Jarvis Cocker, ex-front man of the destined to be legendary Britpop combo Pulp, is about to release the first full-length CD from his new project, the provocatively named Relaxed Muscle. I had my first sampling today of the song “Be Real,” which is rather shadily offered for download today at Fluxblog. This song is great! It’s like some weird collision of Pulp, “Heroes”-era Bowie and the Fall. It has me totally enthusiastic for an impending album for the first time in a long time. Cocker has always struck me as an oddball genius on the verge of charicaturizing himself into obscurity, so I’m thankful that, in this song at least, he has kept his wits about him and written a truly superb track. You can also catch a video for another of his new tunes at NME.com.

Everyone thinks The Onion is gut-bustingly hilarious and so do I, but if it came down to choosing between the faux newspaper’s satiric content — The Onion proper — and its supplemental entertainment section — The Onion A.V. Club — I’m almost certain I would choose the latter. This section, composed primarily of movie, music, video and book reviews, is highly underrated or at least under-noticed.

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Without apology, I admit a prejudice against any Windows-based software that blatantly mimics innovations that originated on the Mac OS; a prime example is Candy Labs’ App Rocket, a startlingly faithful and shameless reproduction of Objective Development’s superb LaunchBar that was developed for — you might even say “ported to” — Windows XP recently.

Unfairly or not, I regard those indiscretions with scorn, and not a little indignation, which was my attitude when stumbling across Picasa, a program that bears a remarkable similarity to Apple’s iPhoto software for management of digital photos. I might have dismissed it altogether, but the attractive design of their Web site hinted at some level of cleverness at work, and so I decided to download and install the software on my Windows box for a trial run.

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When I lived in Southern California in the early part of the 1990s, I saw earthquakes, wild fires, droughts, floods and the worst civil riots in recent American history. Not necessarily for those reasons exclusively, I found it hard to nurture much affection for the Golden State, but I still do have good reasons to remain sympathetic to the plights of its citizens — not the least of which is because my mother, sister and nephew all still live there.

And, from fiscal crises to horrific lapses in Democratic judgment, I always feel at least a little bit saddened by the unfortunate events that always seem to beset the world’s fifth largest economy. The recent wild fire raging throughout Southern California is another of these instances. I just got off the phone with a colleague in the Southland, and he’s tense with worry that he may lose his home to this monstrous natural disaster. I took a look at the satellite photos at NASA, too, and I found myself humbled and frightened by the immensity of the smoke. My heart goes out to everyone facing this elemental beast.

Roger Angell’s “The Summer Game,” which is a gorgeously even-handed account of baseball’s subtle evolutions in the 1960s (and which I have been trying somewhat unsuccessfully to listen to in audio book format for a few weeks) contains one brief summary of Yankees fandom that is well worth revisiting after Saturday night’s embarrassing World Series loss to the Florida Marlins.

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With my girlfriend away all weekend in San Francisco, I figured that if I was going to make the somewhat reckless and potentially time-consuming decision to install Mac OS X Panther that I may as well do it while I had two good, solid days to myself. On Friday night I settled down after dinner and and set about preparing my system for the upgrade. First I did some research around the Web for tips on how best to avert any potential problems, which led me to pay for and download “Take Control of Upgrading to Panther” — a PDF-based ebook from TidBITS publishing that is an invaluable primer sold at the bargain price of US$5.

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All 23 gigabytes of my PowerBook’s hard drive have been backed up to my G4 tower, so I am, in some sense, ready to install Panther, the newest version of Apple’s Mac OS X software, as soon as it goes on sale tonight. In about an hour and a half, on my way home, I’ll probably swing by the venerable Tekserve and pick up my own copy… but I cant’t decide whether to actually go through with it and really install this major upgrade to the operating system on the very first weekend of its public release. Typically, I would wait a little while to see what kinds of problems other, more adventurous Macintosh fans might encounter. But there’s something about Panther that has me very anxious, and I’m just itching to get it running on my Mac. In all likelihood, I will install it on an external FireWire drive, but somehow I know I won’t be satisfied until I’ve thrown caution completely to the wind.

Today at Behavior, we finally got a majority of the office running iTunes, thanks to the Windows version of this excellent music management, shopping and playing software that was released recently by Apple. This means both the Windows machines and the Macintoshes were all working together without a hitch, and much more seamlessly than just about any other cross-platform technology I’ve ever used.

