Reason for Resistance!

What is Cyborg Anthropology?

2011-10-31T15:35:00.002-05:00

Lets talk Cyborg Anthropology

A cyborg anthropologist looks at how humans and non human objects interact with each other, and how that changes culture. So, for instance, we have these things in our pockets that cry, and we have to pick them up and soothe them back to sleep, and then we have to feed them every night by plugging them into the wall, right? And at no other time in history have we had these really strange non human devices that we take care of as if they are real. And we're very dependent upon them. So that's one of the aspects that I'm studying, the idea of mobile technology and its effect on people's relationships. Another thing is the idea of extending into the second self online, through an avatar. So studying how people interact with each other through these little techno-social interactions, versus just the analog interactions, is another aspect of cyborg anthropology.I know many reading this will say - wow this is a load of mularky. However if you have read Ray Kurzweil's books on the coming Singularity it shouldn't ring as crazy.

Traditional vs. Cyborg Anthropology

In traditional anthropology one visits another culture to examine what makes a culture unique. One looks at how interaction occurs between classes and social actors. One examines how knowledge goes through, how kinship forms, and why rituals occur, ones examines pastimes and hobbies, eating habits and social structure.

Anthropology, the study of humans, has traditionally concentrated on discovering the process of evolution through which the human came to be (physical anthropology), or on understanding the beliefs, languages, and behaviors of past or present human groups (archaeology, linguistics, cultural anthropology). At the base level an anthropologist might go over to another country and says, "How fascinating these people are! They're so strange. Look at all their curious and unique customs!" The anthropologist then compiles the extensive research they've done and presents it to colleagues back in the first world. Cyborg Anthropology is no different than traditional anthropology, except that cyborg anthropologists look at all worlds and social classes, first world and third world, analog and digital, scientific and artistic. For a cyborg anthropologist, all fields are valid. Knowledge, tools and spaces are all sites of examination. Knowledge is treated as a social actor, modifying relations and stratifying knowledge systems. Tools are examined as much as people are, as people with different tools and access to sites of knowledge have different powers and opportunities available to them.

In a time where the use of Google+ is common, and cell phones live in everyone's pockets, technology is a more of a decision making process for the general person more than something that is critically looked at. Technologies have become so omnipresent that they have seeped into almost every nook and cranny of physical and social lives in many countries. A cyborg anthropologist has the ability to leverage both new and old methods to take a step back and look at these changes on a longer scale.

New Tools

Examining actors in the digital cannot be done with traditional tools. A different set of knowledge and capabilities is needed in order to both save time and gain the necessary data required to understand what's going on in different groups. Partnering with a developer is a common occurrence for those researching the web, as the social web has extremely valuable but large datasets. Cyborg Anthropology takes the theory and methodology of traditional anthropology and applies it to technology, non-human objects, and global cultural systems involving information and communication. Time and space, interfaces, and the construction of value are important topics. Mobile computing and connectivity are also central.

The web is full of timestamped information, and is a field all its own. Technically, a lot of an anthropologist's work in coding and time stamping is done, but the transient nature of this data requires archiving. Future anthropologists will benefit from learning code or partnering with technologists. Anthropologist danah boyd has done this well, specifically at Microsoft Research.

Human-Centered Anthropology vs. Cybernetic Anthropology

"Cyborg anthropology poses a serious challenge to the human-centered foundations of anthropological discourse. The term "cyborg anthropology" is an oxymoron that draws attention to the human-centered presuppositions of anthropological discourse by posing the challenge of alternative formulations. While the skin-bound individual, autonomous bearer of identity and agency, theoretically without gender, race, class, region, or time, has served usefully and productively as the subject of culture and of cultural accounts, alternate accounts of history and subjectivity are also possible".^[1]

“The autonomy of individuals has already been called into question by post-structuralist and posthumanist critiques. Cyborg anthropology explores a new alternative by examining the argument that human subjects and subjectivity are crucially as much a function of machines, machine relations, and information transfers as they are machine producers and operators.

From this perspective, science and technology affect society through the fashioning of selves rather than as external forces. For example, the establishment of anthropological sub-jects and subjectivities has depended upon boats, trains, planes, typewriters, cameras, telegraphs, and so on.

How the positioning of technologies has defined the boundaries of "the field" as well as the positioning of anthropologists within it has been a notable silence in ethnographic writing. It is increasingly clear that human agency serves in the world today as but one contributor to activities that are growing in scope, that are complex and di-verse, and yet are interconnected. The extent of such interconnectedness has been made plain both by the decline of challenges to capitalist hegemony and by the empowerment of information technologies, the latter through the combined agencies of computer and communications technologies".^[2]

"A crucial first step in blurring the human-centered boundaries of anthropo-logical discourse is to grant membership to the cyborg image in theorizing, that is, to follow in our writing the ways that human agents routinely produce both themselves and their machines as part human and part machine. How are we to write, for example, without using human-centered language? And if writing is a co-production of human and machine, then who is the "we" that writes?".^[3]

UX/Cybernetics Design

See Cybernetic UX Design

What is a Cyborg?

A cyborg (shorthand for “cybernetic organism”) is a symbiotic fusion of human and machine. Humans have always developed technologies to help them survive and thrive, but in recent decades the rapid escalation and intensification of the human-technology interface have exceeded anything heretofore known. From satellite communications to genetic engineering, high technologies have penetrated and permeated the human and natural realms. Indeed, so profoundly are humans altering their biological and physical landscapes that some have openly suggested that the proper object of anthropological study should be cyborgs rather than humans, for, as Donna Haraway says, we are all cyborgs now.

From: Cyborg Anthropology Joseph Dumit PhD, Assistant Professor, Program in Science, Technology and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Robbie Davis-Floyd PhD, Research Fellow, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Texas Austin

Relations to other fields

Medicine

New diagnostic technologies, from genetic tests to brain imaging, and new therapeutics from antidepressants like Prozac to organ transplants, create new ways of living and deciding that are at once exciting and troubling. For instance, testing for the BRCA-1 breast cancer gene, which identifies an increased risk of cancer in some women, often restructures a woman's relationship to the healthcare system, to her family, and to her self. Taking the test can lead to losing insurance coverage and to accelerated treatment choices like prophylactic mastectomy; in other words, identification of genetic risk can result in the woman being treated as if she already has breast cancer. The existence of the test thus creates a new cyborgian category—the presymptomatically ill—and a new set of risks posed by the “prophylactic” treatments prescribed for its members.

Science

The most developed cyborg anthropological work in women's studies concerns reproduction, addressing everything from technologies of conception and prenatal diagnosis and treatment (Rapp), to the technologization of birth, to the commodification of disability and pregnancy loss (Layne). For example, Rayna Rapp's long-term fieldwork among genetic counselors and her attention to racial, class, and religious differences in how women make choices given uncertain information about amniocentesis constitute outstanding examples of simultaneous attention to technology, its mediators, and its implications for women. In the contemporary world, there is almost no such thing as normal labor, as giving birth without the assistance of prenatal testing, hospitals, electronic fetal monitoring, drugs, and forceps is generally considered unsafe, despite the demonstrated safety of midwife- attended out-of-hospital births. The mothers and children whose lives are structured and whose bodies and development are altered by birth technologies can be fruitfully analyzed as cyborgs who demonstrate the full range of ambiguity and possibility that concept encompasses.

Various chapters in Cyborg Babies probe these ambiguities, asking whether the sense of control provided to women and practitioners by the routine application of such technologies compensates for the very real physical damage they often do.

