To quote a certain movie franchise that has long outlived its welcome, “I would like to play a game….” This game, though, does not involve bloodshed, ridiculous puzzle-traps, or overly-simplistic moralism. No…wait, it does. It does involve bloodshed—the blood of thousands upon thousands of people whose lives were taken or ruined thanks to the so-called ideals of “leaders.” It does involve ridiculous traps—of supremely twisted, oftimes incoherent “logic” and propagandist rhetoric. And it sure as HELL does involve plenty of appeals to the supposedly simple, commonsense morality of The People.
The game is this: I will present to you a quote. This quote may come from speeches, writings, poster slogans, and so forth. YOU, then, get to guess where the quote originated! Now, to make things easier, you only have two choices here: did the quote come from the Third Reich, or did it come from the Republican Party?
And that’s all there is to it! There are no prizes in this game other than a greater awareness of the threat that right-wing rhetoric poses for progressive thinkers and policy-makers in this nation.
Yes, it can happen here. The George W. Bush years were just a taste of what a strong, right-wing, neoconservative government would be like—but, fortunately, Bush’s own self-limiting idiocy and croneyism demolished his regime from within, and ensured the liberal backlash that President Obama rode into office. But even though Obama’s in office and the Republican Party seems like a gutted cadaver, DO NOT FORGET that pundits like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Michael Savagestill speak for the majority of the Republican Party. And let’s not forget the wonderful examples of restrained, well-reasoned civil discourse being conducted at “Tea Parties” and town hall meetings around the nation.
Anyway, enough of this blather. Here’s the first quote!
Today we once more join with him in this strong and unshakable belief in the greatness of the country and the historic future of the nation. Loyal and unshakable, we trust this man and his historic mission, and will do everything to ensure that his orders will always find a ready and determined people.
OK, then. Reich or Republican?!
(Incidentally, quotes may be rewritten slightly in order to avoid giving them away with obvious terms such as “Reich” or “United States.” In each subsequent installment of “Reich or Republican” I will provide a link to the unedited original quote from the previous installment.)
[PEGRITZ(.com)! is proud to present a new series of Zen tales, koans, and parables translated from the Japanese by yours truly, uhhh, me (Pegritz). All of these anecdotes are believed to have been written (or, at least, inspired) by the legendary Zen master Cat-Piss Genji (c. 1760(?) CE – who-the-hell-knows CE). Very little is known of Cat-Piss Genji’s life outside of the events and stories that Japanese Zen historian Ishizaki Kaigo (1920-2008 CE) collected and published under the moniker The Zen of Assholery. For all we know, he might not have even been a real dude. But that’s irrelevant, as Cat-Piss’s adventures and the many koans he is credited with coining brilliantly illuminate the ineffable nature of enlightenment and serve as some of the finest parables of right understanding found in the Japanese Zen tradition. Too bad not a single Zen school will admit to having been associated with him. Well…regardless, I’ve decided to translate as much of Ishizaki’s The Zen of Assholery into passable English as possible, believing that Western Zen—specifically Zen in America—is in desperate need of Cat-Piss Genji’s ruggedly individualistic message. Here then, is the first of my translations from The Zen of Assholery, titled “Cat-Piss Genji at the Filthy Well.”]
After travelling for some time, Cat-Piss Genji and a young monk who had been travelling with him came to a well outside a small town. The townspeople at the well thought Cat-Piss and his companion to be vagrants and attempted to drive them away with sticks and rocks. Then like a crazed ninja Cat-Piss beat the townspeople until they shit themselves then beat them again for shitting. He then stripped them of their clothes and threw their soiled linens into the well.
“Master!” the young monk exclaimed. “You have poisoned these people’s well with their own filth, and knocked half of them senseless! How can you do something like that? [alternate translation: Now why the fuck did you do that?!] “
“Do you think their shitty drawers made that well any less disgusting than it already was?” asked Cat-Piss Genji. “Do you think the ass-whuppin’ I gave them will help them realize Buddha nature? A filthy well and a busted ass are greater lessons than a thousand sutras! Maybe you need a little extra suffering [dukkha] of your own to get you off your ass?”
The young monk was at that moment enlightened. He turned and ran as far away from Cat-Piss Genji as he could.
Today, in honor of Martin Luther King day, I’m not going to post one of Dr. King’s famous speeches, because I’d like to honor not just Dr. King himself but his legacy—and, considering that tomorrow America’s first black President, Barack Obama, will be officially sworn into the office, I’d like to present to you the video and transcript of Obama’s masterful speech on the current (and, hopefully, future) state of African-Americans in the United States. Let’s keep moving forward, people. And remember: Dr. King may have been one of the first to get the ball rolling, but it’s up to us to keep it rolling.
