The Grand Wide Area Archive

“If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.”― Ludwig Wittgenstein

I am not sure how I missed the headline that the Internet Archive turned 25 last year. I just found out about this past weekend, digging around the internet as I tend to do, looking for interesting stories and finding that the New York Public Library is doing a live interview with the Archive’s founder and chief Brewster Kahle TODAY at 4pm PST (7pm EST) titled: The Internet Archive at 25 (it is open to the public for free either live or on Zoom). Then a little more digging and I came upon an incredible interview with Kahle that frames a bigger article written about this momentous anniversary by Joshua Benton.

Brewster and the beginnings of then World Wide Web, 1991

Truth be told: I think Brewster Kahle is one of the great pioneers of my lifetime (and I am very much not alone) and his Internet Archive one of the great developments since the world wide web was founded (and one of the earliest). I first came across archive.org, as one might imagine, looking for music. I heard about it through some Dead fans, who sourced live shows from archive.org and told me that while I might not have the Jerry-inclination, there were other bands posting shows and a digital garage full of folk and blues. Back in those days, with one click you could get hours of Big Bill Broonzy or Ukulele Ike or Duke Ellington or The Ink Spots. And as I searched around the site, I found full-length film noir movies and classic horror flicks, all watchable…all downloadable. Before going on trips, I would search for crazy films I had never heard of from the 30s and 40s, often b-level budget specials that were only on the archive’s database…and bring them with me on my computer (many of them are still on the site…I will do a list of my favorites in the future).

But The Archive is so very much more than a place to find films and music: it was founded for the same reason The Library of Congress was founded: to collect the products of humanity, the difference being, The Archive is solely interested in the digital versions for the world to access instantaneously. The number of books, films, recordings, photographs, webpages, applications, commercials, etc etc etc it has collected and made accessible for ANYONE is mind-boggling. And to follow Kahles journey in putting this together is to follow battle after battle of fighting copywright owners and sceptics just to be able to get copies of what might be lost.

Before Covid times, I would occasionally show up to their free lunch on Fridays at the offices in San Francisco and hear from the archive.org team about the new projects that were underway (the office incidentally boasts a theater full of clay representations of everyone who has ever worked there). You can find all of their major projects on the website, each one mind-boggling in scope. Just recently, with the help of my friend Leigha, I have been reconstructing the website for my label Birdman Records. For reasons too boring to go into, the last iteration of the site is gone…no more…and I am using the Archive’s Wayback Machine to see the old website pages…even finding a super-old version of the site I had completely forgotten about. And this kind of archiving is done for billions of websites.

Brewster at the Archive

With the help of B. George and the ARChive of Contemporary Music, Kahle is digitizing hundreds of thousands of 78s creating one of the biggest music archives in the world. And he is doing this while he is collecting every political advertisement aired on national and local television, creating an open-sourced library where every book in history will have its own webpage, saving vintage software programs from the beginning of silicon valley to the present… When I found myself searching out an Irish writer from the 1800s named John Banim, the only way I could read one of his supposed classic novels, Crohoore of the Bill-Hook, was to pay $$$$ for an original edition or download it on archive.org from the copy they scanned and digitized (it was a great novel, by the way…and still only available at archive.org). For any deep-research project I take on, I always hit the archive first…and so often find interesting source material and ephemera not available anywhere else.

…and how about Kahle buying an apartment building to make sure his workers can afford to live in San Francisco? I have met Brewster Kahle many times…had great conversations with him about the difference between COLLECTING and COLLECTION CURATION (something I would love to be more a part of there) and it never wears off that the person I am speaking to is one of those great legends of the modern age.

Happy 25+ years to the Internet Archive!

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MARK YOUR CALENDARS: Reboot Ideas Presents A Conversation about HBO film THE SURVIVOR

THIS WEDNESDAY April 27 at 5 p.m PT/8 p.m. ET Reboot and The Shoah Foundation will celebrate the release of the new Barry Levinson film The Survivor with a conversation between Levinson, producer Matti Leshem, actor Ben Foster and journalist Sami Sage. More about this on the next Signal…but as a teaser: the film is incredible and the conversation promises to be inspired (co-hosted by yours truly).

