FOT Forum
The Best Show on WFMU => Show Discussion => Topic started by: JonFromMaplewood on March 21, 2008, 03:01:20 PM
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Tom was mentioning the ways in which New Jersey has won out over New York recently. For example, NY's Spitzer was brought low by NJ's Dupree, and Manhattan was stomped in Cloverfield while New Jersey watched.
There was one other example on the tip of Tom's tongue. I think he may have been thinking of American Gangster, which he has mentioned before. Jersey's ragtag cops bring down the drug kingpin before the crooked New York cops can.
I'm sure there are other ways, but that is one that comes to mind from previous shows.
-Jon
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[tumbleweed blows by. crickets chirp. mic feedback. someone coughs.]
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New Jersey won the Sopranos.
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You get impatient for a response after only 41 minutes and 39 seconds? You must find much of life hell.
As for NJ vs. NY, The Sopranos comes to mind. Tom was certainly rooting for Tony & Co.
P.S. Dan B. beat me, but only by a second or two so I'm posting this anyway.
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It didn't get any media attention, but someone who knows told me the Jersey band Bouncing Souls kicked the crap out of the boys of Campfire Weekend after a recent show. I don't think it was a fist fight. I think it was Outburst.
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Tom was mentioning the ways in which New Jersey has won out over New York recently. For example, NY's Spitzer was brought low by NJ's Dupree, and Manhattan was stomped in Cloverfield while New Jersey watched.
There was one other example on the tip of Tom's tongue. I think he may have been thinking of American Gangster, which he has mentioned before. Jersey's ragtag cops bring down the drug kingpin before the crooked New York cops can.
I'm sure there are other ways, but that is one that comes to mind from previous shows.
-Jon
You are correct! From the 1/29/08 recap:
Charlie reminds Tom about Guiliani's comments during the 1998 dispute over Ellis Island ownership. Guiliani stated that his Italian immigrant father had no intention of coming to New Jersey, a quip that elicited guffaws from the New York press corps. Tom informs Guiliani that his relatives were coming to America. He revels in New Jersey's undefeated record in its battles with New York. The state earned an outright W on The Sopranos by squishing Phil Leotardo's head and more recently authorized aerial defense to thwart the Cloverfield monster's destruction of NYC. Newark, Jersey City, and Hoboken were unscathed. Tom also wonders how many Super Bowls the New York Giants, who have played their home games in the Meadowlands since 1976, appeared in while playing in New York with Y.A. Tittle at the helm. Zilch. (They did win four titles in the pre-Super Bowl era.) Back in December Tom noted New Jersey's triumph in American Gangster when Newark detective Richie Roberts brought down Harlem heroin dealer Frank Lucas. Charlie starts to talk about looking at a map, but Tom tells him to shut up for a second. He wants to make it clear that he does not have to justify his support of New Jersey. Tom admits that New York is an awesome place loaded with great stuff, but he will not tolerate its inhabitants throwing New Jersey under the bus and making lame what-exit-are-you-from queries. He recalls arguing with a guy who was mocking New Jersey only to discover that he was dealing with someone originally from Delaware. Charlie gets excited and says that Manhattan is full of transplants. Tom asked Charlie if he's also on a topic delay because he just made that point.
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You get impatient for a response after only 41 minutes and 39 seconds? You must find much of life hell.
You're right, Sarah. But not impatient....I would never be impatient with swell folks like yourselves. I was quickly discouraged. It's just that my recent posts were apparently covered with hantavirus. No one got near them. So I was getting a little down. I was feeling like perhaps there was no place for a Honky Lips like me.
But then you all came through. Thank you, FOT!
As a reward, no more fon fiction from me! Or at least, much, much shorter fon fiction.
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New Jersey might win me. I'm going in next week to interview for a job as a building caretaker in Palisades Park (I think), just over the GWB. The upsides: free rent and utilities, bigger apartment, just as close to NY as I am now, I wouldn't take the NY/NJ reverse-commuter tax hit, probably quieter. The downsides: we'd violate our lease, most of my friends live in Brooklyn, I'd miss all of the stuff I have right outside my door, not having the subway and cabs 24/7 actually does make a huge difference, I never thought I'd move back to NJ and so left all kinds of bureaucratic things in a huge mess. And I'd probably eventually have to get a car, which would mean going back to the DMV (already the worst place on earth this side of Gitmo) with my tail between my legs and start to straighten everything out.
