  

But the simple magics for escape are waning. All our magics for escape are waning. You used to only have to evade the moon and the clouds, but now people are building along the shores of the Bahía, and the oblivious lights of their carports slash between the earnest dinoflagelates and the billion far sad stars. Who builds on the shore of the world's brightest bioluminescent bay? And who, having picked this of all the places in the world to stack yet more buildings, puts lights on the outside of them? Who drags sacks of cement and disregard out to a twenty-mile island off the east coast of Puerto Rico where the army finally stopped dropping bombs, and curses some of the best darkness we have left?  

Buried in a karst sinkhole in Arecibo, less than an hour's flight from Vieques, is the reflector dish of the world's largest radio telescope. This is a different darkness, and a different way of trying to reach into the sky, but signs on the viewing platform have to beg visitors to turn off their cell phones, and are probably one bad funding decision away from having to beg them not to perch houses and Subways and ferret stores on the ringing hills. And maybe darkness doesn't sound like it's worth that much, or that the kind of amazement we can see in tiny light-up sea monsters and SETI@Home are petulant objections against seeing where you're parking your Durango, but these scattered oases of left-alone darkness are part too of how we see who we are.  

We're in Puerto Rico, Belle and I, to float in darknesses and sit on still-near-perfect beaches for a few days before we go back to gray New England winter and the last few months in which we're not yet parents. So we're part of the problem ourselves, in the strictest sense. We don't leave any trash on the beaches, but we drive rented cars to them. We paddle around the biobay on kayaks, with little cyalume sticks, but I can't pretend I really know that this is harmless at the current scale, never mind the ones implied by the flow of people like us. Las Cavernas del Rio Camuy, just a little south of Arecibo, used to be a private magic kingdom for bats and brave Camuy kids with flashlights, and now they're a trolley-fed public park where tourists from Boston and New York line-up to point digital cameras at, mostly and necessarily, the new buried lighting system hacked into million-year-dark stone.  

We always change what we observe, of course. Tourism and colonialism are differences of degree. Arecibo beeps like the Earth is backing up, and we kick millions of dinos into panicked glow, so even in the last few darknesses we the just are not just listening. Curiosity is inherently presumption. Our worst egotism and our most powerfully humane hopes are both entwined in science, and everything we touch we touch. Our greatest revelations and our most inexcusable massacres share the gaudy heraldry of discovery. There were people here when Columbus came, and none of them are left to make forests again out of his statues and plazas.  

And no, I don't know how to follow him into promising unknowns without following him into collapse. I don't know how to stop asking questions, or how to stop answering them with more and faster. I don't know how to stop wanting to be the one for whom we make the exceptions, the one person allowed to make the near-perfect darkness one more person less perfect. I don't know how to improve the world in any better way than by trying to make what we discover be worth what we can't keep it from costing. I don't know what better to do with our vanishing darknesses than promise to remember them with our fondest curses. I don't know how to promise that there will always be a sky into which to disappear. For a while, probably, but before too long we're going to need what we used to only want. Selfishness and charity are differences of timing. We will fill in all these holes. We will build highways from everywhere to everywhere else, until all that is left of place is name. We will build casinos on the moon, and come to them to throw away whatever we saved from home below.  

But every once in a while, if we run a little quieter and faster, just outside the lights, we get to see a little of what it used to be like. And what we can't help displacing, we will find tiny ways to become. Everything we touch at least has touched us back. I believe in darkness, but not as much as I believe in us. I believe we help more than we hurt, and that we understand more than we know, and that we know enough. I believe we're ready, and that this child and this world will be grateful for each other.  

I will miss Orion, when he finally turns and leaves us here, but not a billionth as much as I'd miss these blaring lights and crushing statues and people if we too gave up and disappeared into the sky.

(I'm trying to forget about another score from today...)