Mind the Gap: April 2009 Archives
This morning, Baltimore woke to the disconcerting news that the staff of its local Sun was being slashed. Cruel.
However, I recently learned on the internet that news people have a talent for song, and as our local opera company has now filed for bankruptcy and is in the process of selling off its assets, is there an opportunity here? Hey, what nature hasn't granted, it seems auto-tune will provide!
(T-Pain could not be reached for comment, but Couric is clearly rockin' this format.)
Okay, I'm no Sherlock, but I have surmised that the whole "case of the amazing shrinking modern attention span" is bunk. Like Steven Johnson, I am comfortable arguing that contemporary pop culture actually expects more and more of our brain power, not less.
And I still basically am, but still: along with this morning's coffee, I discovered that there are now :50 "official trailers" for 3:19-long songs. That's what you get, indeed.Elsewhere, the million and six plot twists of Lost slap us back the other way. Confusion is the new (substitute for) sophistication? Let us mull over these developments while taking in the Golden Girls marathons this week.
So, like the car crash we just can't peel our eyes from, The Palin Family Feud was the opera we'd most like to see. I think it works. So many plot lines, so many potential wacky duet pairings. Any takers, composer-readers?
I was thinking more about opera this week, and specifically what keeps me from really embracing it. At root, I think it mostly has to do with how over-the-top the delivery is (awesome, in-and-of itself), yet how slow and plodding the action is often paced. I'm not sure even Brando could clear that hurdle, acting-wise. And, like StoryCorp and This American Life, I guess I'm looking for smaller, weirder, more life-sized stories in the face of the immensity of the world. My artistic interests tend toward the spectacularly intimate over the bombastic stadium-sized variety, and probably they always have.
But I can also perhaps attribute my failure to connect to the fact that I have mostly seen by-the-book, same-as-it-ever-was opera productions. I might be fantasizing that I'm Cher when I go to the opera, but I still appreciate that it's 2009. Maybe my attitude would get an adjustment if I lived in Europe with their wacky concepts? If you see an opera out there that you think might shift me into gear, do let me know about it.
I don't know about the weather in your neighborhood, but things are heating up here on my home turf. And that means the tomatoes are going into the ground and summer orchestra seasons are coming! Which brings us to this week's question:
As I mentioned once before, somehow watching M*A*S*H as a child defined my sense of humor in a rather serious way. As an adult, mass media has continued to shape my cultural perspective--particularly fueled by late nights reading Gawker and watching loads of trash TV. I confess all this to help explain how it is that my contribution to Adaptistration's Take a Friend To the Orchestra project ended up sounding like I was coming off a Gossip Girl bender. (Ahem.) I'm no Corey Dargel when it comes to the audio engineering, but in the spirit of the amateur, I tried. If you have a few minutes and have ever considered going to a symphony concert, I hope this audio handbook of etiquette for elite occasions helps you navigate the experience with confidence. (If you're already a regular, I hope it makes you smile.)
If I have failed, your visit is not wasted because Matt got the party started with one of his kick-ass comic strips. Now go laugh! It's Wednesday.
- Listen to Mind the Gap's 2009 Take a Friend to the Orchestra Contribution
And stay tuned for our next installment: Take an Enemy to the Opera
On Thursday, I've been invited to sit on a panel to chat about the intersection of opera, pop culture, and mass media, so I thought we'd get the ball rolling here on MTG. This week's survey question:
If you have wild card answers, please drop those in the "other" category. If you would like to suggest which composers you expect to see attached to these projects, please drop those in the comments below.
And the survey said:
The "Other" category accounted for 12% of the vote. Answers ranged around the field, but this option was mostly used to further express great distaste for the service--pretty much summed up by this one: "More to feed the obsessive-compulsive loop? No. Please, no."
- I have no need for your micro news. I hope the cat gets it. 46%
- Stand in awe: I am master of the 140 character haiku. 35%
- As soon as I start a Facebook page and figure out what Tumblr is, I'll get around to doing this. 7%
Meanwhile, the media kept up its Twitter love and expressed its concern for Twitter hate. As for me, I'm loving seeing what friends and colleagues around the globe or doing and thinking on occasion, but am still not feeling prepared to wade into the pool quite yet myself. Count me reluctant.