So here’s the video of Soon-to-Be-President Obama’s speech given at the Consititution Center in Philadelphia. And if this man doesn’t go down in history as one of the greatest American orators, I’ll be shocked.
“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”
Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.
The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.
Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.
And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.
This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign - to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.
This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.
It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many, we are truly one.
Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.
This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.” We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.
And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.
On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.
I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely - just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.
But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.
As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems - two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.
Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way
But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth - by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.
In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:
“People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish - and with which we could start to rebuild.”
That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety - the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.
And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.
Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.
But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.
The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through - a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.
Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.
Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.
A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.
This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.
But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.
In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns - this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.
This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.
But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people - that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.
For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances - for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans — the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives - by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.
Ironically, this quintessentially American - and yes, conservative - notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.
The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen - is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.
In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds - by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.
In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.
For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that.
But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.
That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.
This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.
This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.
This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.
I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation - the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.
There is one story in particularly that I’d like to leave you with today - a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.
There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.
And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.
She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.
She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.
Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.
Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”
“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.
But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.
A lot of people want the Windows 7 beta that good ol’ Microsoft released into the wild on Friday, 9 January 2009. Considering how hotly its been discussed in every tech-blog on the Internet, how much stir even screenshots of the damn thing have made, and how many tens of thousands of times a simple technical preview of the damn thing has been downloaded via BitTorrent…well, one would think that MS would have had a clue that officially releasing the beta into the wild would draw lots of attention. But, as usual, the public launch on Friday didn’t go as planned because they “underestimated” the number of people who’d be interested in downloading the beta. Their servers simply couldn’t take the beating and went casters-up within minutes of Friday afternoon’s delayed and delayed and delayed release.
Now, by way of “apology,” Microsoft has said, “Ah, to hell with limiting the beta to only 2.5 million downloads—all’a’y’all can have at it until January 24th! Enjoy!”
Regardless of whether this was just a typical Microsoft oversight or a deliberate ploy to drum up even more talk and excitement surrounding their forthcoming flagship release, it seems to me that the Ballmer Brigade knows exactly what it’s doing this time around. Microsoft has learned a lot from the Vista debacle, and it shows not only in the testing/marketing of Windows 7 but also in the actual construction of the product itself.
First, before we even get into my first impressions of Windows 7, let me say a few things about Vista. Vista is not a bad OS. Today, at least. In mid-November, I decided to invest in a new desktop computer, and because I’ve had good luck with HPs, I purchased a new one with a whopping 600gb hard-drive and 8 gigs of RAM. I was a little wary of it at first, because it came with the 64-bit version of Vista, and I’d read many a horror tale online (especially concerning music-related soft/hardware) about poor 64-bit driver support, endless software issues, and possible incidents of daemonic possession concerning Vista x64. However, all that storage plus 8 gigabytes of RAM for under $800? Hell, if any of my musical *ware didn’t work, I could always return the machine and look for something else.
Turned out my fears were mostly baseless. True, I have a few 32-bit VST plugins that won’t work on Vista x64, but they’re not even ones I use very often; everything else has worked just fine. And Vista x64 runs a thousand times better than Vista x32.
Of course, the different in bits—plus the quadcore processor, plus the RAM—certainly gives Vista a lot more room to work on this new computer as compared to my old one (dualcore processor, 300GB hard-drive, 2GB of RAM)…but Vista just flat-out works better on the new machine, in ways that have nothing to do with greater physical resources. My old machine didn’t originally come with Vista; it was born an XP machine, and just never took to the OEM version of Vista x32 that I put on it when Vista first came out. Even after the release of SP1, Vista on the older machine was unstable, cranky, and flatout more trouble than it was worth. Program crashes were an hourly affair. Sometimes it would recognize my pathetic M-Audio MobilePRE USB soundcard, and sometimes most of the time it wouldn’t (though I suspect the problem here lay more with the fact that the device was a complete Piece O’ Shit*). Anytime I tried to put the computer to sleep—or even change the screensaver: BSOD.
Even after two years of availability, my experience with Vista was so disheartening that I fully expected to wipe it off the hard-drive of my new computer and throw XP x64 on it.
Instead, I have not had a single problem with the Vista installation on my new computer. It is just as stable as XP ever was. I have had no hardware problems whatsoever. And, for that matter, no software problems aside from the aforementioned handful of VSTs. Vista 64-bit is a smokin’ awesome OS. At least I think so. Now.
Vista has finally matured into a decent step up from XP…even if, ultimately, it’s not that much of a step up. But just as it’s coming into its own, it’s going to be utterly eclipsed by Windows 7. Just as Windows ME was eclipsed by the vastly-superior Windows XP.
