Entries by laze

Spotify Radio vs. Pandora

Spotify vs. Pandora

There’s a lot of talk right now about Spotify’s new radio functionality that not only greatly improves on their previously lame attempt at “radio,” but also reportedly gives Pandora a run for its money. Though I’m not a frequent Pandora listener, I have found their careful classification to result in pretty darn fine listening.

I decided to run my own comparison using my favorite song of the year, Nostalgia 77′s “Simmerdown” as the base. The song has a very distinct groove and vocal tone, so I was curious to see which radio provided the best listening. (I would have included other streaming services in the test, but none offer radio based on elements of a single track.) Here’s what I heard:

Spotify

  • Nostalgia 77 – Beautiful Lie
  • Kinny – Water for Chocolate featuring Souldrop
  • Lizzy Parks – All That (Natural Self Remix)
  • Sola Rosa – Ready Now
  • Quantic and his Combo Bárbaro – Undelivered Letter
  • Ebo Taylor – Heaven
  • Skeletons – Marathon Man
  • Flevans – Loose Gardener
  • Quantic presenta Flowering Inferno – Cuidad Del Swing
  • Unforscene – Don’t You Worry Feat Alice Russell
  • Quantic and his Combo Bárbaro – Canção Do Deserto
  • Belleruche – The Itch (Acoustic Version)
  • Bonobo – Terrapin
  • Lizzy Parks – Raise The Roof

A number of Tru Thoughts tracks came up (appropriately, as that’s Nostalgia 77′s label) including Belleruche, but there were also some other wonderful songs I’d never heard before, like Kinny’s “Water for Chocolate.”

Pandora

  • Baby Charles – Life’s Begun
  • Bobby Rush – I Am Good As Gone
  • Dave Matthews Band – Grey Street (Live 2007)
  • The RH Factor – Forget Regret (feat. Stephanie McKay)
  • Mindi Abair – Get Right
  • Con Brio – Not At All
  • D-Influence – Shake It
  • JackSoul – As We
  • Ben Sidran – Ballad of a Thin Man

Of this batch, there were two terrible choices that I thumbed-down (thumbs-downed?) after about 30 seconds (Dave Matthews Band and D-Influence) and two that I thought were really good matches in terms of vibe, tempo, and vocals (The RH Factor and Con Brio).

The Verdict

Spotify served up a really solid collection of tracks that were very much in line with the vibe of the original track. I was quite impressed by Spotify’s list, enjoying the entire hour-plus of music. I’m not sure what they’re using to generate the list of suggestions, but their algorithm is pretty darn good.

I was surprised at how underwhelmed I was by Pandora’s line-up, especially when Dave Matthews hit (shudder). I ended up cutting my listening short because Pandora just wasn’t holding my attention. It wasn’t a complete failure, though, giving me two excellent tracks I’d never heard before.

One other difference between the two offerings: Spotify allows unlimited “thumbs down”s while Pandora cuts off at 12 per day for free users (and 6 per hour for all users).

Pandora’s the go-to for smart radio, but Spotify’s starting to make things interesting. (MOG: you should come along for the ride!)

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Publish date:
December 13th, 2011
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Music
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The White Panthers

While a group dubbed “The White Panther Party” invokes initial thoughts of a far-right white power answer to the Black Panthers, they were actually exactly the opposite:

The White Panther Party (WPP) of Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan was a radical counterculture group which became a major target for the FBI’s counter-intelligence (or “COINTELPRO”) program between 1968 and 1971. In October of 1970, the FBI referred to the White Panthers as “potentially the largest and most dangerous of revolutionary organizations in the United States.” However, just three years earlier, the group’s leaders hosted a “Love-In” on Detroit’s Belle Isle, presided over by John Sinclair, whom the Detroit News proclaimed “High Priest of the Detroit hippies.”

The formation and name of the group came from an interview given by Black Panther leader at the time, Huey Newton. Newton was asked what white people could do to support the Black Panther Party; he replied that they could start a White Panther Party.

In a later interview, Newton clarified:

MOVEMENT: Your comments about the white prisoners seemed encouraging. Do you see the possibility of organizing a white Panther Party in opposition to the establishment possibly among poor and working whites?

HUEY: Well as I put it before Black Power is people’s power and as far as organizing white people we give white people the privilege of having a mind and we want them to get a body. They can organize themselves. We can tell them what they should do, what their responsibility is if they’re going to claim to be white revolutionaries or white mother country radicals, and that is to arm themselves and support the colonies around the world in their just struggle against imperialism. But anything more than that they will have to do on their own.