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Cynthia Plaster Caster, Artist Famed for Plaster Casting Musicians’ Phalluses, Dies at 74

The first I heard about Cynthia Plaster Caster was around a Jack and Coke at Raji’s in Los Angeles. The Muffs had just come back from tour and not only did they meet her…but bassist Ronnie Barnet (also of The Stars and Hearts band) got “casted” with the end product sitting beside the casts of Jimi Hendrix and Jello Biafra. We live in a strange and colorful world…just a little less so with Cynthia’s passing.

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Horace Andy: Midnight Rocker review – the Jamaican singer’s finest performances yet

Jamaican legend Horace Andy has just released his latest record at 71 years of age. The record is produced by Adrian Sherwood, whose crisp workmanship creates a frisky world for Andy’s voice to live, with great throwback numbers as well as some lesser known (new?) compositions that show Andy in fantastic form. The cover of the record plays on Andy’s elder statesmanship, focusing on the wrinkles of Andy’s face and his grey hair, but Midnight Rocker is a youthful delight (Sherwood was the perfect choice to produce, that is for certain).

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Ukrainian art exhibition opens in shadow of war

The head of the Ukraine continues to show the greatest leadership and vision imaginable during such a horrific moment: “On Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky opened an exhibition about defending his country's freedom at the Venice Biennale festival. Speaking via video link, he said ‘art can tell the world things that cannot be shared otherwise.’”

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A Room in the Past

BY TED KOOSER

It’s a kitchen. Its curtains fill
with a morning light so bright
you can’t see beyond its windows
into the afternoon. A kitchen
falling through time with its things
in their places, the dishes jingling
up in the cupboard, the bucket
of drinking water rippled as if
a truck had just gone past, but that truck
was thirty years. No one’s at home
in this room. Its counter is wiped,
and the dishrag hangs from its nail,
a dry leaf. In housedresses of mist,
blue aprons of rain, my grandmother
moved through this life like a ghost,
and when she had finished her years,
she put them all back in their places
and wiped out the sink, turning her back
on the rest of us, forever.

~~

In the Basement of the Goodwill Store

By Ted Kooser

In musty light, in the thin brown air
of damp carpet, doll heads and rust,
beneath long rows of sharp footfalls
like nails in a lid, an old man stands
trying on glasses, lifting each pair
from the box like a glittering fish
and holding it up to the light
of a dirty bulb. Near him, a heap
of enameled pans as white as skulls
looms in the catacomb shadows,
and old toilets with dry red throats
cough up bouquets of curtain rods.

You’ve seen him somewhere before.
He’s wearing the green leisure suit
you threw out with the garbage,
and the Christmas tie you hated,
and the ventilated wingtip shoes
you found in your father’s closet
and wore as a joke. And the glasses
which finally fit him, through which
he looks to see you looking back—
two mirrors which flash and glance—
are those through which one day
you too will look down over the years,
when you have grown old and thin
and no longer particular,
and the things you once thought
you were rid of forever
have taken you back in their arms.

The U.S. Supreme Court Sends Decades-Long Case over Nazi-looted Pissarro Back to California Court

FOR THOSE WHO ARE FOUNDING SUBSCRIBERS TO THE SIGNAL: YOUR CURATED VINYL LP WILL BE COMING FROM THE PRESSING PLANT THIS MONTH AND WILL BE SENT TO YOU PROMPTLY. IT WILL BE THE 2LP SET OF OTHA TURNER’S RISING STAR FIFE AND DRUM BAND CLASSIC “EVERYBODY HOLLERIN’ GOAT” WITH AN ENTIRE SIDE OF UNRELEASED MUSIC. PRODUCED BY LUTHER DICKINSON, CALLED ONE OF THE BEST 5 BLUES RECORDS OF THE 1990S BY ROLLING STONE…IT WILL SOON BE YOURS.