A bunch of videos from whitehouse.gov on health insurance reform. I sure hope this whole effort doesn't go down in flames again. It's frustrating that something this needed keeps dying due to propaganda. Most everyone says we should do something, but ask them to agree on that something and they refuse to budge on anything.

• Flying Lotus - Los Angeles
  • Interesting electronica out of LA. Nice varied beat patterns that make some layered funky rhythms.
•  Keith Jarrett - The Koln Concert
  • Beautiful solo piano from a master. Hadn't really listened to him much before.
• Q-Tip - The Renaissance
  • Q-Tip finally releases (or gets released) a solid solo album.
• Matthew Sweet - Girlfriend
  • I bought this when it came out, loved it, but must have overplayed it 'cause I sold it a while back. Well, I finally got another copy of it and am not sure how I tired of this awesome album. Pure perfect power pop.

Friday the 10th was the 45^th anniversary of the signing by LBJ of the Urban Mass Transit Act (UMTA), which was the first federal funding for mass transit and has evolved into (the programs of) today’s Federal Transit Administration (FTA). Maybe within the next 45 years we’ll get some parity between funding for roads and transit.

All of us recognize that the curses of congestion in commuting cannot be wiped away with the single stroke of a pen, or 50 pens that we have here. But we do know that this legislation that we are coming to grips with faces the realities of American life and attempts to put in motion a movement to do something about it.

Floor 3
Originally uploaded by Scallop Holden

Poul sent me to this cool photoset of the abandoned and decaying Buffalo Central Railroad Terminal. Good to read that an organization is devoted to preserving a good amount of the terminal. Maybe someday it will see a use worthy of it's grandeur, however faded.

The OASIS GIS mapping site is about to have a major upgrade with this 2.0 version, now in beta. Very nice UI design, the timeline feature for aerial photography and the location info are interesting and useful.

Wow. Went to the Park Avenue Armory to see the installation by the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto (who I've written about before), and it's amazing. First of all, I'd never been in the armory before, but it's a great huge space. Apparently the interiors of the rooms are historic too. But the installation is definitely the star.

Huge, anthropomorphic, skeletal, dripping, and yet so soft and beautiful because of the fabric and the forms. It was kid city there on friday afternoon, and you can see why. There was a 'pool' filled with plastic balls for playing in, a funky hand-knotted carpet that came up into a soft bump, and a padded play 'room' - all tucked into and around the big form.

And then the added bonus of the scents - about 20 spices used in the hanging forms - giving the work a whole new dimension that's subtle and very interesting.

UPDATE: Put my pictures up for all to see.

• Foreign Exchange - Leave It All Behind
  •  Another solid neo-soul release from the trans-atlantic paring of Phonte and Nicolay. Not quite the classic that their first album together was, but we're talking a matter of degrees here. Lots of good tracks, lots of good vocalists on this release.
• Dangermouse & Sparklehorse - Dark Night of the Soul
  • (Not yet) released due to issues with his (Dangermouse's) record label, this album was created with a set of photos by David Lynch that supposedly illustrate the story of the songs, probably in an very abstract way. Not that I have a copy, which one could probably obtain very easily on this here interweb, but I've heard it's quite good. I'm going to get the book (which contains the photos and a blank CD-R for one's own use), though.
• Tosca - No Hassle
  • A good release from our Austrian friends. The title fits, very mellow, a bit of ambient, a bit of lounge, a bit of this, etc... Similar to their last album J.A.C. but I like this one better.
• Ray Charles - Genius + Soul = Jazz
  • A gem in my 12" collection that I bought several years ago and never actually listened to that much - and have now re-discovered. Ray on the Hammond B3, with a big band backing, arrangements by Quincy Jones, 1960 session on Impulse! vinyl. Serious!

We just finished watching the entire Spike Lee documentary When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts recently. It's four hours long, but worth the time - it draws you in with the footage and the interviews and the raw power of the events. It's hard to describe it briefly, but if I had to pick one word it would be comprehensive. It brings you through the events, the problems, the (few) successes, the pain, the suffering, the consequences (at the time), and attempts limited analysis without letting it obscure it's focus on what happened.

And how did what happened - happen? Why did the federal government respond so poorly? Why was the response so uncoordinated at all levels? What was it actually like to have lived through it? These are the questions that Spike Lee tries to answer - not directly, but by showing lots of footage, and taking lots of interviews. I think I only heard his voice once, off camera - it seems that as much as he could detach himself from what comes through, he did. Obviously he can edit and select to great effect, but I'd be hard pressed to say that this was propaganda. His films can vary widely in quality, but this project was done with care and love and it shows.

There are lots of things you could point to in the GWB presidency as bad judgments or failures, but this, to me, is the worst. This is the one thing that should make historians look back and write 'the president and his administration failed their people.' It's just a shame that this country couldn't do more for it's own residents.

The Berkeley Center for New Media has created this interesting opinion viewer - you rate you answer to 5 questions (a sliding scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree) and it maps the 3-D (or 5-D ?) combination of you answers into 2-D and plots them against many other opinions. The text answer is just a highlight to see when you click on a particular star.

I like the idea - trying to organize the craziness of comments in web-space. How you would bring the free-form of the web into this sort of model is a question, though - maybe this would be most useful for visualizing poll/survey results?

(by way of Epicenter)

 In honor of earth day, Robert Redford guest curated a set of stunning nature photos on the new and very nice Life.com site.