I am a big fan of tradition and ritual.  For a brief time, my internal, unexpressed career goal was to be a Roman Catholic bishop. (OK, I liked the hat and the crooked stick..)  I’m down with the “we’ve been doing it this way for 2,000 years” bit.  I’m not about to get into church politics, moral theology, or ecumenical philosophy- at least not here.  But what ‘s the deal with Tonto in the Sistine Chapel?  They’ve used this same potbellied stove for decades, and similar ones for centuries, but the damn thing doesn’t work.  Yeah, I’m sure the little scraps of paper (“Eligo in Summum Pontificem…”) burn up nice, and the naked cherubim in Michelangelo’s frescoes aren’t the least bit chilly.  But it’s supposed to be clear-cut:  white=habemus papam, black=we need more time.  What happens if it looks gray, like it does practically every time?  Well, in addition to cell-phone jammers hidden in a false floor, the techno-freaks at the Vatican had a few other tricks up their sleeve.  The first, installing a decidedly non-traditional power booster for the chimney, and adding chemical smoke cartridges, has left me unimpressed.  What amazes me, however, is the huge, Springsteen-concert-sized jumbotrons they erected in St. Peter’s Square  that show the chimney.  If they’re going to show us TV, why can’t they just get Tim Russert and his white board to demonstrate where we’re at:  “OK, now at this crucial stage of the game, if Ratzinger’s delegates move over to Tettemanzi’s camp, and the Indian guy…” Better yet, how about Latin versions of the red-state, blue-state game?

Moving along from traditions forged before the Renaissance, to 21^st century pop culture…

I caved this weekend and got myself an iPod.  While I think it will open doors for my expanding appreciation of music, it hasn’t been entirely without its hitches.  First and foremost, Jesus H., are those things expensive!  300 bucks and you don’t even get a case!  I have about 2,000 tracks, most ripped form my CD collection, but a hundred or so from my days messing with Napster, Kazaa, and LimeWire.  Some friends of mine told me it was easy to trade music with the iPod…you just traded iPods and dumped the new stuff into your software.  Well, I tried that, and succeeded only in wiping out the entire content’s of my nephew’s player. Then my wife finds Napster To Go, where you rent an entire iPod-full of music by the month.  The only problem, obviously, is that it doesn’t work with iPods, just the knockoffs.  That sucks, since I was planning to expand my horizons…just not by forking over $0.99 a song.

Philosophically, I’m not entirely against music piracy.  Most bands get more popular, and thus more powerful, the more people that listen to their music…not the more people that BUY it.  Look at bands like the Grateful Dead…they allow professional-level recording of their shows, and encourage unlimited, unregulated trading of them.  They were consistently among the highest live draws every year.  Yet, the RIAA folks have started to do a good job of intimidating the casual trader/thief (like me), and erecting technological barriers to make it a PITA to get new music.  Think about it…they say that the record industry has taken enormous losses over the past years since the inception of mp3 compression and the Internet.  Yet so many of us never paid for our music in “the old days” (for me, the 70s and 80s)- we taped it off the radio using our Plymouth-sized Sanyo boom boxes.  I can recall sitting every summer and taping the top 500 countdowns on my favorite classic rock station.  In the months between graduating from high school and shipping off to Chicago for college, one of my primary missions was copying my entire record collection, and that of my parents and friends, onto cassette tapes I bought by the case.  Among my prize possessions packed away in the steamer trunk for the trip West was a brown, purpose-built suitcase filled with innumerable musical assets… at a time when record companies and the bands they shilled for were making money hand over fist.  Now, you sign onto a peer to peer network to get one song, and you have to worry about the FBI knocking, or worse…downloading piles of spyware and viruses.  What has this world come to?

So, for the moment at least, my collection is limited to the 1,769 songs currently resident on my little grayish friend.  The cool part, though, is the unlikely combinations you get when shuffling.  On the bus ride home yesterday, I heard the theme from “Gilligan’s Island” followed by “My Hero” by the Foo Fighters.  My cd-based mp3 player’s idea of “random shuffle” was playing every third song…the source of mondo-boredom given that my music is nerdily organized in alphabetical order:  Springsteen, Bruce; Clash, The, etc.

Probably the best feature, though is the ability to have you entire music library available to you at any time.  For me, it’s helped me rediscover a band I love, but haven’t listened to as often as I used to.  If you like kick-ass rock rooted in Irish folk music, influenced by hip-hop and rap, featuring trombone, tin whistles, goatskin drums, and bagpipes, and laying historical themes alongside stout-fueled romps, you should give them a listen.  Better still, go see them in person. www.black47.com