Two years ago when I still lived in New York, I purchased a ticket to see a production at the Metropolitan Opera. Ever since then, I have received a steady stream of promotional emails, and though I've never purchased anything else, I have enjoyed looking at the pictures. Then a couple weeks ago, they sent this to me in Baltimore:
The package struck me for a number of reasons. It was exceptionally heavy, had traveled far (considering what it was selling), and emitted that intoxicating fresh ink smell. Inside was a five-piece subscription solicitation that included personalized mailing labels plus a 50(!)-page four-color brochure jam-packed with more tempting pictures than the JCPenny's Christmas catalog. The real kicker, however, was the eight-page, double-sided, tri-folded (and perforated!) "Order Forms" section. If I had been perusing the catalog with "Maybe we should go to the opera in New York this year!" fluttering around in the back of my mind, I was now paralyzed by the complexity of buying tickets. Forget Tosca; I suddenly did not feel mentally equipped to handle filling out the seat request form. There were New Year's Eve tickets and Opening Night tickets and Season Tickets and Single Tickets and something that cost $50,000, but I was too scared to look.
Now, I bet opera fans were drooling all over this same package, so I don't mean to knock the concept. And it must have cost a small fortune to produce and mail, so I hope they all immediately put in extensive season orders. But it was way more than I, a one-time single ticket buyer, knew what to do with. I'm more a teaser video and "Buy nosebleed seats for this Friday's show NOW for only $25!" kind of girl, myself.
And at root, that's probably the real problem. My image of myself does not include season subscriptions to anything, though (peeking cautiously back in on the order forms) I guess I could afford to incorporate one. This package was a great sales piece, I just wasn't the right customer.
Tell us what you really think. Voting closes Friday!
UPDATE: Though the comments you leave in the "Other" field do not show up publicly, they are being logged. I'll post those next week when the poll closes.
During one of my first panels here at the Conference on World Affairs, someone in the audience threw out the idea that perhaps society was crawling so far up into our technology that we were losing the ability to interact on old-fashioned, face-to-face terms. Were we doomed? Sounds like a reasonable fear, but considering even just the people I've met at this conference so far, in reality nothing seems further from the truth.
Selfishly, I report that I am having an amazing time up here in the mountains of Boulder. From the charming UC sophomore who gamely picked me up from the airport in the middle of the night to the gracious family that has opened their lovely home to me this week, to the scores and scores of amazing speakers and planners and attendees with their insightful, daring questions, this has been an experience I'll be turning over in my mind for a long, long while. In session after session I'm forced to both re-evaluate what I think and incorporate ideas I would never normally even come into contact with because that's how these people play "conference panel". There's a topic title (no description--that's open to interpretation) and three or four panelists from all sorts of backgrounds. Then, the moderator shouts go and we are off. And man can we talk.
During my time so far, some over-arching themes have started to emerge. The world is in a great period of recalibration--not only economically, but socially, politically, and technologically. In the technology sphere, media creators (pro and amateur and combinations in between) are evolving in terms of the stories they tell and the many sophisticated methods they can now choose to use to tell them; the consumers are changing their habits and standards right along side them. After a period of happy, shiny gadgetry, we're also looking more closely at what our technology does and how it can be refined to meet our needs better. Though admittedly it may be a little scary sometimes, everything is in play, and so it is a vital time of experimentation that is best embraced rather than feared--maybe now is the time to take a lesson from the past and not jump to judgment about the evils of evolutionary change. Sometimes we might leave behind things that are valuable, and we'll have to learn the hard way and reincorporate what we find we miss, but we don't need to let that slow us down. Really, most of us are speaking internet technology as a second language, anyway, and it shows. It's the generation coming up that will most likely truly teach us what we can do with this rocket ship.