The problem with Vista—which Microsoft is most certainly not repeating with Windows 7—is that MS bungled the production and the launch of the OS. When the first beta of Vista came out, I was eager to try it, and really liked it: the new Aero look was sleek and pretty (I admit, I’m a sucker for eyecandy), and there were quite a few interface tweaks—especially in Explorer—that I quickly found indispensable. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why or how it took Microsoft five years to produce the OS, but…at least it seemed pretty decent. If, of course, they worked the bugs out of it before they released it. But hey, that’s why you do widespread beta-testing, right? To scare all the insects to the surface and swat them as they come crawling out of their holes.
When Vista went Golden in January of 2007, though…it was actually worse than the beta. I’d had some minor problems with driver support using the beta, but nothing to write home about. You expect that with a beta. The driver support in the final release of Vista was nothing short of execrable, however. It was a demonstrable step backwards from the beta. And rather than get better over time, it got even worse. Somehow, the patching process kept making Vista worse rather than better. Who the hell ever heard of an OS that gets worse and develops more problems over time? (Well, Mac OS X Leopard did, too, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.)
Simply put, Microsoft rushed the damn thing out the door. They’d spend five masturbatory years dicking around with the code and suddenly found themselves facing being left behind as Apple released another major upgrade to their OS. The OS was a Gordian nightmare of needlessly convoluted code accreted over five years by developer teams who clearly never knew what one another were working on. It was a bloated resource hog that demanded more power than a lot of computers then could handle. But even worse, the company knew it had a shoddy product on its hand and threw together a shoddy, last-minute promotional campaign to go with it.
When Microsoft released the betas for Vista, there was a lot of excitement about it. It was the first new version of Windows in half a decade, after all, and folks were excited to see what new innovations the OS would display. Basically, a shiny new interface and some GUI enhancements. But even though the expectations of many beta-testers were let down, the OS still seemed like it would be a decent product, provided, of course, that MS spend the time to debug the damn thing properly—something the company is not known to do. Well do I remember all the problems folks were having with XP when it first hit the market. But Microsoft’s philosophy has always been “Release it and we’ll patch it as we go along.” When you’re dealing with something as complex as a general-use operating system, that’s not necessarily a bad approach—if your initial release that people are actually going to pay for is stable enough and usable enough to be worth the investment.
Vista wasn’t. The version of Vista that went to manufacture in late 2006 was barely a release candidate, let alone an actual stable release. A lot of people complained that Vista just wasn’t worth the amount of money Microsoft was charging for it: after all, it didn’t offer that much more than XP already did—but every version of Mac OS X since the very first hasn’t really introduced anything revolutionary to that OS, and people still lined up for Tiger and Leopard even though they were merely incremental upgrades too. Vista immediately got a well-deserved bad reputation for being a clumsy bug-ridden dud.
It isn’t anymore. If you buy a new computer with Vista on it today, you’re getting a stable, decent operating system. Microsoft has finally patched and sutured and kludged it to the point where it’s just as usable as XP was in its heyday.
But thank the gods Microsoft has learned from the Vista mess. As soon as they realized that Vista’s reputation as a product as irrevocably tarnished, there were two things they could do: attempt to rehabilitate the product via patching and a new promotional campaign, and/or plan for its successor. Smartly enough, they did both…even though the rehabilitation campaign—the ridiculous “Mojave Experiment”—did more to prove that Vista was a black sheep than reform its public appearance. Fortunately, that rehab regime has resulted in a stable, good version of Vista to keep consumers happy until the follow-up OS is released. Fortunately, they’re doing that follow-up right.
Just a little over a year since MS first announced that they were actively working on Windows 7, I’m writing this using Microsoft Live Writer, which is running on the public beta of Windows 7. Of course, being a beta, the OS has problems still—I’ve had to install almost all of my drivers in Vista compatibility mode, for instance (but I fully anticipated that), and there have been a few stability bugs here and there. It’s definitely not ready for Prime Time yet.
But it sure as hell is close.
Even though there are, naturally, bugs in the system, the beta is almost entirely feature-complete. I’m sure some more stuff will be added by the time it goes gold, but the Windows 7 beta offers beta testers and early-adopters a chance to play with and test drive a lot of new features. Windows 7 is ultimately built on the same basic code structure as Vista, but 1) its developers have cleaned up the code and tightened the resource requirements considerably, and 2) the OS is full of notable advancements. I love the new icons-only taskbar, for instance; the compacted system tray is really useful, too; and the OS is packed full of reliability and troubleshooting utilities—many of which debuted in Vista, and have since become absolutely indispensable to me.
