maybe even you

I was driving into Boston yesterday when the new patti smith song "april fool" came on. gorgeous. another example of an artist who continues to impress across the decades. when it came on, though, it took me a minute or two to place it. in that minute I saw ghosts. 

here's april fool - take a listen and buy the album on patti's site [link]. then follow my neuroaudial (yes I made it up) path and visit some old friends.

"come, be my april fool" - unmistakeable voice.

but mistake it I did, as the sound carried me back to an LA band I first heard in france. I loved french record shops in the late seventies - you could ask to listen to the record before you bought it! the clerk would nod toward one of the glass-walled booths, you would go in, and as near as I can recall, you could stay until the whole side was over.

that's where I was introduced to rory gallagher, telephone, and the motels, whose eponymous debut album included this track (sadly, I couldn't find a copy of "porn reggae," my favorite song of theirs). listen to martha davis' vocals and you will see (hopefully) why patti's voice on the april fools track put me in mind of her. debbie harry of blondie has it too, especially when she shows off her jazzier side. I think it's the torch singer effect - plaintive on top, but with a reservoir of strength below...

motels, total control

ok, back to april fools. toward the end of the song another ghost appears in the distinctive guitar figures. richard lloyd was another one of those french record store discoveries. his work on alchemy led me to discover television's 1977 classic marquee moon and tom verlaine. 35 years later, the smith tune was bringing back memories of verlaine? a look at the album credits solved the mystery - verlaine, in fact, plays guitar on the track. listen to him at 2:30 on april fool and tell me it doesn't hearken back to marquee moon at around 8:45, when the television cut takes a brief detour into some kind of garcia-esque noodle party.

television, marquee moon

crazy how the mind works.

in defense of targeted adverting | the qualified yes

I posted earlier today about an article over on the harvard business review blog concerning privacy concerns and "the creepy factor." the caption I used in pushing the post onto some outlet or another reminded me that I had covered this ground in the past. rather than admit to playing both sides, I will simply comment that when I wrote this last summer, I was talking about personalizing advertising, not one's entire web experience.

let’s talk about root beer. I would rather see and most likely subsequently ignore an ad for root beer than an ad for a miracle root beer absorbing tampon. because I would never buy a tampon, no matter what it claimed to soak up.

on the other hand, I _might_ be interested in buying a new brand of root beer if the offer was right. because I do buy root beer. and unlike diet coke, my brand allegiance is not absolute.

via btrandolph.com (read the whole post - it's all this good)

image AttributionNoncommercial Some rights reserved by incurable_hippie

LastPass Settings You Should Enable | Lifehacker via How-To Geek


I love lastpass. check out some cool tips to make you a safer surfer.

Popular password management tool, LastPass, offers a bunch of security options to keep your passwords safe. If you're not aware of all these options, though, such as using a dedicated security email address, it's a good time to review.
via lifehacker.com (click through to the full article)

image: AttributionNoncommercial Some rights reserved by Simon Lieschke

Placing a Dollar Value on Apple’s Mountain Lion Software | NYTimes.com

the ranters and reviewers are in full roar now regarding the Mountain Lion update for iOS. after reading a few articles like David Pogue's in the New York Times, I signed up. I like the voice transcription - still haven't see the enhanced notifications yet, but I think I'll figure them out...here's the money paragraph from the review:

 

So by my highly scientific accounting, Mountain Lion costs $20 but nets $46.90 worth of enhancements. And that’s not even counting the other 170 features: the Preview app (now lets you fill in checkboxes and blanks in PDF forms), Gatekeeper (blocks evil software), new screen saver slide shows, the unified address bar/search bar in Safari, the scroll bars that fatten up as your cursor approaches, and so on.

Over all, then, Mountain Lion is a gentle, thoughtful upgrade. All 200 new features? No, not really. But 10 that you’ll use every day? For $20?

Yes.

via nytimes.com (click to read the full review)