I am not a Mac fanatic. I am not a Mac fanatic. I am not a Mac fanatic. I am not a Mac fanatic. I am not a Mac fanatic.

Sure, I spent my Friday evening trekking up to UCLA to buy Apple's new OS within 30 minutes of it officially being available (8 p.m.) and then the next three hours or so installing and playing and configuring and testing and crashing and rebooting and doing some more playing, but I am not a Mac fanatic.

Anyway, against all reasonable safe computer practices I did the Panther immediately upon its release. Like most rational people I had planned to update once the bleeding edge-ers had blown up their machines with all the bugs, and even figured I'd hold out until the first maintenance update (10.3.1?) was released.

Wrong.

I'm typing on Panther as we "speak." Overall impressions so far are very positive. I'm running a first-generation TiBook G4 (400 mHz/512/10) and it's by no means the sleek cat it was back in 2001. OS X up to this point had been useable but I was always nagged in the back of my mind by the fact that OS 9 just felt "soooo" snappy on this machine. Well, Panther feels close to "sooo" snappy -- menus really pop down, Finder windows resize well, dialogue sheets crisply appear and disappear, opening new windows is great. I really pleased so far.

All applications seem to be compatible. In a nice bonus, they all seem to launch noticeably faster than under Jaguar. Dreamweaver is especially invogorated under Panther, which is great.

Odd observations:
-- TextEdit really does know how to open basic Word docs and can also save its own files as Word docs.
-- The new Activity Monitor utility is great. It's like "top" on steroids.
-- iTunes and iPhoto are both much faster to launch, though neither was really updated for Panther
-- Safari is at v100 and is really, really quick (tough to get any faster, but it is...)
-- Fast user switching is not very exciting on my machine. No spinning/rotating desktop here. Must not have the proper graphics hardware (I told you this was an "old" machine). Oh well...

Only three temporary glitches: 1) had to re-enable php and I thought simply editing the httpd.conf file in BBEdit would do the trick. It didn't, but a quick Google search gave me the proper Terminal commands. 2) had to reinstall MySQL. Downloaded Aaron Faby's "dumb" installer, fiddled with things until phpMyAdmin told me everything was cool. 3) had a rare "hard" crash of the machine shortly after Panther got installed. Dunno what happened but I launched BBEdit and the machine totally locked up. After the forced restart it wouldn't boot all the way, getting stuck just before the Finder and Desktop appear. One more forced restart and things seem to be fine. Hmm...

Well, as you can see, it's after 1 a.m. Time to call it a night. Will do more exploring tomorrow. 

So I broke my pledge and actually watched Game 4 of the World Series. After all, Roger Clemens was pitching and it was the final start of a spectacular career. Of course the media hype has been intense all season, and particularly during the post-season, but this kind of thing doesn't happen very often. Baseball is also particularly good at creating monumental moments given its deeply historical and nostalgic place in American culture. Thus, the combination of modern media and entrenched feeling made for a "special" moment when Clemens walked off the mound at the end of the seventh inning. He left after striking out his eighth batter of the game (quick: name the Marlin who's claim to fame will most likely be that he was the last batter to strike out against The Rocket) and then the nostalgia kicked in. Tips of the cap all 'round from the Pro Player fans and the Marlins for one of the best power pitchers ever to play baseball, and Fox's Jack Buck was there to remind those of us watching at home just how special this all was. I don't mean to sound totally cynical (I acknowledged, and enjoyed watching everyone acknowledge Clemens), but it's important to remember that we allow ourselves to experience moments like these as "special." We're allowing ourselves to participate in the emotion of celebration for a career well-done. And it's important, no fundamental, that we experience the celebration as a group, with other people, even if we're engaging with those other people through a television screen.

Interestingly, Roger Rosenblatt had an essay on the News Hour tonight that focussed on the idea of fandom. Look for it at Rosenblatt's News Hour page in the next couple of days.

UPDATE (10:34 P.M.): Who doesn't love walk-off home runs! Ahh, just another "moment" I'll treasure for the rest of my life. Or until the beginning of Fox's Fall TV schedule. ;-) 

Well, after almost two weeks of drama, drama, and more drama, America's hopes for a mythical Cubs/Red Sox World Series were dashed in two nights of unfortunate managerial decisions. In both cases, Woods in the case of the Cubs and Martinez in the case of the Red Sox, pitchers were left in when they should have been taken out, and in both cases the teams lost everything. Certainly not all of it rests on pitching, but momentum by both the Marlins and Yankees was only increased as the two pitchers rapidly crumbled. In Martinez's case, the manager even asked the pitcher if he's was still good. Deciding not to overrule his star pitcher, the manager went back to the dugout and it was completely downhill from there. Only Aaron Boone remained to finish things.

And so America is bummed. After eons of failure this year was supposed to be the cinderella year: Cubs-Red Sox in the World Series. For the Cubs it would be their first trip since 1945 and for the Red Sox it would be another chance to break the Curse of the Bambino and win the Series for the first time since 1918. What made this America's bummer, ultimately, is the huge Chicago and Boston fan base stretched across the country. Sure the Yankees have a similarly huge fan base, but the Yankees also have an ever-increasing tradition of Braves-like playoff appearances. Which makes them boring for those of us who watch baseball in more nostalgic mindset. And now one of the most up-and-coming boring teams is playing the Florida Marlins. Yes, Florida, that team with the boring Pro Player Stadium that's an awful "throwback" to the multi-purpose fields of the 1970s and 1980s. Florida, that team who are very much a product of the high-stakes "economy" of modern baseball. (Yes, so are the Red Sox and Cubs. I'm well aware that nostalgia is essentially a falsehood. This is my blog, not yours.) And that's what makes the Yankees so gosh darn dull: they're a team full of superstars who've been thrown together at the cost of three less-affluent major league teams (or something). There's only the Yankee history holding the current team together, but the current Yankees seem so "painted on."