Excitement about Windows 7 has been growing since the first technical previews were demonstrated over the summer. This OS is clearly a step up from Vista, and an even bigger step up from XP. Microsoft has been releasing new screenshots, new demonstrations, and new information concerning the OS every chance it gets. Instead of hiring a million monkeys to pound on a million typewriters (or VT-100 terminals), the Microsoft development team has banded together tightly to release a lean, mean, fully-integrated machine full of neat new stuff…and Microsoft’s PR department has been busily letting the world know about it. After the Vista fumble, MS has rediscovered its focus. I’m surprised Ballmer didn’t come out on stage at CES this year chanting “WIN-DOWS SEV-EN! WIN-DOWS SEV-EN! WIN-DOWS SEV-EN!” Because that’s prettymuch exactly what the company is doing.
And it’s working.
The public beta offering on Friday was originally scheduled to be capped at 2.5 million downloads, but it’s clear now that way more than 2.5 million copies of the beta are going to be DLed. And that’s not counting the copies that are already being traded on BitTorrent. This is a beta release done right. With this amount of beta exposure, Microsoft will have a unique opportunity to test out their new OS on a huge variety of machines doing an even larger variety of tasks. Every window in the beta has a convenient Send Feedback link in the upper right corner, and the feedback application that it links to makes it very easy to talk back to the development team, so consumers can not only report bugs but request new features and comment on others. If Microsoft even takes a tenth of those reports to heart—and I’m betting they will, considering how dedicated to this project they appear—then by the time Windows 7 goes gold (almost certainly this year rather than the original projected 2010 date), they may very well have their first revolutionary, rock-solid release since Windows 95.
So, if you’re a Windows user, are you doing your part to help MS shape and polish this beast? If you have a spare computer lying around, give it a shot. It’s 100% free! Here’s a nifty overview of the new OS’s most salient new features courtesy of The How-To Geek, and here’s a guide to setting up a convenient dual-boot Windows Vista-or-XP/Windows 7 system courtesy of Lifehacker. I highly recommend installing Windows 7 on its own partition so you can easily switch back and forth from a stable version of XP or Vista and the beta because, like I said, this sucker still has some warts and holes in it. It’s not production-quality yet, but it will be soon enough!
I’ll report soon on the features of Windows 7 that I really like, once I have a few more days to test drive it and kick the tires.
*Seriously, never buy M-Audio products. They are the Ford of the computer-music world.
I have several books by fantasy/horror author Tim Powers—On Stranger Tides, Dinner at Deviant’s Palace, and, of course, The Stress of Her Regard—but the only one I’ve ever been able to finish is The Stress of Her Regard. Even though the other novels are substantially shorter and less dense than Stress, and despite the fact that On Stranger Tides has zombie pirates in it, I’ve lost interest in all of those other works before I even made it to page 100. Now, why is that? Is Powers a bad writer? No. Are his ideas lacking in creativity or fascination? No. So…what gives here?
Simply put, I think Tim Powers is one of those rare authors who only has one good book in him—one titanic text that embodies every last scrap of that author’s literary abilities. All books that come before it are merely preludes, prolegomenae, test drives; and all books that come after it are weak, watery things utterly lost in the long black shadow cast by The Book. J. D. Salinger is such an author (Catcher in the Rye was amazing…but, really, has anyone ever bothered to read Franny & Zooey?), as is Truman Capote (he wrote something other than In Cold Blood? Really?). There aren’t many of their kind, especially in the sci-fi/fantasy/weird-fiction genres, where authors often have imaginations capable of generating reams of quality texts. But you certainly cannot dismiss them as One-Hit Wonders—their one “hit,” after all, is so monumentally good that no matter how many other, irrelevant texts they may crank out, nothing will ever diminish the sheer genius of their Book.
The Stress of Her Regard is Tim Powers’ Book…and thanks to the folks at Tachyon Publications, for the first time in over fifteen years the novel is back in print (in a very handsome trade paperback edition).
While Powers’ many other books have either remained in print for years or have been periodically reissued, The Stress of Her Regard has been almost entirely ignored since its brief life as a Berkeley paperback in the early ‘90s. My cherished copy, purchased at the Waldenbooks in the Uniontown Mall in the interregnum between my sophomore and junior years in highschool, has never left my sight in the subsequent years; and the few people I know who have been lucky enough to find their own copies of this book (usually after I badgered them into seeking it out) are just as possessive. Until the blossoming e-commerce market brought used booksellers to Amazon.com and other such sites, it was virtually impossible to find even a beaten-up, broken-spined copy of this book—but even now, a quick Amazon search quickly reveals that most used copies of The Stress of Her Regardstart at $17…and that’s not for a special signed or rare edition. That’s just for the mass-market paperback. The special editions, such as the lovely limited edition produced by Charnel House the same year (1989) that the novel was released, generally start at $200.