Exemplary ethnographies in the wider arena of cyborg studies include Emily Martin's work on immunological science; Deborah Heath's work on the science and activism around Marfan's Syndrome; Diana Forsythe's studies of artificial intelligence and expert systems; Joseph Dumit's studies of brain imaging practices; and Karen-Sue Taussig's work on genetics clinics in the Netherlands.

Future Applications

Much work needs to be done to expand cyborg anthropology to address non-middle-class and non-Western issues such as the multiple effects of pollution, pesticide use, and bio-engineering in agricultural production and racial and gendered exclusions from access to cyborg technologies. The strength of cyborg anthropology is its ability to combine attention to scientific practices and working technologies with critical analyses of technophilia (cultural fascination with high technologies), social control, and hegemonic and popular appropriations of technology. Its weakness is that the same fascinating lure of science and technology keeps its practitioners focused on the cyberdazzle of the newest technologies, Big Science, and Western market power.

References and further reading

Davis-Floyd, Robbie and Joseph Dumit (1998) Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots. New York: Routledge.
Downey, Gary Lee, Joseph Dumit, eds. (1997) Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences, Technologies and Medicines. Seattle: SAR/University of Washington Press. (Includes essays by Joseph Dumit, Deborah Heath, and Rayna Rapp).
Forsythe, Diana (2001) Toward an Anthropology of Informatics: Ethnographic Analyses of Knowledge Engineering and Artificial Intelligence. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Gray, Chris Hables, ed, with Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera and Steven Mentor (1995) The Cyborg Handbook. New York: Routledge.
Donna Haraway (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books.
Hogle, Linda F. (1999) Recovering the Nation's Body: Cultural Memory, Medicine, and the Politics of Redemption. Rutgers University Press
Layne, Linda, ed. (2000) Transformative Motherhood: On Giving and Getting in a Consumer Culture. New York University Press.
Martin, Emily (1994) Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in America from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS. Boston: Beacon Press.
Rapp, Rayna (2000) Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America. New York: Routledge.
Taussig, Karen-Sue (forthcoming) Just Be Ordinary: Normalizing the Future through Genetic Research and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Traweek, Sharon (1988) Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.^[4]

Is SQL reallly the problem?

2011-06-07T14:07:00.009-05:00

There is a lot of buzz about NoSQL out there. According to the hype, NoSQL solves scalability issues, NoSQL simplifies development, NoSQL has unlimited write performance, etc. While these claims may technically be true, they are in no way exclusive to the NoSQL offerings out there. All of these things are achievable in a SQL database with full ACID and relational capabilities. In a recent post, Derrick Harris asks “Will Scalable Data Stores Make NoSQL a Non-Starter?”. He Makes the point that scalable SQL is a reality today so why would someone go to a NoSQL solution? What benefit could it possibly bring? Would anyone choose to give up transactions if they didn’t have to? Would anyone choose to give up ACID properties? Would anyone choose to give up the ability to do relational operations? How would giving up any of these things simplify development? Looking at the comments on Derrick’s post provides a clue. They mention the “flexible schema” as the key feature.

A flexible schema is defined by the ability to assign arbitrary properties to an object without having to have defined columns for those properties. For example, in a single table, object A could represent a picture and have “height” and “width” properties while object B could represent an audio stream that has “length” and “bitrate” properties. In a traditional RDBMS environment, you’d probably create multiple tables for each different object type which can be inconvenient and possibly inefficient.

Is that it? Why wouldn’t you just add that feature to a scalable SQL database rather than throw away all the good things SQL databases have to offer? You could easily add a “map” column to a table that allows you to store an arbitrary map of key/values associated with an object. You now have the tools to implement a flexible schema while maintaining relational capabilities, ACID properties, and full scalability. It’s the best of both worlds.

Here are some signs that you may actually NEED a NoSQL solution

You noticed a lot of your database fields are really serialized complex objects in disguise. Why bother with a RDBMS at all then? Storing serialized objects in a relational database is like being on the pill while trying to get pregnant, a bit counter productive. Just use a schemaless database from the start.
Using a standard query language has become too confining. You just want to be free. SQL is so easy, so convenient, and so standard, it's really not a challenge anymore. You need to be different. Then NoSQL is for you. Each has their own completely different query mechanism.
Your toolbox only contains a hammer. Hammers while wonderfully versatile, can not make a nice latte. One size doesn't fit all. Right tool for the right job and all that jazz.
You really feel like protesting something, but all the really cool causes are full up. Protesting the many centuries of relational database hegemony is a first rate cause you can be proud of. Think of all the stirring chants: "Let My Schema Go!" or "Give Me Primary Key Access or Give Me Indexes!" or "Don't Join On Me!"
You stepped in a giant pile of impedance mismatch and need to wash off your shoes. Maybe whatever product you are trying to build would be better represented by a graph? Or a document model? Or a super model? Stop viewing the world from table colored glasses.
Maintaining a completely separate object caching system on top of an already beefy table storage system, has started to seem a little silly. It's a massive duplication of effort, resources, and the consistency problems are brutal.
The Four Horseman contract you to build a fast and infinitely scalable website to help crowd source their new startup: EndOfTheWorld.me.

There is a wealth of excellent NoSQL documents out there, and perhaps one of the first things to learn is the different types of technologies used to solve very different problems. Cassandra is not the same as Voldemort (not to be confused with Harry Potter’s arch nemesis), and MongoDB is different yet again. Not one of these systems can be considered a direct replacement for traditional relational systems such as SQL Server or MySQL, either, but they do solve very specific problems that many web sites and services face as their tools are adopted by more people.

One interesting item worth noting is that many of these technologies, while still very young, are incredibly robust when used properly. Organizations like Google, Twitter, and Zynga would never have employed these systems if they weren’t up to the task. The key, of course, is ensuring the systems that will access this database are created with NoSQL in mind right from the start. As scaling technologies continue to advance and grow more complex, the days of simply bolting something onto the side of an application are coming to a close.

Do you use NoSQL in any of your projects? Has it proven to be faster or more reliable than typical RDBMS tools? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

See you at Oscon last week in July!

Everything you know about disks is wrong

2010-11-29T12:15:00.011-06:00

I love high-scale systems and, more than anything, I love data from real systems. I’ve learned over the years that no environment is crueler, less forgiving, or harder to satisfy than real production workloads. Synthetic tests at scale are instructive but nothing catches my attention like data from real, high-scale, production systems. Consequently, I really liked the disk population studies from Google and CMU at FAST2007 (Failure Trends in a Large Disk Population, Disk Failures in the Real World: What does a MTBF of 100,000 hours mean to you). These two papers presented actual results from independent production disk populations of 100,000 each. My quick summary of these 2 papers is basically “all you have learned about disks so far is probably wrong.”

Disk failures are often the #1 or #2 failing component in a storage system usually just ahead of memory. Occasionally fan failures lead disk but that isn’t the common case. We now have publically available data on disk failures but not much has been published on other component failure rates and even less on the overall storage stack failure rates. Cloud storage systems are multi-tiered, distributed systems involving 100s to even 10s of thousands of servers and huge quantities of software. Modeling the failure rates of discrete components in the stack is difficult but, with the large amount of component failure data available to large fleet operators, it can be done. What’s much more difficult to model are correlated failure

Essentially, there are two challenges encountered when attempting to modeling overall storage system reliability: 1) availability of component failure data and 2) correlated failures. The former is available to very large fleet owners but is often unavailable publically. Two notable exceptions are disk reliability data from the two FAST’07 conference papers mentioned above. Other than these two data points, there is little credible component failure data publically available. Admittedly, component manufacturers do publish MTBF data but these data are often owned by the marketing rather than engineering teams and they range between optimistic and epic works of fiction.

