New and Contemporary

There is little that can lead you to treasure good photography than to look at a lot of bad photography, interspesed with an occasional gem. Which is exactly what I was doing a few weeks ago on (where else?) flickr, where I was editing group pools.

When I started the New Black and White group, back in flickr's early pre-yahoo fog, there were no editing or moderation tools, it was slow and painstaking to remove each and every pic I felt didn't belong. And at first that was fine, as there were very few pics submitted. Two or three a day. I stopped messing with it, left it fallow -- came back to find a thousand pictures.

Edited those down to a few dozen, watched it fill up quickly again. Eventually the flood was far more than I could manage as anything less than a full-time job, so I ignored it for months until there were more than 55,000 photos in the pool, most of them "flickr noise" of the cute kitten variety.

Rather than even try to deal with all that, I started another group, Contemporary Black and White, and invited a few select members. I thought: at least I don't need to edit them (and I don't -- they've been contributing good stuff). But then I started wondering about the old one.....

...could I realistically edit-down the 50,000+ photos to a little kernel, throwing away 90% or more of them? Only one way to find out....

So I did. It took time, it took special tools, it took regular attacks. I worked in blocks of from 1000 to 3000 photos. As time passed, it was quick enough to see how many really endlessly-repeating tropes there were, each trotted out over and again and usually accompanied by plenty of enthusiastic flickr badges and boosting comments (especially if the photo involved a pretty girl).

As soon as I started deleting, of course, the hate emails started coming in. What was interesting, if not surprising, was that some of the worst "offenders" -- by that I mean people whose "NB&W" photos were dull, often not even black and white, and massively spam-posted all over flickr -- were the most strident of the protesters. A handful of them diffidently pulled their photos (by the hundreds) from the pool. Thank you for saving me so much time! I thought, but also couldn't help but believe that they genuinely thought they were doling-out a punishment, as if I would somehow be harmed by no longer being able to view (and congratulate) their hundreds of bare-tree-on-the-plains snaps ("Don't bother replying back as I'm blocking you." too).

Photography, especially as practiced socially on the internet, is as vulnerable as any craft to the curious backwards-expectation principle: that is, for any skill, the very best people are constantly self-critical and pushing, always knowing that they could do better -- while the weakest practitioners are quite securely smug in their belief that they've got everything licked, under control, no need to reflect or review except to roll in adulations.

In internet-style photography, this is reinforced to a staggering degree, if only because so much of photography, as generally practiced, is about flattery -- just like most online social networks.

In the aforementioned 1951 Berenice Abbott article, places the blame for photography's emphasis on flattery on proto-pictorialist Henry Peach Robinson, the creator of the famous Victorian melodrama photo "Fading Away," and most especially his book Pictorial Photography (A sample: "It is an old canon of art, that every scene worth painting must have something of the sublime, the beautiful, or the picturesque. By its nature, photography can make no pretensions to represent the first, but beauty can be represented by its means and picturesqueness has never had so perfect an interpreter."). Personally I don't think he can quite be credited for human vanity, but the gun's still a little smoky.

It doesn't really matter where it came from, but the belief is rampant that "good" photography equals "flattering" (this was exactly the criterion given to me a recent local photo class, a class which also extolled the works of Yousef Karsh as expressing the highest of all photographic virtues). It's a flattery that aims both ways: if your pic is flattering, then it is "good" which flatters the photographer.

The cycle starts there: the photos are flattering, and deserving therefore of flattery, and flattery leads to flattery leads to flickr badges and group invitations and should a tiny shred of actual daylight get into the party the guests will be in a ruinous uproar over its harsh direct brightness.

Not that the angry messages bothered me after the first thousand photos. I stopped informing, just went at it deleting. Didn't look at the names, didn't look at anything but the pics. And saw the same two dozen shots over, and over, and over...

I started to catalog them for a while: "...cute cats, adorable soft-toned children, footprints in the sand at the beach, misty time exposures of water, streets and railroads stretching off into the distance, casual snapshots, rusting cars, ruined castles, silhouetted trees, tele shots of resting seabirds, trees and unidentifiable silhouetted figures in fog, photos of backs of heads, (abandoned) factories, tourist destinations, parked bicycles, wide-angle upshots of skyscrapers, cathedral ceilings and windows, photos of camera collections, geometric airport ceilings, exterior stairways, wistful old statues, people looking bored while drinking coffee, interesting architectural details in closeup, sunlit spiderwebs..." it was actually a relief to leave in at least a few flattering model shots, if only because they weren't another empty craggy landscape.

