Mission accomplished?

hp9-29-04qq, originally uploaded by lotifoazurri.

The country's favorite pastime is returning to our nation's capitol. D.C.'s Mayor Anthony Williams announced yesterday that the District would have a professional team starting next season. The best part of the news, though, is that the yet-named Washington team is being moved from Montreal. As everyone knows, Canada is a nation that has a long record of screwing up perfectly good sports. I know hockey is terribly exciting for seven games every year, but Canadian football? The Expos showed why they're one of the worst teams in baseball again two weeks ago when they fell for the hidden ball trick in a game against the Marlins. One can only hope that this move will give the franchise new life. Washington is building a new stadium on Capitol Ave as part of the deal with MLB and the franchise, and local businessmen are expected to buy the team for an estimated $300 million when it goes up for auction in the off-season.

Tonight is the first debate in what has become an increasingly yawn-tastic Presidential campaign. Al Gore offers tips to John Kerry on debating George W in yesterday's New York Times. Maybe instead of the top names on the ballot debating, they should let the VP candidates do it - an opportunist lawyer debating a board room shark.

Yesterday marked the first private flight into space. Scaled Composites, the company that backed the flight, only has to send one more rocket up to claim the $15 million Ansari X Prize for spaceflight. Not like the money should matter if you have the cash to build a rocketship - one of the company's backers is Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft

Oh, and North Korea announced it had weaponized plutonium to make a nuclear bomb. Have a nice day.

The Tyler Hamilton doping case is still unresolved. More on that tomorrow.

When it's cold but not that deep, your legs grow

Snow & Ice, originally uploaded by lotifoazurri.

Italians always do it better - the Olympic mascots for the 2006 winter games in Turin were unveiled today. Creatively named Snow and Ice, they look instead like the marshmallow man and his wife, the Special K logo.

But there's no beep before the dialtone

We're so thoroughly postmodern that it's killing us all, Generation Y. I've been doing a bit of thinking on the topic after a good conversation with one Matt Lucas, and after listening to one of his Wednesday talks in which he attempted to set out the problems facing college students. You see, we're all searching for something - call it what you will, but for this discussion I'll use the term fulfillment (it also goes by such terms such as meaning and purpose).

Ours is a generation that has grown up with the effects of America's cultural revolution; the philosophies of the Baby Boomers have been unconsciously embraced and become implicit assumptions of our collective zeitgeist. The experiences of the 20th Century have caused us to reject outright the Modernist notions that all things are possible through human innovations: if the First and Second World Wars shaped the ways that the Depression generation (our grandparents) viewed human nature and the value of work, then the loosening of morays in the 1960s and the resulting dissolusionment that our parents' generation faced in the '70s & '80s shaped our formative years like bricks on a wall. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and those giants stand on the ghosts of prior generations.

Think about the major events of the late '80s and early '90s ~ AIDS, the drug war, the Challenger explosion, a soft economy and less jobs for the first time in thirty years. Young parents are grappling with raising children while trying to understand and explain an increasingly complex world to their progeny. The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s changed views on the family and marriage, leading to increased divorce rates. Generation Y has grown up thusly in this environment - unstable families and quickly shifting culture defined by the materialism of their parents, all with an Existential philosophical underpinning.

These two markers lead in turn to our reliance on peers to guide our understanding of the world as we develop our own personal worldviews, and with our Relativistic doubt of anything not instantaneous or tangible. Relationally, we crave deep and meaningful connections to other human beings; we want to be fully known and accepted, and yet we doubt that such a thing is possible in light of our experiences with human relationships.

Women search for fulfillment in their careers, or pour themselves into a man to find meaning. Men seek the next person who will provide them with passing comforts, while shunning an emotional connection. All routes lead to further frustration and apathy with the concept that relationships can be anything other than selfish and fleeting. We hurt others and are hurt in return. The scars are deep and lasting, and we develop a calloused demeanor to the undulations we encounter on the path of the heart.

Community is increasingly dissolved by the rapid pace that advancement takes - we are users of technology and are shaped by it instead of thoughtfully considering how it changes our relationships. Our SUV's get bigger in response to our inability to feel safe and at home in our lives, and horsepower becomes a new conversation of angst between people in a rush to get somewhere else they don't feel right in.

What is the answer to all this pain and ugliness? I'm learning through all my mistakes and flaws that it's a community dedicated to meaningful relationships. I still don't think that we can ever arrive at absolute certainty on this side of perfection, but I'm clinging onto this one hope. I'll tell you about it over coffee if you ask, but it's not something I share unsolicited. It's the way I roll.

This is why we love art and music and literature with a healthy dose of confusion and mess and pain. It's why I love noise and post-rock and Death Cab. We see ourselves in the struggle, and it's good to know we're not alone. Cause you're never alone, and this is chapter one.

