Testing iTunes' Genius Playlists

The Genius feature in iTunes was released a while ago, but I've yet to test it out. The stated purpose of Genius, according to Apple's website, is to "rediscover" great songs in your library -- an attempt to compete with Pandora and Last.fm, no doubt -- but more realistically, the point of it is for a computer to just replace human labor -- specifically, your labor, sifting through your music collection for songs that would make a good mix tape. (I'm not sure where iTunes is collecting all the information Genius uses to construct its playlists, but I think it's based off of what other iTunes customers are buying. The scarier option is that I just sent my entire music library to Apple, and it will be subpeoned by the RIAA in the Copyright Armaggedon of 2015.)

Today I'm going to do some selective sampling of my music collection and see how well it actually works. I'll be judging Genius's results based on a predictability scale from 0-6 (in deference to Kinsey), 0 being a pretty obvious and uninspired mix, 6 being too erratic and disjointed to be enjoyable.

Let's start things off with an older garage indie rock favorite of mine, The Wrens' "Everyone Chooses Sides".
Results: Some obvious indie rock contemporaries: Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party, the single Tapes 'n Tapes song in my library. Not sure what Gnarls Barkley is doing in here, though, and I've never thought of Beirut or They Might Be Giants as being very rough around the edges.
Judgement: 5.

Next let's pick a genre that I have plenty to choose from in my library, like say Andrew Bird's "Nervous Tic Motion of the Head...".
Results: Lots of other Andrew Bird here, along with Beirut (obvious), Sufjan Stevens (yup), Decemberists (still pretty straightforward). The only real surprise here is an electronica track from M83. Weird. I'd like a tad more variety.
Judgement: 2.

Now let's do an artist I have tons of tracks from, Tori Amos, but we'll stay away from any of the obvious choices and go for "Bliss" (from To Venus and Back).
Results: Huh, this one's actually pretty usable. The usual suspects are here: Fiona Apple, Sarah McLachlan, Charlotte Martin. A few outliers, though: a track from an early 2000s David Bowie record, an obscure Nine Inch Nails track, some Blonde Redhead.
Judgement: 3.

Not bad, I guess. It hasn't bored me to death, and only the first playlist would be considered too random to listen to. I do wonder how feasible some of these combinations are in other people's music libraries -- I don't have a huge music library, but I know I buy and/or acquire music more often than your average consumer. Anyone have their own reactions to Genius's success rate?

Back to the Blog

Yesterday I found out that it's NaBloPoMo, or National Blog Posting Month. I guess I'm a little late to the party to start blogging like crazy this month -- plus, who wants to blog during Thanksgiving weekend??? -- but I will be back on the blog on a more regular basis now. Some things that have been keeping me occupied of late:

• Finishing up an extremely busy five or six weeks of shows, both solo outings and with Canasta. Both of us are taking a breather to get some more new material up and running for the live shows. Also, I don't want to get on another interstate again for 20 years. The tolls alone for the tour were $75. Half of that must be subsidizing the mega-oasis we stopped at on I-76 in rural Pennsylvania, a rest stop the size of a New Hampshire township that was 116 miles from the next exit. The pizza place there was still open and it was something like 2:30 in the morning.
  
• Catching up on the Office and 30 Rock, neither of which have started out their seasons very strongly, unfortunately, but Tina Fey's been doing more important work this fall.
  
• Being really effing excited about the next president.
• Being really unexcited about the result of Prop 8 in California.

And on that note, I do have some thoughts about Prop 8 which are starting to be echoed in op-ed columns. This LA Times op-ed piece has a lot of good points but the most important, I think, is that there was never consensus throughout the LGBT community that marriage equality should be the benchmark of civil rights that it's become to so many organizations and leaders. Before same-sex marriage looked like an attainable goal, LGBT lobbyists around the country were spending a lot of effort on hate crime legislation and non-discrimination acts, two areas of legislation which are confusingly inconsistent across state lines. It seems like an even more immediately pressing concern is same-sex adoption, which Dan Savage writes about in the NYT. A ballot initiative passed in Arkansas last week banned adoptions by any non-married couples, which screws over not just same-sex parents but a bunch of straight people, and oh yeah, kids who can't find adoptive parents.

I wouldn't trade my legally recognized marriage license from Massachusetts for anything. I feel incredibly privileged to be one of the few gay people in the U.S. that was able to walk into a town hall and get a marriage license like anyone else. But the keyword there is privilege, and nothing brings that privilege home more than living in Illinois now, where all of the rights and benefits of that marriage license are emotional and/or symbolic. And even if I lived in California, Massachusetts, or Connecticut right now, my husband and I would still have to file our federal taxes separately, and we still wouldn't get the couple of thousand dollars worth of tax benefits we would get if we were straight. And the only reason we would, were we straight, be eligible for all of those juicy tax benefits, has something to do with the fact that we're both white, we're both male, both U.S. citizens, and we're not scraping by on food stamps and Medicaid. I feel so grateful to have a legal marriage certificate, but in the whole scheme of the LGBT movement, I honestly don't know what it has done to secure my civil rights or anyone else's.

Dear America,

Don't fuck this up again.

Love,
Ian

Pre-Tour Rundown: From Iowa to Connecticut

Canasta's loading up the cars for a bunch of tour dates in the next week. I'll try to do some good road-blogging, but it looks like most of our time will be spent driving, sleeping, or rocking. Here's the rundown. (For more details on any of these, see Canasta's show schedule.)