The group existed from 1968 through 1975 and spawned rock band MC5. The Panthers lived at 1510 and 1520 Hill St. in Ann Arbor. Their biggest moment came 40 years ago, on December 10th, when they staged a concert/rally that drew 15,000 attendees in support of their jailed leader. Speakers included Allen Ginsberg and Bobby Seale and performers included John and Yoko Ono, Archie Shepp and Roswell Rudd, Stevie Wonder, protest singer Phil Ochs, and of course, MC5. YouTube has 70+ minutes of video from the concert, available in two parts.

This weekend, there’s a reunion.

Further reading on the White Panthers and their role in the movement:

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Publish date:
December 9th, 2011
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Civil Rights
Race
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Trenton where we live

I’ve recently gotten involved in a new project that aims to bring back a lot of the old school underground Jersey heads. As a result, I’ve been thinking about some old favorites recently. Stuff I grew up listening to on PRB, music that defined my worldview of hip-hop every bit as much as the music coming out of New York. Though it’s not technically all Trenton (Courageous Chief was from Willingboro, for instance), but here are some South Jersey hip-hop classics from Tony D, PRT, 360 Degrees, The Funk Family, and more. RIP Tony D and Baby Chill (#9).

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Publish date:
November 11th, 2011
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Hip-Hop
Music
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Seen, Heard, and Read, vol. 1

This is going to be my attempt at an irregular feature here on the site, where I’ll occasionally post a list of one movie, one book or article, and one piece of music I’ve recently consumed, along with some commentary.

Seen

If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, directed by Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman

While this documentary won’t change the mind of someone whose views are set about “radical” activism, it will no doubt show that there is a big difference between groups like Al-Qaeda and organizations like the ELF/ALF. And it does make one wonder about the “#1 domestic terrorist threat” being an organization that has never physically harmed a person. (That said, their tactics are certainly not ones that I would ever choose to use, but I can understand the thought process behind them.)

There is a bias to the documentary, but even so, it does give a legitimate voice to the victims of the activists’ actions such that the film doesn’t feel like a propaganda piece. Worth watching.

Heard

France Gall: Baby Pop

A while back, I asked on Quora, “What are some amazing upbeat ye-ye albums?,” looking for music similar Chantal Goya’s amazing songs from Godard’s Masculin/Féminin soundtrack. It took a while, but I finally got a bunch of great suggestions from Brie Larson.

I dug in this week and checked out France Gall’s 1966 album Baby Pop. It seems to have been the trend for the most successful ye-ye singers to be pretty young women that didn’t necessarily have the most amazing vocal range, but could carry a tune and look innocent and naive while doing it. Gall fits this role: you can hear some inconsistencies in her vocals, but the songs are catchy as all get-out and downright fun.

Read

Land of the Lost Souls: My Life on the Streets by Cadillac Man

I recently finished this book I received through LibraryThing‘s Early Reviewers program. It’s pretty much what you’d expect from a tale of homelessness as told by one that lived through it: stories of violence, spiraling depression, and a healthy dose of quirky characters. Land of Lost Souls gives us a glance into the everyday lives of the people we pass on the street, often without a second thought.

Though the book’s chronology jumps all over the place, making it hard to get your bearings on your place within Cadillac Man’s life, the structure turns out not to be all that important. What is important are the individual stories, like the touching story of Penny, a 19-year-old runaway who Cadillac Man develops both a fatherly and sexual relationship with before helping to reconnect her with her family. That sounds creepy, but it’s more that it’s just how things go in that environment.

Recommended.

(Cadillac Man reads a selection from his book in this CSPAN video from a couple of years ago.)

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Publish date:
October 27th, 2011
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Books
Cinema
Music
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Studying the trinity of delusion

In the early 1960s, social psychologist Dr. Milton Rokeach received a grant to study three institutionalized patients and how being together affected their sense of self. Each of the men thought he was Jesus Christ.

They all agreed with Rokeach that there could only be one Jesus Christ. Joseph was the first to take up the contradiction. ‘He says he’s the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. I can’t get it. I know who I am. I’m God, Christ, the Holy Ghost, and if I wasn’t, by gosh, I wouldn’t lay claim to anything of the sort … I know this is an insane house and you have to be very careful.’ Very quickly he decided that the other two were insane, the proof being that they were in a mental hospital, weren’t they? Therefore Clyde and Leon were merely to be ‘laughed off’. Clyde concluded that the other two were ‘rerises’, lower beings, and anyway dead. He took, perhaps, the most godlike tone: ‘I am him. See? Now understand that!’ Leon, who became adept at ducking and diving in order to maintain his position without causing the social disruption they all found threatening, explained that the other two were ‘hollowed-out instrumental gods’. When Rokeach pushed Leon to say that Joseph wasn’t God, he replied, “‘He’s an instrumental god, now please don’t try to antagonise him.”

