Posts from November 2005

I am a lucky guy, I love my family and my work, and I got to see two of the best songwriters in the business do solo shows this week.  On wednesday night, Josh and I went to see Bruce Springsteen with friends and last night The Gotham Gal and I went down to Tribeca to see the second night of two nights of Jeff Tweedy at the Tribeca Arts Center.

I love Jeff Tweedy. 

He sings beautifully with deep emotion and honesty.

Last night he was in fine form working the crowd and enjoying himself.

He was joined by the amazing drummer Glenn Kotche, who played a solo set beforehand.

And Jim O’Rourke, the studio experimentalist who was the force behind the wild sounds on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, joined for one song, turning the band into Loose Fur.  The song they did is new and I think its called Whistling Jesus.  It was great.

Here’s the setlist (a better one is here)

Spider
Muzzle of Bees
I Am Trying To Break Your Heart
???
In Your Dreams?
Mountain Bed
Lost Love
Please Tell My Brother (i love this song)
Bob Dylan’s Beard
Sugar Baby??
??
??
Summerteeth

Encore:
Sunken Treasure (loved this one)
Not For The Season (with Kotche)
Whistling Jesus (with Loose Fur)
War on War (with Kotche)
Heavy Metal Drummer (with Kotche)

Second Encore:
Lonely 1

My favorite moments were Please Tell My Brother (a song that I have always loved), Sunken Treasure (the harmonica gets me every time), and the finish with Lonely 1 (a standard Jeff Tweedy finale).

Here is a video of the harmonica part of Sunken Treasure.

And here is a video of the ending of Sunken Treausre – "I was maimed by rock and roll":

View this clip on Vimeo

I know I’ve blogged a bit about these guys, Hard-Fi, before.

I just want to say that this record, Stars of CCTV, is really great.

They are in the Bloc Party and Arcade Fire territory in terms of great new bands.

If you like indie rock with an english (clash) bent, you’ll love Hard-Fi.

The title of this post is basically admission that I am behind on the real time reading event that is Hackoff.com, Tom Evslin’s semi-autobiographical account of life as an entrepreneur in bubble 1.0.

I finally finished Chapter Six.

In this chapter Tom and Mary (oops I mean Larry and Louise) go to Davos for the World Economic Forum at the height of the Internet bubble.

I have never been invited to Davos and probably never will be.

I’ve read many descriptions of Davos in various publications, but never the inside scoop that Tom delivers in Chapter Six.

I felt like I was with Tom and Mary when they in fact went to Davos in late January 2000.

I had no idea what fun it is.

I suggest anyone with a passing curiosity about Davos give this chapter a read.

And if you have a passing curiosity about life as an Internet entrepreneur in bubble 1.0 and its aftermath, you have to read Hackoff.com.

If hard copy is still your preferred way to read, you can pre-order the book at Amazon now.

Josh and I were invited by a good friend and his son to go see Bruce play an acoustic solo show last night, part of the Devils and Dust tour.

We all would have preferred an E Street band show, particularly in light of the 30th anniversary of Born To Run, but all we got was Bruce and that was pretty good.

The highlight was Backstreets, which he dedicated to his good friend Jon Landau.  Bruce sat at his piano and pounded on the keys and gave us a wonderful version last night.

Hearing Jon Landau’s name got me thinking about his seminal piece in The Real Paper in May 1974 where he wrote "I saw rock
and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen".  Here’s the link to the full column.  It’s as great a read now as it was 31 years ago.

We didn’t see the future of rock and roll last night.  We saw one of its masters.  And with 9 year old kids in tow, that’s always a good thing since they and their friends and contemporaries are the future of rock and roll.

While I am venting about Google this morning, I may as well share a feeling I’ve had lately about Google.

They are lame.

Not in their core search product which remains the single greatest web service in existence.

But in many of their recent initiatives, Google has introduced a delay between submit and display.

And that’s just lame in this day and age of instant recall.

Here are some examples of their lameness.

When I first uploaded a video to google, it just vanished.  Poof. Gone. I had no way to see it and no idea where it had gone to.

I put Google Analytics on my blog on Monday.  I still don’t have any data.  The service tells me, "Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being gathered now. Your first reports will be ready within twelve hours."  Not exactly.

I submitted a theater review to Google Base this morning.  And it took ten minutes to be processed and displayed. Does it take Craigslist that long to post a listing?  No way.

Posting stuff to the Internet has to be instantaneous.  What if wrote this post on Tyeppad and it took me 10 minutes to see the result?  What if I posted a photo to Flickr and it took a day to see it? What if I put sitemeter on my blog and had to wait three days before seeing my traffic?

I would stop using all of those services.  Fortunately, they don’t do that to me.

Google does. Is it arrogance that they think they can get away with it while others can’t?

Are they so huge that their vaunted data centers can’t process the posts quickly enough?

Who knows?

But I know this.  Google is lame.

Go give Google some of your content. 

They’ll store it, index it, and give it to the Internet.

It’s a drug and they hope you take it.

I won’t.

Even though I just did.

Google Base is "dBase in the sky" of sorts.

It’s a good idea except that this content is getting created all over the place already.

At Typepad.

At MySpace.

At Blogger.

At Flickr.

At Delicious.

Posting, Subcribing, Tagging, and Search are an ecosystem.

An ecosystem that Google wants to own.

I don’t think its going to play out that way.

Pieces loosely joined will beat one ring to rule them all.

At least that’s my bet.

Umair sums up my feelings best on this one.

Except that I am not totally intent on missing any tetonic shifts!

Venture Capital is a lot about pattern recognition; in finding good opportunities, in managing them, and in exiting them.

So when I say, "I’ve seen this movie before", something I’ve apparently said quite a few times on this blog in the past 2+ years, it means my brain has entered pattern recognition mode.

Some movies have happy endings, some have endings you don’t want to watch. I’ve seen both.

When you’ve seen the movie before and the ending was a good one, it’s a great feeling.  You know you are on to something that’s going to work out well.

When you’ve seen the movie before and the ending was bad, it’s a terrible feeling. You do everything you can so that you don’t have to see it again.

Of course, not every movie ends the same way every time (except in the movie businesss).  Pattern recognition will only do so much for you. But pattern recognition is as good a tool as I have in my bag to try and predict the future.

So if you are in a meeting with me (or anyone else who uses this cliche) and you hear, "I’ve seen this movie before", make sure you ask how the ending was.

I’ve added Google Analytics to this blog.

It takes about 12 hours to start seeing data (Sitemeter is instantaneous).

I’ll showcase the data I am getting once I get some to show.

Two weeks ago, Josh’s band, The Four Fellas, opened Tedstock with a three song set that showcased the talents of four nine year old kids.

They aren’t the tightest band yet, but they rock nonetheless.

For their final song, Sheena Is A Punk Rocker, they were joined by Ted on bass. They had just learned the song two days before specifically for Tedstock.

It was a lot of fun and I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

The Four Fellas – Sheena Is A Punk Rocker