Friday, October 17th - Papa's Corner in Ames, IA
My only familiarity with Ames comes from the part in Omnivore's Dilemma about the industrial corn complex. I'm expecting giant corn silos and an agricultural school. Oh, and I know that the street lingo for agricultural school is "ag school". At least it was back in New England. We didn't have real street lingo in New England, so we take what we can get.
Saturday, October 18th - The Industry in Iowa City, IA
My initial impression of it, based on the name alone, is that this is actually a miniature replica of the state of Iowa. Perhaps there is a neighborhood called "Little Des Moines" where you can get authentic... Des Moinesian food?
Sunday, October 19th - Schubas in Chicago w/ Pale Young Gentlemen, Bearsuit
Canasta's back at Schubas! With fun pop bands! We get to sleep at home! Team Chicago: if you're ready for more Schubas action, we're playing at 9pm. You know you can't get enough.
Wednesday, October 22nd - The Space in Hamden, CT (near New Haven)
The last time I went to Connecticut it was to the New Haven IKEA because Boston hadn't built their own yet. I am hoping that this trip involves fewer self-assembled bookshelves and more rock music. If that means I don't get my Swedish meatballs, oh well.
Thursday, October 23rd - CMJ Marathon in New York!
Arlene's Grocery - Show at 7pm, Canasta at 11pm - $10 for tons of Chicago bands
Canasta is sharing the stage with Brighton, MA again, along with a ton of other great Chicago acts that are descending on the lower east side for the gigantic CMJ Marathon. Even my non-hipster, non-staying-up-late, non-scenester friends have good things to say about Arlene's. I plan to eat cupcakes and pizza during a week mostly spent sitting in a carseat. The next time you see me, I will be fat. Fat fat fat.
Friday, October 24th - MilkBoy Coffee in Ardmore, PA (Philadelphia)
I went to Philadelphia on an 8th grade field trip, and I vaguely remember some animatronic Benjamin Franklin explaining the basics of democracy in a stiff and didactic presentation. Either that or it was a very bad production of the musical 1776. I've blocked the memory.

And then to top things off...
Saturday, October 25th - Solo Show at Uncommon Ground, Chicago
Welcome me home by coming out to the original Uncommon Ground (at Clark and Grace). I'll be playing a late solo show - 11pm - but if you're a fan of that nice Basia Bulat/Ingrid Michaelson vocal style, Jetty Rae will be coming down from Michigan to play for you all at 10.

Schubas Tonight! ...And Drunk Emailing

OK Team Chicago, you know what's on tonight: 9pm at Schubas, me, you, birthday party. Let's get to the good stuff...

Google now offers an option in Gmail that makes you answer simple math questions before sending emails during certain times of the day -- the default setting being on weekend nights. I can think of a few people who read this blog who may raise the cry that Google is overstepping its bounds here, but give credit where credit is due, first. Kudos go to whoever recognized this is as a useful feature and didn't blow it off as a silly side project. I haven't seen it in action yet, but Wired has some details.

Reading questions for the die-hard pomo kids out there:

• Does Google's attempts to inhibit such primal and uninhibited behavior as drunk-mailing demonstrate or exemplify technology's continued stifling of human communication/interaction?
• Why is it that quantitative and not qualitative or verbal reasoning skills are the standard by which rational emailing decisions are judged?
• Are the robots winning?

Lazy Friday Video Post

All of the news in Chicago of late has revolved around baseball or (vice-)presidential races. Sometimes it just makes me want to run away to Canada. Speaking of which, hey! There's a new Final Fantasy video to watch. I tried to embed the video here on the page for those of you who like instant gratification, but for some reason it wanted to take over the entire width of my blog, swallowing everything in the sidebar like some kind of sidebar-eating monster. So just click on the link -- you won't be sorry.

And don't forget, this Tuesday is my birthday party at Schubas, opening for Portlanders Talkdemonic and featuring some birthday surprises.

My Impending Mid-to-Late Twenties Meltdown, with Music

I've spent another week tucked away from the blogosphere, so I thought I'd combine a few quick updates in a single post...

Canasta took a little field trip to Kalamazoo College on Tuesday to play at an outdoor welcome-week picnic/activities fair. Highlights: good root beer (which is, I guess, some sort of special thing in Kalamazoo? Can anyone vouch for this?); the speed limit in Michigan is 70 mph; also, it was our last outdoor show of the summer.

Friday's solo show at Cake Chicago was a lot of fun once we stopped watching Obama and McCain discuss how catastrophic the other candidate's foreign policies were. The Red Line Tap is next to (and owned by) the Heartland Cafe, the informal epicenter of progressive politics in Roger's Park (and possibly the entire North Side), and both were packed with debate watchers/hecklers. It was a weird way to get fired up for a show: on the one hand, it's therapeutic to watch the debates with other die-hard Obama supporters. On the other hand, Jim Lehrer is not much of a rock star emcee. I don't think he even tried to bring the rock. Not a good opening act at all.

Finally, last week I put up details about a very special birthday solo show happening on Tuesday, October 7th. The details are on the calendar as usual, but here's the teaser trailer:

• I am unveiling a new secret weapon. (Hint: I've been re-listening to a lot of Andrew Bird, Final Fantasy, and Patrick Wolf in the last month.)
  
• It's my first solo appearance at Schubas, which is my favorite live music venue in Chicago hands down. (Canasta will also be playing there later next month as part our CMJ tour.)
  
• I'll be opening for Portland-based Talkdemonic, who are in the midst of a huge national tour to promote their latest album, Eyes at Half Mast (which I'm listening to right now).
• Team LA will have a special, one-person "soft launch" at the show. (Who could it be???)