This is an interesting look at how shaky the ethics of psychological studies can be, particularly during this time period. It was kind of shocking to see the justification for this type of experiment:

In the book Rokeach acknowledges that his experiment with his children had to stop where the trial of the three Christs started, with signs of distress: ‘Because it is not feasible to study such phenomena with normal people, it seemed reasonable to focus on delusional systems of belief in the hope that, in subjecting them to strain, there would be little to lose and, hopefully, a great deal to gain.’ This is a very magisterial ‘non-deluded’ view of who in the world has or has not little to lose. Evidently, the mad, having no lives worth speaking of, might benefit from interference, but if they didn’t, if indeed their lives were made worse, it hardly mattered, since such lives were already worthless non-lives. It also incorporated the bang-up-to-the-moment idea that if you want to know about normality you could do worse than watch and manipulate the mad.

Despite having gained some insight into delusion, in a later edition of his book book The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, Rokeach expresses regret at having conducted the study:

There were, he says, four people with delusional beliefs, not three. He failed to take himself into account, and the three Christs, not cured themselves, had cured him of his ‘God-like delusion that I could change them by omnipotently and omnisciently arranging and rearranging their daily lives’. He came to realise that he had no right to play God and interfere, and was increasingly uncomfortable about the ethics of his experiment. ‘I was cured when I was able to leave them in peace, and it was mainly Leon who somehow persuaded me that I should leave them in peace.’

(I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit amusement with the name changes the participants made during the course of the study. Two worth considering for your next child: Dr. Domino Dominorum et Rex Rexarum, Simplis Christianus Pueris Mentalis Doktor and Dr. Righteous Idealed Dung.)

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Publish date:
September 27th, 2011
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Psychology
Religion
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Will there be an AGATpad tablet device?

Oobject is serving up this great collection of 12 Soviet computers from the 1950s through the early 1990s:

Soviet computer manufacture had a promising beginning with devices such as the MESM, which when it was produced in 1950 was the first universally programmable computer in continental Europe. By today’s standards, you’d have to fill the Empire State Building full of MESMs to have the same processing power as an iPhone. Later Soviet block computers were invariably based on Western counterparts with a myriad of Sinclair Spectrum clones, an Apple II based machine, PC compatibles and later on, Vax based systems from Robotron in East Germany.

My favorite is the AGAT from 1983, a machine commissioned by the USSR Ministry of Radio that was “only partially compatible with Apple.” That monitor is something else! (And so is that color choice.)

Apparently, because of the lack of a source for a 6502 processor, they initially used a “partitioned 588 series” CPU that simulated 6502 instructions. Additionally, the ROM (presumably when they shifted to an actual 6502) still had Steve Wozniak’s name in memory. The unit was primarily used in school settings and had an available “Schkol’nitza” (“schoolgirl”) package to help teachers make use of it.

Curious about the AGAT computing experience? Of course there’s an emulator available.

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Publish date:
September 15th, 2011
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Retro Tech
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The Center

There’s a mid-sized city being built in New Mexico with a population of zero. Yet, there will be traffic lights, energy, and other things you might expect in a town with inhabitants. Except there won’t be any. Sounds like a Twilight Zone episode, but it’s not.

The Center will resemble a mid-sized American city, including urban canyons, suburban neighborhoods, rural communities and distant localities. It will offer the only of its kind opportunity to replicate the real-world challenges of upgrading existing city infrastructure to that of a 21st Century smart city, operating within a green economy.

“The idea for The Center was born out of our own company’s challenges in trying to test new and emerging technologies beyond the confines of a sterile lab environment,” Robert H. Brumley, Pegasus Global’s CEO said. “As entrepreneurs, we saw a global need and stepped up to address it. The Center will allow private companies, not for profits, educational institutions and government agencies to test in a unique facility with real world infrastructure, allowing them to better understand the cost and potential limitations of new technologies prior to introduction.”

…

Construction of The Center’s test facilities and supporting infrastructure may require as much as 20 square miles of open, unimproved land. It will be designed to represent the current mix of old and new infrastructure found in most modern U.S. cities.

