Mind the Gap: January 2010 Archives

I know this is possibly ill-considered of me to admit, but I love video paired with live music performance primarily because I often find watching musicians themselves to be kind of distracting. "But Molly!" you may cry, if you're an exceptionally motivated person, "you're missing the artistry, the profound beauty of bows across strings and souls out there on the stage building this beautiful thing before your eyes!" And I'd say I know you have a point, and yes sometimes that's true. But just as often I find that it is not the case at all and it helps me chill out and concentrate on what's really central to the experience if I can have a milder place to park my eyes while partaking in the aural experience (and because, let's face it, closing them seems a bit melodramatic, don't you think?). It's more akin to putting certain senses on mute and giving them permission to remain quiet, not violently turning them off completely.

This may be a very personal thing. I also loved performing in spaces where I was in a pit orchestra or in the balcony of a church where the "audience" couldn't see me that easily. It helped focus things, I always felt. But today I came across a visual manifestation of music that actually kind of rattled me at the core. This wasn't some cheesy "visualizer" option in my mp3 player, but a video directly tied to the shape of the sound. It tweaked something weird in my brain, and I'm still working on what and why that is. Maybe it was just the novelty, but it seemed to plug the sounds into a different ear socket, so to say, in way that I found enjoyably compelling.

[via waxy]

Conan O'Brien is not the only one in a creative tussle with the man. Have you heard the one about OK Go, EMI, and YouTube? Er, well, this isn't quite as brutal an argument as Coco's, but still: the map to the future of music is at stake. By which I mean finding the money.

So, here's what's up: OK Go, the band that rose to stardom arguably on the backs of its videos (remember the synchronized treadmill dance?), is in a bit of a bind: EMI, which is now their record label, says OK Go videos shall be "embedding disabled by request" on YouTube (to pick up the page view ad revenue, I assume). How does this kind of move impact a band that was probably built on the power of viral marketing? Does it get them closer to the money at this stage or risk moving the pot further away again?

Frontman Damian Kulash typed a poignant exegesis on the band's plight. There was also an engaging interview.

Clearly, the future is confusing for everyone and the increasingly pressing problem of financing that future is making people extra edgy, but what can we take from this? That once you get to a certain level--major motion pictures, platinum albums, best selling crime fiction--the rules change and that's fine (same as it ever was)? The early years of web development were fun and exciting and all, but maybe the business-minded middle men are not going to go quietly into that good night. Are they (and their control issues) finally going to catch up to things and redirect our course? Maybe we are just at the bumpy beginning of the stage where money is awkwardly reintroduced into the equation, starting (and perhaps remaining) with many of the same major players in any industry. We've been running so hard looking for the cash to support our content creation ventures and sweating out our passion along the trail, but I'm worried that when we find it, it will look like the real world--most people will pull into an intellectual Wal-Mart, pay to access the "good stuff" they have been advertised and that has been standardized and preselected for their convenience.

Too dystopian a vision? Maybe I just need a nap. A long one. And when I wake up, hopefully you people will have this headache sorted out.

We dropped by Baltimore's Contemporary Museum on Saturday night to catch the opening of Participation Nation, an exhibition focused on projects that nudge viewers out of their passive role as mere observers and invite them to actually contribute to the art on display. I wasn't in the door three seconds when what to my wondering eyes did I spy but a project honoring the work of Maryanne Amacher, courtesy the friendly folks at Neighborhood Public Radio.

Even if you are not lucky enough to live in Baltimore, you can join in the fun. According to NPR:

As part of the Baltimore Contemporary Museum's PROJECT 20 series, celebrating their 20th Anniversary, Neighborhood Public Radio will host a coast-to-coast audio-project for broadcast.

In homage to sound pioneer Maryanne Amacher, who died in October, NPR will re-imagine her seminal radio-locative sound project CITY LINKS (1967) as a community remix project to be aired locally in Baltimore, and streamed to Portable Radio Instruments for broadcast in San Diego, Chicago, and Albuquerque.

Broadcasts will occur every Sunday night at 9pm (EST).

We will collect these recordings every week and remix and process them for broadcast. We will also post the files on our website, inviting anyone to remix and reuse the recordings.

If you remix these sounds, send them to: nprphoneup@gmail.com and we'll put them on the air.

I've had some conversations lately with creators in which they lamented an observed trend towards increasing self-involvement among their audience--a fear of the "my opinion should count because I can Twitter it" critical leveling on display of late. Wouldn't this mark the beginning of the end for great artistic expression? Wouldn't quality be washed out with tsunami force when anyone, regardless of expertise, could participate?

I thought about this as I walked through the exhibitions, particularly one room in which participants had created shrines inside plain wooden boxes. Whether the individual behind each box was honoring a lost loved one or an abandoned vice, the quiet, personal works were remarkably affecting. If this show is an example of what comes when more members of a community are invited to take a creative role, we have little to fear and much to learn from our neighbors.

