Dog
Shawna and I now have a dog. Her name is Kodiak St. Joan of Arc Fischer Hollen or Koda. She is the prettiest and most well behaved pup ever and no dog in the world is as wonderful. That being said it is very strange to be a dog owner. I have learned several interesting items:

1. You are now everyones new pal. The amount of strangers that come up to you in the street and begin conversations is impressive. Often its not just a “oh can I pet her” either. I find myself engaged in lengthy dog related conversations with perfect strangers on a daily basis.
2. You have to become a “dog person.” Puppies love to run and play. Providence doesn’t allow overnight street parking at all. This means that every house/apartment that used to have a yard now has a big asphalt driveway. This means we have to take her to the dog park. This always means you have to interact with other “dog people” and then you find yourself part of a loose knit self reinforcing community against your will. Governments would be so lucky.
3. Dogs with blue eyes get all the attention.

Book
After the death of of His Holiness Pope John Paul II and the elevation of Joseph Alois Ratzinger to His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI I was worried because I knew very little about the new pope and in contrast to John Paul II with his anti-communist freedom fighting, attention to Catholic youth, and reformative attitude Benedict XVI seemed old and authoritarian. However, after reading more about the new spiritual leader through some excellent Catholic blogs (in case anyone is interested in Catholic blogs that are about current events and not “faith” per se.). I realized that he is brilliant. He is not the stodgy authoritarian I imagined and is, in fact, in every sense a theologian. He takes a very rational approach to religion and reminds me more of an academic professor (much like the ones I had at Bowdoin and not surprising considering he was one) than a priest. After his election to the Papacy, Benedict XVI has published a book on the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. It is the second most recent in a long history of books written by Benedict XVI. The startling aspect of the book is that the introduction clearly invites disagreement and discussion on his interpretation of the historical Jesus.

Whether or not you participate in the Catholic faith or if you even hearken to religion at all its a good book. It is a very interesting discussion of the theology of Catholicism with respect to the Catholic relation with Jesus the man. A very worthwhile read for the Christians and atheists on vdov.

Music
There are a few tracks that have been leaked recently or just came out that are most excellent.

For Reverend Green from Strawberry Jam by Animal Collective. (buy it)

The Animal Collective continues to get better with each album. For Reverend Green has the typical Animal Collective repetitive and loud melody dressed with beautiful vocals that give the whole thing a glorious rising sound. The sound is huge and you may find yourself listening to it over and over again. Even as the vocals dip into harsher screaming it is never too long and gives the song the right amount of edge that is at the same time taken off by the wonderful sound of the melody.

Paper Planes from Kala by M.I.A. (buy it)

Basically M.I.A. is gold right now. Everything she does is great. The new album is fantastic. I guess that Paper Planes is her “gangster” song. Singing of globe trotting, visa toting, criminality seems un-M.I.A. but the song is wonderful. Catchy chorus and a great pop sound. Even cash register and gun sound effects thrown in.

The Mending of the Gown from Random Spirit Lover by Sunset Rubdown (pre-order it direct)

Spencer Krug, formerly of Wolf Parade, is just about to release his third album. It is on new label Jagjaguwar based in Bloomington, IN. Sunset is absolutley on fire. This album is currently leaked and from what I have heard it is amazing. Much like Animal Collective Sunset has a big sound that is almost frantic at times. Mending of the Gown is just one of several awesome songs I have heard from this album. The sound is beautifully layered and Krug’s singing is earnest and captivating. The harmonization heard in this track is wonderful and subtle. I am also very curious who Maggie and Sam are.

Friends
Just a couple notes on some of the people over to the right in our blog roll. Matt Murchison is leaving for China just about now. He is going to be breeching the Great Firewall of China (which bans wordpress and blogger blogs). He is going to be posting pictures (and he takes good ones) on his flickr account which should be awesome.

Henry Work is moving to California to start a company. It promises to be awesome. Just look at all his awesome ideas. My guess is he ends up doing robot repairs for Disney’s animatronics.

Tim Barz has finally added more street art (i.e. graffiti) to his site. Some of the stuff is damn cool. One of the benefits of living in Manhattan is that it makes you seem cool even if you just take pictures of walls in your neighborhood.

I am not actually sure what Mort, Derek, and Jesse are actually doing. But their blog keeps getting updated so I can only assume that they are not dead (yet). Its good stuff and there is PHILOSOPHY on it… philosophy that relates to PORN!!!!1

Thats all I really know about. I am sure Costa has more info on his share of internet friends.

