April 2004

The next 15 shuffled songs on my iPod:

As Time Goes By, Jimmy Durante
Tightly, Neko Case
Stupid Girl, Rolling Stones
Flower’s Grave, Tom Waits
Where You Lead, Carole King
Starving in the Belly of a Whale, Tom Waits
It’s Bad Grammar, Baby, Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks
Testament to Youth in Verse, New Pornographers
Desafinado, Rosemary Clooney & John Pizzarelli
Bummed Out City, Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros
Winter Lady, Leonard Cohen
Ball and Biscuit, White Stripes
GhettoMusick, OutKast
Centre for Holy Wars, New Pornographers
Jay-Z + DJ Danger Mouse, What More Can I Say

I think it’s time to rebuild my iPod’s library. I see the same artists and often the same songs from one Random iPod entry to the next.

Last week, Cory Doctorow posted to Boing Boing his thoughts on Peter Ackroyd’s book London: The Biography, which I’ve been meaning to read for a while.

Doctorow discusses the idea of people, books, and cities as continuities–things that shift form, develop, grow, recede, and change while still remaining the same. I realized as a young teenager that the stuff of which I am composed had all died and been replaced many times over. I’m smarter than I used to be but dumber than I will be.

Likewise, books. Not only does a particular book’s voyage from idea to bound volume morph slowly from one stage to the next, but that same book then acquires a body of commentary and criticism that shapes and is shaped by the book itself. And, as Doctorow also points outs, what we call “book” has changed many times over the past centuries–tablet, scroll, codex, e-text, audiobook, etc.–without changing the essence of what a book is and how it communicates with readers.

Cities, too, but here I’ll simply quote Doctorow, who says it better than I could:

London is continuous. It’s not a place — its borders have shifted and shifted again over thousands of years. It’s not a race of people — its inhabitants have changed in individual identity and culture so many times that the culture and ethnicity of London 2004 is nearly completely different from London 0000. It’s not a collection of architecture, or a map of roads, or a political system, for all of these have changed and changed and changed. London isn’t even its name: London’s had many names over the years.

London is a practice: London is what Londoners are doing right now, which is informed by, midwifed by, descended from what Londoners were doing yesterday. London is what Londoners do.

I’m now reading Gotham, and I think it’ll be interesting to read it through the lens of the continuous New York.

The government withdrew a subpoena for abortion records yesterday, Newsday reports. The government is defending itself against suits that challenge the ban on so-called partial-birth abortions and requested medical records of women who’ve sought abortions in New York hospitals.

A district court judge ordered the hospitals to comply, but New York Weill Cornell Medical Center refused, and the judge held the hospital in contempt. Last week, an appeals court blocked the contempt charge and agreed to resolve the issue. The government now has withdrawn the request in hopes of circumventing a drawn-out appeals process.

Right, so the big news out of Brooklyn in the last couple of weeks has been the opening of the new entrance to the Brooklyn Museum. Timed to support the opening of the new entrance, however, is a major renovation to the Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum stop on the 2 and 3 lines. I should get out there and see it before all the cool new fixtures get trashed.

Via Maud Newton, this amusing riff on book titles: change one letter and get a different story.

From here, because it amuses me.

“Don’t be silly,” I replied. I was fretful about my abilities as a lover. From the salad station at the other end of the line, I saw a brief, slurry exchange between Bobby and some of the guests. M pulled the thick file towards him. His eyes wandered slowly up to the date, which Ford was idly tapping at. The stale, rancid smell of cigarette butts, the ashtrays all brimming. He is gasping now.

I’m going to miss the “F to Avenue X” PA announcements. There’s something so sci-fi about Avenue X. However, I won’t miss cringing every time the Jay St./Borough Hall announcer says, “There is a Avenue X bound F train approaching Jay St./Borough Hall.” Gah.

Via BoingBoing comes this Business 2.0 introduction to Creative Commons licenses. These licenses allow writers, artists, musicians and other creatives to choose how their creatures can be copied and distributed, under terms less onerous than what copyright offers.

For those of you who pay attention to such things, I’ve created a Kinja digest and added the appropriate links to my page (under Syndication).

I’m not certain how much I’ll use Kinja myself; as one of its principals, Nick Denton, himself notes, “Kinja is an RSS reader for those who don’t know what RSS is”, and since I do know what it is, it’s probably not really meant for me.

However, I’ve been wanting to check it out. I’ve long thought that blogging and Web publishing in general are needlessly complex for the casual user, who doesn’t care to know what trackback pings, RSS, XML, readers, or permalinks are, but who would nonetheless happily use those features if they were de-geeked, simple to understand, and simple to use. Kinja seems like a step in that direction.

The other reason I wanted to try Kinja is simpler: all the cool kids are doing it, and I’m nothing if not a crowd-following, slack-jawing, tech-geeking, sushi-eating, latte-sipping bandwagon jumper. I checked out A9 the day it went public, and hell, I’d try Gmail if they’d let me.