Doc Watson

[ed. A guitar-picker's guitar picker. Listen to House Carpenter (11:09) one of the saddest songs I think I've ever learned to play. Lyrics here.]

"Doc Watson's very first solo performances--1962 and 1963, in the heart of New York City's folk revival"--per Amazon.com anon reviewer.

Track list: My Time stamps are subjective and irrespective of Doc's preambles, crowd-work, fond reminisces, or recieved crowd applause. The time stamps represent only the moment the song properly begins till it's proper ending.

1. Little Sadie 00:00 - 2:15
2. Blue Smoke 2:25 - 4:16
3. St. Louis Blues 4:29 - 6:59
4. John Herald Introduction 7:12 - 7:45
5. Sing Song Kitty 7:45 - 10:15
6. House Carpenter 11:09 - 14:52
7. Liberty 15:08 - 16:40
8. The Old Wooden Rocker 17:01 - 19:57
9. Milk Cow Blues 20:08 - 22:03
10. Tragic Romance 22:35 - 26:00
11. The Dream of the Miner's Child 26:27 - 29:04
12. The Wagoner's Lad 29:22 - 32:29
13. Cannonball Rag 32:55 - 34:06
14. Lone Pilgrim 34:38 - 38:52
15. The Roving Gambler 39:05 - 41:10

Backstage Confidential

In 1976, the New York rock and punk scene was made up of the CBGB’s bands and the few music writers who loved them. In total, this may have consisted of about 60 people. This small scene did have great influence, but, like any scene, it just sort of happened. A bunch of people formed bands and had nowhere to play. They found a stage. Another bunch of people heard about those bands and went to see them play. Every night. It was similar to when Max’s Kansas City had its moment: if you skipped one night, you might have missed something. At CBGB’s, there was no velvet rope at the entrance. There was no big deal about “getting in.” There was no “list.” The same people who went all the time went all the time. Since we edited Rock Scene—which became a kind of house fanzine for CBGB’s—Richard, Lenny Kaye, and I were among those who just went all the time. I didn’t have to call a publicist or get a laminated all-access pass or a wristband to go “backstage.” We didn’t have to wait for the lead singer to towel off after the performance and receive people. At CBGB’s, there was no toweling off—there were no towels. To get backstage, all you had to do was walk a few feet past the stage to the back hallway, to one of the crummy rooms on the right where Patti Smith or Joey Ramone would be sitting on the lumpy sofa. We’d all sit around with a few bottles of beer and just hang out. It was easy then to just hang out. It still was possible to discover something—either hearing about it from your friends or stumbling across it yourself. It wasn’t already written about in New York magazine before it had a chance to breathe.

‘Here comes success . . . Here comes my Chinese rug,” Iggy Pop sang in “Success,” one of my all-time favorite songs. I’d seen so many bands go through the stages from struggle to success, and the pattern was usually the same. In Stage One, they were young. They were sexy. They had nothing to lose. They wore some version of their everyday clothes onstage. It took two weeks to make an album. Then came attention (if it came) and some success. In Stage Two, a band moved from a van to a tour bus, or to coach seats on flights from city to city. If they got really big, edging toward Stage Three, it was more “cost-effective” for them to charter their own plane. The rationale was they could fit 12 people on a private jet for the same price as 12 first-class tickets. Sort of. Plus, they weren’t hassled in airports. Each band member had a bodyguard. The band had large dressing rooms backstage. In arenas, there were private dressing rooms with even more private inner dressing rooms, with security guards standing outside the doors. There were extra rooms off the backstage hallways to house the trunks with the band’s traveling stage wardrobe. Their production team had an office backstage. There was a greenroom with food and wine for their guests. It took around six months to make an album. And then full-fledged Stage Three or maybe Stage Four of all this was the move to stadiums. More of their fans could be accommodated. It supposedly thwarted the ticket scalpers (except it didn’t). The band had a stylist who oversaw its onstage costumes. And, finally, the band made crazy money. Along with those multi-million-dollar-grossing stadium tours came the houses in Malibu. By now, it might take well over a year to record an album. And a band in Stage Four had all the accoutrements that accompany big-time rock success—including, but not limited to, the plane, the police escorts, the private chefs, the grass-fed beef, and the complicated, political hierarchy of the backstage pass.

