the kiddies and me have been messing with pandora, the amazing internet radio deal where you design your own stations. they seem to be stronger on some things than others: my old-time blues-type thingummy tends to produce the same few artists and songs over and over, whereas contemporary commercial pop is an elaborate world, so jane (8) gets to hear aly and aj and also all sorts of sorta similar stuff she didn't know. under the influence of the amazing joan brown, i''ve built a station around the grateful dead. now i was a huge dead person when i was 14. then i sort of went off, in two directions: "real" country music as opposed to the dead doing "mama tried" or whatever.(i would still say: if you'd rather hear the dead than merle haggard doing "mama tried," you are fundamentaly confused.) and then punk. i started to think of the dead as wimps or idiot hippies, and, actually, not particularly great musicians etc. that the drug culture they built was problematic is attested to by garcia's death.

but i have to say, the stuff sounds great. actually the rough edges and discursive structures are pleasant and kind of inspiring: they remind you what actually playing music is for. and there are so many excellent songs from all phases. right now what's on is "the golden road to unlimited devotion." the garcia song "the wheel" is so stuck in my head it's a form of clinical sanity. sometimes, indeed, the endless jam seems merely pointless, endless noodling. at other times it is inspired. well, that's the idea of a "jam band," though i have yet to really glom on to any jam band other than the dead: the seem kinda like sha na na doing doo wop in 1978: um, you know this was done better twenty years ago.

pandora uses what it calls the "music genome project," supposedly comparing songs along 400 dimension, by computer, i guess. if that's what they're really doing, it doesn't come up with anything other than what common sense and an acquaintance with the history of popular music would produce. you don't need computers to connect the dead with the allman brothers or neil young, aly and aj with hillary duff, mississippi john hurt with mississippi fred mcdowell, obviously, which is what these things spit out.