What’s on Dubya’s iPod?

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According to the International Herald Tribune…

President George W. Bush spent an hour and a half Saturday riding a mountain bike at his Texas ranch. With him, as usual, was his indispensable new exercise toy: an iPod music player loaded with country and popular rock tunes aimed at getting the presidential heart rate up to a chest-pounding 170 beats per minute.

Which brings up the inevitable question. What, exactly, is on the First iPod? …

First, Bush’s iPod is heavy on traditional country singers like George Jones, Alan Jackson and Kenny Chesney. He has selections by the folk-rock singer Van Morrison, whose “Brown-Eyed Girl” is a Bush favorite, and by John Fogerty, most predictably “Centerfield,” which was played at Texas Rangers games when Bush was an owner and is still played at ballfields all over America. (“Oh, put me in, Coach – I’m ready to play today.”)

The president also has an eclectic mix of songs downloaded into his iPod from Mark McKinnon, a biking buddy and his chief media strategist in the 2004 campaign. Among them are “Circle Back” by John Hiatt, “(You’re So Square) Baby, I Don’t Care” by Joni Mitchell and “My Sharona,” the 1970s song by The Knack that Joe Levy, a deputy managing editor in charge of music coverage at Rolling Stone, cheerfully branded “suggestive if not outright filthy” in an interview last week.

Bush has had his $300 Apple iPod since last July, when he received it from his twin daughters as a birthday gift. He has some 250 songs on it, a paltry number compared to the 10,000 selections it can hold.

Bush, as leader of the free world, does not take the time to download the music himself; that task falls to his personal aide, Blake Gottesman, who buys individual songs and albums, including greatest hits by Jones and Jackson, from the iTunes music store.

Apple and podcasting

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Podcasting is an interesting development, but currently is not for the technologically naive user. Steve Jobs has announced that within two months Apple’s iTunes will offer support for podcasts. Lots of people are pondering what this might mean. Here’s Eric Hellweg on the subject.

Hyperventilation

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There is, writes Virginia Postrel in her Forbes column,

something about blogs [that] makes a lot of respectable journalists hyperventilate. News pros seem terribly threatened by online amateurs. Blogging is a “solipsistic, self-aggrandizing, journalist-wannabe genre,” writes David Shaw in the Los Angeles Times. Shaw, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for his media criticism, declares that bloggers are “practitioners of what is at best pseudo-journalism” and that “many bloggers — not all, perhaps not even most — don’t seem to worry much about being accurate.” (Emphasis added.)

Virginia goes on to point out that Shaw omits to provide any links to Blogs which illustrate his claims.

But that’s par for this course. Non-journalists who are dismissive of Blogs behave similarly — and in my experience those who are most critical have rarely actually seen any Blogs, and certainly have not read any serious ones. But in fact the view that “all blogs are x” (where x = ‘self-indulgent’, ‘vanity publishing’, ‘solipsistic’ or whatever other term of abuse comes to mind) is as absurd as the view that “all books are x” or “all newspapers are x”. Blogs (like books and newspapers) come in every conceivable type and quality. There are thoughtful blogs, silly blogs, truthful blogs, fanatical blogs, ideological blogs, biased blogs — just as there are thoughtful, silly, fanatical, ideological, biased books (and newspapers).

Just after reading the Postrel column, I came on Steven Johnson’s Blog, in which he discusses some of the responses to his new book, Everything Bad is Good for You: how today’s popular culture is actually making us smarter. This is a vigorous defence of the value of contemporary culture in which he challenges conventional claims that American popular culture is vile and debased, appeals to the lowest common denominator, is all about sensationalistic exploitation and dumbing down, etc. This is a tough argument to make, and I haven’t read the book yet, but Johnson is a fine writer and I’m looking forward to seeing how he does it.

In the meantime, I followed some of the links Johnson provides to comments on his book. One of them is a really fine essay by Steven Shaviro which is as erudite and thoughtful as anything you’d find in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books or any other reputable literary journal. But it appears on … a blog.

The yucky corporate profile

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A typical, old-media, news-free, adulatory piece about Microsoft — in this case a profile by Steve Lohr of Eric Rudder, who is supposedly a “rising star” in Redmond. Here’s the opener:

The path to the top at Microsoft is not for the timid. Anyone hoping to make the ascent must be able to match wits with two of the most formidable and combative intellects in corporate America: Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder, and Steven A. Ballmer, its chief executive.

Eric Rudder, a senior vice president, demonstrated that skill not long after he arrived at Microsoft. In 1992, Mr. Rudder, then 25, had a confrontation with Mr. Gates, recalled Brad Silverberg, a former senior Microsoft executive. The dispute centered on some now-forgotten technical matter in the Windows desktop operating system.

“Bill, you’re absolutely, totally wrong,” Mr. Rudder said, according to Mr. Silverberg. “And here’s why.”

After hearing him out, Mr. Silverberg said, Mr. Gates conceded the point, saying: “You know what? I guess you’re right.”

See what I mean? This is lazy, uncritical journalism. Pass the sickbag, Alice.

Jacko and postmodernism

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I haven’t been following the Michael Jackson trial but this wonderfully wacky piece by Terry Eagleton made me wonder if I should have been. Sample:

Courtrooms, like novels, blur the distinction between fact and fiction. They are self-enclosed spheres in which what matters is not so much what actually took place in the real world, but how it gets presented to the jury. The jury judge not on the facts, but between rival versions of them. Since postmodernists believe that there are no facts in any case, just interpretations, law courts neatly exemplify their view of the world. Another thing which blurs the distinction between fact and fiction is Michael Jackson himself. There is a double unreality about staging the fiction of a criminal trial around a figure who has been assembled by cosmetic surgeons. Jackson’s freakish body represents the struggle of fantasy against reality, the pyrrhic victory of culture over biology. Quite a few young people are not even aware that he is black. If postmodern theory won’t acknowledge that there is any such thing as raw nature, neither will this decaying infant.

This is bullshit of the very highest order. And it reminds me of a lovely story Frank Kermode once told me. He was on a British Council lecture tour in China, speaking to university students about Shakespeare. In one institution, he was heard in respectful silence. At the end, his host encouraged the students to ask the great man some questions. Eventually, a shy student put up her hand. “Do you know Telly Eagleton?”, she said. This was the only question he was asked!

Murdered Blogger reveals identity of his killer

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This was Simon Ng’s final entry on his Blog at 5:05pm on May 12….

“Today I missed my Japanese class again, since I have gotten a bad throat. I only went to the class once this week, so I am probably so far behind now. I will catch up in the summer tho so no worries hehe. Anyway today has been weird, at 3 some guy ringed the bell. I went down and recognized it was my sister’s former boyfriend. He told me he wants to get his fishing poles back. I told him to wait downstair while I get them for him. While I was searching them, he is already in the house. He is still here right now, smoking, walking all around the house with his shoes on which btw I just washed the floor 2 days ago!”

The guy wandering round the house stabbed him, then waited for his sister to return and then stabbed her to death. For the full story see this NY Newsday report.

Windbreak

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These trees just outside Dingle have always fascinated me. They’ve withstood Atlantic gales for as long as I can remember. I’ve always wanted to photograph them but never got round to it — until yesterday.