The Poverty Jet Set

Allow me to say a few words about grouping music by genre: it’s a stupid concept. I wish the world would banish it to the annals of mid-20th century mega-rcrdlbl company dinasaurs. There is no use for such vague labels as genre. What the hell do they even mean? Look, for example, at the image above - just a small segment of the, oh, 200+ ‘genres’ I have in my iTunes library. I think maybe 10% of them make any sense at all.

Okay, now, many of you probably noticed that iTunes launched a new version of it’s software this past week. Cool, if you use it a lot. But for some ridiculous reason, they decided to disable the ability to get rid of the ‘genre’ column while browsing in the old (and my preferred) boring, spreadsheet style layout. Luckily, I found a quick and painless solution for us Macheads on MacOSXHints.com.

Quit iTunes, launch Terminal, and enter this command:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-genre-when-browsing -bool FALSE

Relaunch iTunes, open the browser, and you’ll notice the Genre column has vanished. You can reverse this by quitting iTunes and repeating the above command, but with TRUE instead of FALSE.

Bing. No genres.

This does get me thinking about the ways in which people initiate their music listening sessions is changing. People once touched, held and looked at at the records on a shelf and pulled out something cool and fresh and in-the-moment. Now, iTunes looks more like a spreadsheet than anything else. And oddly, even with their fancy new CoverFlow layouts, I still use the spreadsheet look. Because I’m used to it? I’m not sure. When I want to listen to something, often times it’s specific and browsing by title is the easiest way to get there. CoverFlow kinda works when I have absolutely no idea of what to listen to, but that’s usually when I default to shuffle. Or ditch iTunes all together and hit up Last.fm or the Hype Machine.

What’s the solution here? How do we recreate the analog, physical experience of listening to records in an immediate digital world when memory is no longer based on a physical object like a record, but rather a name of a band, or how recently I bought something?

Go buy a record player, I guess.

Who doesn’t enjoy a good Martin Luther King, Jr. quote for some inspiration, eh? I just read this and it made me happy:

“I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.

You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.

You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety.

And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

You died when you refused to stand up for right.

You died when you refused to stand up for truth.

You died when you refused to stand up for justice.”

-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
From the sermon “But, If Not” delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church on November 5, 1967.

Thanks, Tim.

Allow, if I may, to re-blog - without comment - a quote I just read on one of my favorite all-things-freak-folk blog, naturalismo:

Q: How do you think your present image as world traveller, bawdy singer, etc. combine with your image as a writer of children’s books?
Shel: I don’t think about my image.
Q: But if you are a spokesman and leader of your generation with millions of followers, don’t you care what they think?
Shel: I don’t speak for anybody but me; I am not a leader. I just want them to let me alone so I can do my thing.
Q: What is your thing?
Shel: I don’t know. That depends on the day, the time of day, and what I did yesterday.

Our friends Lord Whimsy and his wife Lady Pinkwater joined us recently for a soiree chez nous (at which those photos above were taken, making our big, drafty loft look all warm and cozy!). Whimsy and I got into a discussion about ‘microcelebrity‘ and what it means to us as media makers. After further reflection, he’s written a great post about it on his blog, and I encourage you to check it out if you’re interested in such matters.

A snippet:

The timing of this more recent article on microcelebrity seems a bit odd; this technology-fueled social phenomenon has been around for quite some time now, although it has certainly grown and intensified in recent years. We are all becoming more adept as self-mediators: It has become one of those necessary twenty-first century life skills, right up there with knowing a few key phrases of HTML or knowing how to put one’s cell phone on vibrate mode. To quote Clive Thompson: “The truth is that people are developing interesting social skills to adapt to microfame. We’re learning how to live in front of a crowd.” In the words of Quentin Crisp, we’ve learned to “urinate with style”.

On a side note, Whimsy’s amazing book “The Affected Provincial’s Companion, Vol. I” is going out of print soon, and I highly recommend you pick yourself up a copy before they disappear (or before they have the Johnny-Depp-Based-on-the-Book print run).

(photo by Seetwist)

Being that I am a big advocate of riding a bike to save gas, every now and then in our lovely suburbanized America, we can’t avoid using a car. (News flash: those of you think you’re saving the environment by driving a hybrid: you’re not.) Today, I got this email from my grandfather’s buddy in the oil and gas industry. Not sure if this is a spammy email forward making the rounds, or if he really actually knows this dude, but it sounds good.

