Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Get Timmy

Here is another reality check from an article at VirtualWorldsNews.com. A product launch:

“Inversoft’s software understands and analyzes how users communicate with each other, a tremendous value to our customers,” said Amy Pritchard, CEO of Metaverse Mod Squad. “In the hands of our community managers and moderators, this information not only makes us more efficient in stopping inappropriate conduct, but also allows us to channel back a wealth of information about the preferences, behaviors, and motivations of the community. These are incredible tools built by an exceptional company.”


It’s hard for me to grasp how many myths of the web this shatters or what it says about online culture. If they told me this was only being applied to the New York web scene, I might understand it, but as a much needed way to both moderate/control and harvest human behavior across the board?

T-Bone Burnett is right about this medium being cold except that the wires are just wires. All it can really be is a communications amplifier and the collective message from its users has become such that it also has to be a nanny and a snitch. Just as TV went from the great teacher to the subculture pimp, the web devolved in less than two decades from the library of Alexandria to pulp fiction.

And the technology isn’t the reason. The people using it are.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Song for Kim

The Beatles said all we need is love. Keats said, we need beauty and truth. From a life spent making art of my passion, they both were right. I wrote this song for a girl when I was twenty. A friend took her photos. A friend taught her guitar. Art is joy.

All of the men who worked on this video cared about this woman. Because of that, thirty five years later, this video could be made and given to her.

The best art we make of our own lives. This is what is true, beautiful, made of love. We take light and shadow in turn but always love, and from it emerges a greater light. Let there be light.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Song for Kim

I wrote this song when I was 20 for a wonderful girl. I sang it to her for the first time in the then trendiest restaurant in town where I was playing my first night and she was a college gal waitress. I looked up when I finished into two of the most beautiful luminous happy eyes I'd ever seen. The days of long nights playing solo in front of a fire to a room full of young college hippies were grand.

Someone asked if I would take it out of the attic.

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