Even with good quality component failure data, modeling storage system failure modes and data durability remains incredibly difficult. What makes this hard is the second issue above: correlated failure. Failures don’t always happen alone, many are correlated, and certain types of rare failures can take down the entire fleet or large parts of it. Just about every model assumes failure independence and then works out data durability to many decimal points. It makes for impressive models with long strings of nines but the challenge is the model is only as good as the input. And one of the most important model inputs is the assumption of component failure independence which is violated by every real-world system of any complexity. Basically, these failure models are good at telling you when your design is not good enough but they can never tell you how good your design actually is nor whether it is good enough.

Where the models break down is in modeling rare events and non-independent failures. The best way to understand common correlated failure modes is to study storage systems at scale over longer periods of time. This won’t help us understand the impact of very rare events. For example, Two thousand years of history would not helped us model or predict that a airplane would be flown into the World Trade Center. And certainly the odds of it happening again 16 min and 20 seconds later would be close to impossible. Studying historical storage system failure data will not help us understand the potential negative impact of very rare black swan events but it does help greatly in understanding the more common failure modes including correlated or non-independent failures.

Murray Stokely recently sent me "Availability in Globally Distributed Storage Systems" which is the work of a team from Google and Columbia University. They look at a high scale storage system at Google that includes multiple clusters of Bigtable which is layered over GFS which is implemented as a user–mode application over Linux file system. You might remember Stokely from my Using a post I did back in March titled Using a Market Economy. In this more recent paper, the authors study 10s of Google storage cells each of which is comprised of between 1,000 and 7,000 servers over a 1 year period. The storage cells studied are from multiple datacenters in different regions being used by different projects within Google.

Conclusion: Two way redundancy in two different datacenters is considerably more durable than 4 way redundancy in a single datacenter.

· Correlation among node failures dwarfs all other contributions to unavailability in production environments.

· Disk failures can result in permanent data loss but transitory node failures account for the majority of unavailability.

To read more: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36737.html

The abstract of the paper:

Highly available cloud storage is often implemented with complex, multi-tiered distributed systems built on top of clusters of commodity servers and disk drives. Sophisticated management, load balancing and recovery techniques are needed to achieve high performance and availability amidst an abundance of failure sources that include software, hardware, network connectivity, and power issues. While there is a relative wealth of failure studies of individual components of storage systems, such as disk drives, relatively little has been reported so far on the overall availability behavior of large cloud-based storage services. We characterize the availability properties of cloud storage systems based on an extensive one year study of Google's main storage infrastructure and present statistical models that enable further insight into the impact of multiple design choices, such as data placement and replication strategies. With these models we compare data availability under a variety of system parameters given the real patterns of failures observed in our fleet.

Flash on Servers...........

2010-11-12T14:04:00.018-06:00

The original case for network storage lies around the benefits of aggregating disk which include more random IOPS and bandwidth as well as the management simplicity of concentrating data into a centralized place. It has been the case that a single application per host has somewhat limited ability to consume bandwidth.

Considering flash in a networked storage environment, it does not have the same benefits of sharing. Since there are enough IOPS in a flash drive to placate most apps, the equation changes. Is network storage fast when the network latency is noticeable compared to flash? We can do 5 SSDs to get 40,000 IOPS but will the latency be a problem?

We will see flash on compute servers. Servers can already accommodate flash and it is cheap enough with 250GB < 10% of the server cost.

A new tier in the storage hierarchy: Steve argues we will see storage split into two tiers: the IOPS tier and the capacity tier. The IOPS-Tier will offer the best $/IOPS with low latency and will have sufficient capacity for the active data in most typical enterprise systems. It will be the new “primary storage”. The Capacity-Tier will offer the best $/GB – Deduplication, compression, and good serial performance.

Lets outline three broad categories of Host-Based Flash usage. DAS (which I think means “Direct Access Storage but my notes failed me), Primary Storage Service, and Cache.

· Host-Base Flash: DAS: Single point of failure and so you would use normal backup or application based replication like Exchange or Oracle). You can have boot files, VM, temp files.

· Host-Based Flash: Primary Storage Service: File or Block. Requires mirroring or RAID to peers. Allows capacity sharing. Steve believes it is likely that Microsoft and VMWare are likely to compete here – the integration of this is complex. Making reliable primary storage is hard and this may impact the roles of folks in IT.

· Host-Based Flash: Cache –File or block. This will be a writethrough cache. If you do a write-back you will occasionally lose stuff. Using a cache can allow for a centralized data management (in a remote network storage server). This can help with keeping the current IT storage management roles by providing an automatic “tiering”.

So, data management spans the IOPS tier and the Capacity tier. You need to have automated data movement and global access. It is impractical to have manual placement at huge scale. It is going to be important for us to have a technology independent language to specify the desired properties for the data. Say what properties you want and not how to get them. New SLO (Service Level Objectives) for Max Latency, Bandwidth, Availability, etc.

In summary, the new host-based flash is the new IOPS-Tier. It will replace high-performance primary storage in the cloud. This IOPS-Tier s is not going to be economical as a secondary or as archival since the $/GB is higher than spinning media. The Capacity Tier will be implemented as network storage. It is optimized for the best $/GB. Data management between these two tiers will be important.

There was a lot of discussion around the SLO (Service Level Objectives). Steve indicated that their vision was not super-flexible set of knobs but more a small set of options for defining the data characteristics. Margo offered that one aspect of what was important was the “value” of different parts of data which can, in turn, tell the system how hard to work to make the data remain available.

Someone asked if there was any performance analysis for 3-tier storage (memory, IOPS-Tier, Capacity-Tier) over more traditional 2-tier storage (Memory and Disk). Steve answered that there had not been an explicit performance analysis.

Stonebraker observed that enterprises seem to like NAS/SAN but that the Cloud guys are using direct attached storage. Are the forward looking guys walking from NAS/SAN? Steve replied there are people very interested in NAS/SAN because it gives them a way to control the data and make servers stateless. Adding in the IOPS-Tier is a simple extension.

This was a fascinating and engaging presentation!

Cassandra Startup and Get Going!!

2010-08-09T17:02:00.011-05:00

Cassandra is a hybrid non-relational database in the same class as Google's BigTable. It is more featureful than a key/value store like Dynomite, but supports fewer query types than a document store like MongoDB.

Cassandra was started by Facebook and later transferred to the open-source community. It is an ideal runtime database for web-scale domains like social networks.

This post is both a tutorial and a "getting started" overview. You will learn about Cassandra's features, data model, API, and operational requirements—everything you need to know to deploy a Cassandra-backed service.

* Flexible schema: with Cassandra, like a document store, you don't have to decide what fields you need in your records ahead of time. You can add and remove arbitrary fields on the fly. This is an incredible productivity boost, especially in large deployments.

* True scalability: Cassandra scales horizontally in the purest sense. To add more capacity to a cluster, turn on another machine. You don't have restart any processes, change your application queries, or manually relocate any data.

* Multi-datacenter awareness: you can adjust your node layout to ensure that if one datacenter burns in a fire, an alternative datacenter will have at least one full copy of every record.

Some other features that help put Cassandra above the competition:

* Range queries: unlike most key/value stores, you can query for ordered ranges of keys.

* List datastructures: super columns add a 5th dimension to the hybrid model, turning columns into lists. This is very handy for things like per-user indexes.

* Distributed writes: you can read and write any data to anywhere in the cluster at any time. There is never any single point of failure.

Installation

You need a Unix system. If you are using Mac OS 10.5, all you need is Git. Otherwise, you need to install Java 1.6, Git 1.6, Ruby, and Rubygems in some reasonable way.

