Raw, unfiltered joy

The defining moment of Campaign 2008, for me: standing in the lobby of the Rio in Las Vegas, having just gotten out from Penn and Teller, watching mobs of people surge through the hallways, some of them crying, some of them laughing, some of them hugging, all of them chanting, in one voice, with the force and joy and certainty of the vindicated: “Yes we did.”

20-odd hours later, it still rings in my ears. “Yes we did.”

I could be cynical about this. I’m cynical by nature. But I can’t be cynical about this.

Quick hits

A collection of things I’ve been reading:

  • Fascinating thread on cryptography (which hilariously few people read) on the street price of illicitly obtained digital goods, by analogy with the price of heroin as a measure of the success of the war on drugs. I had no idea this stuff even existed, never mind was tracked (though in hindsight I guess I shouldn’t be so stupid).
  • Also from cryptography, is privacy possible in public places? Answer: Probably not.
  • Chantal Hebert has a blogue.

Open Letter #57: In the nick of time, she's gonna come through

Dear Edie Carey,

Last night was simply spectacular. But I have a complaint: Where the hell have you been all my life?


For (quite literally) fifteen years I have been looking for this moment. I didn’t know I was, but it turns out that I was. It’s that instant where you pop a new CD in the player and listen to it from start to finish, and where you can do absolutely nothing else because you are so transfixed by what you’re hearing. Last night, I played your latest album, Another Kind of Fire. And for the first time since October of 1993, I was nearly moved to tears by music that was so achingly beautiful and gorgeous that I have been able to think of almost nothing else for the past 24 hours.

Who are you? Where did you come from? Why didn’t I know about you before last night? How did you manage to write such a lush and pitch-perfect collection of songs without me knowing about it? Why weren’t you writing this music when I was 15 and in desperate need of hearing lyrics like this:

hey, i know just where you are
you ate up every last word
and you swore you’d never let it get this far
and you’d never get hurt
hey, i know i can’t change your mind
like you can’t change her heart
hey, i know i know the cliche ‘love is blind’
but who knew it could be so dark?

God, I needed to hear that once upon a time — when I was young and heartsick and full of unrequited love. I would have found that very, very soothing.

The thing is, Edie, this isn’t really about you and me. Not exactly, anyway, at least, not until now. It’s really about me and a girl called Sarah. See, the early 1990s were eye-opening years for me, musically, and for a bunch of years I kept running into these albums that just knocked my socks off, that left me helpless and unable to do anything except listen. Two of those years stick out — 1992 was all about Shawn Colvin’s Fat City (which I bought and listened to in San Antonio, and will be forever linked to that city); I remember thinking about how grown up the lyrics were, how plain and honest and yet deep and touching. Then, the next spring, I sat in a cafe in Montreal and played Jann Arden’s Time For Mercy over and over again, and I sort of figured that was going to be it for me and 1993 and music; I wasn’t going to find a better record that year.

That’s where Sarah enters the picture. I’d known who she was for a while, mind you, because I’m a Canadian and wasn’t living in a cave. I knew Sarah was going to come back into my life in the fall of 1993, was even looking forward to it a little bit. But I was so thoroughly unprepared for what was going to happen the first time I slipped Fumbling Towards Ecstasy into a CD player and let the thing go — it was stomping on the accelerator of a very very very fast and dangerous car. When I finally worked up the courage to put a new CD in we were well into 1994, and I continued to form all kinds of associations with that album four or five years later. At the time I remember thinking that it had no right to be anywhere near as good as it was, and even now I will sometimes play it through, half-thinking I’m going to discover some kind of critical flaw on it that I’d missed the previous eight million times I’d listened to it.

I know that album better than I know some people I see on a daily basis. I know every note, every chord change, every pause where she stops to draw breath. There’s this long pause after the final track plays, and then there’s this weird little discordant chunk of musical noise (for lack of a better term), and I even know exactly when that chunk is going to come in. It is so familiar to me, and yet I daresay that I still have moments where I’m awestruck by how good it still is. (They’re apparently putting out a new version of it next week that I’m going to have to go pick up — the 15th anniversary edition. Who knew?)