The Center will provide the opportunity for “end-to-end” testing, evaluation and demonstration of new intelligent and green technologies and innovations emerging from the world’s public laboratories, universities, and the private sector with the goal of determining the direct and indirect benefits and costs the innovations tested would have on our existing infrastructure.

For example, this controlled environment would permit evaluation of the positive and negative impacts of smart grid applications and integration of renewable energies for residential, commercial and industrial sectors of the economy. Additional testing opportunities would include technologies emerging in intelligent traffic systems, next-generation wireless networks, smart grid cyber security and terrorism vulnerability.

Is it weird that I’d like to take a vacation there?

(via Engadget)

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Publish date:
September 14th, 2011
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Ghost Towns
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Someone saved his life

In 1975, Elton John released “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” a single off of that year’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, his most personal and, arguably, his best record. “Someone Saved…” was one of those songs that, even if you didn’t know specifically what he was referring to, you could tell that it was about a turning point in his life:

When I think of those East End lights, muggy nights,
The curtains drawn in the little room downstairs.
Prima Donna, lord, you really should have been there,
Sitting like a princess perched in her electric chair.
And it’s one more beer and I don’t hear you anymore.
We’ve all gone crazy lately,
My friends out there rolling round the basement floor.

And someone saved my life tonight sugar bear.
You almost had your hooks in me didn’t you, dear…
You nearly had me roped and tied,
Altar-bound, hypnotized,
Sweet freedom whispered in my ear.
You’re a butterfly…
And butterflies are free to fly,
Fly away, high away, bye bye.

I’ve long been a fan of this song, but never really knew the story behind it. The “Prima Donna” referred to is Linda Woodrow (now, Linda Hannon), who John was engaged to in 1969. According to Hannon, in 1970, John came home drunk one night and broke off the marriage, saying he had to put his career first. Though Hannon disputes that she was “dominating” or “had [her] hooks in [him],” John credits fellow singer Long John Baldry with talking him out of the marriage, making Baldry the “someone” in the song’s title.

Baldry and John were in a band together in the mid-60s called Bluesology, along with future Soft Machine member Elton Dean. John developed his stage name by combining Elton Dean and John Baldry’s first names. Baldry himself was gay and came out as such in the early 1960s. John didn’t come out until the late 1980s after a failed marriage.

Whether or not both John and Hannon felt the relationship was as one-sided as John paints it in his lyrics, it’s clear that he was conflicted at the time not only about how a marriage would affect his burgeoning career, but also his own sexuality, making “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” such a deeply personal song that is still extremely evocative, even 36 years later.

I never realised the passing hours of evening showers,
A slip noose hanging in my darkest dreams,
I’m strangled by your haunted social scene,
Just a pawn out-played by a dominating queen.
It’s four o’clock in the morning,
Damn it, listen to me good,
I’m sleeping with myself tonight,
Saved in time, thank God my music’s still alive.

And I would have walked head on into the deep end of the river
Clinging to your stocks and bonds,
Paying your H.P. demands forever.
They’re coming in the morning with a truck to take me home
Someone saved my life tonight, someone saved my life tonight.
Someone saved my life tonight, someone saved my life tonight.
Someone saved my life tonight.
So save your strength and run the field you play alone.

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Publish date:
August 15th, 2011
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Music
Rock
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Dear Maury, Love Wikipedia

Things over on the Maury post have quieted down, as tends to happen when you close comments on a post. But, for fun, I recently made a visit to Maury’s Wikipedia entry, which has my blog entry linked up. Then I clicked over to the Talk page for Maury and found this gem:

I had to laugh.

(Random Maury-blog-post-related story: A few years back at WebVisions in Portland, Paul and I were standing around with a few people, one of whom was Matt Haughey. Since Matt was the one who helped make the Maury post a sensation, I thought I’d be funny and introduce myself to him as Maury. He looked at me like I was an idiot and moved on.)

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Publish date:
August 2nd, 2011
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1 Comment
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Meta
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Tie Guan Yin

Three things you should see/read about Tie Guan Yin oolong tea, one of the most delicious and complex teas one can enjoy:

1. Rootd Tea’s history of and brewing suggestions for Tie Guan Yin

2. Chan Teas’ overview of the processing of Tie Guan Yin

3. An amazing 38-minute CNTV video about Tie Guan Yin

(via the previously mentioned Chan Teas post)

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Publish date:
July 17th, 2011
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Tea
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