Mad Men On AMC

There were seven deadly sins practiced at the dawn of the 1960s: smoking, drinking, adultery, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism and racism. In its first few minutes “Mad Men” on AMC taps into all of them.

This new drama set in the golden age of Madison Avenue serves as a bridge to a faded and now forbidden world.

Men wore white shirts, drank Manhattans and harassed compliant secretaries in the elevator. Everybody read Reader’s Digest. Jews worked in Jewish advertising agencies, blacks were waiters and careful not to seem too uppity, and doctors smoked during gynecological exams. Women were called “girls.” Men who loved men kept it to themselves.

The magic of “Mad Men” is that it softly spoofs those cruel, antiquated mores without draining away the romance of that era: the amber-lit bars and indigo nightclubs, soaring skyscrapers, smoky railway cars and the brash confidence that comes with winning a war and owning the world. It’s a sardonic love letter to the era that wrought “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” and “The Best of Everything,” but homage is paid with more affection than satire.

The advertising executives, who called themselves “mad men,” were at the front of the consumer rat race, hypnotizing the American buyer with huckster campaigns created off-the-cuff in smoky meeting rooms or on a cocktail napkin at El Morocco. The advertising business was flush, blissfully unburdened by aging readerships, failing newspapers, DVRs or the Internet, and only barely accountable to the federal government or public opinion.

And that kind of unbridled freedom is the series’s one speck of sentiment, evoking nostalgia for a time before the current audience-knows-best rule of business, in which viewers vote on who gets to become a pop star, publishers ask readers to choose their authors, and politicians ask viewers to decide what issues they should discuss.

In recent years there have been a few movies set in the late ’50s and early ’60s and directed in that vintage style: before “Good Night, and Good Luck,” there was “Far From Heaven” in 2002, a loving tribute to the full-throttle melodramas of Douglas Sirk. In 2003 Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor were paired in “Down With Love,” a sendup of Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies.

“Mad Men” is both a drama and a comedy and all the better for it, a series that breaks new ground by luxuriating in the not-so-distant past.

Virtual Friendship & The New Narcissism

Christine Rosen — who you might remember as the crypto-techno-conservative author of The Age of Egocasting — is back with another tirade in The New Atlantis: Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism. Actually, it’s one of those foreboding pieces that you will want to dismiss, but it’s also fun to read — so you’ll probably make it through all 12 printed pages only frowning (and grinning) a few times.

Good Bad Not Evil By Black Lips

Black Lips can, to date, be depended on for raucousness, irresponsibility, occasionally pissing in their own mouths onstage, and sloppy garage tunes indebted to noise and punk as much as the band’s Southern roots. Given all that, the idea of them hitting anything outside of a niche audience seemed slim. They’re a go-to band for filth-rock puritans, even as their unhinged live shows have helped them slowly gain a larger audience with each album’s release.

Good Bad Not Evil, however, is the record where naysayers, disinterested friends and acquaintances, and anyone else within earshot has to sit up, shut up, and listen. The “garage rock” tag will perpetually follow this band, and while I’m not saying it isn’t sometimes apt, there’s a difference between being a revival act and seeming blissfully out of time. Black Lips’ idea of being topical is writing a jilted love song to a girl named Katrina from New Orleans, and their idea of diversity is writing a country song about breaking a death to children (and sounding terribly inconvenienced by doing so). It’s as if they missed the past 30 years of rock history; perhaps they drank the memory away.

While it may not be as blistering as the band’s early work, or even this year’s “live” Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo– because where else could you really go after that?– Good Bad nonetheless stands tall in their catalog for finding a way to turn it down without becoming tame. Here, Black Lips fold all of the bacchanalia into the corners of direct, vintage pop songs, so that the new tracks have taken on an ominous tone without being quite as off-the-rails as the band’s reputation would suggest. Note the brief moments of backwards guitar in the otherwise, uh, lean “Lean”, a twangy undistorted march with plenty of echo on the ragged vocals.

The band is still preoccupied with its reckless bad-boy image, as “Bad Kids” is a country-inflected sing-along to the merits of irresponsibility that sounds so puerile it’s almost self-deprecating. Still, they’re hardly one-note here: “Cold Hands” is the record’s lead-off single and probably its catchiest song, but it’s more wounded than brash, lyrically occupied with trying the straight and narrow and failing rather than eschewing it entirely. It’s a nice change of pace that hits a new emotional center– for two-and-a-half minutes anyway.

Throwbacks to earlier albums– such as “Slime and Oxygen”, with its stomping circular rhythms, caterwauling guitar bends, and more-than-usual vocal echo– already pale next to the braver material. Even the record’s few missteps are at least adventurous, including colliding immaturity with more mysticism on the toy-piano-led “Transcendental Light”. Were you to grab any of their older records– which you really should– you could hear a band out-freak the best of them. But Good Bad Not Evil is evidence that they want to do something more, which is heartening– and here they’ve accomplished it.

Amen, Brother.

I Want A New Platform

One that won’t go away (under load), one that doesn’t keep me up all night (worrying about scaling), one that won’t make me sleep all day (when I should be adding features). If you have tried to build an Internet site or application recently that needs to work for thousands or tens of thousands of concurrent users you may share this desire.

Why is this still so hard? Why do we find ourselves worrying about locating experts in the dark art of database performance tuning? Why are we spending time haggling with Rackspace over the price for another set of servers or racking our own servers at Equinix? Why are we writing our own user management (from scratch)?

