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This Is What I Think About While Cleaning Up After The Kids' Dinner

I listened to a few tracks from the new U2 album yesterday, and I had the same thought I've had every time I've heard a new U2 song since around the time of Achtung Baby: the problem with Bono's voice is that he needs to stop sounding so much like Bono. Only this time the thought led me into a brief reverie -- while washing dishes, mind you -- about the role of the voice in rock music in general. (I have no idea whether this applies to opera, or jazz vocalists, or any other genre.) What bothers me listening to Bono now is all the mannerisms and theatrics -- the crackling falsetto, the stirring, anthemic sustained notes. These, of course, are precisely all the qualities that I immediately loved when I first heard U2 in the early eighties. I feel the same irritation when I hear other voices that have had comparable longevity: Michael Stipe, for instance, or Morrissey. I suppose if Kurt Cobain had lived and Nirvana were releasing a genuinely new album this month, and not a boxed set retrospective, I'd be beginning to feel the same disenchanted feeling about Cobain's growl. Certainly I've started to feel some of this towards the vocals on Sonic Youth records, but that's not exactly singing, strictly speaking.

So far, this is an easy phenomenon to explain: you get sick of things. If you can wear out a melody, you can wear out a voice. But it occurred to me yesterday that I haven't reached a comparable point of irritation with older rock voices that are equally stylized: Van Morrison, Jagger, Lennon and McCartney, Patti Smith, Lou Reed. For some reason, those voices don't have an aural expiration date for me. Now, some of you might simply argue that those classic voices are just better, more timeless than Bono's voice, but I don't think that's quite right. I think in a way it's exactly the opposite: the reason that they've lasted longer has to do with a very specific kind of timing. I heard Bono, and Stipe, and Cobain when they first arrived, and felt the impact of that arrival in a truly visceral way. Great rock voices have a way of fusing what had been wholly separate worlds, if you listen closely enough: I remember listening to Murmer and hearing this incredible mix of the American South and art-school obscurity in Stipe's singing; Bono's voice engineered this remarkable revival of the political rock anthem in the middle of all that Human League synthpop dross. So the power of the voice comes, in part, from the sense that it is literally breaking down walls with each phoneme, and from the rush and the wonder you get from being there as they're falling.

All those classic rock vocalists had a comparable effect in their own day, of course, but I wasn't around to experience it. By the time I heard Astral Weeks or Exile On Main Street, those voices had become thoroughly assimilated -- or to put it in a more positive light, the culture had embraced and built upon the initial collision they brought about. And so I heard them not as a challenge to the existing state of things, but as a cornerstone in the state of things: they were classic voices, after all. I'm sure this made them less intense to hear for the first time, but in a strange way, it has helped them survive longer in my tastes. When I hear Bono now, I'm reminded of what's missing: the initial electricity -- or should I say vertigo? -- of hearing a voice that sounds like nothing you've ever heard before. But Patti Smith or Lou Reed still sound complete to me, precisely because I wasn't around to hear them in their original glory. My ears don't know what they're missing.

My First Post About Stock Prices Ever!

This morning, I was looking at the crazy (or not so crazy, given the iPod and early word on iMac sales) rise in Apple's stock price over the past few months. I went back and looked at the 10-year history of the stock compared to Microsoft's, and found something very striking. Someone who bought Apple anytime in the 96-98 timeframe and held on to it would be seeing a better return on investment than someone who bought Microsoft during that same period. (And obviously anyone who bought Apple since the bubble burst would be doing several times better than a Microsoft investor.) Has that ever been the case before? That Apple would be a better long-term and short-term investment than MSFT?

New York City: Now With Free Technical Support

The new issue of Wired has an opening essay from me in their Start section about NYC's amazing 311 service, which I think ranks alongside London's congestion charging program as one of the two most significant innovations in urban information technology over the past decade. (Yes, I know there are other implementations of both ideas in other cities, but these are two the most ambitious in scale.) Here's a clip from the article:

Is tonight's Central Park concert canceled due to rain? Call 311. Looking for the nearest day care center? Call 311. Is alternate-side parking in effect? Call 311. "So if someone calls in to report a homeless encampment, that call gets routed to the police department's quality-of-life division," Menchini says. "If someone wants to help the homeless, the call gets routed to the Department of Homeless Services."

[With 311] the government learns as much as the callers do. That's the radical idea at the heart of the service: Every question or problem carries its own kind of data. Menchini's system tracks all that information; just as the heralded CompStat system mapped problem crime areas with new precision, 311 automatically records the location of each incoming service request in a huge database that feeds info throughout New York City's government. Think of 311 as a kind of massively distributed extension of the city's perceptual systems, harnessing millions of ordinary eyes on the street to detect emerging problems or report unmet needs - like those worries about unrefrigerated insulin. (Bloomberg himself is notorious for calling in to report potholes.)

Already, 311 data is changing the government's priorities. In the first year of operation, noise was the number one complaint; the Bloomberg administration subsequently launched a major quality-of-life initiative combating city noise. Today, geomapping software displays streets with chronic pothole troubles and blocks battling graffiti - all integrated into custom dashboards on city officials' laptops.

Surfacing

I've been pretty studiously avoiding the blog since I returned from doing my CalTech speech in L.A. (Which went very well, I think -- more about the new book in the coming days.) Mostly I've been putting off posting something because I felt obliged to say something about the election. After a week of mulling, I've come up with a theory about it that I'd like to share with you: The election was really, really lame.

That's pretty much all I've got.