The 1996 film is directed by Terry Zwigoff, director of Ghost World, Bad Santa, and Art School Confidential (all good films), and it is clearly a low budget affair but in that it is very direct and gets very personal with Crumb and some of his family. It is the sheer uncomfortable strangeness that the viewer is presented with that makes the documentary so appealing and yet somewhat repulsive. One thing you realize when watching the documentary is how intensely personal Crumb is in his drawing and that a lot of the oddity stems directly from his own life and his own fetishes. The level to which Crumb and his family (especially his brothers) open up in front of the camera is fairly startling. One minute Crumb will be musing how a strange unpopular boy somehow became an icon of the 60’s counterculture without ever really fitting into it and in the next scene him and his brother Charles are laughing about an abusive father. What really sets this movie apart from other artist documentaries is the access that Zwigoff is able to obtain to Crumb’s family and friends. The biographical sketch is extremely deep and you get a sense of understanding where Crumb is coming from if not what he is thinking. The movie is definitely worth a watch but I will remind our readers once again that Crumb really has no constraint in what he depicts and a lot of it is silly but there is a definite undercurrent of odd sexual fetishism and some racism. Don’t let it scare you off but be duly warned.

The big difference in this arena between acosta, shollen and myself is that they have a large disdain for the theatrics of election time politics. Whereas, I view it as a national spectacle along the lines of high school prom queen drama. October in even numbered years is really my O.C. In the spirit of glorious political dramatics I have decided to play around with embedded YouTube links to bring you the very best of this year’s political attack ads, ad remixes, and general election brouhaha.

Judy Baar-Topinka vs. Rod Blagojevich (inc.)

In the Illinois governor’s race Blagojevich has done a bang up job of making everyone hate Topinka mostly by simple association with George W. Bush. For example this fine ad in the “What’s She Thinking Series:”

More in the “What’s she thinking?” series: [1], [2]

I think that this just about captures the message:

Here is another by the same author.

And one final remix:

From this one responding to Topinka’s attack ads which was just screaming for the cut and paste.

A couple more fun ones

anti-Ron Kind (WI congressional race):

Ben Nelson killed a giraffe! (Nebraska senatorial race)

Vdov.net official campaign endorsement: Reelect Senator Ted Stevens

Why systems like Pandora suck
The problem with things like Pandora is that it relies on a keying system. Those of you that have gmail might make the same type of correlation to “labels” in their interface. This system is completely arbitrary in complexity and in inputs. There is an incredible amount of data out there but each individual person (input) is responsible for organizing their own sets, and no real intelligent analysis of the problem happens past that point, other than basic, basic statistics. So here’s a question. Is the key for ‘genre’ actually a significant one? How significant is it? What keys are most significant? What keys are least significant? Does my assignment of genre X and theme Y to one particular song actually differentiate it at all from any other items? How do I quantify that? This keying system is a supervised approach which absolutely sucks for this type of data.

Factor components
Factor analysis or, in the simple case principal component analysis (PCA), is generally capable of making unsupervised decisions about the significance of arbitrary factors, and creating a series of column vectors describing the most significant ones. I encourage everyone to look PCA and factor analysis up if interested.

Initial application to music classification
Screw manually organizing music into genres and ratings. I want my computer to tell me what I’m going to like without having to do anything other than analyze my current collection. If I had the processing power, I would probably assign some sort of 1D value to every 1/10th of a second second of a song based on some calculation. A perfectly reasonable example might be a frequency/amplitude analysis in the simple case, or perhaps something very fancy like a Fourier/superposition-type deconstruction. Regardless, I would end up with a column vector of values for each song. Then I’d normalize then length such that each column vector for each such is exactly the same, such that a rectangular matrix could be constructed, representing the entirety of music known to my computer. Then I’d probably do a 2D factor decomposition (although this can be done in any dimension, and often is for good reason). The eigenvectors/eigenvalues I get out of the analysis represent the most, and second most variance within the data set. This is generally most easily done with a singular value decomposition (SVD). I would bet almost anyone reading this site that most of the music you actually listen to falls within one quadrant of Factor 1 vs. Factor 2 on Cartesian plane.

Even if your musical taste is extremely eclectic, this would easily give you great differentiation of genre (probably represented in Factor 1, the factor describing the most variance in the data set) without having to actually manually key or classify anything. To those of you who know what I’m working on currently, the similarities between this and my work are, I’m sure, not lost on you.

Other systems
Now you can ask questions: Is genre a separable quantity given the vectors I have constructed from the raw data? Is any key used in the Pandora or Google model actually useful at all? If yes, great … now I can arbitrarily understand a new mp3 or email based on factors that actually have some real significance without having to do any manual classification or introduce any personal bias into the system. I can, of course, write very clever code to do this all for me. This is a general technique applicable to really any system in which you can construct column vectors describing one data point, and in which you want to differentiate between types (for instance, mass spectra). Here’s an example of a 2D plot for such data. Note that the data I used to construct this (and ran my code on) was completely arbitrary and random and therefore no separation was observed.