I dunno. Part of me is like yeah, I can get out of debt and in a few years just move to Portland or LA or upstate or back to NYC. But the other part of me is like, I don't wanna move.
We might not even get hired anyway, which would take a lot of the pressure off.
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the DMV (already the worst place on earth this side of Gitmo)
well at least you're keeping things in perspective
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Jason -
Now that the NJ DMV has gone computerized, things go pretty fast there. Don't fear the Jersey DMV!
I cannot speak for the New York DMV, but I can only imagine that it is a nightmare.
Suck it one more time, NY!
Tom.
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Jason -
Now that the NJ DMV has gone computerized, things go pretty fast there. Don't fear the Jersey DMV!
I cannot speak for the New York DMV, but I can only imagine that it is a nightmare.
Suck it one more time, NY!
Tom.
I've had moments at the DMV in East Orange recently that were so smooth and easy and fast that I was like, "Oh! Really?? That's it?? I'm done??? Thank you - I LOVE you!!"
Now, the Rhode Island DMV in Pawtucket? That's like the Vestibule of Hell.
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Josh, have you ever been to Jersey DMV? Or Guantanamo? I have, except Guantanamo, and I don't think I'm exaggerating.
It's good to hear that they've smoothed everything over, though. The NY DMV was bad but not as bad as the last time I went to the Jersey one, which admittedly was over ten years ago. I did leave everything a mess, though, which is on me.
I also have the Best Show podcast this time around, which might actually make me wish the DMV wait was even longer.
No plans to move to Rhode Island any time soon, luckily. A friend told me about a tenure-track position at Brown but the application process looked incredibly tedious and paralyzing (and honestly I probably wouldn't get the job anyway), so I blew it off.
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In high school a friend of mine went to take the driving test at a Jersey DMV. The instructor got in and told him to start driving, but he didn't put his seat belt on. My friend asked the instructor to put his seat belt on but the instructor told him not to worry about it. My friend thought it was like a test trick and said something along the lines of "I am not going to start driving until you put your seat belt on." The instructor said "Well, then you fail" and got out. Jersey attitude at its best.
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Try not being a U.S. citizen in a weird immigration limbo, and renewing a license. I have to go with my dad on his day off, because he's more patient than I am.
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PA DMV is the worst of the NY/NJ/PA DMV sytems in my experience. I was unable to register an old car I'd bought in PA despite numerous documents proving ownership because I had no title (not required in GA for cars over ten years old). So I 'sold' the car to my then-girlfriend in NJ and we got everything we needed there even though it was against NJ State policy. Any institution that is willing to work around policy in exceptional circumstances is awesome in my opinion.
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I was reading Check The Technique (probably the best book about rap I've read) and it mentioned that one of the guys in Das Efx is from New Jersey. There we have one place where New Jersey does not defeat New York. Very few good rappers are from Jersey.
(note that while I live in Brooklyn, I would never say that's where I am from. San Francisco is where I am from and I am well aware that the bad music to good music ratio from San Francisco heavily favors the bad)
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New York wins in the battle of having interesting shit to do every night.
Boo-ya!
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I was reading Check The Technique (probably the best book about rap I've read) and it mentioned that one of the guys in Das Efx is from New Jersey. There we have one place where New Jersey does not defeat New York. Very few good rappers are from Jersey.
(note that while I live in Brooklyn, I would never say that's where I am from. San Francisco is where I am from and I am well aware that the bad music to good music ratio from San Francisco heavily favors the bad)
Wait, whuuuuuuuuut?? Redman, Queen Latifah, Naughty by Nature, The Violaters, Biz Markie lived in Newark for a while... There's gotta be more... Anyone?
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Dalek.