Backstage passes reflect status. The first time I was made aware of this was when I traveled with the Rolling Stones in 1975. The entire touring party had laminated photo passes that allowed us to go anywhere backstage. This became the norm for a major group. Clubs and smaller halls didn’t always have this pass setup, but as soon as a band made it to arenas or stadiums, the elaborate pass situation was standard for what goes on behind the scenes. The first and lowest backstage pass is the stick-on “After Show” pass for the greenroom mob scene. This literally is a square or circular or triangular piece of fabric with paper on the back that you peel off and stick onto (and ruin) your clothes. Next is the stick-on “V.I.P.” pass for the “pre-show” greenroom mob scene. (I always thought it would be funny if some band had a pass that led to a door that opened right into the parking lot outside the venue.) The next level is the laminated “V.I.P. Guest” pass for a “band room.” It isn’t really a band room; it’s a “meet and greet” room where the band—or, in the case of U2, Bono—might make an appearance before the show. After the V.I.P. Guest pass comes the “Staff” laminate, with no photo, which allows the bearer to move freely around the backstage area—except in the band’s dressing rooms. Then there is the “All Access” photo laminate, but you still might need an “escort” with a better pass to take you into the band’s dressing rooms. And then there is the top pass: the “All Access” laminate for friends and family, which allows you to go anywhere, including the band’s dressing rooms and the stage. But still, there might be a sticker or a star on this pass that alerts security just how far you can go: into the band’s private, inner dressing rooms or just the band’s private, outer dressing rooms. The whole structure is byzantine, and familiar only to people who’ve been through all these maneuvers. I recall many a time seeing someone proudly waltz backstage with a stick-on pass on their jacket or jeans, only to watch their face fall when they saw someone else with a laminate. Or those with non-photo V.I.P. laminates glance enviously at those with the photo laminates. The entire pass arrangement is a visual indication of just exactly where you stand with a group. John McEnroe and I became friendly because of just such a situation. In 1978 the Rolling Stones were performing at Madison Square Garden. John was backstage. I was writing for the New York Post, and I was a huge McEnroe fan. I went up to introduce myself to him. He sneered when I mentioned the Post. I pointed to his stick-on pass and pointed to my all-access laminate. No words were needed. It broke the ice; we’ve been good friends ever since.

by Lisa Robinson, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image: Bob Gruen

The Long Goodbye: How Modern Medicine Decreases Our Chance of a Good Death

In 2001 journalist Katy Butler’s father suffered a stroke at the age of seventy-nine. A year later a hurried decision was made to equip him with a pacemaker, which kept his heart going while doing nothing to stop his descent into dementia. In 2007 Butler’s mother, exhausted from being her husband’s full-time caregiver and distressed by his suffering, asked her daughter for help getting the pacemaker turned off. Butler agreed, and so began a long investigation into how modern medicine has changed the way we approach the end of life. (...)

In 2010 she wrote about her father’s death in The New York Times Magazine. The piece, titled “What Broke My Father’s Heart,” won awards from the Association of Health Care Journalists, the Family Caregivers’ Association, and the National Association of Science Writers. It went on to become the basis of Butler’s first book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death. In addition to recounting her family’s experiences with her father’s slow decline, the book looks at Butler’s mother, who died fairly quickly a year and a half later, after refusing open-heart surgery. “Her death was totally different,” Butler says. “She was continent and lucid to her end, and she died the death she chose, not the death anyone else had in mind.”

Since the publication of Knocking on Heaven’s Door, Butler has spent the majority of her time on the road, giving talks about overtreatment, end-of-life care, and “perverse” economic incentives in the medical industry. She’s become an advocate for the growing Slow Medicine movement, which focuses on “non-rushed medical decision-making, palliative care, and comfort-giving treatment, especially as the end of life approaches,” according to its Facebook group.

Mowe: How has the development of modern medicine transformed our experience of death?