Start a terminal and run: sudo gem install cassandra

If you are using Mac OS, you need to export the following environment variables:

export JAVA_HOME="/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home"
export PATH="/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home/bin:$PATH"

Now you can build and start a test server with cassandra_helper:

cassandra_helper cassandra

It runs!

The above script boots the server with a schema that we can interact with. Open another terminal window and start irb, the Ruby shell: irb

In the irb prompt, require the library:

require 'rubygems'
require 'cassandra'
include SimpleUUID

Now instantiate a client object: twitter = Cassandra.new('Twitter')

Let's insert a few things:

user = {'screen_name' => 'buttonscat'}
twitter.insert(:Users, '5', user)

tweet1 = {'text' => 'Nom nom nom nom nom.', 'user_id' => '5'}
twitter.insert(:Statuses, '1', tweet1)

tweet2 = {'text' => '@evan Zzzz....', 'user_id' => '5', 'reply_to_id' => '8'}
twitter.insert(:Statuses, '2', tweet2)

Notice that the two status records do not have all the same columns. Let's go ahead and connect them to our user record:

twitter.insert(:UserRelationships, '5', {'user_timeline' => {UUID.new => '1'}})
twitter.insert(:UserRelationships, '5', {'user_timeline' => {UUID.new => '2'}})

The UUID.new call creates a collation key based on the current time; our tweet ids are stored in the values.

Now we can query our user's tweets:

timeline = twitter.get(:UserRelationships, '5', 'user_timeline', :reversed => true)
timeline.map { |time, id| twitter.get(:Statuses, id, 'text') }
# => ["@evan Zzzz....", "Nom nom nom nom nom."]

Two tweet bodies, returned in recency order—not bad at all. In a similar fashion, each time a user tweets, we could loop through their followers and insert the status key into their follower's home_timeline relationship, for handling general status delivery.

The data model

Cassandra is best thought of as a 4 or 5 dimensional hash. The usual way to refer to a piece of data is as follows: a keyspace, a column family, a key, an optional super column, and a column. At the end of that chain lies a single, lonely value.

Let's break down what these layers mean.

Keyspace (also confusingly called "table"): the outer-most level of organization. This is usually the name of the application. For example, 'Twitter' and 'Wordpress' are both good keyspaces. Keyspaces must be defined at startup in the storage-conf.xml file.

Column family: a slice of data corresponding to a particular key. Each column family is stored in a separate file on disk, so it can be useful to put frequently accessed data in one column family, and rarely accessed data in another. Some good column family names might be :Posts, :Users and :UserAudits. Column families must be defined at startup.

Key: the permanent name of the record. You can query over ranges of keys in a column family, like :start => '10050', :finish => '10070'—this is the only index Cassandra provides for free. Keys are defined on the fly.

After the column family level, the organization can diverge—this is a feature unique to Cassandra. You can choose either:

A column: this is a tuple with a name and a value. Good columns might be 'screen_name' => 'lisa4718' or 'Google' => 'http://google.com'.

It is common to not specify a particular column name when requesting a key; the response will then be an ordered hash of all columns. For example, querying for (:Users, '174927') might return:

{'name' => 'Lisa Jones',
'gender' => 'f',
'screen_name' => 'lisa4718'}

In this case, name, gender, and screen_name are all column names. Columns are defined on the fly, and different records can have different sets of column names, even in the same keyspace and column family. This lets you use the column name itself as either structure or data. Columns can be stored in recency order, or alphabetical by name, and all columns keep a timestamp.

A super column: this is a named list. It contains standard columns, stored in recency order.

Say Lisa Jones has bookmarks in several categories. Querying (:UserBookmarks, '174927') might return:

{'work' => {
'Google' => 'http://google.com',
'IBM' => 'http://ibm.com'},
'todo': {...},
'cooking': {...}}

Here, work, to do, and cooking are all super column names. They are defined on the fly, and there can be any number of them per row. :UserBookmarks is the name of the super column family. Super columns are stored in alphabetical order, with their sub columns physically adjacent on the disk.

Super columns and standard columns cannot be mixed at the same (4th) level of dimensionality. You must define at startup which column families contain standard columns, and which contain super columns with standard columns inside them.

Super columns are a great way to store one-to-many indexes to other records: make the sub column names TimeUUIDs (or whatever you'd like to use to sort the index), and have the values be the foreign key. We saw an example of this strategy in the demo, above.

If this is confusing, don't worry. We'll now look at two example schemas in depth.
twitter schema

What could be in StatusRelationships? Maybe a list of users who favorited the tweet? Having a super column family for both record types lets us index each direction of whatever many-to-many relationships we come up with.

Cassandra lets you distribute the keys across the cluster either randomly, or in order, via the Partitioner option in the storage-conf.xml file.

For the Twitter application, if we were using the order-preserving partitioner, all recent statuses would be stored on the same node. This would cause hotspots. Instead, we should use the random partitioner.

Alternatively, we could preface the status keys with the user key, which has less temporal locality. If we used user_id:status_id as the status key, we could do range queries on the user fragment to get tweets-by-user, avoiding the need for a user_timeline super column.
multi-blog schema

Imagine we have a blog named 'The Cutest Kittens'. We will insert a row when the first post is made as follows:

require 'rubygems'
require 'cassandra'
include SimpleUUID

multiblog = Cassandra.new('Multiblog')

multiblog.insert(:Blogs, 'The Cutest Kittens',
{ UUID.new =>
'{"title":"Say Hello to Buttons Cat","body":"Buttons is a cute cat."}' })

UUID.new generates a unique, sortable column name, and the JSON hash contains the post details. Let's insert another:

multiblog.insert(:Blogs, 'The Cutest Kittens',
{ UUID.new =>
'{"title":"Introducing Commie Cat","body":"Commie is also a cute cat"}' })

Now we can find the latest post with the following query:

post = multiblog.get(:Blogs, 'The Cutest Kittens', :reversed => true).to_a.first

On our website, we can build links based on the readable representation of the UUID:

guid = post.first.to_guid
# => "b06e80b0-8c61-11de-8287-c1fa647fd821"

If the user clicks this string in a permalink, our app can find the post directly via:

multiblog.get(:Blogs, 'The Cutest Kittens', :start => UUID.new(guid), :count => 1)

For comments, we'll use the post UUID as the outermost key:

multiblog.insert(:Comments, guid,
{UUID.new => 'I like this cat. - Evan'})
multiblog.insert(:Comments, guid,
{UUID.new => 'I am cuter. - Buttons'})

Now we can get all comments (oldest first) for a post by calling:

multiblog.get(:Comments, guid)

We could paginate them by passing :start with a UUID. See this presentation to learn more about token-based pagination.

We have sidestepped two problems with this data model: we don't have to maintain separate indexes for any lookups, and the posts and comments are stored in separate files, where they don't cause as much write contention. Note that we didn't need to use any super columns, either.
storage layout and api comparison

The storage strategy for Cassandra's standard model is the same as BigTable's. Here's a comparison chart:

multi-file per-file intra-file
Relational server database table* primary key column value
BigTable cluster table column family key column name column value
Cassandra, standard model cluster keyspace column family key column name column value
Cassandra, super column model cluster keyspace column family key super column name column name column value

* With fixed column names.

Column families are stored in column-major order, which is why people call BigTable a column-oriented database. This is not the same as a column-oriented OLAP database like Sybase IQ—it depends on whether your data model considers keys to span column families or not.
Click to enlarge

In row-orientation, the column names are the structure, and you think of the column families as containing keys. This is the convention in relational databases.
Click to enlarge

In column-orientation, the column names are the data, and the column families are the structure. You think of the key as containing the column family, which is the convention in BigTable. (In Cassandra, super columns are also stored in column-major order—all the sub columns are together.)

