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The Panopticon was an ingenious 18-century prison design in which, as the name implies, prison management could keep an eye on every square inch of the facilities, without the prisoners knowing if they’re actually being watched at any given time.

Does that sound like the world we’re living in now — except that most of us haven’t been convicted of anything, and aren’t supposed to be treated like prisoners?

The Panopticon photo pool on Flickr is a collection of citizen photographs of the omnipresent security cameras, those instruments of our modern Panopticonic society, where the government wants to keep track of all of our activities, but God forbid it we should want to take a picture of a building or a public statue. (See my previous post, “The End of Photography?”.)

This Flickr pool, then, is the public’s chance to document some of those eyes that are pointed our way.

Other Flickr groups with similar ideas are the 1984 and Big Brother is Watching You pools.

So check them out, and by all means participate.

I’ve already got my eye on a couple of cams that I’ll personally put into the scrapbook.

(Link via Boing Boing.)

I’ve thought of several things to post about, and darned if several of them don’t have to do with music — so let’s confine our discussion to that:

Check out this free-music-download blog, the wonderfully named Molly O’Poverty’s Guide to (Mostly) Free Music.

One of the many cool things I found there was the website of the band Tree Wave. The site has a cool retro-tech feel to it, and for a reason — they’re old-school Commodore geeks like me! Woo-hoo! Plus, I DL’d a couple of their free MP3′s and they’re pretty interesting.

(Via Look at This.)

NPR’s All Things Considered had two complementary stories today: One on a new Payola investigation, the other about singer-songwriter Jeff Black’s popular new podcast series.

In other words: The death throes of the old, corrupt music industry, and one of the thousands of rays of light from what could very well take that industry’s place.

In the CD player the past couple of nights: Paul McCartney’s Ram. There’s much more to this album that “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey”, you know — although I must admit that that overplayed song is kick-ass in its own quirky way.

What got me to listening to it was that last week, when I was starting to try to resurrect the long-faded guitar-string callouses on my fingertips, I had dug out my out Paul McCartney songbook, but I couldn’t quite remember the tunes of some of the songs.

Then, when I was in the library to copy the New York Times’ Friday crossword puzzle (shut up) that I had missed last month, I figured that I’d give the CD rack a quick glance. That is, after all, how I ran across the Laurie Anderson and Ventures CD’s earlier this year.

And what do you know, there was Ram, just sitting there staring up at me like an old friend that recognized me in the crowed long before I even noticed them, and so I checked it out, and here we are.

I definitely recommend it if you’re unfamiliar, or even if you’re not; Dear Boy and Long-Haired Lady are particular favorites of mine.

It occurs to me that I haven’t yet, on this new blog, linked to Mishie Chau’s independent music blog. Mishie was one of the participants in my very first online mix CD swap, and she knows more about cutting edge music than one person should be able to remember, so check it out, because you just might learn something.

I know I always do.

I mentioned last week that I went to school with the mom, aunts, and uncles of Jake Kellen, the talented young contury artist that just released an excellent first album; I also mentioned that the band was going to be playing this past weekend at my hometown’s Festival of Dirt.

I had told my mom that Jake would be playing, and that he did country music.

The next day my mom called me and said, “They were really good, but they’re not just country. They do a lot of other things too.”

I said, “Oh, okay.”

What I didn’t say was, “Yeah, like you could tell Buck Owens from Beethoven”.

But I must confess that I thought it.

I’m constantly amazed by the inventive uses that people are coming up with for Flickr.

Here’s something weird I came across today: Slideshow of a guy eating a whole can of beans.

(Hint: Move your cursor to the top of the black area and set the intervals to 1 second.)

This guy should turn pro.

It was 31 years ago today that President Nixon announced his resignation. Love him or hate him, he’ll always be my President — the guy who was in office just as I was becoming aware of what politics were all about. I was in the dorm in summer school when he gave his resignation speech. A bunch of us sat around watching, drinking cokes, trying to let the enormity of the situation sink in …

And I had “Pomp and Circumstance” going on the stereo, since it was the only piece of music I had that fit the ceremony of the occasion.

We witnessed history in our own quirky way.