Google labels suck bad
So let’s extrapolate to a system that everyone is extremely familiar with: Gmail. Even though I get a lot of crap from friends for this, I really like Google. 99% percent of the time they produce products and services that are just downright impressive and well done. However, one of my least favorite concepts is this manual labeling of emails and of RSS feeds, etc. It’s a terrible system. Really terrible. So instead of manually labeling stuff, let’s analyze all your email and figure out everything we need without having to do a damn thing.

1. Take emails and normalize them.
2. Build column vectors describing something about each set of characters in the email.
3. Do the factor analysis.
4. Ask a question: are these N labels significant?
5. If so, apply.
6. Build a new set of vectors describing something different about each character set.
7. Repeat the analysis.
8. Ask another question: do we do better with this vector type?
9. You get the point …

For those of you who love your calculus I could even imagine some very fancy multidimensional function/model describing the way in which we build column vectors to describe character sets in each email, a minimization of that function giving us the best way to construct these column vectors from the data.

Now, when a new email comes in, I know everything about it based on its relationship to the vectors I’ve calculated! Sweet! There’s obviously a little more to this to get it to work right, and this does require fairly large data sets. This would be of basically no use to someone with only a few emails in their account, although there could be a global set calculated from averages of each Gmail user from which initial vectors are calculated for new/small system users.

I will kill spam with this technique
The stuff I’ve described above deals with fairly complex systems. One type of system that is absolutely not complex is spam. Spam filters work in nearly the same way as any keying mechanism in the other systems.

1. if (email_contains_word_viagra) total_score += significance_of_contains_word_viagra;
2. if (email_contains_unresolved_link) total_score += significance_of_contains_unresolved_link;
3. …
4. if (total_score >= spam_score_limit) mark_as_spam(email);

You can see this in action in any email just by looking at the X-Spam: headers (of course, there are other mechanisms that don’t work this way). Go ahead, give it a try. One of the problems with this system is that it assumes everyone gets the same type of spam. They may be right: word N might be the most significant globally, but if I don’t get any spam of that type, what good is it to me? Therefore I think it might be reasonable to address spam as a non-global issue. So, here you go Google, here’s another idea.

1. if (i_mark_something_as_spam) label_email(email, “spam”);
2. factor_analysis_for_spam(factor_results, set_of_real_email, all_current_emails_marked_as_spam);
3. int any_good = can_i_differentiate(factor_results, “spam”);
4. if (any_good) develop_filter_from_factor_analysis(factor_results, “spam”);
5. if (any_good) store_new_filter(factor_results, filter_structure);
6. remove_obsolete_filters(factor_results, filter_structure);

Without having to do anything at all, I have organically developed a new filter for a specific type of spam that I get. These aren’t run in order as their listed but they are just concepts necessary to build such a spam-vector data set.

There are a lot of good answers to good questions about this type of methodology. For instance, applications to visual pattern and facial recognition. Feel free to ask them, but for the brevity of this post, I’m leaving a lot out. It’s already far too long as it is. I’d also like to point out that I think this is the first time I’ve ever used six category “keys” to describe a post. Fitting, isn’t it?

Cheers.

1) Ennio Morricone – Titoli (Title) – Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo (The Good, The Bad, The Ugly)
2) Band of Horses – The Funeral – Everything All The Time
3) Solvent – Introduction to Ghosts – Idol Tryouts II: Ghostly International
4) Mobius Band – Electric Piano – Idol Tryouts II: Ghostly International
5) Joan Baez – Here’s To You – The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissue OST
6) Underworld – Cowgirl – Dirty Epic (single)

The Rt. Rev. always honors requests and loves to get feedback. As always you can reach the Rev. @ rtrev -at- vdov -dot- net

Creative Commons was started by Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig in response to the influx of open source programming and the copyright problems that followed. The company has since evolved into providing copyright services not only for programming, but also for media. This media includes music, movies, photography, etc. The copyright services are free and easy to use, have been upheld in court and provide varying levels of security that you choose for your work.

The varying levels of security to choose from opens the floodgates of creativity while upholding the personalized demands of the original creator. These levels of security include any combination of the following:

By: – The new author of the changed work must give credit to the creator of the original work.
Non-Commercial – The new author cannot use the changed work for commercial purposes.
No Derivatives – The user cannot change the work, but may redistribute it.
Share Alike – The new author can use the new work as long as they use the same copyright terms as was originally put on the object.