In Cassandra's Ruby API, parameters are expressed in storage order, for clarity:
Relational SELECT `column` FROM `database`.`table` WHERE `id` = key;
BigTable table.get(key, "column_family:column")
Cassandra: standard model keyspace.get("column_family", key, "column")
Cassandra: super column model keyspace.get("column_family", key, "super_column", "column")

Note that Cassandra's internal Thrift interface mimics BigTable in some ways, but this is being changed.
going to production

Cassandra is an alpha product and could, theoretically, lose your data. In particular, if you change the schema specified in the storage-conf.xml file, you must follow these instructions carefully, or corruption will occur (this is going to be fixed). Also, the on-disk storage format is subject to change, making upgrading a bit difficult.

The biggest deployment is at Facebook, where hundreds of terabytes of token indexes are kept in about a hundred Cassandra nodes. However, their use case allows the data to be rebuilt if something goes wrong. Currently there are no known deployments of non-transient data. Proceed carefully, keep a backup in an unrelated storage engine...and submit patches if things go wrong.

That aside, here is a guide for deploying a production cluster:

Hardware: get a handful of commodity Linux servers. 16GB memory is good; Cassandra likes a big filesystem buffer. You don't need RAID. If you put the commitlog file and the data files on separate physical disks, things will go faster. Don't use EC2 or friends without being aware that the virtualized I/O can be slow, especially on the small instances.

Configuration: in the storage-conf.xml schema file, set the replication factor to 3. List the IP address of one of the nodes as the seed. Set the listen address to the empty string, so the hosts will resolve their own IPs. Now, adjust the contents of cassandra.in.sh for your various paths and JVM options—for a 16GB node, set the JVM heap to 4GB.

Deployment: build a package of Cassandra itself and your configuration files, and deliver it to all your servers (I use Capistrano for this). Start the servers by setting CASSANDRA_INCLUDE in the environment to point to your cassandra.in.sh file, and run bin/cassandra. At this point, you should see join notices in the Cassandra logs:

Cassandra starting up...
Node 10.224.17.13:7001 has now joined.
Node 10.224.17.14:7001 has now joined.

Congratulations! You have a cluster. Don't forget to turn off debug logging in the log4j.properties file.

Visibility: you can get a little more information about your cluster via the tool bin/nodeprobe, included:

$ bin/nodeprobe --host 10.224.17.13 ring
Token(124007023942663924846758258675932114665) 3 10.224.17.13 |<--|
Token(106858063638814585506848525974047690568) 3 10.224.17.19 | ^
Token(141130545721235451315477340120224986045) 3 10.224.17.14 |-->|

Cassandra also exposes various statistics over JMX.

Note that your client machines (not servers!) must have accurate clocks for Cassandra to resolve write conflicts properly. Use NTP.
conclusion

There is a misperception that if someone advocates a non-relational database, they either don't understand SQL optimization, or they are generally a hater. This is not the case.

It is reasonable to seek a new tool for a new problem, and database problems have changed with the rise of web-scale distributed systems. This does not mean that SQL as a general-purpose runtime and reporting tool is going away. However, at web-scale, it is more flexible to separate the concerns. Runtime object lookups can be handled by a low-latency, strict, self-managed system like Cassandra. Asynchronous analytics and reporting can be handled by a high-latency, flexible, un-managed system like Hadoop. And in neither case does SQL lend itself to sharing.

further resources

* Cassandra wiki
* Presentation by Avinash Lakshman about Cassandra: slides, video
* Cassandra's bug tracker

Norwegian Wood

2009-09-07T12:05:00.006-05:00

I've come to find out that some fans of Hiruki Murikami's early work regard this book the way early Metallica fans view the "Black Album:" as the first 'mainstream' work by an artist who initially went against the grain. This book turned him from author with a cult following to a multi-million seller and uber-celebrity in Japan, so much so that he had to flee his country for several years.

Nonetheless, I truly enjoyed this story, which centers on a tragic suicide of a friend which causes the narrator to rethink his life. The main character is someone I relate to a lot: a young sensitive, intellectually curious soul who appreciates rock and jazz and doesn't understand the behavior of his peers or fit in with their cliques. Despite it being a coming of age tale in the late 60's in Japan, there are many behaviors described which could take place in present day America. The herd mentality of ignorant youths living in groups is universal.

A 37-year-old Toru Watanabe has just arrived in Hamburg, Germany. When he hears an orchestral cover of the Beatles' song "Norwegian Wood," he is suddenly overwhelmed by feelings of loss and nostalgia. He thinks back to the 1960s, when so much happened that touched his life.

Toru, his classmate Kizuki, and Kizuki's girlfriend Naoko are the best of friends. Kizuki and Naoko are particularly close and feel as if they are soulmates, and Toru seems more than happy to be their enforcer. This idyllic existence is interrupted by the unexpected suicide of Kizuki on his 17th birthday. Kizuki's death deeply touches both surviving friends; Toru feels the influence of death everywhere, while Naoko feels as if some integral part of her has been permanently lost. The two of them spend more and more time together, trying to console one another, and they eventually fall in love. On the night of Naoko's 20th birthday, she feels especially vulnerable, and they consummate their love. Afterwards, Naoko leaves Toru a letter saying that she needs some time apart and that she is quitting college to go to a sanatorium.

The blossoming of their love is set against a backdrop of civil unrest. The students at Toru's college go on strike and call for a revolution. Inexplicably, the students end their strike and act as if nothing had happened, which enrages Toru as a sign of hypocrisy.

Toru befriends a fellow drama classmate, Midori Kobayashi. She is everything that Naoko is not — outgoing, vivacious, supremely self-confident. Despite his love for Naoko, Toru finds himself attracted to Midori as well. Midori is attracted to him also, and their friendship grows during Naoko's absence.

Toru visits Naoko at her secluded mountain sanatorium near Kyoto. There he meets Reiko Ishida, another patient there who has become Naoko's confidante. During this and subsequent visits, Reiko and Naoko reveal more about their past: Reiko talks about her search for sexual identity, and Naoko talks about the unexpected suicide of her older sister several years ago.

Now back in Tokyo, Toru unintentionally alienates Midori through both his lack of consideration of her wants and needs, and his continuing thoughts about Naoko. He writes a letter to Reiko, asking for her advice about his conflicted affections for both Naoko and Midori. He doesn't want to hurt Naoko, but he doesn't want to lose Midori either. Reiko counsels him to seize this chance for happiness and see how his relationship with Midori turns out.

A later letter informs Toru that Naoko has taken her own life. Toru, grieving and in a daze, wanders aimlessly around Japan, while Midori — whom he hasn't kept in touch with — wonders what has happened to him. After about a month of fugue, he returns to the Tokyo area, where Reiko is visiting. The middle-aged Reiko stays with Toru, and they have sexual intercourse. It is through this experience, and the intimate conversation that Toru and Reiko share that night, that he comes to realise that Midori is the most important person in his life. Toru calls Midori out of the blue to declare his love for her. What happens following this is never revealed — Midori's response is characteristically (by this point) cold, yet the fact that she does not explicitly cut Toru off at that point (as she did before) leaves things open.

You can score the book HERE

Why Sonic Youth still rules...........