For the sake of completeness (no, just to be random) I kept some in place, throwing away the OTHER photos just to keep runs of clichéd ones: say, thirty black trees on white (URL approximate), or twenty men with hats, or 30 shots of animals -- in order. Moderators can't rearrange the photos, I could only do this by eliminating the pix between how many runs of shots were just the same, same, same.

What none of the protesters did is what would have redeemed them. Despite repeated patient invitations in the face of their ad hominem vitriol, not one of them was willing to say why their photo deserved consideration, why it was special or worth anyone's time to view. Not one.

I can't help but feel the person who has benefited most from the exercise, though the obvious result is a much better pool of photos, is me -- seeing in a deep way, night after night for weeks, just how many "gorgeous!!" photos are really not worth a second glance and how many of them are in the same narrow predictable range that have been little-changed since the 1860's. Now the real challenge: remembering to avoid them myself while still making photos. At least photos I'd bother putting on the web.

Caveat eyeball.

Kinda Busy

Okay, I suck. Not a single post since my return from China. Of course, I have tons of excuses, including the fact that I was back in the office for less than one hour before hustling off to the airport for yet another business trip; or that GDC came in the middle of this period; or that I was sick in bed for weeks; or that it's beta time and much software needs writing; or that I keep catching myself putting my web energy into (giant sucking sound....) Facebook; or that a large slice of the remaining time has been happily spent on family and wonderfulness. All true.

Error Condition

I've been listening to session recordings from the recent Singularity Summit. One of the speakers, Peter Norvig from Google (just a few blocks from the Mountain View coffee shop where I'm now typing this) addressed the speculative concern that Google's vast array of computer systems might spontaneously combust into some sort of consciousness, a la movies like The Forbin Project or Ghost in the Shell.

To my surprise, they have already spent some billable time on this, thinking about what to monitor: unexplained and unattributed traffic between nodes, across disks, and so forth. In fact they seem to be ready to shut it down at any time. Which implies that to Google, which is itself an entity that's already behaving according to its own logic as a rational economic being: intelligence, in a computer, is an error condition.

Timeless

I have been picking, one by one, through the many many MANY unread blog posts that have been steadily accruing in my bloglines feeds. The numbers have been intimidating. Alec Soth, 65 posts. Ed Kashi, 28 posts. Joerg Colberg, 158 posts.... even a long backlog of What the Duck. And that's just the "Shoot Me" folder. It goes on and on. I haven't even dared to get started on the flickr feeds.

These things creep up on me because I want to read in detail and my circumstances so rarely give me time and focus for anything more than a glance. And then the lists grow and keep growing while I'm trying to make time for it.

The experience pricks at a notion I've been having about just how much really, really great imagery there is in the world today. There are ways of coping, like trusting in editorial vision, at least hoping that it will be grand. You can try to be your own editor, which was the point of the Bloglines feeds. But I worry that perhaps even the greatest work just really becomes a blur -- that even at the highest levels there gets to be so much great imagery that the human capacity for distinguishing great from greater is overwhelmed & the only thing left to distinguish anything is the depth and volume of its promotional machinery.

It's been likewise apparent to me that at many of the sites with the busiest posters, there are also many busy commenters, who often seem to be in a bum's-rush against one another to comment often and early. It leaves me curious about the dynamic of the whole enterprise, and the huge impatience of it seems so antithetical to the charters of photography and art-making in general. I have to wonder, for sites like, oh, Conscientious or Mrs Deane (or non-art sites like Corante), just how steep is the dropoff in readership over the first few hours? If today's post gets a hundred hits today, how many does yesterday's post get today? Two? And what about the post from the day before?

A lot of the posts Ive been reading tonight, from the last couple of months, are cross-links and opinions and reprints of obituaries of John Szarkowski. By coincidence, this morning while visiting my office I found a shrink-wrapped copy of his book The Photographer's Eye, a copy I had purchased months ago from Amazon and that had gotten buried under paperwork on my desk. The book hammers home to me the largely-unchanging and well-determined nature of photography itself, and makes me wonder what all the hurry is about. In his introduction, Szarkowski digs out a passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables on making Daguerreotype portraits: "We give [heaven's broad and simple sunshine] credit only for depicting the merest surface, but it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even if he could detect it... the remarkable point is that the original wears, to the world's eye... an exceedingly pleasant countenance, indicative of benevolence, openness of heart, sunny good humour, and other praiseworthy qualities of that cast. The sun, as you see, tells quite another story, and will not be coaxed out of it, after half a dozen patient attempts on my part. Here we have a man, sly, subtle, hard, imperious, and withal, cold as ice."