We talk a lot about the shrinking attention span of the audience in a tone of voice that tends to imply "less sophisticated audience," when what we're really dealing with is the phenomenal increase in competition for people's eyes and ears and minds. In response, we're learning better ways to get our message across--in words, in audio, in video. Long form isn't dead, even if it's (arguably) a bit unfashionable at the moment. Where commercial demands force us to sacrifice what we feel is too much (smaller newspapers, commercial radio, Hollywood movies) we move to new venues (often, the internet) that provide what we need.
I've also been into deep conversations about the future of radio, the benefits to society presented by the economic fallout, and the evolution of women's artistic voices, and then observed some of the more heavy-hitting political and religious panels. Strangely, and yet in another way obviously, a certain refrain followed me along: Focus on the real goals at the core of your being or your business, and let the rest fall away when it prevents you from moving towards them; do unto others as you would have done unto you. Good for commerce, good for society, and good for the soul.
Okay, the creative commons/copyright panel is tomorrow. Look out.
After watching this cover of "Creep", I got a little nostalgic and looked up the original Radiohead video from (gasp) 1992. I listened over and over, clicking for a replay every time the last notes died away.
Part of my fascination was the emotional lockbox I had forgotten I'd left inside music that was part of my high school life. Lots of fun stuff to kick around and blow dust off of in there! But when that was over and done, something was still scratching at me. Sure it helps that Jonny Greenwood has that wounded puppy look on his face that just makes you want to flash your claws and protect him from the world, even while he rakes his own against his guitar. But sonically, the song is all fish hooks, attractive in the most base sense, which isn't about beauty or cool so much as how it holds itself--immediate and raw and temptingly close. That's what I heard, anyway. Think back and recall the sounds that spoke most to you when the adult you'd become started waking up inside you.
"Creep" makes a basic and fast and easy connection, and I don't mean to hold it up as any kind of musical ideal or goal. It's just what got me thinking. A lot of us who talk about art feel a need to push whatever we presume falls into the entertainment category into the wastebasket, or at least keep it isolated in the junk food drawer. We tend to get protective of the line drawn between because it's art that's "teaching us something profound about how to be human". Great art as Bible or something. "Creep" would not make the cut using the definitions we are taught; it probably wouldn't for me if I had only just heard the track for the first time today. But whether you're 15 or 50, you don't necessarily go looking to the Western canon for guidance. You look and read and listen, and when you're hunting for some deeper understanding of yourself and your world and your messed up head, you sometimes find it in places like this and discover something that sticks with you for a long time after, making it art in every sense of the word, no, even if it's only for you, only for a little while?
I'm off to Boulder on Sunday to serve as a panelist for the 61st Annual Conference on World Affairs (April 6-10)! I know! Why the hell would they have asked me?!?
Public speaking makes me incredibly nervous, so usually when people are kind enough to invite me to sit on panels and suchlike, my first thought is how to graciously get out of it. But then I tend to find the people and the topics so damn interesting I just can't resist (this also explains how I've been talked into a few New Year's Eve parties, but that's a story for another time).
How I ended up with an airline ticket to Colorado, however, is pretty much the same story writ large. The Conference on World Affairs sounds like summer camp for intellectuals--big idea discussions on "the arts, media, science, diplomacy, technology, environment, spirituality, politics, business, medicine, human rights, and so on." Plus, once I found out that Molly Ivins used to go every year, there was no way I was going to miss the chance. They said they were interested in me because of the whole "writing and music and internet" thing going down around me. Does anyone smell copyright debate and conversations about new media in the air?
Yesterday, however, I read the bios of my fellow panelists and seriously started to sweat. These are some major league heavy hitters. Will I sound foolish?
Okay, deep breath--enough with the whining. Here's hoping I can string my words together in an interesting fashion and add something to the conversation. The entire event is massive: some 200 panels, plenaries, and performances. I'll try and report in while I'm there. If you see anything in the line-up you'd like some vicarious eyes on, let me know. And if you know of any good coffee shops I can hide out in if I embarrass myself, let me know about those, too.