Behold, a geek’s guide to saving gas (other than driving less!):

1. Fill up your car or truck in the morning when the temperature is still cool. Remember that all service stations have their storage tanks buried below ground; and the colder the ground, the denser the gasoline. When it gets warmer gasoline expands, so if you’re filling up in the afternoon or in the evening, what should be a gallon is not exactly a gallon. In the petroleum business, the specific gravity and temperature of the fuel (gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, ethanol and other petroleum products) are significant. Every truckload that we load is temperature-compensated so that the indicated gallon age is actually the amount pumped.

A one-degree rise in temperature is a big deal for businesses, but service stations don’t have temperature compensation at their pumps.

(more…)

[Note: I attempt to refrain from delving into overtly political discourse on my blog because, well, I find it rather banal. But...]

Nothing gets my blood boiling faster than an undeserved police beating. I hate gawking at them. I spend a good deal of energy trying to NOT be pissed off at the state of the world, at brutality, injustice, oppression and the like. It ain’t easy, as many of you know. But now that witness to unwarrented police violence in America is more readily accessed than in Rodney King dayz, I have a hard time staying calm. This latest video making the rounds got me thinking. And because tasering incidents are a dime a figgin’ dozen on YouTube, because America tends down a path of self-destruction, because we lose control of our freedom more and more every day (and Lord knows I love my sense of freedom), I feel like this is a good time to bring up some of my all-time heroes, the White Rose movement:

White Rose was a non-violent group of German philosophy students in the early 1940’s, who, against all odds, printed out and distributed dissenting literature against the Nazi regime. With their friends and neighbors being carted off by the truckload to concentration camps, these kids had the cohones to try to do something. Anything. No, they weren’t going to stop the Nazis. But at least they didn’t just accept things and turn a blind eye. Here’s a film about them.

This gets me thinking about the importance of speaking up. About the power of self-publishing - blogging and video blogging - in an age of a censored corporate mass media. About how we should protect this neutral Internet with our lives. About how everyone should be learning how to use these mediums for when the time comes. Because if you ask me, it’s coming.

You might be interested in giving Naomi Wolf’s new book a read. Here’s her thesis - the ten steps all dictatorships have taken in a quest for power:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
2. Create a gulag
3. Develop a thug caste
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
5. Harass citizens’ groups
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
7. Target key individuals
8. Control the press
9. Dissent equals treason
10. Suspend the rule of law

While Audrey and I were talking about money, jobs, careers and all that crap the other day she turned to me and said, “We just have a high sense of freedom requirement.”

It’s true. When balancing out the decisions in life, all people take the obvious factors into consideration. Does buying this house without running water or electrical outlets make sense? Is this cubical farm job not-so-bad because it pays okay and is relatively secure? Will this video of me pole dancing in a speedo make me rich and famous? You approach these quandaries with care and penitence while your mysterious internal mechanisms begin to weigh the options. Thing is, of course, we all have different factors that dictate our happiness. Money. Fame. Security.

She hit the nail on the head, methinks, for us. Freedom. We just need a lot of it. We can’t function without it. And therefore, we have pledged to ourselves to make sure we don’t live without it. Free time. Free thinking. Free as in speech. Free movement. Free food. Yeah!

Okay, that’s my liberating thought for the day. Don’t forget the freedom, peoples. Over and out.

Technorati Tags: work, povertyjetset, free, wisdom, freedom, jobs

On my mind: One of the finer things in life. Just look at all those amazing health properties. Up with deep red foods!

(photos not quiet as mouth watering as the shots on my pal Taylor’s blog Mac and Cheese Review)

Technorati Tags: health, howto, food, juicing, povertyjetset, idea, love

If you fancy the ‘humanity as virus’ theory propagated in pop-culture by the likes of The Matrix and 12 Monkeys, I’m sure you’ll be sweet on this new book: The World Without Us.

What will our world look like if we disappear in an instant? How long will it take to wipe our mark from the planet? Not long, it turns out. It’s a fascinating look into the fragilities of human-made creations and systems. But also a great reminder that, heck, environmentalism is a human-focused pursuit. The Earth is gonna do fine without us. I like that thought. Frees me from the shackles of recycling anxiety, if nothing else.

(thanks for pointing this out, Audrey!)