Compare a century later: "Everybody has this thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe... Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way, but there's a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can't help people knowing about you. And that has to do with what I've always called the gap between intention and effect." -- Dianne Arbus

I will be returning to San Diego on Monday, to see the Dead Sea Scrolls, Legoland, to re-visit the Callahan exhibit in Balboa Park and to have some fun with the family. Drop a line if you're around...

Schmaprd

...as if on cue, I received a letter from Schmap saying that they are planning to use one of my photographs in their (allegedly non-commercial but obviously ad-revenue-driven) travel guides.

Not particularly surprising to me, the photo was not marked with a Creative Commons tag, but rather as "© All Rights Reserved." Maybe they don't realize that I habitually send CDs of thumbnails to the Copyright Office to actually register my pix?

Ooops.

Flickd Off

As a followup to the earlier post on skepticism about "Creative Commons," it's been sadly amusing to watch the recent flaps declaring flickr (a) as censors but (b) not censorious enough. What seems common to both situations is a failure of common sense, a failure rendered raw with typically abrasive flourish by EPUK's "Sqweegee" in his article on the Schmap smokeup:

Flickr is a mashup of hobbyists who merely want to share snaps of kittens and sunsets and rather a lot of more serious photographers who covertly dream of dumping the day job and becoming pros someday. For now, all are content to share for free, but the expectation is that enough exposure and recognition should eventually lead to fees, fame and stardom if you are good enough.

This is of course romantic rubbish : there really are no clear demarcation lines between pros and amateurs anymore except an insistence on being paid that is being rendered untenable by oversupply. "Pro" means "makes a living." Every aspirant pro who gives away their work "for exposure" undercuts their own future by demonstrating to clients that they need not pay for work they consider good enough to use. So they never will.

Now we all know: that Creative Commons licenses are not meant to cause harm, or so their proponents remind us. They are meant as a shining pathway to an ideal Republic of pure creativity and form based on freedom and love where everyone with a laptop and a wifi connect can be their very own personalized Philosopher King. And get rich.

No, the concept can't be flawed, it makes perfect sense to create copyrights where there's no control over the copying rights. Instead, there must be some conspiracy, some very bad people who have been using it without having their hearts pre-aligned according to our approved rules. So no, let's not look at the fundamentally pig-dumb notions of Creative Commons: let's make a right turn and find a new set of different problems that won't make us look bad.

Is the potential for corruption in government and enterprise a deep one, and one that causes plenty of real problems for people every day? Yes. And it's one that I too care deeply about. But... what? This will get fixed by the wiki/CC crowd? It's their very ignorance (or deliberate glossing-over) of the ability of people to be guided by their own self-interest (particularly in this case, the self-interest of people who realize that it's cheaper to steal images and ideas than it is to create them) that has made Creative Commons such a social disaster. And now the same people claim that they're out to somehow fix the general problem of corruption?

Just give them ten years before requiring any further statements. Yeah, that's the idea. Should land all the CC culprits right into tenured retirement without having to have any further pesky demands for a "pre-baked" "revolution."

As the Schmap folks wrote in response to outrage at their broad appropriation of images and further use of them as a means for advertising Schmap's products right back at and through the hoodwinked flickrites: "We'll do our best to stay the right side of the line throughout all this."

Which line is that? I suspect the bottom one.

Portrait Paradox

How to handle portrait-format images in an ongoing weblog? is the question that's been dogging me since switching PhotoRant to its current, 807-pixels-across form (why 807 pixels? I genuinely don't remember).
As Michael pointed out in a recent 2point8 post, there's an appeal to the idea of giving all photos "equal time" — that is, giving them all equal area on-screen (in his case, 375,000 pixels), distributed according to whatever aspect ratio they have.