2009-08-18T10:46:00.006-05:00

Has Sonic Youth been around for a long time - yes - Have they put out a few clunkers - yes - Are they still relevant after all these years - yes

I picked up "The Eternal" their latest offering about three weeks ago and it has pretty much been on repeat ston nop ever since. One only need to listen to Thurston ramble on about his teenage years hanging out at CBs and going to see Richard Hell shows and yelling at Mike Watt about squid to know his pedigree in punk rock and post punk artyness..I mean you can't really question that Sonic Youth are the real deal they just plain ARE.

This new record doesn't contain all the noisy slabs over the old days or crazy tunings but its got something that I would say.... the thing being Sonic Youth just rule it - look at Kim in her "it was free from Chanel" outfit with the boat dress motif playing the ever enduring Fender P-Bass I mean if there is one thing we are lacking in this day of everything all the time its an enduring icon. If you are young enough to think that it comes in the form of Radiohead (who wishes they were SY) or whoever else then so be it..but SY has stood the test of time - they are a band that has no apologies to make. Good lord their "goo" album has a Richard Pettibone cover art (for you not in the know that is Greg Ginn of Black Flags brother)

Sonic Youth stands out today as a giant in an indie world gone insane - watch any interview with that band and they are right where they always were. Punk, art rock history Thurston and Kim as are ...well legends ..they just rule - Not to mention the addition of x-Pavement bass player Mark Ibold on bass as Kim as switched to "additional guitar"

Personally I would rather get one that is already totally F$&^$%ed up but the new Fender Sonic Youth guitar models do have some unique to SY mods available they are a little pricey but still cheap compared to signature "shred" guitar models you can check them out here LEE and THURSTON model AXES

anyways kiddies CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERS

Blitzen Trapper ...........

2009-05-11T14:07:00.002-05:00

I first got hipped to this band when they were touring with Malkmus yeah I know they have been around for a while but hell I am old gimme a fricken break okay?? The music has kind of a jangly woodsy vibe thats how I look at it anyways I saw them live late last year and was pretty impressed - I am pressed for time right now so here is the wiki info I will update again soon -

Blitzen Trapper is a Portland, Oregon-based experimental folk rock band signed to Sub Pop Records. Formed in 2000, the band currently operates as a sextet, with Eric Earley (guitar/vocals), Erik Menteer (guitar/keyboard), Brian Adrian Koch (drums/vocals), Michael VanPelt, (bass), Drew Laughery (keyboards), and Marty Marquis (guitar, keyboards, vocals). Blitzen Trapper self-released its first three albums. "Wild Mountain Nation" was #98 on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Best Songs of 2007.

Blitzen Trapper released its third album, Wild Mountain Nation, in 2007 to much critical acclaim from critics such as Pitchfork Media, The Nerve, and Spin Magazine. The group signed to Sub Pop Records in the summer of 2007.

The release of Furr in 2008 was a high-water mark for the group as their eclectic new songs received a two-page feature in Rolling Stone. The album was ranked #13 on Rolling Stone's Best Albums of 2008 while the title track was ranked #4 on the magazine's Best Singles of 2008.] The title track was also featured on an episode of Chuck on December 8, 2008 in the episode titled "Chuck vs. the Delorean."A second song from Furr, God & Suicide, was featured in the opening of the March 9, 2009 episode of Chuck titled "Chuck vs. The Lethal Weapon".

Marnie Stern - it WAS Sly Stallone Story!!!

2009-02-11T10:54:00.009-06:00

Marnie latest video..They pulled the one about Sly he probably threatened to sue!! lol

Marnie Stern is like the indie rock version of a shredder she does do a lot of finger tapping but the songs are totally cool this version of the lame Journey song is killer anyways I will be up in Dallas for the show haven't seen a KRS band in a while should be awesome!

Well I went to see Gov't Mule with some friends who took me (well I paid for my ticket) and man they were really tight - Warren can straight up rip it up I was really blown away - I think his hand wired Soldano cost more than most cars on the road me and my 8 year old Ethan were downtown having lunch and were right around the block when they were loading out he got a kick out of watching that - some of the Mules crew were hardcore road dogs to be sure - One of the coolest parts of the show was where Warren came out and did a knocked out version of Pink Floyds "Wish you were here" with the Disco Bisquits (quite possibly the worst band name ever)

What's up on the heavier side of music - Cradle of Filth and Satyricon will be here next Wednesday night ripping it up - I must say I don't care too much for COF but I really really really want to see Satyricon and hey this is momentus because Frost is actually allowed to tour in the US now! This guy is one of the sickest drummers in the Black Metal scene he just kills it -

* I just found out Agnostic Front is playing like three blocks from my house tonight I think I will skip that I like my teeth the way they are.......

I am gonna walk down the street now and get a sandwich at Whole Foods
Check me out on Twitter bitches!

F-Bands galore...Portland bound again for OSCON soon....

2008-07-07T15:15:00.006-05:00

Seems like for some strange reason its the invasion of the F-Bands lately - the above clip is from Brooklyn based Fiery Furnaces (originally from Oak Park Illinois) Which further stresses my theory that all great bands have some kinda Chicago tie in...Anyways I am making my way towards Portland again in a couple weeks for OSCON the O'Reilly Open Source convention should be a blast - geekmania if you will.......

So as you can tell from the post below I have been into Fleet Foxes as of late and they happen to be playing at Doug Firs whilst I be roaming the streets of Portland so I will be at the gig.

I was watching Liquid Sky online the other day - man that film rocks I know I blogged about it a while ago but jeez if you haven't seen it beg borrow or steal a copy it rules ....What else is going on ..oh yeah you can follow my senseless ramblings on twitter We should be hitting Toronto sometime in October also not sure of the exact dates yet though I think we have to go to North Carolina first...Bands to check out? give these a listen

Pierced Arrows
Canadian Rifle

Can't wait to hit Portland!

Pitchfork Music Festival looms near!!

2008-06-29T17:08:00.003-05:00

Pitchfork festival is rolling up on us like a mugg.....Mission of Burma, Sebadoh
and Dinosaur Junior! That is what I am talkin bout!!
Set times for all the acts primed to invade Chicago's Union Park July 18-20. Grab a pencil, bust out the PDA, or hit the "print" button and have a look:

A = Aluminum Stage; B = Balance Stage; C = Connector Stage

Friday, July 18 (in conjunction with All Tomorrow's Parties/Don't Look Back):

6:00 p.m. Mission of Burma performing Vs. (C)
7:15 p.m. Sebadoh performing Bubble and Scrape (C)
8:30 p.m. Public Enemy performing It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (A)

Saturday, July 19:

12:30 p.m. Boban i Marko Markovic Orkestar (B)
1:00 p.m. Titus Andronicus (C)
1:25 p.m. A Hawk and a Hacksaw (B)
1:30 p.m. Jay Reatard (A)
2:00 p.m. Caribou (C)
2:20 p.m. Icy Demons (B)
3:00 p.m. Fleet Foxes (A)
3:15 p.m. Fuck Buttons (B)
4:00 p.m. Dizzee Rascal (C)
4:15 p.m. The Ruby Suns (B)
5:00 p.m. Vampire Weekend (A)
5:20 p.m. Elf Power (B)
6:00 p.m. !!! (C)
6:25 p.m. Extra Golden (B)
7:00 p.m. The Hold Steady (A)
7:30 p.m. Atlas Sound (B)
8:00 p.m. Jarvis Cocker (C)
8:25 p.m. No Age (B)
9:00 p.m. Animal Collective (A)

Sunday, July 20:

12:30 p.m. Mahjongg (B)
1:00 p.m. Times New Viking (C)
1:25 p.m. High Places (B)
1:30 p.m. Dirty Projectors (A)
2:00 p.m. Boris (C)
2:20 p.m. HEALTH (B)
3:00 p.m. The Apples in Stereo (A)
3:15 p.m. King Khan & the Shrines (B)
4:00 p.m. Les Savy Fav (C)
4:15 p.m. El Guincho (B)
5:00 p.m. Ghostface Killah & Raekwon (A)
5:20 p.m. Occidental Brothers Dance Band International (B)
6:00 p.m. M. Ward (C)
6:25 p.m. The Dodos (B)
7:00 p.m. Spiritualized (A)
7:30 p.m. Bon Iver (B)
8:00 p.m. Dinosaur Jr. (C)
8:25 p.m. Cut Copy (B)
9:00 p.m. Spoon (A)

And for the cell-phone savvy, a few perks, courtesy of Boost Mobile: text "Pitchfork" to 6509, and you'll get a full Pitchfork Music Festival schedule. Text the name of your favorite fest act (i.e., "Les Savy Fav", "Dirty Projectors") to 65095, and you'll receive an alert 15 minutes before that act goes on. Ain't technology grand?