Because we are using tools that simply were not made for the job. Relational databases have gotten faster and better, but their fundamental construct of data stored in rows and neatly parceled out across tables (which frequently need to be joined) does not really match up with either rapid development using some notion of objects or with scaling horizontally using commodity hardware. Web servers started out by simply providing static content and were then forced into running applications with the result of not doing either particularly well. Yes, people have been writing new ones to address that, but even those are fundamentally designed to work on a single machine. The second you go beyond one machine you need separate load balancers, reverse proxies, caches and all sorts of other paraphernalia just to make stuff work together. Worse yet, the web server, the application and the database are connected to each other via thin straws that were bolted on after the fact with important information either not passed at all or only painfully (e.g., information about which user is requesting a particular set of data).

What about the growing cast of frameworks, like Ruby on Rails, CakePHP, Django, etc? Don’t they provide a solution to these issues? Not really. These frameworks are for the most part about enabling rapid development. They do great on the add features rapidly front but often make matters worse on the scaling front. The reason is that they layer more stuff on the very tools that are wrong for the job to begin with.

What then is needed? A platform that is created from the ground up to enable modern web sites and applications. What would such a platform look like? It would be hosted and (nearly) infinitely scaleable. It would provide object storage that’s as simple as saying “here’s an object, store it” (you get back a handle, ideally, if you want a human readable, search engine optimized one). Later on, retrieval should be something like – “here’s a handle, give me back the object” (with full user level access control baked in). Stored stuff should be easily indexed so that one could say “give me back all the handles for objects that match this pattern” (and to which the user has access). The same should work for media: “Here’s a picture, store it for me with this metadata” and “Find all the pictures for me tagged x.”

Aside from storage there are other useful services the new platform should come with, since essentially every modern web site / application needs them, such user authentication, authorization and access control. Flexible processing of pretty URLs. Easy creation and maintenance of page templates. Ability to send emails and process bounces. Handling of RSS feeds (inbound and outbound). Support for mobile access and possibly even voice capabilities.

Code would run inside the platform (this is what Marc Andreessen calls a Level 3 platform) but it would not be cut off from the outside world. It would have full access to other services that live on the net via web services. So, for instance, there would be no need for the platform to have its own payment service.

Let me try to head off some potential objections.

Can such a platform be built at all? Won’t there be problems with distributed transactions (or some other technical objection)? Nobody said it would be easy (besides, if it were it wouldn’t be half the fun or represent a big opportunity). But there is no fundamental impossibility here, especially in a hosted environment and keeping in mind that the goal is not to create a platform on which anything can scale automagically, just a large set of web sites and applications that are currently hand crafted. For instance, the object storage magic does not have to work for arbitrarily complex objects. My guess is that the vast majority of sites and applications can live with (fairly) shallow objects based on just a few underlying types.

Isn’t this just a fancy way of saying you want a hosted object-oriented database and didn’t those fail miserably as software products? Just because stuff failed in the past doesn’t mean it won’t work now, especially when circumstances change (the current ugly picture in the credit markets is a reminder that the opposite is equally true).

Won’t folks be completely locked into this platform? We are not really worried about being locked into MySQL, because we feel that if push came to shove, if we really had to, we could switch to say Postgres or SQL Server or Oracle. This of course is a lot harder to do in practice because in the quest for performance we often resort to using custom SQL extensions that are specific to our current DB. But it does point to standards as an important way to mitigate lock in and anybody providing a platform like this would do well by working with existing standards where available and promoting new ones where not (e.g. an object storage standard). A more dramatic way to mitigate lock in might be to offer an open source “community” version of the platform and compete based on hosting the most reliable version.

Hasn’t Amazon has already built this? Isn’t this S3 and EC2? S3 and EC2 and the upcoming database service are steps in the right direction. But they are not nearly as easy to program as the “new” platform (in particular EC2 is really just high speed provisioning of traditional servers). Amazon could, however, use their pieces to offer something like the new platform.

I am sure there are other objections (look forward to the comments), but those aside, where might this new platform come from? Marc Andreessen lists companies who are working on it now, including his own Ning, Salesforce and Amazon. I would not be surprised if folks at Google were also thinking about offering something. Based on their recent announcements, Salesforce seems furthest along in offering a new platform but they have made many idiosyncratic choices which result in high lock in (not to mention that they run an applications business which might compete). Despite the big guns already working on this, I believe there is still an opportunity for someone new to build the new platform. It’s the kind of disruptive change that requires throwing overboard a lot of existing assumptions and conventional wisdom and trying something radically different. It will also require maniacal focus and independence from the needs and influences of existing operations. Sounds like a startup to me.

Can You Guess Which Organization This Is?

Can you imagine working for a company that has a little more than 500 employees and has the following statistics:

• 29 have been accused of spousal abuse
• 7 have been arrested for fraud
• 19 have been accused of writing bad checks
• 117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses
• 3 have done time for assault
• 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit
• 14 have been arrested on drug-related charges
• 8 have been arrested for shoplifting
• 21 are currently defendants in lawsuits
• 84 have been arrested for drunk driving in the last year

Can you guess which organization this is?

Give up yet?

It’s the 535 members of the United States Congress. The same group that cranks out hundreds of new laws each year designed to keep the rest of us in line.

Anthony Bourdain’s Overrated Menu

“When the water sommelier comes over, I reach for my gun.”

Anthony Bourdain’s menu of overrated, trendy items.

Circular Reasoning Works Because

Cultural Map Of The World

This map reflects the fact that a large number of basic values are closely correlated; they can be depicted in just major two dimensions of cross-cultural variation.

The Science Of Gangsta Rap