palewire

Bo Diddley died today. But his beat lives on. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Try to tell what these songs have in common.

I signed up for Twitter this morning, opening an account at http://twitter.com/palewire. Since I haven’t seen or heard from my cell phone in a week or two, don’t count on much on the scene reporting. But I did take a few minutes this morning to line up my Last.fm feed, so that my lastest listenings are now automatically Twittered to the huddled masses yearning to have my musical taste shoved down their throat.

For any other Ubuntu users who’d like to follow along, here’s a quick recap on how I made it happen.

1. Move to the folder where you store random scripts. Me, I use…

cd /usr/local/bin

2. Create a new Perl script and open it in gedit.

sudo gedit twitter_fm.pl

3. Copy and paste in the ready-to-serve code provided by Walter Higgins.

4. Edit in your Twitter and Last.fm login information. Save and exit the file.

5. Create a new shell script.

sudo gedit twitter_fm.sh

6. Paste in the following, editing the folder structure to reflect wherever you stuck your steez.

#!/bin/sh
 
perl /usr/local/bin/twitter_fm.pl

7. Set the shell script so it becomes executable.

sudo chmod +x twitter_fm.sh

8. Navigate through the System>Preferences>Session menu as described here and add the shell script to your startup processes.

9. Restart!

I just patched this mess together a couple minutes ago, so there might be some bugs. Either in my setup or in Walter’s script. Don’t know yet. Let me know if you see anything idiotic on my part.

I also installed Wordpress’s Twitter Tools plugin, so now my latest blog posts will also be sent out via Twitter.

Also on the Twitter tip, earlier this week we launched a feed at work for our popular political blog, Top of the Ticket. It includes the latest posts from our team of writers, and, on election nights, live election results as they come in. You can sign up here. For anyone looking to reroute their own data streams to Twitter, I can’t recommend Chris Thompon’s Net::Twitter Perl module enough. Easy. Peasy.

Last weekend I finally got around to seeing Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, a really good 70s movie starring Harvey Keitel and Robert DeNiro. I had a light bulb go on in the first couple scenes when I realized that one of my favorite one-hit wonders from the 2000s took their name from DeNiro’s character, the self-destructive Johnny Boy. I’m sure everybody else had this figured out by now, but it seems like a good enough excuse to put two great YouTubes together.

from Mean Streets, “Be My Baby,” by the Ronettes.

“You Are the Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve” by Johnny Boy.

Knowing this now, it’s clear JB aren’t shy about any inspiration from the Ronettes.

Tonight I attended my first world-class classical music performance (I’m guessing my teenage vist to the Cedar Rapids Symphony probably doesn’t count). It was up Bunker Hill at the Disney Music Hall where I saw András Schiff perform four of Beethoven’s sonatas, including the famous no. 14, the Moonlight Sonata. My seat had a clear view of Schiff’s gliding hands, an enjoyable sight. I’m not sure I was ready for two hours of piano playing, but it was definitely an impressive show.

For your enjoyment, here’s a YouTube recording of Schiff performing a Schubert sonata.

And, if you’re into this kind of thing, the Guardian has published a series of lectures Schiff gave on Beethoven’s work, including the four sonatas I saw tonight.

There’s a great nugget buried in the back of the Berkman Center’s new study on the Iranian blogosphere. I’m sure their awesome social networking diagram is going to rack up hits across the Western Web this week, and deservedly so, but what I’m really taken with is their ranking of Iran’s most highly cited YouTube videos (as of Feb. 2008). The study’s general finding is that Iran’s blogosphere has a fairly diverse set of views, but they mention that expatriates and secular reformers tend to link in YouTube more often than conservos. Their methodology for the study (and, presumably, the ranking) is at the bottom. But, first, let’s get those mothers out the pdf and onto the Web, where they belong.

10. “Against Capital Punishment—Against the Islamic Regime”

09. “Mansour Osanloo - Freedom Will Come”

08. “Iran ey Sara e Omid”

07. “Mohsen Namjoo”

06. “Nazeri”

05. “Crack in Iran”

04. “Holy Crime”

03. “A girl with a childish voice”

02. “Akhoond’s (Cleric) Comment on Girls.”

PRIVATE! NO!