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Biz Markie moved around a lot and lived in Harlem and Brooklyn for much of his life.
You can, however, add Lords of the Underground, The Artifacts, Joe Budden and The Fugees to your list. Still, every single borough of NYC has a more impressive list.
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New York wins in the battle of having interesting shit to do every night.
Boo-ya!
You clearly have never been to Bunny's Pizzeria in South Orange.
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Biz Markie moved around a lot and lived in Harlem and Brooklyn for much of his life.
You can, however, add Lords of the Underground, The Artifacts, Joe Budden and The Fugees to your list. Still, every single borough of NYC has a more impressive list.
Brooklyn represents something very different to hiphop heads than it must for rock people
I never had a clue it had a reputation for being a seat hipsters etc until I heard it on the Best Show
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Being an Ohioan, I'm pretty much impartial to this whole argument, but I've gotta give it to Brooklyn for all the great stuff coming out on Daptone Records (Budos Band and Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings in particular).
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Not NJ related but on the topic of hip-hop: one of the funniest things I've heard recently was Dick Button saying that a Japanese figure skater has absorbed hip-hop into his very soul and now embodies it. This is what inspired the accolade:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eeivMpd2jc[/youtube]
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That guy has Kool Moe Dee's double axle down pat.
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I know they're considered "soft," but PM Dawn are from Jersey City.
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I know they're considered "soft," but PM Dawn are from Jersey City.
I consider them more "fall-off-the-stage-y" than "soft."
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I love NJ but it can't come close to NY for homegrown rappers.
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Jason -
Now that the NJ DMV has gone computerized, things go pretty fast there. Don't fear the Jersey DMV!
I cannot speak for the New York DMV, but I can only imagine that it is a nightmare.
Suck it one more time, NY!
Tom.
I've had moments at the DMV in East Orange recently that were so smooth and easy and fast that I was like, "Oh! Really?? That's it?? I'm done??? Thank you - I LOVE you!!"
Now, the Rhode Island DMV in Pawtucket? That's like the Vestibule of Hell.
East Orange sounds like Boston, as insane as that may be to believe. Every experience I have had with the Massachusetts RMVs has been mind-bogglingly smooth, courteous, and all those other good things you never would expect. The first time I registered a car in Massachusetts, I got back to work and promptly sent them a glowing note of thanks for their service. Total gracious pros, all.
I do feel you re. the Rhode Island DMVs, though, TL. Nightmare s hit, to be sure. It blew my mind that I could walk into the one in Providence and not have to go through a metal detector, because those nasty (and that is putting it mildly) clerks were nothing if not ripe for... well... ah... you know where I'm going with this. It has to be some bizarro-world, fractional-modicum-of-service-anti-ethic that gets instilled in all Rhode Island bureaucratic operations, whether it's a motor vehicle registry or a state college registrar's office. Signing up for classes when I was going to URI was as harrowing as getting my driver's license renewed when I still lived in the state. I do not miss it in the least bit.
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I know they're considered "soft," but PM Dawn are from Jersey City.
As an outsider and a huge fan
NY/NJ sound has always been pretty indistinguishable
In rap I mean.
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I know they're considered "soft," but PM Dawn are from Jersey City.
As an outsider and a huge fan
NY/NJ sound has always been pretty indistinguishable
In rap I mean.
Yeah - I don't think there's really ever been a different sound - northern NJ is in the NYC media market - the KISS FM Friday night Mastermix was what everyone into hip-hop grew up listening to, from the middle of Long Island to probably close to Trenton, and there always seemed to be less territorial pissing between NJ and NY than there seemed to be between the boroughs of NYC themselves - Queens Bridge v. South Bronx, Brooklyn v. The Rest of the World, etc. It's like Staten Island and Jersey were never in those battles. In '84 I do remember a song that was big on KISS and BLS that was actually about Newark - Club Zanzibar and what was actually a lot of cool shit going on back then, but after that, it wasn't until the whole Tribe Called Quest/Queen Latifah/Vioators axis started rising that you started hearing about Newark and the Oranges again. Then came Naughty By Nature and the Fugees, and NJ started getting more mass-media respect, but it seemed like within the hip-hop world, it was never really "dissed" per se - it was just part of the mix, albeit a less "powerful" (?) one.