Butler: Death used to be a spiritual ordeal; now it’s a technological flailing. We’ve taken a domestic and religious event, in which the most important factor was the dying person’s state of mind, and moved it into the hospital and mechanized it, putting patients, families, doctors, and nurses at the mercy of technology. Nonetheless we still want death to be a sacred occasion.

Mowe: What about those who are more secular in their beliefs?

Butler: I think many of us aren’t as secular as we claim. We’re a society of seekers. Maybe we don’t like organized religion, but we yearn to place the events of our life into a larger, more meaningful context. We want death to be about more than the end of a person’s life. Death is part of an eternal pattern. Obviously if I’m dying, for me that is a major tragedy. But billions of people have died before me and have faced death with varying degrees of courage. A sacred understanding of that can help both the dying and the survivors.

Mowe: And this notion of sacredness has been undermined by modern medicine?

Butler: In the mid-twentieth century there was an explosion of postwar inventiveness: dialysis, the respirator, the ventilator, the defibrillator, the pacemaker. We invented a panoply of devices that both prevented sudden death and in some instances literally brought people back to life. But when we eliminated sudden death, we also eliminated natural death, and we lost the distinction between saving a life and prolonging a dying.

by Sam Mowe, The Sun |  Read more:

Image: Eugene Richards for The New York Times

[ed. Repost: source misplaced}

Carrie Mae Weems, “Untitled (Phone),” 1990
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Cat Shirts By Hiroko Kubota Go Viral

[ed. I think I posted one of these a few months ago.]

Fashion and the Internet have collided spectacularly in this series of awesome embroidered cat shirts by Japanese embroidery artist Hiroko Kubota. The cute kitties, embroidered with great skill and detail, are an unexpected and interesting manifestation of the Internet’s obsession with cats.

In an interview with spoon-tamago.com, Kubota explained that the idea for these shirts happened to come from her son. Because he is of a smaller build, most store-bought clothes wouldn’t fit him, so she often found herself having to make him clothing. At her son’s request, she also began embroidering the shirts with cats, mostly peeking out from the breast pocket.

After posting pictures of the shirts online, they went viral. The majority of her shirts have already sold out, $250-300 price tag notwithstanding. As an excellent embroiderer, she has a ton of other great non-cat-related works as well, all of which can be found on her Etsy store.

by Bored Panda |  Read more:

Image: : Hiroko Kubota | Etsy | Flickr

Small Plates

[ed. I thought these used to be called appetizers.]

One pizzetta, topped with prosciutto and cut into a few pieces to share. Five charred asparagus stalks underneath a poached egg. A finger of raw sablefish, succumbing in seconds to colliding forks. Toasty breadsticks and sauces for everyone to dip them in.

If this is dinner, where is the main course?

“Small plates dining” has been making noise at American tapas bars and on high-end tasting menus for at least a decade, but it now appears to be entering the mainstream. Ten years ago, all five of the inaugural James Beard Award nominees for Best New Restaurant hewed more or less to America’s traditional menu format dividing starters and mains; of last year’s nominees, you’ll find only one—San Francisco’s 60-seat Rich Table, which cultivates a spontaneous and communal vibe notwithstanding its traditional menu structure. On the other end of the dining spectrum, big chains like Friday’s and Olive Garden are reworking their menus to feature small plates, too. Underlying this trend is the restauranteurs’ belief that small-plates dining encourages consumers to have a more entertaining night out—and also a more expensive one.

Subtly, “small plates” often means two things at once. The first aspect is “dishes for sharing”—which represents a chance for us restauranteurs to push you, our guests, into more conversation and conviviality. We’ll do whatever we can to get you to have a better time, because success for us requires that we move beyond serving delicious food and into the business of creating compelling experiences. (...)

A “small plates” menu also usually means that the dishes aren’t timed by the kitchen – instead, they’re cooked as soon as possible and brought to their table in whatever order they are completed. This tends to get food to the table as quickly as possible, which makes for happy guests. And, eschewing coursed meals allows some restaurants to save money by not employing an “expediter” to coordinate the cooks’ timing. That makes for one fewer job on the payroll, in an industry where labor is almost always a business’s highest expense.

