Vintage West African pop

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I am not too far away from crying with happiness over the first episode of Frank’s new WFMU radio show, Radio Freetown.

In case you’re too lazy (and who isn’t?) to click through and check it out, you can listen to the first show right here. (RSS readers, you do have to click through to this post, at least.) Find out what the heck vintage music from West Africa in the 70’s is like. You may be surprised!

Radio Freetown, October 6, 2008 (1:07:09)

UPDATE: whoops, that file is now unavailable. Just visit Frank’s archives page for other choices.

African funk, Afrobeat, disco, highlife, Afro Latin, psychedelia, . . . Frank’s got it all. Gorgeous, danceable, irresistible music, with that warm slightly crackly sound of treasured old vinyl.

Who is this Frank? He’s a German guy who lived three years in West Africa, hunting down and collecting records. Along the way, he blogged his adventures.

Now he’s in New York trying to make a living as a DJ. I was feeling a bit downcast, since I’ll probably never make it to one of his live gigs. But the new radio show has made me blissful once again. Thank you, Frank!

My favorite iTunes visualizers

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Have you tried the new iTunes 8 visualizer? It’s based on Magnetosphere.

iTunes visualizer

And do you know how to access the variations? Start iTunes, start the visualizer, then press the ? key to bring up the menu:

? Toggle help screen
M Change mode
P Change palette
I Display track info
C Toggle auto-cycle (on by default)
F Toggle freeze mode
N Toggle nebula mode
L Toggle camera lock

And some unlisted commands:
+/- Increase or decrease the intensity
A/S Add or substract particles
R Reset particles and intensity

If you find a favorite Mode, press C to stay in that Mode. (Sadly, it won’t stick through an iTunes relaunch.)

Who knows what “camera lock” is? I have no idea.

LED Spectrum Analyzer for iTunes

LED Spectrum Analyzer is old school but I love it.
LED Spectrum Analyzer

After you activate it, go to View -> Visualizer -> Options to play around with the settings. I particularly like to check “Choose at random when track changes” under Colours.

Having your iTunes cake and eating it

It’s cool to have pretty moving pictures, but you have to stop the visualizer if you want to choose a different track from your playlist.

So before you start the visualizer, double-click the name of the playlist you want. This will bring up a second iTunes window. In this second window, start playing music, then minimize the window. Now start the visualizer in the original iTunes window!

You can maximize the minimized window when you want to use it as a controller.

Go ye forth and explore the possibilities!

The important kind of freedom

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If, like me, you hadn’t read David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, before his suicide, a good place to start is his 2005 speech to the graduating class of Kenyon University.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

Go read the speech. Let David Foster Wallace be your new friend, even though he speaks now only through the printed page.

http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

Update: I stopped by Bookshop Santa Cruz this afternoon and picked up their last copy of Consider the Lobster, a collection of essays by DFW. It’s about all they had in stock. Of course, they’ll be getting more of his books soon.

Then I found this conversation with Michael Silverblatt.

More links:

Remembrances on McSweeney’s

David Foster Wallace on Bookworm

David Foster Wallace on Harper’s Magazine

Roger Federer as Religious Experience