Post rock and slightly seasoned

22-interpol, originally uploaded by lotifoazurri.

Interpol releases their second album today. I'll try to skip the surly bonds of work and go buy it today, along with a few other CD's I've been pining for. Pitchfork couldn't decide what to think of the album, despite giving it an 8.5 rating. Antics is, according to the perpetually disdainful boys and girls at Pitchfork, not a traditional sophomore release like they consider Turn on the Bright Lights to inexplicably be. It's a departure from their album format to a more single-friendly outlook, but what it appears that Pitchfork is trying to say is that the production values are just better - more space between the heavy rythmn section and piercing guitars and the vocals, which were obscured in their first release. I'll let you know what it actually sounds like in the next week.

More interesting is the fact that Interpol has taken the original step of opening art spaces in New York, LA, and London, where they are selling 7" box sets and singles for the album, along with screen printed original band images. Paris gets it's own Interpol shrine later in the year. Expect lots of skinny ties and dark suits, paired with hair swept to one side.

I'm also getting the following titles:
The Future Soundtrack for America
The Microphones - The Glow, Pt 2
Murder by Death - Who Will Survive, and What Will Be Left of Them
Rogue Wave - Out of the Shadow

Some countries have all the fun

The New York Times details outrage in the Netherlands over a film that graphically portrays what the director calls the hidden abuses of Muslim women in European nations under the cover of organized religion. Sadly, I'll probably never see it. However, the film is controversial in that it shows Koranic verses written on the bare flesh of women who are typical recipients of the violence that Ms. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a member of the Dutch parliment, Somali immigrant, and former Muslim says is all too common in Muslim immigrant societies.

The Washington Post shows some suprising poll numbers, only 38 days away from the general election. Apparently, those voters who are decided predominantly choose Mr. Bush again for his handling of the 'War on Terror." One has to wonder, though, if the current polling fails to take into consideration what is being billed as a groundswell of fierce anti-Bush sentiment among segments of the voting age public that traditionally stay home on November 2nd. If it's true that 67% of those reached for the ABC poll think that this is one of the most important elections in memory, then the conventional wisdom should get thrown out of the window. As my friend Lee Bandy at The State likes to say, South Carolina could very well come down to the turnout within the black community. Are you better off then you were four years ago?

We played on the big rock stage made the big rock wages

I stole Edvard Munch’s famous painting, ‘The Scream’, from a museum in Oslo, Norway, a couple of weeks ago. Missing a whole week of class is nothing compared to pulling off an international art heist just so you can admire a painting every day while you walk to the bathroom. That’s right Interpol, come and get me – it’s just sitting in my house.

Of course, this is a ludicrous statement at best, and let’s all hope that the authorities won’t be knocking down my door late some night to check the veracity of my claim, but it’s also a perfect analogy for the problem that USC and other universities are facing on the file-sharing frontier. There has long been buzz that the university was looking into setting up a way for students to legally download music, and the rumor was finally confirmed through an article in this paper on Friday. However fuzzy the details are at this point, it seems that USC is already taking the wrong route in an attempt to cut down on digital piracy.

It shouldn’t be a big deal for higher education in America to admit that they are at least ten years behind in dealing with the impact of the digital revolution on media. In struggling to catch up, USC and its peers may inadvertently implement solutions that will only encourage more illegal activities as students attempt to get around legal downloading. Chief Information Officer Bill Hoague was quoted as saying that his preference was for the RealNetworks system in place at the University of Southern California-Berkley, which confirms that Student Life has already failed to consider the implications of such a service on anything other than the university’s infrastructure.

Take a look at the situation that Cornell University finds themselves in a year after adopting the new Napster as a subscription service on campus funded through student activity fees. Napster, as well as Real’s Rhapsody service, are not compatible with Apple computers, which at Cornell comprise 6 to 7 percent of student’s computers. Furthermore, the main portable audio player in use on college campuses (with a 70 percent market share) is the Apple iPod, which can be used with either PC’s or Apple’s Macintoshes, but cannot play files downloaded from Napster or Rhapsody. Adopting a music downloading option offered by either Napster or Real would render these devices useless, and cut the primary user of such a service out of the loop.

The only way to make a music service viable on campus is to ensure that it has enough content to dissuade students from illegally downloading through Limewire or Bearshare. Real and Napster are severely limited in terms of the files they offer, and even Apple’s iTunes has a catalog that does not include many non-mainstream acts. Since the ultimate goal is to eliminate illegal file sharing, whatever service they chose must include adequate digital rights management (DRM). However, this is in ignorance of the fact that there are no protections against someone legally downloading an album and then ripping it to a format to share illegally. USC’s best option is to aggressively limit student’s ability to use illegal file sharing while encouraging private use of legal services like iTunes instead of endorsing one and limiting choices.