The troubles are in the tall ones. The 16x9 pictures I make regularly are 897x454 when put into this format . If I turn it those same pixels on their sides, the 807 pixels is just, well, too tall. It doesn't fit most web browsers, and scrolls off the top. Ungh. Making a photo 512 high (as this one is) fits most browsers, but leaves the picture only 40% as big as the horizontal version. And the horizontal one is minimized enough as it is (then again, the version here is still a tiny big bigger than a flicker standard or "medium" picture).

I've come pretty well to the conclusion that there is no good answer. I could reduce the size of the webpage header, but I can't control how many extra bars of lins and navigation tools are in each user's browser. I hate the idea of pictures appearing so tall that you can't see them all at once.

The relentless landscape format of web presentation is one of those attributes that have probably had more influence than we realize, and will continue to do so. Compare it to books, whose pages are usually portrait format but that can be any aspect at all. Is it any surprise that the default formats for internet-based book printers like iPhoto and Lulu are landscape-format books?

Separated @ Birth?

Five

I've been reluctant to engage in the five things meme — mostly because when I thought about answering it, my mind would transform into clear gelatin, leaving me unable to think of a doggoned thing. And my usual excitement about web memes is surpassed only by the suggestion of a stirring round of the Minister's Cat. Still, Todd finally got me going.

I've noticed that most people answer at least some of the questions with anecdotes about their irresponsibly wastrel childhoods. This game is, of course, all about scandal! I guess time gives obscurity (and these days, for those who blog every last dumb thing, what else is there that people don't know already?). I'll toss out one old and four current. I'll leave out the part about how I used to introduce myself at L.A. parties as "Sven Skarnasdag."

1. I used to be terrified of the numeral 7 and would avoid arithmetic problems like "17+2=__" unless protected from the 7 by a friendly 3 or (better) 5. Regardless, I ended up eventually doing well in math & testing out of my college math requirements, though it made no difference as I went to art school (either did my placement as a National Merit Scholar). Oddly, I now work in a highly-mathematical field. Jacobian determinants, anyone?
2. I lost over forty pounds two years ago. I gained about ten back during the last year because I kept thinking "well, just this one slice of cake..." Lesson learned. Currently, I'm going down again & still wear those jeans.
3. My mom reads my blog. But my daughter does not (much).
4. I haven't shot any new film since the second week of December. Plenty of pictures, but none on film. It's such a PITA to travel with film these days. I've been buying a fair bit of film. The Contax and Bronica have recently been reloaded. Hmmm, wonder what I'm up to....
5. I dunno but Alaska. I've been in all the other 49 states, and yet not Alaska, despite having an uncle there.

As for the nominating end-game:

• Roy Taylor
• 2point8
• 3pointD
• Gary
• Dirk

The 9 Billion Spams

Xenical Xenical
Famivir Famivir
Ymmbgrx Celexa
Tarot Therapy

I have been shovelling the spam. Not so much here, but over at PhotoPermit.Org.

The spam comes in multiple flavors. The most common are spurious forum posts; unrelated trackback pings to old, obscure posts from the main news feed; and the creation of fake user accounts, sometimes with and sometimes without a 'home page' link to some often non-existant URL selling levitra and auto insurance ringtones teen grandma+sex of come sort or another.

Some of it — like the 1300 pings that I deleted this morning, including about fifty that had been added to a single year-old news item over the course of twenty minutes — are surely placed there by robots. The robots appear to be increasingly sophisticated, able to recognize and bypass shifting command tag titles, php file names, and handily confirming passwords.

I've been regularly hacking-in counter-measures, adding non-standard features to my local WordPress and phpbb in attemps to thwart the 'bots. And have come to the conclusion that it's not just bots, but also live humans who are adding a great deal of the spam.

For even the poorest wage slave in some remote (but wired) corner of the world, how can this be profitable? Who do they expect will come to farm-up the information contained in the user profile of "Y67chick" and follow it to buy videos and warez? Even if in the hopes of having some Google spider raise a page ranking, what's the point of attempting to raise the ranking of a page that's not even there? And for every successful attempt to register a new false user and use that account to post a list of discount office supply links, how many more attempts fail?

Though the web is large, and the margins narrow: even then, how can anyone expect all this effort to be profitable?