This is all thanks to Apple’s superb implementation of the Zeroconf technology standard — Apple calls it Rendezvous — which makes networking and sharing ridiculously easy. We had already been using this between the Macs, but being able to see my colleagues’s Windows-bound iTunes music with absolutely no effort left me duly impressed.

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“Kill Bill” is like a kind of delicious cinematic dessert commingled with a helping of tongue-piercing thumbtacks; it is at once sweetly delirious and deeply offensive. This mix is about the right combination for Quentin Tarantino, a writer-director who seems to go out of his way to make incredibly disgusting movies, all of which will be remembered as pioneering artistic statements but never without inciting a terrible queasiness in some subsection of his audience.

After having steeled my stomach through the sheer viciousness of “Reservoir Dogs,” the shock-for-shock’s sake of the overrated but still compelling “Pulp Fiction” and the dodgy blaxploitation-philia of “Jackie Brown,” I can say that I had not counted myself among those who took issue with the director’s wanton desire to piss off just as many people as he delights.

So, I figure, it makes sense that I find “Kill Bill” to be just about the worst piece of Orientalism to make it before discerning movie audiences in quite some time. It’s my turn to be indignant.

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With this past weekend’s trip to D.C. and the unrelenting workload at Behavior, the past week or so, it’s been hard to catch up on email and to find time to post to Subtraction.com. I’m hopefully going to be able to make some real headway on my to do list this week, but to clear out the backlog a bit here are things with which I’ve been preoccupied.

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Remember that episode of “The Brady Bunch” when Peter Brady met another student at school who looked exactly like him? I was reminded of that when my girlfriend and I drove down to D.C. this weekend to stay with some friends for the first time in about two years, we realized that their dog looked exactly like our dog. They weren’t perfect twins, but their heights, builds, and faces were within 90% of one another, to the point where it was often difficult to tell them apart without looking carefully. The uncanny resemblance entertained us all weekend, and we couldn’t stop talking about it, finding it endlessly fascinating. We’re totally dog people now.

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You can call me a fair weather fan, but when the home team is behind, I don’t think I’m constitutionally suited to watching baseball. This is the situation I find myself in this evening, watching the Yankees struggle against the Red Sox in the seventh and deciding game of the American League Championship Series.

The winner moves on to the World Series, and the loser spends the winter in ignominy — this kind of drama is the definition of good ball, but I find it’s a sort of drama both too excruciating and too superfluous for me to watch. That is, I am endlessly fascinated by the game but I find these moments of extreme competitive consequence to be too much, too engrossing and too demanding of my emotional energy. What’s more, I find something subliminally complicit in watching, as if I’m somehow partaking in my team’s progressive defeat. This is all completely irrational, I know… but with everything else going on in my life, I’d just as soon not watch these pivotal matches and thereby save myself the exhaustion. Anyway, go Yankees!

A good chunk of my day today was spent designing an investor presentation for a client using the supremely inaccurate Microsoft PowerPoint — first on Mac OS X and then on Windows XP — a process which is best likened to assembling a model airplane with oven mitts on. There’s a lot left to be desired in all of the Microsoft Office applications, mostly owing to fact that counter-intuitiveness seems to be the suite’s guiding design principle, but I have a special complaint for PowerPoint. Not only does it do a poor job of crystallizing a thorough thought process, but it’s remarkably unfaithful to user intentions.

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Here’s how impulse shopping helps crowd-pleasing consumer choices trump more high-minded pursuits like literature: my girlfriend was looking for a copy of Juan Carlos Onetti’s “A Brief Life,” which has been impossible for her to find in town. While checking my Hotmail account (which I almost never check), I came across some spam from Alibris, an online clearing house for used book retailers. I bought a book from them once about four years ago, and they’ve been faithfully sending me junk mail ever since.

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New work from Behavior: this evening we launched a redesign for Muléh, (pronounced moo-lay) a D.C.-area retailer specializing in imported, high-end furniture. It’s certainly not the largest scale site we’ve ever done, but it’s a lot of fun launching smaller sites as well — the path from concept to completion is much less circuitous. Muleh.com is almost 100% XHTML Transitional 1.0-compliant, relying entirely on a simple CSS file for layout; we’ll be tweaking things here and there over the next several days to get it up to code. The site is also driven by the endlessly handy Movable Type, which was the perfect light-weight content publisher for a do-it-yourself kind of client who didn’t want to learn a complex CMS. Now I go to sleep.