The problem is that October of 1993 is the last time that happened to me. Oh, sure, there’ve been tantalizing moments where that kind of experience flashed in front of my eyes. Sarah Harmer’s You Were Here didn’t start out that way, but turned into it over time — I certainly didn’t need to sit there and just listen the whole way through the first couple of times. Ultimately You Were Here is an astonishingly great piece of work, and Sarah Harmer deserves every bit of praise and then some for it. Suzie Ungerleider’s “Tangled and Wild” and “Alabaster” are nearly pitch-perfect, and Johnstown was looking like it was going to be one of those albums, but somehow it fell short; other than those two tracks, it never really came together for me in the way that Fumbling Towards Ecstasy or Fat City did.

But here’s the thing about Suzie’s music: It has this weird, timeless quality to it. Playing those songs, it feels like I’ve been listening to it forever. Every time one of her tracks rolls over in the player I keep thinking I should have piles of CDs with music like that. But I don’t. And then, last year, I heard Rose Cousins doing a studio session on CBC Radio 1, and there was this momentary shiver that ran up my spine.

Let me talk about Rose for a second. You know Rose, of course; she’s another in a long line of east coast musicians, girls with guitars, who are classified broadly as folk acts but for whom that particular label is totally useless. Rose is a folk act the way I wear shoes — it’s technically true, but there’s a lot more to it than that. I bought If You Were For Me last year on the strength of its title track. On first listen, I felt a little twinge on the back of my neck. The sound, the mood, the lyrics — it all fits. Like Suzie’s music, it had that ageless feeling to it, familiar though it was the first time I’d heard it. I thought, once again, “I know I have more like this.” And, once again, I couldn’t find anything like it.

If You Were For Me didn’t exactly take the first couple of times outside of a handful of tracks, though. Slowly, though, I’ve been coming to realize how remarkable it really is — to the point where I’m listening to it quite regularly right now, and to the point when someone asked me the other day what kind of music I liked, I almost immediately blurted out “Rose Cousins!” before realizing that (a) it wouldn’t have contributed anything to the conversation and (b) he wouldn’t have had any clue who I was talking about, so instead I made up some lame story about being really into ambient and trance right now, which made me seem like a huge dork.

I should have said something about Rose instead. If You Were For Me really is a great album, and deserves all kinds of publicity.

Anyway, because I’ve been listening to her music so much lately, I thought it might be nice to try branching out a bit. Since it seemed like I should have had CDs full of her kind of music, I thought it would be reasonable to assume that finding more music would be trivial. Yeah, not really — it turns out it’s hard to come up for comparables for musicians who aren’t well-known outside of a small but loyal following. Out of desperation and more for my own amusement, I fed Rose’s name into the engine at music-map.com, and was deeply disappointed by the three comparables that came up in response.

Tracy Rice, who was closest to Rose on the map, wasn’t very good. I didn’t really want to listen to Sophie B. Hawkins, because I’ve never been able to get into her stuff. But there you were, drifting down towards the bottom right of the map. I fed you into Google and went over to your MySpace site in the thoughts you might have some music samples up.

Now, when I listened to Fat City, it took about four tracks — right into the middle of “Round of Blues” — before I fully understood what I had on my hands. I sat through “Polaroids” and “Tennessee” and “Tenderness on the Block” with a kind of a stupid look on my face, and halfway through the fourth track I finally understood why I hadn’t been able to do anything else. It was the third track on Time For Mercy, “Will You Remember Me?” that secured that album’s place in my heart. “Possession” had been floating around for a couple of weeks on radio before Fumbling Towards Ecstasy had been released, so it didn’t count as far as I was concerned, but it took 30-45 seconds of “Wait” before the album vaulted itself into my musical pantheon. I knew it was going to be good, but it took me that long to realize how good it was, and from there I was hooked.

Here’s where things get kind of strange. It took you and Another Kind of Fire the first thirty one notes of “Hollywood Ending.”

And all I could do was sit there, slack-jawed, listening to this music wash over me. I realized at that moment what had been missing from my music for so long — I didn’t think I’d been craving that kind of experience again, but it turns out that I needed it in some way. God, how I needed it! I’m a loser that way, I know, but strange to discover that something had been missing for so long.

Another Kind of Fire is perfect. I hesitate to call it a concept album because I don’t know if you meant it that way, but it feels like a concept album about the nature of love and relationships; it feels like it grows in its understanding of those concepts, building towards a grand finish. There isn’t a single moment on it that feels wrong or artificial. It is soaked in honesty. God, it’s really, really good. It’s so good it almost hurts.