Only individual day tickets for the 2008 Pitchfork Music Festival remain, and they're going fast! Snag yours while you still can via TicketWeb for the sweet price of $30 each.

Of course these pages have been rife with Pitchfork Music Festival extracurriculars in recent weeks, so here's a quick recap:

-- The 2008 Pitchfork Music Festival Sampler, featuring MP3s from 25 festival acts, is available for free download via eMusic now through August 1.

-- On Thursday, June 17, the Pitchfork Music Festival and the Future of Music Coalition present a panel discussion of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back featuring Public Enemy's own Bomb Squad members Hank and Keith Shocklee and "Media Assassin" Harry Allen, along with activist/scholar/filmmaker Kembrew McLeod. Details and RSVP info for the free event can be found here.

-- That same evening (June 17), Fleet Foxes, Extra Golden, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, and Boban Markovic will play the Pitchfork Music Festival Preview Night at Chicago's Millennium Park, a free show co-presented by the park's Music Without Borders series and the festival. Details here.

-- The "Audible Architecture: Chicago Nightclubs at Noon" free lunchtime concert series continues this Monday (June 30) with Killer Whales, and keeps rolling through late August.

-- Finally, have you checked out the festival website yet? Pretty much anything you'd ever want to know about the Pitchfork Music Festival awaits, just a link away.

Fleet Foxes.....

2008-06-05T16:06:00.005-05:00

UPDATED** I will be at the Portland show!! Jan 25th @ Doug Firs

Fleet Foxes "Oliver James", another nearly a cappella showcase for Pecknold's solo vocals. As he thumps out a soft rhythm on his Martin acoustic, he sings about handmade tables and long-gone grandparents, howling the chorus "Oliver James, washed in the rain/ No longer." The brief snippet of "Red Squirrel" and "Sun It Rises" invites you into Fleet Foxes' debut, but "Oliver James" doesn't shoo you out the door. Instead, Fleet Foxes let you linger for a few more bars, leaning forward to catch Pecknold's last syllable as it fades into the air.

...In other news man there is this band from Chicago called Condenada they totally rip it up seriously check their chili - there is another band that has been kicking around the bay area for a chili check called Peligro Social they also do what they are told!! Well Obama is in the official the nominee now lets hope we don't have 4 more years of Repugnican hell

Maaaan this band has been around for a while but check them out if you haven't yet..Pittsburgh's own destruction machine BEHIND ENEMY LINES

*Updated Fleet Foxes news........

Hairy dudes with acoustic guitars will be in abundance at four dates this August in cities like Boise and Spokane, where there is certainly no dearth of hairy dudes. Wilco have tapped Fleet Foxes to join their summer tour, a jaunt that already includes such stellar openers as Bon Iver and Retribution Gospel Choir.

The Chicago vets have also added shows with Andrew Bird and Jennifer O'Connor since our last report. What's more, frontman Jeff Tweedy now has a trio of solo dates taking place in September under Sky Blue Spanish skies-- not to mention a set at the "Kidz stage" at Lollapalooza.

For their part, Fleet Foxes have a summer tour of their own in support of their self-titled debut. They'll traverse quite a bit of North America before meeting up with Wilco, including a stop in Chicago at the Pitchfork Music Festival. Recent Hardly Art signees the Duchess and the Duke will open most of those shows.

Fleet Foxes + Wilco:

08-18 Salt Lake City, UT - Red Butte Garden
08-20 Boise, ID - The Winery at Eagle Knoll
08-21 Spokane, WA - INB Performing Arts Center
08-23 Bend, OR - Les Schwab Amphitheater

Malkmus rocks an elevator

2008-02-13T14:49:00.007-06:00

For those of you who have been living in a closet for the last 15 year Stephen Malkmus was the creative side of Pavement This is footage of him doing something that us mere mortals get busted doing sometimes singing in an elevator. There is something that is really warming about this clip. I am not sure what is so endearing about it but it just rules.

I am not sure if he is freestyling the words or not but he probably is. His lyrics on his studio recordings with the Jicks have always been way out there and most interesting. Stephen has special meaning with me and my wife cause we saw the Jicks on like our third date I had seen Pavement years before hand. I was also kinda stoked on Barlows Folk Implosion shizzle years before also I loved the clunkiness of it thought it was now! well then in a now kinda way you know?

Malkmus currently resides in Portland, Oregon with his wife, artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins. In 2005, Hutchins gave birth to the couple's first child, a daughter named Lottie. The couple had their second child in 2007.

On May 23, 2003 in Milwaukee, while touring with his new band The Jicks, Malkmus opened the show by saying, "This is off our first record." The band then proceeded to play an evening's worth of Pavement songs. This show has been dubbed by fans as The Milwaukee Show.

In 2007, Malkmus provided the singing voice for Cate Blanchett's portrayal of Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes' film I'm Not There. He contributed on the songs "Ballad of a Thin Man", "Can't Leave Her Behind", and "Maggie's Farm".

Malkmus' fourth studio album with The Jicks, Real Emotional Trash, is set for release in March of 2008.

You can watch a great performance of Jenny Ess Dog on Letterman HERE

UPCOMING SHOWS

3/19/08 Minneapolis, MN First Avenue #
3/20/08 Milwaukee, WI Pabst Theater #
3/21/08 Chicago, IL The Vic Theatre #
3/22/08 Indianapolis, IN The Vogue #
3/23/08 Newport, KY Southgate House #
3/25/08 Nashville, TN Mercy Lounge #
3/26/08 Atlanta, GA Variety Playhouse #
3/28/08 Washington, DC 9:30 Club #
3/29/08 Philadelphia, PA The Fillmore at the TLA #
3/31/08 New York, NY Bowery Ballroom #
4/1/08 New York, NY Bowery Ballroom #
4/2/08 Brooklyn, NY Music Hall of Williamsburg #
4/3/08 Boston, MA Paradise #
4/4/08 North Adams, MA Mass. Museum of Contemporary Art #
4/20/08 Austin, TX La Zona Rosa
4/21/08 Dallas, TX Granada Theatre
4/23/08 Albuquerque, NM Launchpad
4/28/08 Sacramento, CA Harlow's
5/3/08 Vancouver, BC Richards on Richards

New Bomb Turks doing b-u-n

2008-01-27T14:26:00.000-06:00

About 10 years ago these cats were on every little ankle biter that was reviewing at MRR top 10 list - I mean it was like a meglamania and kinda for that reason I never really paid much attention to these guys which turned out to be a retardo move on my part. I have been digging into the back catalog of these guys and their brand of punk and roll is really awesome. Yeah I am 10 to 15 years late on this one but hey I was 10 years ahead with RTX so stuff it. Here is the bio crap:

The New Bomb Turks are a garage punk band from Columbus, Ohio. They are part of an early 90's midwestern garage revival that included bands such as the Devil Dogs and Gaunt. The members are Jim Weber, Eric Davidson, Bill Randt, and Matt Reber. Sam Brown replaced Bill Randt on drums in 1999. Musically, they are akin to the The Saints, Dead Boys, The Pagans,The Sonics or the Troggs. Their lyrics are generally witty and humorous, but have serious themes underneath.