It was when I was deleting pings that it came to me. Deleting them in careful steps, 15 at a time, in a stready ritual and repetitive motion of scroll-down/click 'invert selection'/click 'delete selected'/click 'Okay'... scroll-down/click 'invert selection'/click 'delete selected'/click 'Okay'... scroll-down/click 'invert selection'/click 'delete selected'/click 'Okay'... as my head swayed rhythmically over the keyboard and my hand twitched predictably at the mouse I felt at one with the universe of data and the voice of the One True Spam sang clear in my heart. I realized in that moment that spam is not a business proposition.

Spam is a form of prayer, and needs no sensible rationale. Spamming the world is an act of faith, and the realities of the spamming, its effectiveness, its purpose are unneeded details.

We beseech you:

Zyrtec Tamiflu
Acyclovir Tamiflu
Bentyl Tamiflu
Visit my site!

Second Job

The Second Job doesn't come with a second paycheck. Ah well.

Besides working on GPU Gems III (the quality of the submissions just keeps rising with each successive edition! Far more fantastic work than we even can squeeze into one large book... choosing the most-appropriate from so many good choices is tough); prepping for the upcoming Game Developers Conference in San Francisco; creating proposals and abstracts for conferences in the months after that; working on developer tools and ongoing work in helping 3D artists expand their abilities to create great-looking GPU-savvy games... I'm also busy dealing with lots of MMO and Virtual-World developers and researchers.

I guess it was my inevitable destiny: the origins of the name for this very site, Botzilla, come from the now-slumbering BotBot program, designed to create customized avatar scripts for the mid-90's virtual world The Palace.

It would certainly be useful to have a second me around, mostly to do errands while the FirstMe was busy with... well, you know, stuff.

Stuff like keeping track of the household, making sure people get fed, homework completed, DVDs and library books returned, Tivo watched, pictures occasionally taken or printed, books read, scuba gear used, friends acknowledged and seen, or keeping up with my RSS feeds, which I set up in theory to make it easier to keep up with blog pages and the like. Unless I'm insanely diligent they just keep falling behind, behind, behind... all the labor-saving technology is a powerful mechanism for giving me too much to do. Rather than being thrilled that, say, Alec Soth has posted 58 entries over the past month or so, entries I know I will enjoy reading should I get the chance, I just end up feeling guilty that I haven't had the chance for a settled time to read them :/

And then there are the games... I'm still lingering in the late second act of Final Fantasy XII, interupted by two weeks of computer-less and console-less holiday break, and looking in the immediate future my hope of playing any of my existing consolers gets increasingly slim under the encroaching shadows of Wii and PS3 or any of the many great PC titles that are stacking up next to "Lolo," my game-and-itunes machine.

Just the same: if you do wander into SecondLife, give an IM holler to "Shashinka Komparu" or just seek out (and join!) the "NVIDIOTS" group.

(Or if you play EVE: drop me a line either here or via eve-mail to "Fenris Chow" — our corporation is likely to open for recruitment again in the near future)

Random(ized) Fix

After a long dry spell, the photoblog sampler page is functioning again. The previous page-builder script had been invalidated when Botzilla's host environment was changed by the ISP, but that software's now bee re-written.

Many of the thumbnails that appear on the sampler page a coming up as dummies currently, since there are no thumbs for most of the images used in the blog for 2005 and 2006. That will be remedied transparently as I create such images. Or maybe you like clicking on unknown question marks....

The page contains random links to images used in blog entries. Usually they are photos, though on rare occasion you may see a chart or title card. If you don't like the selection, you can try randomizing it yourself.

cc

A couple of days back I was part of an informal web conversation about "Creative Commons" copyrights (spurred by a publisher who had grabbed CC-marked images off the web and republished them for a profit without clear notification to the owner). A predictable pro-CC argument came up: that somehow using a CC notice, rather than the traditionally-restrictive "All Rights Reserved," would encourage the publication of images from artists who might otherwise never get a venue (The takeaway: one should be honored when their otherwise-unknown creations have been found worth stealing?).

Similarly, last week I finally got to listen to the entire "Google Print Panel" session at the Commonwealth Club of California, in which it was suggested that copyright-free publishing was crucial to get "those little books that every publisher had rejected but that just might become the Next Big Thing" out to the public.

They both seem like the same argument, both using a straw man. Maybe someone will create some amazing but unrecognized work, and maybe open publishing would help that one person, but does this speculation really justify the wholesale dismantling of the entire copyright portfolio for all other authors? Maybe it's a convenient, publisher-coddling fiction. If anything, it seems to me that with the ease of modern web publishing, those independant and small creators are actually the ones who need a full suite of copyright protection, not the mega-corporations.