Using these four copyright options people can personalize their copyrights to best benefit them and the community as a whole. These types of copyright options encourage the use of open source in all contexts, not just programming.

The organization is doing some really cool things with this new open source data. Under their Creative Commons Mixter website there is a contest sponsored by Warner Brothers Records to remix an existing song that is under a “cc” copyright. The winner of this contest receives a record contract from Warner Brothers. Another interesting tidbit: artists such as Boards of Canada and DJ Danger Mouse and Jemini, have uploaded their songs to be remixed or mashed by anyone who wants to.

The organization has been growing exponentially since its inception and is now providing flexible copyright laws in over 20 countries. The company has also recently started providing copyrights for scientific research under their Science Commons website.The growing need for these innovative copyright licenses ensure the protection of artists and the flexibility for creative minds to improve on others work.

Jash Pictures represents the work of Jaron Henrie-McCrea, who I was lucky enough to go to high school with. He is a very strange guy, but strange in all the right ways. I have not really had any contact with him since I went to a party at his house Thanskgiving weekend of 2003, so all I have is news clippings and hearsay from friends. From what I can tell Jaron basically was the Ball State University film scene (once again this is supposition at best and mythology at worst) and made quite a name for himself by winning…

Student Academy Awards
* Gold Medal winner, Alternative category, 2005: “Knock Knock”
* Regional finalist, Alternative category, 2004: “Marry This”

Regional Emmy Awards
* Directing – Tape/Film winner, 2004: “Rose”
* Magazine Format Programs producing winner, 2004: “Connections Live”
* Feature/Entertainment Segments winner, 2003: “Yak to Shaq”
* Feature/Entertainment Segments winner, 2002: “Welcome to JASH”
* Ten-time nominee

Heartland Film Festival
* Jimmy Stuart Memorial Crystal Heat Award winner, 2005: “Knock Knock”

Other Awards/Recognitions
* Ball State Senior Telecommunications Student of the Year, 2005
* Ball State Junior Telecommunications Student of the Year, 2004
* David Letterman Scholarship winner, 2003
* “Connections LIVE” Member of the Year, 2002
* Eagle Scout

…a whole ****ing lot of awards (yeah those are Emmy and Academy awards). He is now in Columbia for a Masters in Fine Arts (my mom actually knew this before I did). The most recent incarnation of Jash Pictures’ Website has very little new material and actually is missing some work from previous incarnation. However, it does contain Jaron’s most critically acclaimed work, “Knock Knock.” I have tried to get Jaron to agree to an interview, but have not gotten a reply as of yet. Hopefully, I will be able to wheedle one out of him (in a weird and internet stalkeriffic way). Until then, enjoy some good film.

Link the First:
Brian Eno is apparently selling off some of his long standing recording gear. If you find yourself with your hands on several thousand British Pounds Sterling then you can alternatively find yourself with some pretty legendary equipment. For those that don’t know (but should), Eno is a big mover and shaker in the indie music community, especially if you like more ambient music. He is noted as having a hand in developing several production strategies that are in heavy rotation in pop music nowadays. There is good info at the Wikipedia and at All Music.

Link the Second:
As you know I love my movies. Independent film is one of my favorite entertainment mediums and is rivaled only by independent music. I think it is actually harder to get independent film off the ground than it is music simply because of the primacy of the big studios and the fact that it is harder to sell and distribute film (for example via the web) than it is to do the same with music. Often the biggest problem from a viewers side is sifting through the staggering amount of truly bad indie films and culling out the gems. I also have a weakness for “Top #” lists whether it is to agree or disagree or simply satisfy my curiosity. This is a good list with plenty of info about each film and a nice interface. The overrated films in my opinion are “Sideways” (WAY overrated), “Memento”, and “Roger and Me.” The underrated ones in my opinion are “Nosferatu,” “Lost In Translation,” and “City of God.” But like I said it is a solid list.

Review:
Morningwood’s new album is the bands first and most self titled album. I was a pretty skeptical picking this one up even though it came with a stamp of approval from the WBOR indie cadre (podcast!). The band looks like a hit it and quit MTV2 pop rock attempt with a cute front woman, not exactly awe inspiring to a suave and oh so cultured indie conoussier such as myslef. However, it is a solid album. The name is lame but I think if “Clap Your Hands Say Yeah” has taught us anything it is that you can have a bad name and a self titled album and still rock. The sound from this quartet is grungy pop rock with more than a little Le Tigre and Veruca Salt thrown in… perhaps shades of Dressy Bessy on power pop tracks such as Nth Degree.