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No disrespect TL, but my friend, who's a huge, huge Tribe fan, always says they came out of Queens - near where he grew up. It was a point of pride for him as he would play Can I Kick it? Yes you can - over and over again.
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This isn't just about hip hop! This is much, much bigger. None of us would be listening to recorded music if it wasn't for Thomas Edison - a resident of West Orange, NJ. No Redman. No Raffi. No Hooters.
[I am waiting for someone to give me the "Zeitgeist" counterargument to my "Great Man" argument... To which I will have no counter-counterargument.]
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Yeah, Tribe is from Queens. Jamaica, right?
I had an awesome Jersey day yesterday. The wife and I went out to Cliffside Park for the interview, and were thinking, there's no way these guys are going to hire us. But the guys - these three middle-aged, North Bergen Italian dudes (the place is in N. Bergen, not Pal Park as previously reported) really seemed to like us. Then we got on the wrong Bergenline assvan and wound up in Jersey City, but it was such a nice day that we decided to walk to Hoboken. Lo and behold, there's an elevator down the from the Heights to Hoboken. We had some decent Indian food at the Karma Cafe on Washington Avenue, and were both like, "we could live here."
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This isn't just about hip hop! This is much, much bigger. None of us would be listening to recorded music if it wasn't for Thomas Edison - a resident of West Orange, NJ. No Redman. No Raffi. No Hooters.
[I am waiting for someone to give me the "Zeitgeist" counterargument to my "Great Man" argument... To which I will have no counter-counterargument.]
It's OK, Jon, I hear the Zeitgeist was from Jersey too.
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True - Queens and East Orange. My point is exactly that, actually - just that there's no real separate Jersey hip-hop world (at least within the NYC area). According to Wiki, Q-tip was born in Harlem, but yeah - grew up in Queens, you're right. There was a period of time, though, when they were coming up in the early 90s, when I remember him talking about living with his grandma in East Orange.
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This isn't just about hip hop! This is much, much bigger. None of us would be listening to recorded music if it wasn't for Thomas Edison - a resident of West Orange, NJ. No Redman. No Raffi. No Hooters.
[I am waiting for someone to give me the "Zeitgeist" counterargument to my "Great Man" argument... To which I will have no counter-counterargument.]
About that Edison fellow . . .
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23444712-5005961,00.html
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True - Queens and East Orange. Q-tip lived there for a long time, definitely still has family there, and I think Fife has some EO connections, too. My point is exactly that, actually - just that there's no real separate Jersey hip-hop world (at least within the NYC area).
I guess I was just thinking more about silly bragging rights. For a state that gets knocked around a lot, it's nice to have a rich rock legacy of YLT, the Feelies, Bouncing Souls, Rye Coalition, Ashley Tisdale to counter those NYC snobs and say "who do you got, The Strokes?"
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This isn't just about hip hop! This is much, much bigger. None of us would be listening to recorded music if it wasn't for Thomas Edison - a resident of West Orange, NJ. No Redman. No Raffi. No Hooters.
[I am waiting for someone to give me the "Zeitgeist" counterargument to my "Great Man" argument... To which I will have no counter-counterargument.]
It's OK, Jon, I hear the Zeitgeist was from Jersey too.
Nope - Zeitgeist was from Paris, apparently:
The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27soun.html?hp)
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This isn't just about hip hop! This is much, much bigger. None of us would be listening to recorded music if it wasn't for Thomas Edison - a resident of West Orange, NJ. No Redman. No Raffi. No Hooters.
[I am waiting for someone to give me the "Zeitgeist" counterargument to my "Great Man" argument... To which I will have no counter-counterargument.]
It's OK, Jon, I hear the Zeitgeist was from Jersey too.
Nope - Zeitgeist was from Paris, apparently:
The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27soun.html?hp)
Damn! Had we known, we could've found out if Lincoln really had a high-pitch voice.