CC and "open publishing," from my view, offer creators nothing, other than reduced paychecks. They are not about "enabling" creativity, but rather de-valuing it for the sake of publishers (including web-portal publishers like Google/Yahoo/MS, who as far as I can tell have largely co-opted the notion of "web sharing" by creating behemoth databases of "contributed" data which they in turn own — an ownership which is the source of their great wealth) — publishers who continue to charge the same amounts for their products containing images and other works that they haven't paid for, benefiting from the protections of intellectual property laws that they've convinced their suppliers to abandon.

Short, Attentive Spans

When we lived in Hawaii I enjoyed what seemed like a relatively short commute: only twenty minutes from Leeward to Windward sides of Oahu, traffic permitting. I could have the sunrise over the sea going in and up the Pali, and the sunset over the sea driving back away from the harbor.

In the morning I would usually time my drive to coincide with the local broadcast of the local news in Hawaiian, tacked-onto the end of All Things Considered and just before a program I had not heard since our move: Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac. The presence of some single poem each morning was a regular reminder that life and spirit could contain more than just another predictable workday.

In these days of home-office and even shorter commute (three minutes from my driveway to NVIDIA building D, traffic permitting), I don't get much opportunity for radio. Happily I've recently found that the program is podcasted, so now I collect episodes in clusters, waiting for the right moment every week or two for me to consume them while in some waiting room or chilling in an airplane seat.

To me a sign of great art is my own desire to have been the person who made it — not for the accolades or the persisting prestige but merely the desire to have had the experience of having Those Thoughts, unbidden — the ones that led to This Thing.

There have been a handful of poems in the recent weeks' archives that I've felt that way about, by Bukowski and by Sexton and this one, "Light, At Thirty-Two" by Michael Blumenthal from Days We Would Rather Know:

Light, At Thirty-Two

It is the first thing God speaks of
when we meet Him, in the good book
of Genesis. And now, I think
I see it all in terms of light:

How, the other day at dusk
on Ossabaw Island, the marsh grass
was the color of the most beautiful hair
I had ever seen, or how — years ago
in the early-dawn light of Montrose Park —
I saw the most ravishing woman
in the world, only to find, hours later
over drinks in a dark bar, that it
wasn't she who was ravishing,
but the light: how it filtered
through the leaves of the magnolia
onto her cheeks, how it turned
her cotton dress to silk, her walk
to a tour-jeté.

And I understood, finally,
what my friend John meant,
twenty years ago, when he said: Love
is keeping the lights on. And I understood
why Matisse and Bonnard and Gauguin
and Cézanne all followed the light:
Because they knew all lovers are equal
in the dark, that light defines beauty
the way longing defines desire, that
everything depends on how light falls
on a seashell, a mouth ... a broken bottle.

And now, I'd like to learn
to follow light wherever it leads me,
never again to say to a woman, YOU
are beautiful, but rather to whisper:
Darling, the way light fell on your hair
this morning when we woke — God,
it was beautiful. Because, if the light is right,
then the day and the body and the faint pleasures
waiting at the window ... they too are right.
All things lovely there. As that first poet wrote,
in his first book of poems: Let there be light.

Short, Attentive Spans: posted 04:55 PM | Comments (1)

Pop Smarts

At the moment, my iTunes library has just grown over the magic five-digit mark: 10,000 tracks. Or 51.9 GB. Or most importantly, far more than I can casually browse.

I like iTunes' "Smart Playlists" function and use it a lot. I have more smart playlists than "regular" playlists in fact, mostly because they can be used as inputs to other smart playlists.

For example, I have a smart playlist called "-No Talk" that eliminates anything tagged as "Books & Spoken," "Dialogue," "Sound Effects," and so forth, and I usually use is as an initial restrictor when building playlists based, say, on how many stars a track has been rated and so forth (examples below).

Smart playlists are handy in this way for either paring-down or joining tracks that iTunes doesn't see are connected by itself: combining Death Cab for Cutie and Postal Service into a "Ben G" list for example, or collecting all the tracks relating to Beethoven, or Ben Folds and his various ensembles (including Shatner).