Wait, no, I have some links! Two observations seemed to me to be particularly right on, and both more optimistic than one would expect under the circumstances. First, there was Josh Marshall's moving post-mortem, written last Wednesday, particularly his bit about the center-left and the left being as united as ever this year. That's good news if it holds. And then this excerpt from Ruy Teixeiria's excellent blog:

The Democrats need to find a candidate that can talk to both PhDs and tractor-trailer drivers. If they do this, the Democrats will be able to win presidential elections. Kerry, after all, came very close to winning this time despite his inadequacy as a candidate. Democrats showed that they can hold their own in states like Colorado (where Democrat Ken Salazar was elected to the Senate), Arizona, Nevada, and Virginia. In many of these states, demography is on the Democrats' side. Colorado is going to become more like California and less like Utah or Montana, and Virginia is going to become more like New Jersey and less like South Carolina. The future of Ohio is Franklin County, not Butler County.

I said it before the election, and I'll say it again: for a challenger to lose the electoral college by a hundred thousand votes -- after 9/11 with the country at war -- is nothing to be ashamed of. It's something to be depressed about, and maybe something to avoid your blog for a week over. But it shows that there is a clear and strong opposition alive in the country, and I suspect four more years of looking at W every day will only make that opposition stronger.

Where I'm At (Physically)

Been traveling out here to LA to give this speech tonight, so haven't had time to post. Will try to get some thoughts up in the next 24 hours or so. In the meantime, if you're in the LA area, come out and hear this talk at Caltech tonight at 8 PM. I'll cheer you up, I promise. I have charts!

Plus, I'll be on KPCC out here in LA today between 11:30 and noon on the Larry Mantle Show. Talking about the new book as well.

Trackback Tragedy (continued)

I am filled with rage right now, and I need your help. A month or two ago, I turned off trackbacks on this site, because the trackback spam was getting out of control. Or at least, I thought I'd turned them off -- in fact, all I had done was make "trackbacks off" the default setting for new posts, leaving all the old posts open for spam. And I turned off the "email me new trackback pings" option, because I figured there was no point with trackbacks off. And then today, I discover that at least a thousand trackbacks with the most gruesome xxx-rated text have been steadily piling up on all my old posts.

Now, I can relatively quickly delete all these posts with the batch-delete function in Movable Type. But I can't figure out a way to globally turn off trackback pings in every post on the site. If I have to go through and turn them off individually for each entry, I'm seriously going to shoot myself. Or at least curse loudly at the monitor.

The Day Before

We're still a day away from real numbers, of course, but for what it's worth the Slate "if the election were held today" Election Scorecard chart has arrived at the exact 299-239 count that I predicted last week. So if Bush wins in a landslide, at least I've got the consolation prize that I correctly predicted the Slate prediction. [Oops, spoke too soon -- they did an update at around noon with Bush winning, though the fine print says they still suspect a 75% chance of a Kerry victory.]

I still think Kerry is going to win this thing, and the last round of Zogby and Gallup state numbers support that contention. If he's winning the electoral college -- albeit by a slight margin -- the day before the election, you gotta believe he's going to get at least another point from all the other last-minute factors I described in my original prediction post. (Particularly now that you factor in 1) the 50-40 pro-Kerry breakdown in early voting so far, and 2) the extensive studies released in the last week on the cellphone-only crowd, who are pro-Kerry almost 2-to-1.)

But all it takes for Bush to win is for him to pick up Ohio and Florida, and both have been bouncing around like a superball for the past two weeks. So who knows? But let me get out in front of the story with two editorials, custom-tailored to the two possible outcomes.

First, if Bush does win, I really don't want to hear a lot of carping about how Kerry was a terrible candidate and blew an easy win. The fact that Kerry is leading by a hair on November 1st is pretty amazing in itself. You cannot underestimate the unique power of the White House in this post 9/11 period; I cringed every time Bush described himself as a "war president" but they had him saying those words because they know they have an hypnotic power over people. It is no easy feat to take on a likable guy who cuts taxes and is engaged in a battle to defeat the forces of darkness before they kill you and your family. Even if the guy has been a miserable failure when it comes to actually doing his job. WIth one or two exceptions, Kerry has fought a tough and smart campaign since the Iowa caucuses, and I'm convinced that he was the best candidate we had in the field this year. (Just think how he transformed the race with his performance in the debates.) So if he loses, the Democrats need to hold off on the self-recriminations; yes, Bush has been a terrible President, but that doesn't mean he's easy to beat.

Second, if Kerry wins (in fact, even if Kerry doesn't win), I think some folks on the Left need to admit that their dark predictions of a Karl Rove/Tom Ridge/John Ashcroft October Surprise did not in fact come true. I can't tell you how many otherwise sensible people told me grimly over the past two months that they suspected that the Bush administration would either stage or allow some kind of terrorist event in the weeks leading up to the election, just to ensure a rallying around the leader bounce in the last few weeks. That was always crazy talk, and dangerous talk as well. But even the more sane predictions of electoral malevolence from Rove really didn't pan out as well -- yes, the Swift Boats were ugly, but no uglier than a lot of the Saudi conspiracy theory stuff that came out of Fahrenheit 9/11. In terms of actual tactics directly supported by the Bush campaign, though, it really wasn't all that bad: quoting Kerry out of context repeatedly, and the puppies ad. If that's the worst that the Evil Genius Rove can come up with, I think we should consider ourselves lucky. If you look at it objectively, I think where dirty tricks are concerned, it really wasn't a blowout on either side: yes, of course, the initial Swift Boat ad was pretty out of line, but I can see how the Right feels that a major liberal newscaster putting forged documents on the air was pretty out of line as well.

But of course, there are still twenty-four hours to go. Perhaps Karl Rove will astound us all with a November Surprise. And there may well be ugliness with all these contested registrations. For now, I just hope this thing is over Wednesday morning. I feel like I'm going to get six hours a day back, once I eliminate the constant checking of all the poll sites and the political blogs. I have a feeling I'm not alone in this.