The New Bomb Turks have released ten full-length LPs, two EPs, and over twenty singles, some of which contain songs not available elsewhere. Their early recordings appear on the Datapanik, Sympathy For The Record Industry, Get Hip and Bag of Hammers labels. Crypt Records signed the band and released !!Destroy Oh-Boy!! and Information Highway Revisited.

Then Epitaph Records signed them and released LPs Scared Straight, and Nightmare Scenario, among others. Gearhead Records released their next album, The Night Before the Day the Earth Stood Still. The band also released three b-side and outtakes compilations: Pissing Out the Poison, The Big Combo, and Switchblade Tongues & Butterknife Brains.

As of 2005, the New Bomb Turks have slowed down their touring and recording in order to pursue other interests. Guitarist Jim Weber, for example, is now a 10th and 11th grade English teacher at Hilliard Davidson High School. The band's name refers to the main character (Newbomb Turk) in the 1980 film "The Hollywood Knights", played by Robert Wuhl.

If you don't dig the above clip you deserve to be subjected to a life filled with Nickleback and Third Eye 182 (or whatever they are called) More totally radical (yes that is sarcasm) info can be found on these cats at these locales...

Punk Rock Academy!
Just no getting around this damn myspace crap!
Buy tunes here!
Interviewage

I knew that cat was aping Husker Du with that flying V and sure nuff there is the shirt in that pic!!

HAILS \m/

Got Hoof???

2008-01-21T14:59:00.000-06:00

Greg Saunier is one sick mofo lets be straight up about it -

There's a high you get from the classic 1970s "art-rock" of Yes, Genesis, or King Crimson-- and when it hits, there's nothing like it. I'm not talking about the way other music peaks, like a dance track where the beat kicks in and the crowd goes berzerk, or metal music that gets louder and louder until your skull caves, or gutbucket singers who can make your heart jump out of your chest. With art-rock, there's a lot of mumbo-jumbo and funny time signatures, and sometimes there's like 10 or 15 minutes of really boring shit (see: Yes, "Awaken"). But when the "good part" hits? Holy shit-- the band crescendos and the singer, smooth as silk but loud as God, rams Buddha down the throat of a giant silver dragon. If I sound like I'm growing a mullet, I've done my job.

Deerhoof, an indie band who have released plenty of discombobulated pop and no wave albums, have lately turned toward accessible, foot-stomping rock. It worked on The Runners Four, but it works better and quicker on their new album, Friend Opportunity. We've been using the term "inde prog" mostly to describe bands that quick-cut between ideas and construct mini-suites out of mini-songs. But on this record Deerhoof take everything that clique of indie bands has worked toward-- add the suddenly popular twee vocals-- and ride it like an h-bomb.

If it weren't for Satomi Matsuzaki's little-girl voice, this music would be demagoguery: concussive beats, stabbing horn fills, pounding drums, a guitar chord that lands like a 10-ton weight on a 20-ton trampoline. I've never been more aware of the attack of an electric piano. And while a new love of knob-twiddling and loop-peddling brings more tonal colors, they're here for percussion, not atmosphere.

I didn't even want to make out all the words, in case I'd screw up the Obi Wan-spanks-Zelda Hero's Journey I had in my head in tracks one through nine. Snatches of story-like lyrics-- the stage-setting of "The Perfect Me", the flashes of conflict, warnings that "It's a trap"-- imply a narrative arc, with a detour for a new character on "Cast Off Crown", drummer Greg Saunier's sole vocal performance and a mini-epic that crams introduction, exposition, and resolution into three minutes.

The rest of the vocals are held down again by the high, heavily-accented singing of Matsuzaki. And the more song-like Deerhoof's music gets, the more obviously she becomes a barrier to new fans. The bleep-bloop speak-singing of "Kidz are So Small" seems to be the dealbreaker-- like you shouldn't take anything so sweet and cute seriously. (Listen to that gristly bleep in the background: that's a fucking droid, dude.) But wait 'til you hear the climactic "Matchbook Seeks Maniac": Jesus, Matsuzaki is the homecoming queen from Saturn, complete with silver glitter makeup and hip-side death ray. She rides the album's peak in the main chorus-- "I would sell my soul to the devil/ If I could be the top of the world"-- and when she belts the title phrase? It makes me quail.

Only thing is, after that 24-minute binge we get the 12-minute hangover of "Look Away". Like a rambling, shapeless homage to Yes' "Sound Chaser", it's listenable and it has a great instrumental traffic jam at the midpoint, but on this record it's just an appendix. All of a sudden the band is back to silences and blank stares, sustained tones and reverbed guitars. They're "deconstructing pop," which means they're asking questions. But on Friend Opportunity, Deerhoof work best when they blast right to the answers.

Wilco Tour 08!

2007-12-31T13:07:00.000-06:00

Well here we are in 08 and the mighty Wilco are getting ready to tour! Seeing Wilco live is certainly a good way to kick off the year. I thought my first show of the year was going to be Killing the Dream but I think I am gonna flake out that show.
**updated I did go to the show I was impressed with RUINER.

With all the solo love Jeff Tweedy's been giving his hometown recently, Wilco's recently announced 2008 U.S. tour looked a little strange without a single date in Chicago. The band has remedied that situation, however, with a five-show residency at Chicago's Rivera Theatre, which will kick off the tour in mid-February.

According to a press release, the residency is "five shows exploring the band's complete recorded works," and Tweedy had this to say about it: "Over the five nights we will attempt the 'complete Wilco' and try to clear out the dusty corners of the catalog that we haven't attended to in a while."

What better way for Wilco to celebrate Sky Blue Sky's Grammy nomination for Best Rock Album (the band's fourth Grammy nod)?

If you aren't familiar with Wilco they are another great Chicago band that has an amazing midwestern sound. You can check them out HERE

Awesome pix HERE

Complete dates:

01-26 Chicago, IL - Vic Theatre (Jeff Tweedy solo)
02-15 Chicago, IL - Riviera Theatre
02-16 Chicago, IL - Riviera Theatre
02-18 Chicago, IL - Riviera Theatre
02-19 Chicago, IL - Riviera Theatre
02-20 Chicago, IL - Riviera Theatre
02-22 Cleveland, OH - Lakewood Civic Auditorium
02-23 Philadelphia, PA - Tower Theatre
02-24 New Haven, CT - Schubert Theater
03-02 Nashville, TN - Ryman Auditorium
03-03 Mobile, AL - Mobile Civic Center
03-04 New Orleans, LA - Tipitina's
03-05 New Orleans, LA - Tipitina's
03-07 Houston, TX - Verizon Theater
03-08 Tulsa, OK - Cain's Ballroom
03-09 Des Moines, IA - Val Air Ballroom
03-18 Sydney, Australia - Enmore Theatre
03-19 Brisbane, Australia - The Tivoli
03-20 Byron Bay, Australia - East Coast Blues Festival
03-22 Auckland, New Zealand - New Zealand Festival
03-23 Wellington, New Zealand - Front Room
03-26 Melbourne, Australia - Palace Theatre