Technorati Tags: experiment, books, worldwithoutus, environment, sustainability

Agnes Varnum (the wonderful documentary film blogger behind Doc It Out and pal of mine from the True/False Film Festival) has ‘tagged‘ me to play the 8 Random Things Meme Game, which, truth be told, is kinda like those silly MySpace survey bulletins do when they’re bored at work, but a little bit cooler ‘cuz it’s about MEME! I’m up for it. Here it goes:

Rules:
1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged write their own blog post about their eight things and include these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged and that they should read your blog.

8 Things about Mark, randomly selected:

1. My first concert ever was The Beach Boys on their Kokomo Tour. Oh yeah!
2. I’m way into this drink: 3 parts sparkling water, 1 part 100% pure cranberry juice - oh yeah!
3. I always name my cars. My first car was Sparky. My first blog post ever was about him. Now, I drive Lil’ Red, a 1980 BMW 320i. He rulez, too.
4. I never lived in one place longer than two years during my 20’s. I’m tired of moving.
5. My first pet was a turtle named Jeffrey. My second pet was a turtle named Jeffrey. My third pet was a hamster named Jeffrey. Hmmm… Maybe I was like this kid.
6. The first CD I ever owned was Nirvana’s Nevermind. The last CD I ever bought was Pissed Jeans Hope for Men, from the band, at a gig here in Philly.
7. I’ve been to nearly every single National Park in America. And 46 of 50 States. Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota and Vermont remain. I’ve got to savor those.
8. I’m a serial Partial Continuous Attention practitioner. I’m wrote most of this blog post while listening to a discussion about mobile devices and blogging and Twittering other people sitting in the room.

Okay, now I’m tagging you, dear friends from BlogPhiladelphia!
EricSmithRocks
StellarGirl
Girls Can Tell
Blankbaby
Dangerously Awesome
knowHR
Jen Simmons

NOTE: I clicked through to this NYTimes article because of it’s title, but then I realized it was written by one my best friends from college, Steve Kurutz, so now I HAVE to blog it!

I love freeganism. Though lately, I haven’t done much dumpster diving (mostly for lack of time, but lord knows I ain’t stopped ‘cuz of money). Nothing really beats getting stuff for free that’s in perfect condition. People love to say they’re saving the planet by buying organic food and driving a hybrid car, but I’ve said it before… it’s all a just a sham. Recycling cans won’t save the planet. Not buying them in the first place is a start.

Freegans are scavengers of the developed world, living off consumer waste in an effort to minimize their support of corporations and their impact on the planet, and to distance themselves from what they see as out-of-control consumerism. They forage through supermarket trash and eat the slightly bruised produce or just-expired canned goods that are routinely thrown out, and negotiate gifts of surplus food from sympathetic stores and restaurants.

I love that the topic gets its time in the New York Times. (Thanks, Steve!) Weird that it seems to be happening more often. Since when did the NYTimes get so fringe? Here’s another great quote from the article:

As people began to load plates of food, he leaned in and offered a few words of wisdom: “Opening that first bag of trash,” he said, “is the biggest step.”

Technorati Tags: free, NYTimes, freeganism, concept, recycling, povertyjetset, environment, stevekurutz, freedom

I thought you’d all enjoy this little nugget from the great performer, Daniel Higgs.

I’ve got more video of Daniel singing some far-out songs on my Live Music Journal. Check it out.

Technorati Tags: dreams, Philly, poetry, art, philosophy, danielhiggs, video, psychedelic, people

So this cat John Young, out in West Chest, PA, has been making things like this (see below) to project movies at ’secret locations’ and totally on the fly. Man, that’s hot. No doubt one of the sexiest machines I have ever laid eyes upon. Someone should bring one to Sundance next year.

Technorati Tags: idea, lo-fi, projecting, homebrew, gadgets, motorcycles, film, filmfestival, art

Seems like I run across one of these projects every month or more recently. And yet, I’m still enamored by them.

In this iteration of the long-distance-bike-adventure-cum-video-blog-slash-documentary-film, I present you Dominic Gill picking up would-be hitchhikers to ride on the back seat of his tandem bike while he rides it from the top of North America to the bottom of South America. That’s a long way, baby. His project is called Take a Seat: Cycling the Length of the Americas in Search of Company and while he’s not yet vlogging the trip, he does have lots of cool photos and a blog.