More importantly, between fast ticket times, tables that turn more quickly, and the rowdy chaos of guests ordering and eating at a rapid pace, small plates offer crowded venues the promise of increased revenue. One San Francisco small-plates chef I know says his guests spend a lot more money in less time, due to their food arriving so quickly. “They keep ordering more and more because they don’t feel full yet,” he told me, “and then suddenly they’re stuffed, they’re ready to leave, and they have a really big tab.”

by Jay Porter, Quartz |  Read more:

Image: Reuters/Carlo Allegri

Maki Haku - Poem 71-39
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The Sound of Despair

Grunge was often defined by its negativity. It was not a rebellious negativity but a passive negation, a cancelling out. If you asked grunge what it was for, the answer was, supposedly, “Nothing.” The same answer might be given if you asked grunge what it was against. This sentiment was encapsulated by Kurt Cobain’s famous – and perhaps most enduring – lyric, “Oh well, whatever, nevermind.” The sullen indifference (sometimes referred to as irony) of grunge – and the generation that produced it – was mind-boggling and infuriating to the generation of the 1940s, 50s and 60s, generations defined by wars and causes. Grunge had no external wars, no causes that felt immediate enough to be worth fighting for. The grunge generation was said to be internal – in other words, self-absorbed. This was true. Grunge looked mostly inward, as its war was with and about itself. Musically speaking, grunge’s most direct influence was punk. But where the full-blown nihilism and shock of punk still had the touch of theatre and play, grunge was all the more desperate for feeling it had nothing really to show. Punk was shredded, ripped-apart, exploded. Punk was dyed in brilliant colors, adorned with metal and combat boots. Punk was furious. “Kick over the wall, cause government’s to fall,” sang The Clash. Grunge was torn, faded, uncombed. It was the sweater your friend found in a thrift store and annoyingly left on your floor for a month, which you decided to start wearing for lack of initiative to get your own sweater. The image of grunge was, essentially, that of a homeless person.

Punk screamed at you. Grunge called into the desolation. “Oh well, whatever, nevermind.” This lyric is far from a battle cry. This is the song of despair.

The homeless despair of grunge was born of a generation that felt itself on the fringes of American life. Few people could understand how young Americans who lived in relative prosperity and peace could sing about alienation so passionately that it sounded like a crisis. What crisis was there in suburbia, in the innocuous food court of the mall? “Anti-social” and “non-aspirational” were other adjectives used but a better word, perhaps, is “bereft.” What defined grunge most was a longing, a grasping for something essential but inexpressible.

by Stefany Anne Golberg, The Smart Set | Read more:
Image:MTV Unplugged

Health Care Nightmares

When it comes to health reform, Republicans suffer from delusions of disaster. They know, just know, that the Affordable Care Act is doomed to utter failure, so failure is what they see, never mind the facts on the ground.

Thus, on Tuesday, Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, dismissed the push for pay equity as an attempt to “change the subject from the nightmare of Obamacare”; on the same day, the nonpartisan RAND Corporation released a study estimating “a net gain of 9.3 million in the number of American adults with health insurance coverage from September 2013 to mid-March 2014.” Some nightmare. And the overall gain, including children and those who signed up during the late-March enrollment surge, must be considerably larger.

But while Obamacare is looking like anything but a nightmare, there are indeed some nightmarish things happening on the health care front. For it turns out that there’s a startling ugliness of spirit abroad in modern America — and health reform has brought that ugliness out into the open.

Let’s start with the good news about reform, which keeps coming in. First, there was the amazing come-from-behind surge in enrollments. Then there were a series of surveys — from Gallup, the Urban Institute, and RAND — all suggesting large gains in coverage. Taken individually, any one of these indicators might be dismissed as an outlier, but taken together they paint an unmistakable picture of major progress. (...)

Republicans clearly have no idea how to respond to these developments. They can’t offer any real alternative to Obamacare, because you can’t achieve the good stuff in the Affordable Care Act, like coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, without also including the stuff they hate, the requirement that everyone buy insurance and the subsidies that make that requirement possible. Their political strategy has been to talk vaguely about replacing reform while waiting for its inevitable collapse. And what if reform doesn’t collapse? They have no idea what to do.