01. “Kiosk: Love for Speed”

Berkman provides a translation for the No. 1 hit. Here goes:

The power of love or love of power
Modernism versus tradition forever

Living in the evil axis
Speed freaks in jalopy taxis

Why feel any pain and suffer
When pills and powders’ all on offer

Nothing for lunch or dinner to make
Then let them eat Yellow Cake

Multiple choice elections left to chance
Holy matrimony by loan and finance

Scraped up the very last dime
Sent it straight to Palestine

Guaranteed success or money back
Underground music or cultural attack

No need for cardiologists
Just facelifts by cosmetologists

Immoral zealots, fanatic factions
Chinese-style economic expansions

Religious democratic droppings
Pizza with Ghormeh Sabzi toppings

Now for the Berkman methodology:

The basis of the social network analysis and blogs selection was a corpus of blog data collected by Morningside Analytics (MA) between July 2007 and March 2008. MA tracks a list of over 200,000 Persian language blogs, built initially from a snowball spidering process. 98,875 of these blogs are monitored daily, with all new text and links recorded to a database. Social networks analysis was used to identify the most active and prominent blogs, the top 6018 of which were mapped to identify the core structures of the Iranian blogosphere, create visualizations, and identify blogs for human and computational text analysis. The map (visualization) of the Iranian blogosphere is plotted using the Fruchterman-Rheingold algorithm, which employs a ‘physics model’ approach in which blogs that are more densely connected are drawn together into clustered ‘network neighborhoods.’ The color of the blogs results from ‘Attentive Cluster Analysis,’ in which the linking histories of blogs are compared statistically in order to identify groups sharing similar linking preferences. The largest seven attentive clusters corresponded with major structural features of the Iranian blogosphere, and were selected for qualitative study. Smaller clusters were not studied in-depth, though this would be a worthy topic for future analysis.

Right now I’m getting a kick out of this YouTube hype tape for last year’s CL Smooth album. There’s not a lot to it, but I love seeing my man Pete Rock do his thing with some pure 80s cheese. Are there more “producer-in-action” tapes like this around the web? I’d love to see ‘em.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co__eHlCFJs[/youtube]

You can sample the whole song here. These guys can still out some pretty decent hip hop considering their age. It’s not anywhere as startling as the burner Premier and AZ recently managed, but CL is about as solid as ever. Pete isn’t weaving as tight as he once did, but the novelty of the sample is enough for me right now.

So I’m out on a casual stroll in downtown LA the other night, and what do I bump into? If you guessed an illegal rock show put on by a group of chicks armed with fireworks and dressed in bikinis, you guessed right. Photos below the fold.

The crowd wandered over after a show at the nearby indie club, The Smell. The noise brought down an angry loft-dweller from the nearby Higgins Building, and eventually the LAPD officer pictured below, who advised the musicians to considering holding future events a few blocks further down, away from residential developments.

For their part, the band — who go by the name Josh Taylor’s Friends Forever — played dumb, telling the cops that they didn’t realize so many people lived downtown these days.

Have you seen the goofy new McDonalds commercial with the kid dancing to “The Cha Cha Slide?”

Funny stuff, right? And I bet you’ve heard the same song at weddings too, even if you didn’t know its name.

But did you know it was produced M.O.B. Records Inc., a Chicago record label controlled by Marvel “King Vel” Thompson, the reputed head of the Gangster Disciples street gang?

Or so said U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald back in 2004, before he became famous as the special prosecutor who convicted Vice President Dick Cheney’s aide Scooter Libber.

Doesn’t look so cute after you hear that, does it?

I wonder where the royalties for the commercial are going. Is M.O.B. Records still operating? If not, who is collecting off the track these days?

It looks like their Web site is down. Here’s what the homepage says:

Sorry our site’s broken… but we have had problems with our web server and a slow hosting company (yawn!) and we’ve had to take it out of service. We will resume normal service in the next day or so… Come back soon!

Thanks for being here for us…

Maybe I’ll send an email over to the McDonalds PR squad on this.

After perfecting the hell out of the electro angle they went after on Black Cherry with 2005’s Supernature, Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory have picked a pitch perfect change of direction. If the lead single, “A&E,” is any indication, they’re intent on moving into Kate Bush’s old territory. All airy longing and surging electronic burble. Oh, I’m thrilled.

Here’s the new thing:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VPyso87fZU[/youtube]

And the string it plucks in my brain:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRHA9W-zExQ[/youtube]

Who knows if the album can deliver on the single’s grand promise. But I’m eager to find out.

Here’s what happens if you try to access palewire.com using the Los Angeles Times internal web connection.

I have no idea what the filter is up to, but a search for the offending term yields only a reference to a certain punk rock band and a brief whine about becoming a professional geek, neither of which seem all that sexy.