And of course, he has a trailer for the coming documentary of the trip:

If you’d like to delve in even deeper into this one, check out Kristen Pope’s interview with Dom over on Vagablogging.

Technorati Tags: nomad, adventure, documentary, bikes, technology, povertyjetset, vagabonding, biking, video, backpacking, blogging, travel

Help me out, friends. I have been trying to find out who this guy is. Anyone help me out on that? This decal is pasted all over the place in Thailand, on trucks, on doors, on buses. It seems like some kind of graffiti, but I can’t figure out anything about it. I wonder if it’s some kind of Andre the Giant has a Posse kind of thing.

Update: the verdict is in. It’s Serpico! Yet the mystery continues… why is Serpico’s face plastered all over Thailand?

Technorati Tags: art, povertyjetset, graffiti, thailand, travel

…when I feel like being in India or Laos or somewhere real slow, real far away, sipping a coconutty drink, smelling some funky mix of incense and cow dung and wiping sweat off my brow with a colorful piece of printed cotton bought from a street kid for a few cents. Or doing this, for example:

Technorati Tags: povertyjetset, daydreaming, travel

Admit it, there’s something goofy about a coupl’a blokes wearing tuxedos when they ain’t at a wedding. You know, like Charlie Chaplain funny. All goofy and fumbling and why-the-hell-are-they-wearing-those-outfits. Enter Tuxedo Travels. Two dudes on a mission. To wear a tuxedo all the way around the world. Something Lord Whimsy might get into, though I think he’d do it in a much classier suit. At any rate, these guys, the ‘delegates‘ Heath and Douglas, are blogging and vlogging and obviously having a really fun time. And you know, I wouldn’t post about something like this unless they really made me laugh. And laugh out loud I did. Watching this:

Technorati Tags: tuxedotravles, backpacking, povertyjetset, inspiration, blogging, video, videoblog, adventure, lordwhimsy, travel, funny

See, thing is, I spend a lot of time on my computer. But for ten years all I did was travel, travel, travel. Barely checked email. Never had a cell phone. Went to the other side of the world on a whim. It’s kinda nutty, but now this comic is how my life is, exactly. My youngest brother Paul sent it to me. Thank you, Paul. You hit the nail on the head, there good buddy.

Technorati Tags: blogging, povertyjetset, advice, adventure, documentary, backpacking, comic, humor

Just came across this amazing wiki called WikiMapia where they have satellite images of the whole earth and you can add meta data to it describing places, wiki-style. It’s pretty awesome! Anyone can add info, and just like all the other map programs, you can zoom down and see different detail of places. The photo above is my neighborhood.

Technorati Tags: socialgeography, wiki, mapping, tools, povertyjetset, map

I just read an incredibly interesting article about the revolutionary thinker Stewart Brand in the NY Times. It talks about his new ideas on the environmental movement, a group he divides in two: the romantics and the scientists.

Mr. Brand predicts that his heresies will become accepted in the next decade as the scientific minority in the environmental movement persuades the romantic majority. He still considers himself a member of both factions, just as in the days of the Merry Pranksters, but he’s been shifting toward the minority.

“My trend has been toward more rational and less romantic as the decades go by,” he says. “I keep seeing the harm done by religious romanticism, the terrible conservatism of romanticism, the ingrained pessimism of romanticism. It builds in a certain immunity to the scientific frame of mind.”

I find the idea really interesting. It’s been a nagging sensation in me for a while now, this idea that eating organic and drinking filtered water won’t save the planet. I mean, it’s obvious, but we do it anyway. But I love what he says, too, about energy, for example. I find myself on the brink of this very same thinking…

“It is one of the great revelatory bets,” he now says. “Any time that people are forced to acknowledge publicly that they’re wrong, it’s really good for the commonwealth. I love to be busted for apocalyptic proclamations that turned out to be 180 degrees wrong. In 1973 I thought the energy crisis was so intolerable that we’d have police on the streets by Christmas. The times I’ve been wrong is when I assume there’s a brittleness in a complex system that turns out to be way more resilient than I thought.”

I guess we’ll just have to do our best. Wait and see. And try not to be overly romantic about organic mineral water from Fiji.

I’m still dreaming of building an off-the-grid cob house on a mesa in the desert, though. No one can convince me that I can’t ward off the apocalypse on my own!

Technorati Tags: stewartbrand, endoftheworld, environment, povertyjetset, sustainability, idea, apocalypse, psychedelic, 60s