And so America is bummed. Fox experienced amazing ratings with the Cubs and Red Sox chasing the pennant, and now all they've got to look forward to is a dull Yankees/Marlins World Series. Sure, there will be some great baseball, amazing plays, pitching, and home runs, but it's going to be the Yankees and Marlins. Sorry, but I'll be sitting around waiting for network reruns to end.

Maybe I'll watch the second half of Game 7 though. 

I have to admit I spent most of the LCS watching the Cubs/Marlins, and I quite enjoyed Al Leiter's back-up color commentary. He's by no means a professional commentator but he's articulate enough to provide some pretty interesting perspective. It's too bad that he'll only get more talkative in the years to come (he'll be asked back next year if the Mets don't get to the post-season) and thus become less interesting, but this time he was good.

Bret Boone on the other hand... Woops. That one didn't work out so well, eh Fox? Since I hadn't been watching the Yankees/Red Sox games too much I hadn't heard him until tonight. In fact, I'd forgotten he was even in the booth until he spoke this evening. He sounded like one of those on-the-field reporters (his mic was too close to his mouth) and he only said about a sentence every two innings, and unfortunately what he said wasn't very interesting. After all, he's a second baseman so there's not a lot he can contribute beyond some defensive stuff and some hitting stuff (yes, I'm well aware that Joe Morgan was also a second baseman). Since there's so much time between events on the field, Leiter, as a pitcher, could offer much better up-to-the-moment commentary, dissecting pitching strategies and such, and I thought he brought an interesting less-polished contribution to the NLCS. Boone, either because he's not a pitcher or because he was generally too reserved, couldn't contribute to the in-booth banter nearly as well. Thus, we were stuck with Joe Buck (who's actually not bad and comes from a respected announcing family) and that gawd awful Tim McCarver, otherwise known as the Dan Dierdorf of baseball commentators. Talk, talk, talk, talk. Yak, yak, yak, yak. I'm not nearly as bothered by football and baseball commentators as my dad is, but McCarver has difficulty staying quiet or at least making sure he's got something really interesting to contribute, and I begin to see what Dad's always complaining about when I'm forced to endure Tim McCarver.

Anyway, kudos to Al. 

...and a $99 .Mac subscription.

iBlog is a pretty nice blogging app, and its connection to your .Mac "homepage" is seamless. iBlog seems to be a little quirky, especially in terms of configuring the templates, and adding the navigation content you see on the right side of the page. I'd like to add some things I've seen on other blogs, such as links to other blogs and other things which I've temporarily forgotten. Point is, you can't really do it in iBlog (at least using the interface).

Also, look at the C A L E N D A R. See how the actual calendar is not centered in the table cell? That bugs me but I can't figure out what's wrong. Everything in the HTML is saying "center!" but for some reason that cell or <div> just ain't listening. Gotta look through the iBlog forums I guess... 

Damage Incorporated: Metallica and Production of Musical Identity

Hmm. Perhaps... 

This part was much easier to come up with. From the dissertation I've basically broken up both the first and last chapters into two. Six chapters also means three equal "Parts," which is also cool.

 

Damage Incorporated: Metallica and the Production of Identity 

PART I — GENRE AND STYLE
Chapter 1 –Thrashing All Around: Rhythm, the Body, and the Genre of Speed Metal
Chapter 2 – Death Greets Me Warm: The “Fade to Black” Paradigm
PART II — RACE AND REPRESENTATION
Chapter 3 – “Thinking Man’s Metal”: Whiteness, Detachment, and the Performance of Musical Complexity
Chapter 4 – The Mode and the Road: Musical Tourism and Ethnicity Roaming
PART III — COMMERCE AND HISTORY
Chapter 5 – Shape Shift, Mutiny in the Air: The Sell-Out Question
Chapter 6 – Which Blues? Whose Blues?: Popular Music Histories 

Just spoke to Cecilia. After sharing condolences over the Cubs, we worked through the book title some more. After a quick peek at Word's thesaurus, things are leaning toward:

"Damage Incorporated: Metallica and the Production of Identity"

While Cecilia likes "Business," that word brought to mind the whole "This Business of Music" thing. Basically a famous book about how to survive in the music industry, readers learn all about contracts and royalties and other minutæ involving the "Business" of music. That's not at all the image I want for the Metallica book, even though I am still interested in how the mechanisms of commerce come into play as part of the construction and negotiation of identity. "Production" seems like a nice middle ground that gets at the concept of business/commerce without getting at the M.B.A. of business/commerce.

Stay tuned... 

Been sitting around thinking about the title for the Metallica book. So far, Cecilia likes: "Damage Incorporated: Metallica and the Business of Identity." While I do like the pre-colon element ("Damage Incorporated" will turn a lot of heads in a book store) I'm not yet convinced that "the Politics of Identity" is the best summation of the book.