In many ways, this novel has had the mystique of the “lost classic” for the last fifteen years—a tome jealously hoarded by those who’ve been touched (or tainted) by its tragic magic—and considering the plot of the book itself, and the characters that people it, such a fate has been somewhat apropos. But finally—FINALLY—The Stress of Her Regard is once more available to the reading public…whom I sincerely hope will glut themselves on this printing and insure that this true classic remains in print evermore.
“OK, fine,” you say. “What’s the damned thing about, anyway? What’s so special about it?”
The Stress of Her Regard is a Gothic novel—one of the very few hardcore Gothic works produced in the Twentieth Century—and is generally regarded as one of the most original takes on the concept of vampires and vampirism ever written.
“Oh, jesus,” you sigh. “Yet another ‘Gothic’ novel about vampires? Do they sparkle? Are they ridiculously sexy? Do they spout poetry?”
My gods, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but…yes, they sparkle. Yes, they are savagely sexy creatures. And yes—honest to Nyarlathotep, there’s poetry involved.
But this novel is not only lightyears distant from any of Stephanie Meier’s wangsty teenybopper tripe, it doesn’t even exist in the same galaxy as today’s ridiculous “vampire romance” literature—even though it is, indeed, filled to brimming with Romance. Because, when I say “Romance,” my usage of the term has nothing to do with treacly saccharine sexuality or hand-stapled-to-forehead Gothic stereotypes. When I say “Romance,” I mean the Romantics—as in the Romantic movement in British poetry, that delicious, decadent movement propelled by the likes of Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
In fact, Byron, Keats, and Shelley are all major characters in the novel. Though the story is primarily focused on the protagonist, turn-of-the-19th-Century obstetrician Michael Crawford, the plot itself revolves entirely around the lives of these three great poets…and the stony succubi who drain their blood and slaughter their families even as their bites drive their beloveds into whirlwinds of poetic ecstacy.
The “vampires” of the novel are not undead corpses who creep forth by night to plague the living, but rather ancient lamiae—identified with the nephilim, the “giants in the earth” of the Bible—who seem to be made of some sort of sentient, spiritual stone. They manifest as mountains, or as statues, but can also appear as glittering, electrophosphorescent serpents, or as everyday humans. For centuries, these awe-inspiring but life-draining creatures have lived amongst humans, often “marrying” themselves to one person, whom they love exclusively, to the detriment of their lovers’ families or anyone who may come between the lamia and her adored. They have traditionally allied themselves with poets, though, because their presence proves to be a mystical source of inspiration for the poetically-minded.
Michael Crawford is not a poet—he is, in fact, a baby-doctor—who accidentally finds himself wed to a lamia of his own. On the way to his own wedding, Crawford and his groomsmen one night find themselves drunkenly celebrating the forthcoming nuptials at an English country inn built on ancient Roman pavement. At one point, trying to recover a friend driven half-mad by the sight of something unnatural in the storm-wracked dark, Crawford finds himself confronted by a statue in the yard—a statue with an outstretched finger. In his pocket is the expensive wedding ring he’d purchased for his beloved, so to avoid losing it in the dark and the muck, he slips it on the statue’s finger. When he attempts to retrieve the ring later, though, the statue is nowhere to be found, the ring gone with it.
Crawford eventually makes it to his wedding and marries his betrothed…completely unaware that he has inadvertently taken another bride. When he wakes the next morning in bed with the butchered remains of his human wife, the story of Crawford’s subsequent wanderings throughout the Continent, entwined by fate and by “marriage” with the lives of the three great Romantic poets, begins in earnest.
The Stress of Her Regard is at once a retelling of the “secret” lives of the great Romantics and a startling, effective evocation of the classic Gothic novels that the Romantics adored. Its plot is labyrinthine, filled to brimming with subterfuge, dire deeds, and devious evil. It wends its storm-wracked way from the ancient lands of the first Britons to the peaks of the ancient, godlike Alps; from the foetid slums of London, where “neffers,” or nephilim-addicts, attempt to lure lamiae of their own by shaking handfuls of kidney stones, to the politically-charged environs of Prussian-occupied Italy. The novel is liberally drenched in all the elements of the Gothic: spooky castles, tumultuous weather, nefarious conspirators, familial curses, a brooding sense of inescapable doom, and, of course, beautiful, seductive evil. The multilayered plot, which takes place over several decades, is oftimes reminiscent of Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk, and, naturally, the inevitable influence of Frankenstein is quite apparent.