At the state level, however, Republican governors and legislators are still in a position to block the act’s expansion of Medicaid, denying health care to millions of vulnerable Americans. And they have seized that opportunity with gusto: Most Republican-controlled states, totaling half the nation, have rejected Medicaid expansion. And it shows. The number of uninsured Americans is dropping much faster in states accepting Medicaid expansion than in states rejecting it.

What’s amazing about this wave of rejection is that it appears to be motivated by pure spite. The federal government is prepared to pay for Medicaid expansion, so it would cost the states nothing, and would, in fact, provide an inflow of dollars. The health economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the principal architects of health reform — and normally a very mild-mannered guy — recently summed it up: The Medicaid-rejection states “are willing to sacrifice billions of dollars of injections into their economy in order to punish poor people. It really is just almost awesome in its evilness.” Indeed.

by Paul Krugman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: piperreport.com via:

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Lindsey Buckingham

Rebecca Mock
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Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds

[ed. Note to advertisers just so you know... whoever inserts an insipid advertisement before a YouTube video automatically gets my animosity.] 

“Every path is the right path. Everything could’ve been anything else. And it would have just as much meaning.”

                                                                                         ~ Mr. Nobody (2009) dir. Jaco Van Dormael
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Massive Security Bug In OpenSSL Could Affect A Huge Chunk Of The Internet

[ed. Before you go bonkers, read this... the true spirit of the internet (I hope). Also this: What You Need to Know.]

I saw a t-shirt one time. “I’m a bomb disposal technician,” it read. “If you see me running, try to keep up.”

The same sort of idea can be applied to net security: when all the net security people you know are freaking out, it’s probably an okay time to worry.

This afternoon, many of the net security people I know are freaking out. A very serious bug in OpenSSL — a cryptographic library that is used to secure a very, very large percentage of the Internet’s traffic — has just been discovered and publicly disclosed.

Even if you’ve never heard of OpenSSL, it’s probably a part of your life in one way or another — or, more likely, in many ways. The apps you use, the sites you visit; if they encrypt the data they send back and forth, there’s a good chance they use OpenSSL to do it. The Apache web server that powers something like 50% of the Internet’s web sites, for example, utilizes OpenSSL.

Through a bug that security researchers have dubbed “Heartbleed“, it seems that it’s possible to trick almost any system running any version of OpenSSL from the past 2 years into revealing chunks of data sitting in its system memory.

Why that’s bad: very, very sensitive data often sits in a server’s system memory, including the keys it uses to encrypt and decrypt communication (read: usernames, passwords, credit cards, etc.) This means an attacker could quite feasibly get a server to spit out its secret keys, allowing them to read to any communication that they intercept like it wasn’t encrypted it all. Armed with those keys, an attacker could also impersonate an otherwise secure site/server in a way that would fool many of your browser’s built-in security checks.

And if an attacker was just gobbling up mountains of encrypted data from a server in hopes of cracking it at some point? They may very well now have the keys to decrypt it, depending on how the server they’re attacking was configured (like whether or not it’s set up to utilize Perfect Forward Secrecy.)

by Greg Kumparak, TechCrunch | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Decoding Nature's Soundtrack

[ed. I'm not sold on the practical applications of this type of research, but I'm kind of glad somebody's doing it.]

One of most immediately striking features about Bernie Krause is his glasses. They’re big—not soda-bottle thick, but unusually large, and draw attention to his eyes. Which is ironic, as Krause’s life has been devoted to what he hears, but also appropriate, since it’s the weakness of his eyes that compelled Krause to engage with sound: first with music, and later the music of nature. Nearsighted and astigmatic, Krause has spent most of the last half-century recording biological symphonies to which most of us are deaf. (...)

At this particular moment in Earth’s history—the morning of what some scientists call the Anthropocene, an age in which human influence on natural processes is ubiquitous and immense—we have many tools to measure our ecological impacts: by eye, generally, focusing on particular species or guilds of interest, counting them in the field, peering by satellite at changes in land use, and translating our observations into the language of habitat type and biodiversity.