Thank you so much for making this album, Edie. I didn’t realize what I’d been craving, but once I figured it out there was this almost palpable sense of relief that came over me. I don’t know whether I’m relieved because I found another one of those amazing albums, or whether I’m relieved because I’m still able to feel this kind of thing fifteen years later.

But you know what? I don’t care. Your album is fantastic. I want to hug it.

Lots of love,
Dr. Hazmat

Random disconnected thoughts about the death of an airline



N823AL, a Boeing 737-200 belonging to Aloha Airlines, at Keahole Airport (PHKO)
30 January, 2008

News of Aloha’s suspension of passenger service has spread throughout the air travel world, and we’re now 24 hours into a post-Aloha passenger universe. Aloha is one of the first airlines that I remember clearly, and one that played a pivotal role in forming some of my most treasured memories as a kid. Going to Hawaii was always a great thing; going through Honolulu, over to the inter-island terminal, with the bus station atmosphere, the dark floors, the generalized mayhem, to end up on one of these psychedelically painted planes and whisked off to the Big Island — it was heady stuff for me. So much so that, when I went back to Hawaii for the first time in way too long last year, and climbed aboard the Aloha flight to Hilo in Honolulu, settled into my seat and got a small plastic container of guava juice once we hit cruise… it was a lot like nothing had changed, and I was 8 again.

Seeing N823AL on the ramp in January I thought I was looking backwards into my past. No other plane looked so ridiculous and yet so sublime. I’m a lot older now and way more jaded, and yet I felt a little weak taking this picture from the departure area while I waited to leave.

We didn’t fly on AAH earlier this year and it had more to do with availability, timing, and fares than anything else — we were leaving PHKO and heading back home and trying to find an available seat on an AAH flight was difficult. So instead we few Hawaiian, and I had one of the most pleasant short-haul flight experiences I’ve had in a very long time. Now I feel bad, because I thought I’d come back to AAH the next time around, and there won’t be a next time, now.

It’s strange how we invest emotional energy in things like airlines. I remember watching CP turn into Canadian, loving every minute I spent in the air with Canadian, smirking at anyone dumb enough to fly Air Canada by choice. And then it all fell apart; my last flight on Canadian, to Boston in May of 2000, was bittersweet because the return was on Air Canada metal, and the contrast was stark, obvious; I didn’t like it at all. Now I put up with Air Canada and I tolerate WestJet, and am shocked when I have an ACA flight that doesn’t come with a side order of extreme annoyance, or a WJA flight that doesn’t make me grit my teeth over some issue or another. Air travel doesn’t seem like much fun anymore, and yet it continues to hold some kind of silly appeal for me.

The world changes, you heard it here first. There are all kinds of things you can no longer do on airplanes; some, like the decline and fall of catering standards and service, are a function of the business climate. Some, like riding in the pointiest part of a 767-200 all the way to Toronto, are a function of our time. (This remains the coolest thing I have ever done in an airplane I wasn’t being paid to ride in to date.) That’s lost and gone forever. You’d think, though, that the joy of travel, the experience of getting somewhere, would still hold some fun; now, it’s drudgery at the airport, ritualistic humiliation at the screening point, cattle-class service on board, and baggage roulette at the final destination. No wonder people are down on the airlines — it’s not fun anymore.

Aloha had its share of problems. I didn’t really enjoy flying with them last year, but that experience hasn’t changed my memories or my love of the airline any. I have decades of warm, happy thoughts for AAH, and I’m really going to miss them. They, more than any airline I spent time on as a kid, were the providers of the last of the “fun” trips, from start to finish.

"… by *GOD* I know what this network is for…"

I was cleaning out a directory tonight (this is what I do these days when I’m tense or angry, I go and clean out my hard drive) and I came across the original version of Russ Allbery’s magnificent rant about… I’m not sure what it’s about, actually.

Superficially it’s about Usenet, my first true love on the net, but if you dig a bit deeper, read a bit between the lines, it gets at some of the core issues around the Internet and inter-networking generally — how the network itself, while interesting and fun to play with, is entirely secondary to the goal of allowing people to connect with each other; the value of the relationships forged on the network; the exclusivity of some of those relationships; the ability of this phenomenal tool to bring people together, and what happens when it is under threat from people who don’t understand that.