Word processing changed the way we write, and music notation software changed the way we compose, but how is the internet changing the way we think?

There are long and short answers to this query, but either way, you can easily lose many, many hours while people (of variable expertise) pour thoughts (of various interest) into your brain.

I think that's how I'd answer the question, actually.

Wow, now this is engagement. Are you watching, cultural organizations? Feel that?

And if you're sitting there wondering what all that was even about:

So, after my last "technology is changing my life and I might want to get off this ride" S.O.S. post, I've been thinking a lot about what I'm truly anxious about in 2010.

When everything is available, what is special (and how on earth are you supposed to find it)?
We're drowning in a sea of choice, and though we learn daily how to more effectively deal with our new reality, it's still often a source of significant stress and anxiety. How can we even begin to discover things to love and admire when wading through this much stuff? I find myself perversely shutting down to new experiences as more and more of them present themselves.

Everything is forever and yet nothing is forever.
In our digital lives, there are no magazines to recycle when all the articles are online and no music collections to move when it's all in the clouds, yet servers fail and things disappear, sometimes with witnesses to sound the alarm, sometimes without comment or explanation. Though I have letters from middle school, every email I sent before 2005 no longer exists.

Keeping up with how technology is changing our lives feels like a marathon I am about to lose.
As technology increases the pace of our lives, will a backlash come? I can't help but imagine a coming trend in which a group of people very consciously makes the decision to unplug themselves from this culture of constant digital sharing. There will be stories about these people deleting all their social networking accounts and turning in their smart phones. People will praise and disparage them with a shocking intensity that reflects their own personal struggles with these changing social paradigms.

I am a *music* *journalist*.
Sometimes I feel like I'm standing with a foot on the deck of two different sinking ships. Right now pretty much any venture that counted on selling copies to pay the bills looks like a toppled game of Jenga. As we begin 2010, we remain in a period of redefinition and recalibration, but we seem to be getting a better handle every day on how to develop even as problems and their solutions continue to morph and change before our eyes. The fun, if we're optimistic and flexible about it, is in figuring out how to restack these blocks into a relatively stable form: distilling things down to what is essential about these pursuits, and coming to terms with what is merely disposable (and dated) window dressing--the superficial, if comforting, shells that we continue to cling to at our peril.

UPDATE: The future, or the journalism part at least, solved! Classical music, however, seems destined for a bumpy ride.

NPR's four-minute analysis of two current chart toppers suggests that they are so much of everything that their net effect is nothing--nothing but cash, anyway.

 'Avatar' And Ke$ha: A Denominator In Common? by Neda Ulaby and Zoe Chace

A sample of their findings:

The lyrics mean nothing; the song is about nothing. Even the bridge of "Tik Tok" sounds like a bridge that's making fun of a bridge.

Speaking of good things on TV, check out this eight-minute short written and directed by Neil Gaiman and staring Bill Nighy and Amanda Palmer. There's not a word of dialog, which is just fine because it leaves lots of room for Sxip Shirey's charming score. (Yes, that Sxip.)

Happy 2010, everyone! Hope you all enjoyed a fabulous holiday.

Just on the cusp of the new year, a friend sent me this article about a couple who was seriously taking it back to the land. They lived without running water in a yurt in Alaska. (Wi-fi, however, was deemed an essential resource). Some people found the whole idea incredibly annoying, but it stuck with me solely for the reminder that life--to varying degrees, depending on your circumstances--can be the adventure you're brave enough to create for yourself. I'm no resolution maker, but I wondered if I was doing a good job in that department. I fantasized about yurt life for 48 hours, though I confess that I would vote for the water and ditch the internet, if it came down to it. My friend laughed and said that was silly--my head would surely explode if I was unplugged from my email for any serious length of time. I worried she was right.

Though I see how I may be blowing this out of proportion historically, as we blast into 2010, do you consider/worry about how communications technology is shaping your life as things move from novelty to status quo? After a day of endless emails and the writing of small ideas and the consumption of 200 blog posts, I can't help but roughly tally up the time/mental drain and think about how that same chunk may have been applied to other ends. What is happening to my brain and my output? Is this much information a stimulant or a mind-numbing distraction? Do I want to go further down this rabbit hole, or retreat to the dark (or at least non-pixelated) ages before anything like interactive TV watching touches my life?

My thinking was further poked at (and somewhat steadied) by Michael Agger's evenhanded consideration of the ideas in Jaron Lanier's new book You Are Not A Gadget. The review read like a call to not freak out and run backwards, but take a second and reflect on where exactly we're going with all these magical toys (and what they may take from us) as we move forward. We can blow an hour of the day absorbing the mix and mash, but what have we gained and how much has it truly cost us? I, for one, feel like I could use a time out, though I'm honestly not sure if getting off the ride to re-evaluate would do anything but leave me in the dust.

UPDATE: Feeling more optimistic.