At the office, we were debating the issue of file sharing and its impact on artists, specifically whether or not a digital distribution system for music sales would allow artists to see a larger share of the proceeds from every sale. The argument was made that the low overhead of digital distribution doesn’t necessarily ensure that artists will see more money and in fact it may mean that they get a reduced share of the profits.

That’s when I realized that, after all the fuss over Napster (whose impending relaunch actually kicked off this conversation), Gnutella and lawsuits filed against individual users by the RIAA, I’ve developed a pretty callous attitude towards artists’ rights. This may anger some of my friends who are musicians and who aspire to become very well-paid musicians for a living, but at this point, it doesn’t really matter to me much whether artists get their fair share of money from recordings or not.

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Apple promised to deliver Panther — the next major upgrade to Mac OS X — by the end of the year, which to my mind meant that we’d be lucky to see it by early December. Imagine my surprise when they announced that it would ship as soon as 24 Oct — just a little over two weeks from today — and that it’s available for pre-order immediately. When I heard this, I started getting excited in the way that one might get excited for a long-awaited movie release, or a new album from a favorite band; the anticipation suddenly took on a tangible quality, and I started imagining myself actually sitting in front of a computer — maybe even a new computer — and actually using, rather than reading about, this software.

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If I took the time document every frustrating Web site I had to deal with, I’d be posting several times a day, every day. But Cisco.com deserves a special kind of commendation for being egregiously difficult to use, as I discovered last night while trying to download some simple drivers from its site.

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Watching the recall process in California has been like watching an insane neighbor dig up his backyard in some crazy treasure hunt. Every day, as first the grass and then the soil and then the pipes running beneath the neighborhood get torn up and piled in a destructive heap, the yard becomes a worse and worse disaster, and yet it still seems hopeless that the neighbor would ever listen to a reasonable argument against calling the whole thing off.

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Not feeling so great today about the following things: The very poor customer service at Circuit City, where my girlfriend and I have been trying to redeem a store credit for weeks without success. The broken CSS support in Microsoft Internet Explorer, which always seems to mangle pixel-perfect layouts that Safari and Mozilla seem to nail without a problem. The unyielding nature of the airline industry, which won’t allow my girlfriend and me to reschedule tickets we booked to Las Vegas in November without onerous penalties. The nagging effects of repetitive strain injury, which comes and goes for me but lately has been more and more persistent. And the fact that the Oakland A’s should have swept the Boston Red Sox on Saturday night, but instead blew their lead in game after game, until this evening’s painful fifth game.

All of my passwords and user data have been stored in a home-brewed FileMaker Pro database for years, but recently worries about poor security finally started getting to me. So I downloaded and registered Alco Bloom’s Web Confidential, which bills itself as “the most powerful password manager on the Macintosh.” Normally when I write a post like this, it’s with the intent of praising the entrepreneurial spirit of the lone shareware author, and I had assumed that I would become a Web Confidential fan more or less immediately. The software has been highly praised in Mac circles for years as an indispensable, highly secure tool for managing the bewildering array of security permissions with which Web surfers must contend.

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Just a tip of the hat to Adobe for the packaging of their soon-to-be-released Adobe Creative Suite, which bundles and not-so-cleverly rebrands the software giant’s flagship applications by appending a “CS” to each. This new creative strategy finally, finally does away with the cheesey-ass Photoshop eye logo and the Illustrator Venus logo, both long-standing icons that grew tired long ago. These new designs are sophisticated and attractive, and they kinda sorta help Adobe catch up with modern software packaging trends kicked off four or five years ago by Neville Brody for Macromedia. Better late than never.

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Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” can be said to be a shallow exercise in style. First, it’s clearly a savvy assembly of key touchpoints for a specific niche of the New Thirtysomethings. Its characters, milieu and tone constitute an almost exquisitely calculated dream combination of many hallmarks of hipster elitism: a fascination with the idiosyncrasies of urban Japanese culture, the dissonance of semi-obscure British pop, the watercolor kinetics of Wong Kar Wai’s films, the mannered understatement of naturalistic acting, the ironic wisecracks of Bill Murray, and the irresistibility of adorable young actresses who spend a lot of time appearing in indie films.

All of these things possess an unimpeachable street cred, and yet, their confluence in this film has an overbearing quality. It’s as if Coppola is determined to illustrate her impeccable taste; any movie that gives a prominent role to a My Bloody Valentine song (and even employs Kevin Shields for original music) is making an unmistakable declaration of its own sophisticated, conspicuous eclecticism.

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