The post is ten years old this month. It feels, in its broad images, like it could have been written yesterday. It dates only because the technology and the specific source of the problem has changed; the essence, its core, is as true as it ever was.

Now nearing the end of my second decade on the Internet (and its predecessors), I see this more clearly now than I ever did. Spam, trolls, denials-of-service, flooding — all of this is, in some way, an attack on the infrastructure itself. Yet although no one cries when a router screams because its table is overloaded, a great many people cry when jerks invade their bboard or flood their favorite blog. We don’t care about the physical reality of the Internet — most of us probably never did, and wouldn’t know a router from a switch if it bit us in the face. We care about the space in our heads, the collective space we all made, the space that was special to us and meaningful, the space that got chewed up when some vandal came roaring through.

I used to argue about spam as though it were some kind of stolen resource. It is, in the purest sense of the term, but I didn’t get sad because my mail client had to spend a few more seconds processing mail. What saddens me about the e-mail spam problem is that I’ve had to implement filters, wall off entire countries, and disable even the most basic diagnostic messages because I can’t deal with the volume of junk flowing back to me. The platonic ideal of e-mail, to my mind, no longer works — and while there’s a technical side to this, I’m not really upset that no one with an e-mail address that ends in .hk or .tw can send me mail. I’m upset that no person with an e-mail address ending in .hk or .tw can reach me anymore. It’s sad that we’ve reached this point, yet I don’t know how a reasonable person can do anything else. This was, ultimately, one of Russ’s points. “The difference, to me, between those things that Usenet is for and those things that Usenet is not for, is one of manner and quantity. Not one of content. I do not want to see any person excluded from Usenet, even if they believe that Usenet should be used for machine-generated spew. I just want to stop the spew, because if it goes unchecked it will drown out and destroy the beauty of what Usenet is.”

Perhaps I am not explaining this well; perhaps I am rambling. It’s late and I’m up past my bedtime. But I am thinking about the things that I love, and have loved, and how they make me feel, and I think back to the arguments we used to have about the nature of the network, and I keep thinking that we were all missing the point — that maybe we’re all still missing the point. The point is the contact. The point is the connection — the ability to reach out and find someone to make you feel less lonely. I think we sometimes forget how precious and special that is, and how sad we are when other people ruin it for us.

Talking about the problem in that sense — in terms of the effect it has on people trying to reach each other — somehow feels more honest than worrying about computational cycles and mail server load. Russ’s rant was shocking because he put into words what many of us felt but could not explain; we couldn’t defend the emotional damage we felt when a part of Usenet (or the network generally) broke because of someone else’s malfeasance. But he could, and he could focus that hurt and anger like a laser beam on a very specific example, which gave his rant a shocking degree of power. It’s not the anger that amazes me, ten years later — I remember being plenty angry on Usenet. What amazes me is the passion.

I wish I could write such an empassioned defence of the Internet.

Everybody dance now!


Hold on a second, clamhead! You think you can just roll in here and tell us it’s not on when it very clearly is on?! You’re just trying to make us not practice, aren’t you? Because you know your kids are goin’ down when my kids give them this! Give me some moves out, Girl T! Check this out! Yeah! You like that?!”

Much to my sorrow, embedding on this magnificent YouTube video is disabled, but that will in no way prevent me from using it as a teaching aid, or just as some filler material the next time I have to give a talk even tangentially related to cardiac electrophysiology.

It is absolutely brilliant beyond words. Better, I think, than a cheap knockoff of a Justin Timberlake song (which is, in and of itself, pretty damn good).

Now it can be told.

With Mike Huckabee’s win in the Iowa caucuses tonight, I thought it might be nice to congratulate the former Arkansas governor with a trip down memory lane…



Way to go, Mike! Yeah!

Open Letter #48: "Nice network you got here. Be a shame if anything were to, uh, happen to it…"

Dear Botnet Owners,

On behalf of the entire Internet, I would like to say “thank you!” for finally putting that “mailer-daemon” character in his place, and making sure that I will have to forever automatically delete any piece of e-mail that comes from him. I am so grateful that you’ve managed to make bounce messages so thoroughly useless I now have to start ignoring them, thus ensuring that I’ll never really know whether my mail got through or not.

Thanks again. I love my new broken Internet.

Fuck you very much,
Dr. Hazmat