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This isn't just about hip hop! This is much, much bigger. None of us would be listening to recorded music if it wasn't for Thomas Edison - a resident of West Orange, NJ. No Redman. No Raffi. No Hooters.
[I am waiting for someone to give me the "Zeitgeist" counterargument to my "Great Man" argument... To which I will have no counter-counterargument.]
It's OK, Jon, I hear the Zeitgeist was from Jersey too.
Nope - Zeitgeist was from Paris, apparently:
The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27soun.html?hp)
But it took someone like Edison to sell the sizzle - not just the steak! At least, I think that's how Edison put it.
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This isn't just about hip hop! This is much, much bigger. None of us would be listening to recorded music if it wasn't for Thomas Edison - a resident of West Orange, NJ. No Redman. No Raffi. No Hooters.
[I am waiting for someone to give me the "Zeitgeist" counterargument to my "Great Man" argument... To which I will have no counter-counterargument.]
It's OK, Jon, I hear the Zeitgeist was from Jersey too.
Nope - Zeitgeist was from Paris, apparently:
The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27soun.html?hp)
But it took someone like Edison to sell the sizzle - not just the steak! At least, I think that's how Edison put it.
Well, the really amazing thing about the phonautogram - the thing that gives me chills - is that it's actually a completely different conception of sound. As they said, it was never meant to be replayed, only studied visually! It's like raising a reluctant ghost from the past to actually pull the human voice through, via these scratches on a sooty piece of paper - it makes me wonder where else sound waves have been recorded - innocently or purposely - in non audio playback media (wood? water? wet concrete?), and whether we might be able to bring them to life, too. Also, it's amazing that he basically sent the sounds he was recording down an evolutionary detour that didn't intersect back with the main flow of history and knowledge until technology within the main flow was ready to receive it - it really blows my mind - the development of audio editing software, which essentially digitally deconstructs sound waves and displays them as visual information, enabled the completion of the circuit this guy inadvertently started with the analog deconstruction and visual display of sound waves, completely serendipitously.
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Yeah, actually, that is pretty fucking mind-blowing. I originally skimmed this, looking for the zinger, but whoa. Imagine what this could do to history, archaelogy, or linguistics, to someday be able to mine sounds from inanimate objects?
The meeting of old and new technology is pretty great too. There's got to be a name for that, maybe invented by that Henry Petrowski guy.
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This isn't just about hip hop! This is much, much bigger. None of us would be listening to recorded music if it wasn't for Thomas Edison - a resident of West Orange, NJ. No Redman. No Raffi. No Hooters.
[I am waiting for someone to give me the "Zeitgeist" counterargument to my "Great Man" argument... To which I will have no counter-counterargument.]
It's OK, Jon, I hear the Zeitgeist was from Jersey too.
Nope - Zeitgeist was from Paris, apparently:
The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27soun.html?hp)
But it took someone like Edison to sell the sizzle - not just the steak! At least, I think that's how Edison put it.
Well, the really amazing thing about the phonautogram - the thing that gives me chills - is that it's actually a completely different conception of sound. As they said, it was never meant to be replayed, only studied visually! It's like raising a reluctant ghost from the past to actually pull the human voice through, via these scratches on a sooty piece of paper - it makes me wonder where else sound waves have been recorded - innocently or purposely - in non audio playback media (wood? water? wet concrete?), and whether we might be able to bring them to life, too. Also, it's amazing that he basically sent the sounds he was recording down an evolutionary detour that didn't intersect back with the main flow of history and knowledge until technology within the main flow was ready to receive it - it really blows my mind - the development of audio editing software, which essentially digitally deconstructs sound waves and displays them as visual information, enabled the completion of the circuit this guy inadvertently started with the analog deconstruction and visual display of sound waves, completely serendipitously.
Makes me wonder how far human civilization could have advanced already if we could have given every great mind at least the opportunity to work on things like this. How many minds as great as this man or greater spent his or her whole life as a serf/slave or died on a factory floor. It could have been one unique person killed in some dumb war or something who could have got us to flying cars already.
I love you humanity...but c'mon guys.