One of the great running jokes on Futurama is that, 1000 years in the future, the President of Earth is Richard Nixon’s head.

When Bender hocked his robot body, Nixon bought it and used it to run for President, so now on every episode involving war or politics, we get to see Nixon’s head scowling and blustering through various situations.

It takes me back to my youth.

But enough about that — Check out this Flickr set: White Trash Birthday Party.

And speaking of Flickr, check out the new picture of Molly that I took tonight and uploaded. Isn’t she a little sweetie?!

Yes, I admit it — I’m puppy-whipped.

Anyway, I uploaded my 100th photo on Saturday night: A picture of a replica of Frodo’s sword Sting, which I took at the Irish Festival last March.

This umbrella theme, BTW, is because we were blessed with a late afternoon deluge, so I probably won’t have to water the lawn all week. (Note to self: Pay the water bill — online, of course.)

The downside to the day was that I had to stay a half-hour late, which put me home an hour later than usual because of all the extra traffic.

I had to stay late because The Boss needed me to change a few words in a doc file that someone had sent him.

Yes, you read that right.

On the plus side, he’ll be gone the next two days, and so will New Boss in Training, so the opportunity to crank up some tunage will almost certainly present itself.

This week we’re having a visit from a health inspector from Australia. I told my receptionist that as soon as he came in the door, she had to greet him with “G’DAY, MATE!”, or else we would immediately fail the inspection and it would be her fault and we would send her off to the home office in Arizona for appropriate punishment.

She knows me well enough by now to only take me seriously for half a second.

No one thing merits talking about tonight, so here’s a grab-bag o’ goodness:

Japanese-American writer Joi Ito reports on Boing Boing:

“I got an email from the New York Times asking me to write [...] about my thoughts about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the bombing. They said the deadline was Friday. “You mean next Friday?” “No, the day after tomorrow.” “Oh.”

Hey, New York Times, there’s a brand new invention: It’s called PLANNING.

I mean, it’s the 60th anniversary, so they had ten years since the last major anniversary to know it was coming up; and they had a whole year since last year’s anniversary. Don’t they have calendars there at the Times? Do they think that a day and a half is plenty of time to write something worthy of space in their paper?

With organizational skills like this, it’s no wonder their reporters sometimes find themselves having to make stuff up.

I read that Must Love Dogs kind of bombed at the box office last weekend, in spite of the presence of Diane Lane, John Cusack, and DOGS, and in spite of a non-stop commercial blitz.

Hey, I’ve got a theory: The commercials for this movie prominently mentioned PerfectMatch.com, just as ads for the Heather Locklear movie The Perfect Man earlier this year shamelessly plugged Match.com.

The problem is that while we can sort of accept brazen product placement in movies, it’s a real turn-off when it creeps into the commercials for the movies.

We’re already having to watch a commercial, Hollywood; don’t add insult to injury by piggybacking another commercial on top of it.

And I think the fact that these were online dating sites is irrelevant. If a commercial comes on a the first thing a character — a real movie star — says is, “Get me a Coors Light from the bar, would ya?” … and it’s NOT a Coors Light commercial, we going to start thinking that someone’s trying to sneak something in on us.

And that plants a bad feeling about the product they’re really trying to sell.

Seriously — they should consult me on these things.

This one’s for The Spook: Remember that dorm where we met, our first summer at Tech? Today I met a woman who was also there in that dorm complex that summer.

Small world, huh?

Since the campus population during the summer is pretty small, we probably saw her several times during the summer, especially at meal times, but I couldn’t place her.

Anyway, her name is Jill. Do you remember a Jill from that summer?

This one’s for Todn8r: This morning The Wife was trying to talk Molly into finishing her dog food; she said, “How can you get big and strong if you don’t eat your food?” As a reflex I said, “How can you have your pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”

She said, “Huh?” I replied, “Pink Floyd. From ‘The Wall’. You know, the ‘We don’t need no education’ song?”

She said, “I’ve never heard of it.”

Now the song’s been going through my head ever since …

We rented Alexander tonight, it could have been better, considering the budget and all the talent that went into it, but it could have been much worse.

For one thing, it was about ten times better than Troy.