But what’s most fascinating about this novel is its portrayal of Byron, Keats, and Shelley. We meet Keats as a young medical student in London, Byron and Shelley at Lake Leman (shortly after the magical night that eventually gave birth to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), and again and again throughout their entire lives. The various poets’ tragically short lives are brilliantly reinterpreted in light of the lamia/vampire mythology that Powers has created. Of course, in the hands of a lesser author (such as Anne Rice or Stephanie Meier), the whole “Romantic poets suffering from attacks from vampiric creatures” could easily be sheer tripe…but Powers knows his history, and the lives of the historical characters, very well. Regardless of the fact that the novel is historical fiction, I learned a lot about the characters through this book. In fact, this was the novel that truly got me into the Romantic poets. Once I’d read about their lives—which certainly were haunted, though not by supernatural sparkling serpents made of living stone—I sought out everything I could find about them, and was thrilled to discover that almost everything in this novel did indeed happen…though, of course, not quite as Powers describes.
Powers’ prose itself, however, is this novel’s only weakness—though it’s a weakness completely overshadowed by the monumental imagination of the story itself. I’m one of those folks for whom a perfectly good narrative can be thoroughly wrecked by an author’s bland style. I’ve liked a number of early Dean Koontz novels (Phantoms still remains a favorite), but his prose is…workmanlike, at best—and utterly mechanical at worst. Considering the nature of the story Powers is telling in The Stress of Her Regard, the simple, straightforward writing is a little jarring. One would expect a somewhat more flowery, more Romantic prose apropos for a plot involving the Romantics themselves. However, Powers’ straightforward, no-nonsense prose is the complete antithesis thereof. Though that detracts a tiny bit from my overall pleasure with the book, the story itself is just so damned good that after the first fifty pages I was completely enraptured by the tale and no longer noticed any deficiencies in the prose.
All things considered, this is a terrific book. It is most assuredly the best book in Powers’ entire oeuvre, though by all means check out his other works if you particularly like this one. That I found them a little lacking is irrelevant to anyone but me. But truly, had I produced a book like The Stress of Her Regard, I would’ve never written another word. It’s truly a shame that this novel has been so overlooked—but now that it’s back in print, it may finally get the chance to gather a true cult following. Go ahead and just buy it. Now. Then read the first twenty pages. If you’re not hooked by then, you may be more stone than flesh. (Of course, I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.)
Well, finally, I’ve gotten a proper music homepage up for the distribution of my solo musical works (i.e., the stuff that I release under the name “Derek C. F. Pegritz” as opposed to any of myotheraliases). Conveniently enough, it’s located at the following address:
At any rate, all three of my Subterranean Passage EPs are available there, as is my recent album of music inspired by the movie THX 1138. Those two projects could not possibly be different; you may even wonder how they both came from the same guy. Diversity is a good thing! Everyone should try it sometime. Also, the fact that I was suicidally depressed while writing the Subterranean Passage pieces and relatively at peace while obsessing over the THX 1138 material no doubt made a big difference in how each project was conceived and executed.
The Subterranean Passage EPs, Not much longer now, A special place prepared for you in hell, and Please notify next of kin are collections of shapeless, ice-cold ambient audio sculpture: extremely minimalist experiments in capturing, through sound, the feeling of your life ending. I’ve been told by some that they make for relaxing listening(!), but most folks find them to be great pieces to inspire horror fiction. At any rate, if you like your music amorphous, atonal, frigid, and droning, you may very well dig this stuff. I won’t blame you if you don’t, however.
THX 1138: Incidental Sound Architectures is a completely different beast—an upbeat collection of skittery IDM beats, ominous subterranean sound textures, and spacey audio effects that attempt to capture the atmosphere of the film in original audio compositions. It’s not exactly a soundtrack to the movie: more a collection of tracks inspired by concepts, images, characters, and situations from the film. If you like artists such as Download, Otto von Schirach, Front Line Assembly, and others considered to be “Intelligent Dance Music” or “industrial,” you’ll probably get a kick out of this stuff.
Also on the page are a number of “loose” tracks—assorted works that don’t quite fit together with anything else. Personally, my favorite of these “assorted tracks” is “The Radiologist’s Nightmare,” which I believe to be the creepiest damn thing I’ve ever written. Seriously. I want to see some young, aspiring horror filmmaker produce a short—preferably an otherwise silent pieces—to which “The Radiologist’s Nightmare” is the soundtrack.
And guess what? Because everything on this site is, as always, FREE to download and licensed under Creative Commons, you’re more than welcome to do so! Feel free to remix stuff, sample stuff, do whatever you like with stuff…just, please, do a brotha the favor of acknowledging where the source sounds came from. Dig?
All files are available from the Internet Archive as well as from this website. All downloads contain the tracks of the albums plus printable-quality cover artwork. Unfortunately, since I no longer have the source files for any of the Subterranean Passage EPs, those are only available as 256kbps mp3s—but you can get the THX 1138 album as either high-quality mp3s or FLACs. All other music added to the site in the future will be available as in both mp3 and FLAC formats as well.