The album is rock solid especially considering my low expectations. Expect to hear it on the podcast tomorrow. The front woman is Chantal Claret who is backed up by ex-Wallflowers drummer Pedro Yanowitz who actually plays base this time around, John Paul Keenan O on drums, and former Space Hog member Richard Steel on guitar. The album is produced by none other than Gil Norton who has produced such gems as Doolittle by the Pixies and the self titled Echo & The Bunnymen. This album probably doesn’t meet those noble predecessors but still if you can get over a little bit of the camp there is some good stuff. You have a pretty wide range in here despite the pop label I have applied. Nu Rock is an all out ,full meter grunge track, while you have the the ever campy Nth Degree on the other side with poppy reverb guitar and lyrics consisting of self referential description and spelling the band’s name. This reminds me of an indie and earnest New York City version of the Monkees famous cut Hey We’re The Monkees. That is definitely in full contrast to the gritty, full bore sections of Jetsetter. The truth is that these guys swing from one side to another almost instantly and even within songs. I am not truly convinced that these guys will keep up. I have the feeling they will hit the MTV2 rotation and then fade away but I will horde away a small kernel of hope.

1) Architecture In Helsinki – The Owls Go – Fingers Crossed
2) The Fiery Furnaces – Inca Rag/Name Game – Gallowsbird Bark
3) The Avalanches – Frontier Psychiatrist – Since I Left You
4) Brian Eno – Blank Frank – Here Come The Warm Jets
5) Dr. Octagon – Halfsharkalligatorhalfman – Dr. Octagonecologyst
6) The Fiery Furnaces – The Garfield El – Rehearsing My Choir

The movie starts off with almost excruciating slowness. There are a lot of obvious visual metaphors floating around. For instance, make sure to watch the wind turbines (slow to fast) as the movie gets going. There are some excellent scenes that play off the old “gents,” such as the new waitress at the bar and Schultze discovering Zydeco on the radio. The whole first half basically lays out the boring routine of life in rural Germany for pensioners. It shows the mundane routine but never demeans the life, which is certainly a fine line to walk. It would be easy to clumsily portray the life of these three pensioners making them seem like old losers, but Schorr does an excellent job of making the characters interesting and lively, but merely trapped in the routine.

The movie really starts picking up when Schultze hits the American South. The culture “clash” is great. Schorr does a superb job of showing how Americans pose as Europeans and vice-versa. Basically what Schorr creates is a German “Blues Brothers” combined with the mythologic questing through and old time land that you see in “O’ Brother Where Art Thou.” The movie definitely is as much a series of cultural vingettes as anything else (German and American). In the way that Alexis de Tocqueville provides us with one of the best looks at early American democracy it is often the unjaded eyes of a foreigner that point out best the strange differences of a new land, but notice the indelible mark left on our culture by our cousins across the sea.

I won’t give away any more. “Schultze Gets The Blues” is not a quick movie. It definitely takes some patience and the end is frustrating as hell, but it is a monster of a movie.

Although before you go whole hog on this guy remember that I watched this guy lose a directing award to a movie of a kid fighting a chair.

So here in America we have a grand tradition of appropriating Asian culture. We love kung fu. California can’t get enough of “Eastern” spirituality. Asian food is a must in almost all walks of life round this northern half of the continent. However, there has always been a strained relationship between Asian and American culture. So any time I get to see a movie like Kung Fu Hustle I am filled with joy. The cross-appropriation of Chinese imitating American values, shown to an American audience looking for Chinese values is almost too much to bear. The movie is glorious. The combination of 1920’s gangster film, Looney-Tunes cartoon lampooning, Bruce Lee, West Side Story, Kurosawa, cowboy films, and every samurai movie ever makes for a savory movie dish. It is not as if this kind of film is completely new. The cross-reference of The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven falls into this type of category, but I have not seen a film where all of the cross continental elements have been combined so well in one epic tale. Tarentino’s Kill Bill series certainly looms large in this setting, but Kung Fu Hustle has a certain flair that has not been seen before.

The movie is essentially a redemption tale about a kid turned wannabe gangster turned natural Kung Fu master. Stephen Chow (who plays the protagonist, Sing) is the actor/director behind this and Shaolin Soccer (you might be noticing a patters here). He does a fantastic job of brining out the slapstick comedy in the film while never becoming too cheesey. The message is about the incredible aptitudes trapped inside “ordinary” people. It’s fun, it is not overly serious like other films in the genre (i.e. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The House of Flying Daggers), and the cartoonish fight sequences are masterpieces in Kung Fu experimentation. I highly reccomend this one and hope that Chow comes up with something really excellent for his next US release.