Oh, man, was Troy a big steaming pile of nothing or WHAT. Brad Pitt was supposed to be this big super-human hero star of the show, but his character was oily and disinterested and totally unlikable. And Orlando Bloom and Eric Bana (who?) were supposed to be these bad-ass warrior princes, but instead they were scrawny and timid and probably not too bright, especially Bloom. And the who movie was as long and boring as a root canal and twice as painful: March, march, march, talk, talk, talk, march, march, march, fight, fight, fight, march, march, march, talk, talk, talk, fight, fight, fight …. And meanwhile, the only scenery was rocks and dirt. I don’t think I’ve looked at my watch as many times during a movie in my entire life.

But back to Alexander: Much beter than you would excpect from a loose cannon like Oliver Stone. Of course, the movie was a little light on Alexander’s strategies and motivations, and exactly what made him such a supposedly great leader. He was the best because he didn’t give up? Come on, Stone, try harder.

And what was with the accents? Most notable was the thick Irish brogue on Val Kilmer, and Russian accent on Angelina Jolie (who occasionally lapsed into sounding like Bela Lugosi). Then there was Colin Farrell, who actually is Irish, who can’t seem to decide where his accent’s from.

And yeah, we get it, Alexander had gay tendencies, so enough with the lingering, drooling stares between him and the guy who looked like the “chick” in Crying Game.

But the historical aspects were pretty interesting, as was the scenery (especially in Babylon, and the jade-walled interior shots in India).

So go ahead and rent this one, you could do worse.

Flickr user Djune has an excellent photo set called O.P.P.: Other People’s Pictures. Each picture is a six-by-six grid of photos found on Flickr, usually conforming to a color or subject, like Pink, or Fire, or Eyes, or Red Roses.

It’s really interesting. Check it out.

Whenever I do a long, major, one-topic post, I find myself putting off other stuff that have to be lumped together in a miscellaneous post. Like so:

Another thing I find myself doing after a long major post is following up with more stuff on that topic. The first is that the Jake Kellen Band (the subject of the previous post, keep up) will be appearing tomorrow night at Sandhill Days (or as I like to call it, the “Festival of Dirt”) in my hometown.

The second thing is that I’ve uploaded a sample from one of my favorite songs from Jake’s new album; seriously, parts of this track give me chills, but don’t take my word for it. Listen to If I Could and judge for yourself.

And if you like what you hear, go to his website and listen to samples of the rest of his songs. Yes, “If I Could” is there too, but it’s only the first minute or so; the best part of the song is in the last couple of minutes, when all the instrumentals are mingling in perfect balance, so that’s what I sampled.

There are other songs on the album that might have more chart potential, but this is the one that’s going to win Jake some fans for life.

(And yes, I did procure, through a third-party, permission from the album’s co-producer to post a part of a song. Don’t try this at home, kids.)

But enough about country-western: Here’s another musical form involving alcohol and domesticated animals: Irish drinking songs for cat lovers.

(Link via Presurfer.)

And speaking of doing bizarre things with a traditional musical form: Matisyahu Miller is an Orthodox Hasidic Jew who uses music to let the world know of his faith.

Specifically, he uses reggae music.

Seriously. Visit his site and check it out for yourself; it must be heard to be believed.

First Willie Nelson goes Rasta, and now it’s the Orthodox Jews.

Where will it all end?

And finally: A parody of Warren Zevon’s Lawyers Guns and Money that only people who follow tech news will find funny.

Hipster-geek humor is like that.

As promised, here’s the CD I mentioned earlier in the week: Take Me Home by Jake Kellen. I’ll state right out that even though I’ve never met Jake, I went to high school with his mom, and his uncle (and co-producer) was in my graduating class — plus, another good friend of mine was involved in bringing the album into existence, so I’m not even going to pretend to give an unbiased review. Instead, I’ll just stick to the facts and let them do the talking:

I’ve said in the past that I don’t care for a lot that passes for country music these days — Nashville’s cookie-cutter crossover pop, I’ve called it. Just like in regular pop, the record companies have a stable of anonymous songwriters that churn out songs by the dozen; the executives then look at the thousands of young people who want to be stars and pick the ones that would look the best on a CD cover, and put them in front of a microphone with some sheet music. That singer on the charts could just as easily be somebody else.