(Personally, I cannot tell the difference between high-quality mp3 and FLAC, but there are some folks out there who apparently can. Doesn’t surprise me, really. Too many years of loud-ass concerts and club nights have done a number on my hearing—one of the reasons I rarely go out even to shows anymore. Music is more than just a hobby to me: it’s a bandage for the innumerable wounds on my spirit. If I can’t appreciate it anymore because I’ve blown out my hearing, I might as well be dead, so….)
So that’s it. Check ‘em out. Download ‘em. Give ‘em to your friends or your exes. But most of all, enjoy what you hear, even if it is incredibly discordant and depressing. As I said earlier, diversity is vital to everyone’s lives, so even if you’re not the ambient-music type of you’d rather listen to Ice Cube than Plateau, check out the stuff I’ve done anyway. It might strike a chord with you. Or just annoy your neighbors. Either way, I’ve done my job.
It’s seven minutes of vituperative, bipolar spleen and disappointment. I’ve classified it as “industrial,” but lest you ridiculous cyber-goth children who believe that bad trance music with ridiculous vocals is industrial be misled, I’m talking “industrial” in the oldskool “machine noises, distortion, and jagged audio sculpture” sense, a la Einsturzende Neubauten or early Skinny Puppy. There is a bit of IDM thrown in, though, and lots of twitchy, glitchy atmospherics and raging feedback.
PEGRITZ(.com)! as it is will be going away shortly. I’m just going to revamp the site into a somewhat more professional portal to my writing, music, and assorted other projects. This blog is just going to move to the address blog.pegritz.com after the Reconstruction is complete…which, knowing me, will probably take anywhere between six months and seven years. The RSS feed will remain the same, though.
Oh! And don’t forget to check out my Tumblr blog, The Collected Works of Derek C. F. Pegritz, which not only indexes this blog but every other damn blog I’ve got going—plus random little clips like quotes, fun links, music that I’ve been listening to, and assorted other miscellany. And it’s got its own RSS feed…which kinda/sorta is an RSS feed for all my RSS feeds—a meta-RSS feed, if you will. But then again, I’m a pretty meta kind of dude. In fact, right now, I’m writing about writing this very sentence! Wrap your brain around that strange loop, Hofstadter!
No Technorati links for this post, ‘cause what else would I link to? Other people’s blog-restructuring efforts? Like I care about anyone other than myself!
Everyone knows by now that Google’s finally thrown its own offering, Chrome, into the Great Second Browser Wars. It’s been called “soft, yet elegant” and a “smart, innovative browser” and everyone everywhere is crowing about everything from its simplicity to its speed. Sure, there was a little craziness about Chrome’s EULA, but that’s been taken care of. If you’re reading this, though, chances are you just want my take on the browser. Well, here it is! As a nod to Chrome’s absolutely-no-nonsense, no-frills approach to the browser’s interface, I’m going to restrain my usual logorrhea and deliver a nice, calm, minimalist review.
The GUI is incredibly sparse, but (like all Google products) quite intuitive: tabs, back and forth buttons, a stop/reload button, a bookmark star next to the URL/search bar, and two control buttons (one for page-related activities like opening new tabs and printing, and one for browser preferences). No menus. No titles. That’s it. It’s the browser equivalent of a Mondrian painting.
Whenever you open a new tab, the default home page shows you nine of your most frequented sites (somewhat like Opera’s Speed Dial) plus a list of recent searches. Also, new tabs display your bookmark bar, which you can also select to have shown at all times. When you mouse over a link, its URL appears in a little pop-up line in the lower lefthand corner of the window. And, of course, it’s got your usual pop-up blockers, cache clearers, etc. Nothing revolutionary, just handy.
When you download a file, its download progress pops up at the bottom of the tab. Chrome’s downloads manager opens up a new tab in which all recently downloads are listed by date. Cool.
I particularly like the “Omnibar” that combines Google search with the traditional URL bar so you can easily search Google and your own browsing history at once. Again, nothing earthshaking here, just neat.
Now here’s the really impressive shit.
Google Chrome is very fast. Pages render with lightning speed and JavaScript executes smoothly and quickly. The WebKit HTML engine and v8 JavaScript engine are top-notch. But big deal, right? Firefox renders pages quickly, too, as does IE8 and Opera—and the new JavaScript framework Mozilla has been working on for Firefox will be just as good, if not better, than v8. But what makes Google Chrome so neat is this: each tab, each JavaScript process, is run in its own processor thread.