Lists based on lists are the only way you can combine "logical and" and "logical or" operators on conditions (called "all" or "any" in the smart playlists dialogue) — for example, if I want to get all tracks labelled "Pop" or "Rock" (by genre or potentially by a "hidden" field like "Grouping" or "Comments") but none with a ranking of lower than four stars, I need to use at least two smart playlists (simplified here as an example):

• "-PopRock"
  (ANY)
  Genre contains "Pop"
  Genre contains "Rock"
  Comments contain "pop"
• "Fave PopRock"
  (ALL)
  Playlist is "-PopRock"
  My Rating is greater than ***

Combining and intersecting playlists and conditions in this manner is probably the only way I'd actually ever get to hear a lot of the music squirreled-away in my iPod at this point. I have a number of playlists based on variations of one I call "neglect":

• "Neglect"
  (ALL)
  Playlist is "-No Talk"
  My rating is greater than ***
  Limit to 50 tracks ordered by least recently played

In plainer English: music tracks that I've rated as ones I like, but haven't played in a long time. Variations on the idea usually focus on genres, or intersect with some other playlist or another.

With the multiplicity of playlists calling other playlists, I've tried to keep some order among them in the pulldown menus (which are alphabetized) by using extra characters like "-" and "." in the names of lists that are meant purely as "abstract inputs" (like "-No Talk").

One set of playlists is based on a root playlist called "Bunch of Stuff I Like Right Now" — I stick in new albums as I get them, or stuff I know I'd like to hear more often but not based on its star rating. And likewise I may remove whatever based on... well, whatever. Basing a bunch of different playlists on the one lets me explore new and favorite music in novel ways while only having to maintain a single list "by hand."

Lists based on that one are variations on my standards, with relatively descriptive names: "Bunch o Faves," "Bunch o Neglect," etc. Like many computer-related topics, most of the interesting things happen when the structures of algorithms collide and combine with the unstructured intents of the user (me).

Everyone who uses iTunes for a while seems to have their own organizing scheme: I ran into one woman DJ a bit ago who kept all her tracks indexed by the comment field, and had inserted the BPM counts of every track in there so that she could be sure to build lists with consistent rhythms (more work than I'd ever put in, to be sure).

As flexible as it is, I still often wish for more: particularly conditions that might aggregate values or relate them, so that I could create selections like "albums that contain at least two tracks that I've rated as *****" and so forth. There doesn't seem to be any way to really manage the relationships of groups of tracks, only (in limited ways, such as date stamps or alphabetic order) between individual tracks.

(Added)And how could I forget regular expressions, or at least wildcards?

Maybe someone knows of tools that could piggyback more functionality into playlists?

Some other smart playlists that I've found useful to balance familiarity and variety:

• Introductions
  (ALL)
  Track # is 1
  Playlist is "No Talk"
  Limit to 1000 track (or some other large number, effectively infinite) ordered by least-recently added
• Numbers
  (ANY)
  Title contains "1"
  Title contains "2"
  Title contains "3"
  Title contains "4"
  Title contains "5"
  Title contains "6"
  Title contains "7"
  Title contains "8"
  Title contains "9"
  Title contains "0"
  Album contains "1"
  Album contains "2"
  Album contains "3"
  Album contains "4"
  Album contains "5"
  Album contains "6"
  Album contains "7"
  Album contains "8"
  Album contains "9"
  Album contains "0"
• Calculated
  (ALL)
  Playlist is "Numbers"
  Title does not contain "1983" (Or other dates)
  Album does not contain "Disc" (as in "Disc 1" or "Disc 2")
• Most played yet unrated
  (ALL)
  Playlist is "-No Talk"
  My rating is (none)
  Limit to 50 tracks based on most often played
• Most played but not lateley
  (ALL)
  Playlist is "-No Talk"
  Not played in the last three months
  Limit to 50 based on most-played
• Oldest Unplayed
  (ALL)
  Playlist is "-No Talk"
  Play count is zero
  Limit to 50 indexed on least recently added

If anyone has suggestions for their own unusual or cool playlists, let me know — I'm easily entertained by this sort of thing, heh.

As an aside, it's astounding to me that no matter which track I can pick randomly, once it starts playing, I can most always remember it — and such memories usually are embedded among others such as some location where I heard it, who I might have been with at the time, and so forth — the music very often serving not just its own function but as a trigger to other, often emotionally-based, recollections. To me it's a vivid illustration of the fluid character and complexity of memory — how we are not just tape recorders and cameras, but much more (and sometimes less).