Take Me Home, on the other hand, is a true independent effort. Eight of the ten songs were written by Jake himself, and the other two were contributed by his uncle. What comes out in the music is real-life experience, not just prefab product passed over the transom. You here all the standard themes of country music, and they’re all first hand.

The album was recorded in a series of local studios, with veteran musicians that included Lloyd Maines (father of one of the Dixie Chicks, but don’t hold that against him). It may be an indie album, but just going by sound quality, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference between this CD and one recorded in a Nashville studio.

Here’s an informative article in today’s Plainview Daily Herald. What really strikes me is the strong sense of destiny — of Kismet — in Kellen’s short journey to being a recording artist: After lots of amateur playing, his first time on stage was his 21st birthday — a singer in a bar band traded time at the mike for Jake’s John Deere cap. He had his first paying gig on the day that Johnny Cash died. The name of his record label (“Horny Toad Records”) came from the spiky little reptile that he spotted upon stepping out of the studio after the album’s final session. He had recorded the album’s title song, but didn’t choose it as the title until he say a hitchhiker holding a sign that said “Take Me Home” (he pulled over and gave the man five dollars for the sign, and a photo of the sign appears in the liner notes).

This man is my kind of visionary.

Here’s an excerpt from the album’s press release, which you can read in its entirety here:

What emerges is an unpretentious (Texas) country album that sounds like it grew right out of the sands of West Texas. Even with hot Nashville players, there is nothing Nashville about the sound, it is not over produced or over dramatic or “over sung”.

The album winds its way through your mind-leading you from the rock and raucous “Red Roses” and “She Says She Loves Me” to the “so lonesome I could cry” ballad—“Give It Some Time”, giving you just enough of the full spectrum of emotional feedback necessary to keep you wanting more. And there is more. There is the light hearted look at a failed college career in “College Days”, the comical observations of a “bad drunk” in the song “Bullet Proof”, as well as that haunting realization that comes when a long distance relationship ends in “September in Abilene”.

Athough it’s very much a country album, the rock influences are obvious: The rock guitar at the end of the instrumental break of the first song, “Red Roses”, reminds me of a hit of the late 70′s — possibly by Fleetwood Mac or Lynyrd Skynyrd; track 2, “College Days”, starts like “Rebel Rouser”. And the Hammond B3 organ used on several tracks is a wonderful touch; it adds a whole new dimenstion — it sounds a lot like some of Bob Dylan’s early work.

Another personal observation: I’d be willing to bet that “If I Could” will be a smash slow-dance request at the dance halls. That song’s going to be real popular.

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Enough talk: Go on over to his website and click on the Music tab to listen to samples of any or all of the songs.

Then order your own copy of the CD.

And tell them Brykmantra sent you …

I was going to do a post on the new Jake Kellen CD (which was amazingly well done), but I’m running out of time to do it justice, so let’s cover lots of bases tonight:

Yesterday NPR’s All Things Considereddid a story on a chemistry who has had a Twinkie sitting in his classroom, unwrapped, for 30 years.

Ew.

Why did MTV move so far away from their roots — from showing music videos? Maybe we can get some clues at this huge collection of 80′s music videos, which for some reason look a lot more ridiculous than they did almost 25 years ago …

(Via Look at This.)

Vickie never fails to remind me how much better she likes my old blog than this one — she prefers that old look of chaos and clutteredness.

I told her to be patient, I’m trying to clutter this one as fast as I can.

Remember, Rome wasn’t ransacked in a day.

Maybe I can get Vickie to like this one better by talking about her more, like for instance: I just found out today that her daughter is friends with Cowboy Troy, the black country rapper — in fact, she’s known him since he was working at Cavender’s Boot City and claiming he was going to be a star someday and everybody said Yeah right …

Guess he showed them who plays chicken with the train …

And P.S.: Even though I’ve heard his hit before, in researching this post I went to Troy’s website (linked above), where they let you listen to several whole songs without even have to click through to a sample page to hear half a song.

And, Lord help me, I really like what I’m hearing.

Who would have thought that Country + Old School Rap = Good?