What’s that mean to non-geeks? Simple: if a JavaScript or plugin glitch makes a tab’s processes choke, only the tab closes, not the whole browser. Now, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 implements this as well, and I’m sure Mozilla will be doing the same shortly too—but neither IE8 nor Firefox 3 have built-in process managers that let you track individual tabs and individual JavaScript engines’ memory usage and stability. Yes. Chrome has its own Windows-style Task Manager.
Don’t think that’s cool or useful? Try opening it up the next time Chrome seems to be acting really slow or some page doesn’t want to reload. You’ll be able to recognize the problem and axe it without causing any of your other Chrome tabs or windows so much as a shiver.
So, yeah….Google Chrome is good. Damn good, in fact.
But it’s not great. Not yet, that is.
The version of Chrome available right now is prettymuch just a proof-of-concept beta. An initial offering to publicly test some new concepts and technologies. It works great—hasn’t crashed on me yet, and I’ve been running it for two days, loading it up with tons of tabs containing everything from Flash games to extremely Ajax-heavy webapps.
But it’s limited. It presently offers no extensibility aside from support for common plugins like Flash and Shockwave, but Google has announced that the browser will support extensions like Firefox soon. In fact, I’m betting it will probably support any and all Firefox extensions, or at least Google will release an API to make it easy to port FF extensions to Chrome.
And they’d better not prevent developers from offering ad-blocking extensions. Or that will kill their browser before it even has a chance to grow. Google text ads are fine by me, but if I can’t click an annoying Flash ad and say, “Go the hell away,” I’m jumping ship without a second thought.
The tab bar definitely needs work, too. Whereas FF3 will allow tabs that do not fit all on one screen to scroll, Chrome merely makes tabs smaller and smaller as it tries to squeeze more and more into the row. Eventually, they turn into nothing more than tiny white peaks with little X’s in their corners. Hint: copy Firefox’s scrolling capability.
A little more polish, a little more user-end functionality would be nice, too, but I know that will be coming soon enough.
Nonetheless, for being an early technical beta, Chrome is quite polished. It works great. It’s stable as can be. I’ve been using it almost exclusively for three days now. I really like it.
In a few months, once more functionality—and, even more importantly, more support for functionality—gets added…I’ll probably love it.
I haven’t been this excited about a stupid browser since I first discovered Firefox’s 0.1 beta years ago. Chrome manages to capture the minimal aesthetic of that ancient Firefox progenitor and add an HTML/v8 framework to it that makes it perfectly suited for today’s interactive Web.
In fact, I would recommend this beta—this right-out-the-door, slapped-together first-run beta—to any web user, novice to expert, who wants a faster, more stable browsing experience. Yes, it’s that good already.
So yeah. Way to go, Google guys! But you’ve still got stuff to work on. Quite fuckin’ around with Picasa and get down on it.
[Errata: Is it just me, or does the Chrome “ball” logo look like a Pokemon sphere? “I choose you WebKit!” *Peewwww-p-p-peww-pewwwwww!*]
Here’s a quick heads-up for fans of all things Pegritzian: I’ve just started a tumblelog over at Tumblr.com.
“Jesus, Pegritz,” you say, “why the hell do you need another freakin’ blog? You’ve already got this one, plus your Footnotes to the Human Species thing, your NONFICTION! thing, and that Oneirophrenia site you never update…not to mention countless others that even you forget that you have!”
Well, here’s the cool thing about having a Tumblr log: it acts as an aggregation site for the RSS feeds of all my other sites. Whenever I post something new here on PEGRITZ(.com)!, a link to it with an explanatory excerpt is automatically posted on the tumblelog. Whenever I post a new chapter to a story over at Footnotes to the Human Species or any other site, the same thing happens. Anytime I update any of my sites, links to those new updates will technomagickally appear as links on the tumblelog! It’s basically a one-stop shop for all things Pegritzian—and, best of all, it has its own RSS feed. In essence, subscribing to the tumblelog feed is like subscribing to all relevant Pegritz-related RSS feeds at the same time.
But wait! There’s more! Tumblr.com also provides a nifty little no-nonsense interface for posting Random Junk, like cool quotes, pictures, links, and…hell, just about anything else you can think of. This is not the kind of material I’d post on, say, this blog or on Footnotes because I don’t like to clutter up content that I regard as more important or relevant to a site with random videos of cats doing silly things, links to amusing articles, miscellaneous pictures and other such errata. But I still like to share that kind of information with folks who enjoy little tidbits of weirdness along with more substantial content. So, not only will the Pegritz tumblelog index the meatier content of my primary sites, it’ll also serve as a dumping ground for the assorted, individually-wrapped chunks of mind candy that I’m constantly stumbling on around the ‘Net.
PEGRITZ(.com)!
