. . . if by "near future" you mean the present and/or the immediate past

so, it looks like for all the hype and hullabaloo surrounding the new yorker conference--or, at least, all the hype and hullabaloo the new yorker has attempted to create surrounding its conference--there isn't going to be much to it that people who read the new yorker won't already know a fair bit about. i mean, there's plenty of cool shit goin' down--dan barber will be there to talk about his sustainable and community-based agricultural projects; jonathan haidt, a social psychologist who co-authored a delightful paper on the neurological underpinnings of morality with one of the current loves of my life, joshua greene, will be on hand to remind (or at least ask) everyone to be nice; and david byrne is david byrne is david byrne, and i shouldn't have to say any more about that--but then there's will goldfarb, who makes things that are reminiscent of desserts out of ingredients that are mostly food and who was written up by buford last june (the conference page credits him with the invention of "experiental" cuisine, which sounds like what you get when you stir fry blindfolded while listening to early sonic youth albums, but i'm fairly certain that the term goldfarb actually uses is "experiential," which just sounds like a snooty, puffed-up way of saying you can taste it), and will wright, the creator of the sims, who was profiled in the magazine last november prior to the release of his new game, spore. and there's some guy who makes cocktails out of oxygenated water (?!?) whose name i refuse to know, and a bunch of men who know how to make money, and some other men who know how to make money by selling drugs. it'll be good enough, is what i'm saying, but for $1,200 it could probably be better. even my malcolm, whom remnick is pimping over this shindig as if he were a berry-lipped virgin lass and the conference were being held in a corner room at The Enchanted Hunters,* is recycling last year's news and lugging mike mccready,** the dude whose hit-song formula was tucked oh so tidily into the center of last october's epagogix article, back into the spotlight.

that article, as we all (secretly) know, was my birthday present, and a lovely present it was, and here we are at my approximate half-birthday talking about it again, and i don't love it any less . . . but the "hooray for money and formulas!" zealotry of some of its subjects didn't exactly warm my heart, and since this conference is about the future (or so we're told) and, presumably, how grand this select group of individuals is on the verge of making it--i don't know. i guess i was hoping for something a little more optimistic from malcolm than "i know a guy who can tell you how to pad a radio playlist." because if platinum blue is the future of music, boys and girls, well, i don't even know what i'll do. i hated that gnarls barkley song, but it was all around me everywhere i went for months and months, it sat on the crown of my head and thumped its knuckles against my temples in that relentless 2/4 tempo until tears came to my eyes, and i really was crazy . . . and in the land of platinum blue that would be my life. or, no, i guess more accurately my life would swerve helplessly between that and the soul-deadening cruise-liner-lounge "jazz" of norah jones. what is up, america? all the music out there, and you're all, i want to swap my right ventricle for a drum machine! no, i want to be yelled at by angsty boys wearing suits and eyeliner! no, i want to drown slowly in grade b maple syrup!

well, that's your right, isn't it. you can do all of those things. but i want to listen to mirah and the version of love spit love's "am i wrong" where the marching band comes in in the last bridge, and joanna newsom, and anything that involves a banjo or a harpsichord, and if you and people like mike mccready push the sounds i love any farther toward the left end of the dial we're apt to fall off the edge of the earth. so huzzah for math and entrepreneurs--the world benefits greatly from them both, to be sure--but keep them away from my stereo, thank you very much. we're doing just fine on our own.

i don't know why malcolm gets so excited about these things. i tend to chalk it up to a boyish love of gadgetry, the end result of coming of age alongside atari and microsoft, coupled with a very endearing desire to know why any of us likes any of the things we like, and i forgive it. how could i not? after all, i wonder about that plenty myself; i also wuved my colecovision. but all software is not good software, and lately i'm of the opinion that very little progress is good progress. i thought this conference was designed to convince me of the opposite. no dice, new yorker; it's the same old song and dance on a new stage. you don't care about progress, not really. all your pomp and chest-beating about the recycled paper you print your blow-ins on . . . you're not fooling us. the magazine itself is bright, clean, pre-consumer, tree-felling content through and through, and in truth the recycled blow-ins basically negate themselves by coming six to an issue.*** poor elizabeth kolbert, traipsing all over the planet, trying to gather enough convincing evidence to compel the right people to make the right changes in the hopes of constructing an honestly inspiring future--and the future, ungrateful little churl that it is, doesn't even invite her to its party.

well, i'm not going either, lizzie. but maybe you could ask a friend of yours who is going to ask daniel levitin why i and everyone i know can't seem to listen to this song any fewer than nineteen times in a row in any single sitting, and yet have never once heard it on the radio. curious, no? or not. i can't tell anymore. but now that i've got it in my head i must progress into my own private near future, which consists, obviously, of another eighteen listens. and that's enough music math for this evening.



* not that this is all bad; the video promo they've put together shows off malcolm's pretty eyelashes quite nicely. look at them batting all dark and sweet, bat-bat; between them and that perfect adam's apple i'm wobbly enough in the knees that i'd hand over that $1,200, if i had it to hand. oooooooh, what an evil genius david remnick is.

** lest you, as i was initially, be confused, this is not the mike mccready who has been the lead guitarist of pearl jam for the last sixteen or seventeen years--and thank god for that; i'd have been sorely disillusioned by such treachery.

*** really, is that necessary? seriously? i don't believe you.