To Krause, these are measurements best made by listening to natural soundscapes. In a career of listening and recording, he’s amassed a veritable Library of Alexandria of nature’s sounds, and he emphasizes that they’re not merely recordings of individual creatures. The traditional approach of bioacoustics, focusing on single animals and species, is anathema. It’s “decontextualizing and fragmenting,” he says, like trying to extract a single violin from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. “Take an instrument out of the performance, and try to understand the whole performance, and you don’t get very much,” he says.

Inevitably Krause has captured the players—bearded seals with voices that echo geomagnetic storms, baboons booming in granite amphitheaters, a fox kit playing with a microphone—but they’re incidental to recording whole habitats and communities.

In his home studio, perched on an oak-covered hillside in Glen Ellen, Calif., Krause plays me some of his favorites: a Florida swamp, old-growth forest in Zimbabwe, intertidal mangroves in Costa Rica, and a Sierra Nevada mountain meadow. As the sounds pour from speakers mounted above his computer, spectrograms scroll across the screen, depicting visually the timing and frequency of every individual sound. They look like musical scores.

In each spectrogram, Krause points something out: No matter how sonically dense they become, sounds don’t tend to overlap. Each animal occupies a unique frequency bandwidth, fitting into available auditory space like pieces in an exquisitely precise puzzle. It’s a simple but striking phenomenon, and Krause was the first to notice it. He named it biophony, the sound of living organisms, and to him it wasn’t merely aesthetic. It signified a coevolution of species across deep biological time and in a particular place. As life becomes richer, the symphony’s players find a sonic niche to play without interference.

by Brandon Keim, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Brandon Keim

Gemma Hayes

In the End, People May Really Just Want to Date Themselves

Opposites attract. That’s how the cliché goes, and people really believe they are attracted to those different from them: 86 percent say they want a partner who “complements them” rather than one who “resembles them.”

There’s only one problem with this idea: It’s false. I studied 1 million matches made by the online dating website eHarmony’s algorithm, which aims to pair people who will be attracted to one another and compatible over the long term; if the people agree, they can message each other to set up a meeting in real life. eHarmony’s data on its users contains 102 traits for each person — everything from how passionate and ambitious they claim to be to how much they say they drink, smoke and earn.

The data reveals a clear pattern: People are interested in people like themselves. Women on eHarmony favor men who are similar not just in obvious ways — age, attractiveness, education, income — but also in less apparent ones, such as creativity. Even when eHarmony includes a quirky data point — like how many pictures are included in a user’s profile — women are more likely to message men similar to themselves. In fact, of the 102 traits in the data set, there was not one for which women were more likely to contact men with opposite traits.1

Men were a little more open-minded. For 80 percent of traits, they were more willing to message those different from them. They still preferred mates who were similar in terms of height or attractiveness2, but they cared less about these traits — and they didn’t care much at all about other things women cared about, like similarity in education level or number of photos taken.3They cared less about whether their match shared their ethnicity.4

Women prefer similarity in subtler ways as well: A woman shows a small but highly statistically significant preference for a man who uses similar adjectives to describe himself, with “physically fit,” “intelligent,” “creative” and “funny” having the strongest effects. Men showed no such preference.

by Emma Pierson, 538 |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Living Organ Regenerated for First Time

A team of scientists at the University of Edinburgh has rebuilt the thymus of an old mouse — the first regeneration of a living organ.

After treatment, the regenerated organ had a structure similar to that found in a young mouse.

The thymus is an organ in the body located next to the heart that produces important immune cells. The advance could pave the way for new therapies for people with damaged immune systems and genetic conditions that affect thymus development.

The function of the thymus was also restored and the mice began making more white blood cells called T cells, which are important for fighting off infection. However, it is not yet clear whether the immune system of the mice was improved.

The study was led by researchers from the Medical Research Council Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh.

The researchers targeted a protein produced by cells of the thymus called FOXN1, which helps to control how important genes are switched on. By increasing levels of FOXN1, the team instructed stem cell-like cells to rebuild the organ.

by Kurzweil AI |  Read more:

Image: N. Bredenkamp et al./MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine, University of Edinburg