Archives for 2009

Well, kids, a cold and steady October rain is falling and the radiators are knocking. I’m not complaining, however, because such changes in the season are all strangely comforting to this Midwestern girl’s heart. Also, I have a stack of New Yorker‘s to catch up on and the Shouts & Murmurs contributions are making me laugh so hard I’m scaring the cat.

First, in last week’s issue we got a few words on program notes:

“The Dialogue Between the Wind and the Sea” pits roiling strings against strident brass, belligerent woodwinds, and unhinged timpani bent on physical reprisal. Again, the composer ingeniously juxtaposes regular and triple figures, a development that for many years was hailed as a breakthrough in modern composition, although it is now generally acknowledged to have been a printer’s error. Still, the layered rhythms create a spectacular lurching effect that vividly evokes the roll of waves, as well as a tremendous desire to urinate.

And now this week we get a few tips on marketing when the only person left on staff is the intern:

If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they’re better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent. You may have gotten the blast e-mail from Jason Zepp, your acquiring editor, saying that people who do this sort of thing will go to Hell, but just ignore it.

And if everything your tech department has ever said to you sounds something like that, it only gets better from there…

For some reason, I tend to drag my feet when the idea of adopting some snazzy new technology is introduced. Hand cranked pasta maker? That’s just practical. iPhone? Um, now really, do I need that?

No, of course I don’t. But staring out at a sea of panel attendees taking pictures and video with their iPhones last week suggested to me that it was perhaps wise that I board this bandwagon already if I was going to continue working in internet media. (Also, a bit later when starvation was eminent and Sidney asked his iPhone where we should eat lunch, it literally drew us a map.) And so, with my reservations finally tamped down, Brian and I welcomed twin iPhones into our lives this past weekend–his wearing the black case, mine in steely mauve.

I have to admit that it is a pretty cool device and I am enjoying getting to know my new little gadget. Still, suddenly having five more ways to organize my copious to-do lists did not exactly lower my stress level.

“You need a game!” I thought to myself, while browsing through all those actually productivity increasing apps. But the whizz and bang of the games on offer didn’t really seem like my thing. The zen garden, however, was a bit too much of a cat nap. And then, across a crowded iTunes store, I saw it. Bloom. For the remainder of the weekend, every time Brian looked up from his own iPhone to ask what I was doing, I was not exploring new ways to organize my travel reservations or plan dinner menus. I was actually making music again. Well, sorta-kinda.

(Video is by mrk087, not yours truly. Sorry for any confusion there, folks.) 

In the past week, I’ve had the chance to take in both the National Summit on Arts Journalism at USC Annenberg (via webcast) and the Future of Music Coalition’s three-day Policy Summit (in person, and this one included a two-hour round table on the “Critical Condition” as well–and they let me play too!–so I feel like I doubled down in that department).

Anyway, it was an eye-opening, career-examining, industry-evaluating set of events, and though being a “music” “journalist” sort of feels like standing on the decks of two sinking ships in this economic environment, I ended up really jazzed about the field because of how passionately people create, consume, and connect over music these days. Sure, making a living wage and having health care are not small concerns, but if those first pieces aren’t in place, we are surely lost on the rest of it, so I was encouraged.

Now, on to the things I learned about, or learned more about, that you might find useful in your own life and work:

1. Need money? Try Kickstarter

What does that do, you ask? Kickstarter is “is a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers…” I personally know at least one composer who successfully used this platform to raise the funding he needed to make a record.

Think this can’t possibly work? Seriously, none of these videos make you at least consider opening your wallet? Not even Allison’s?:

2. Need dynamic multimedia? Meet Sophie

Love all the crazy multimedia content out there but feeling technically under-skilled to put it all to use in the digital realm? There’s an app for that! Well, actually not an app, it’s a whole set of software tools and it’s really for educational institutions to use, but I see a wider application of this kind of product coming down the pike, don’t you? Go ahead and dance about architecture!

3. Need new music? Get ready for Spotify

Not yet available in the US (licensing deals still to be done), it’s the streaming music service Europe is abuzz over that’s completely legal and completely free (ad supported). Subscribe for extra bells and whistles and to avoid the ads. I tried not to get sucked in as Spotify’s founder and CEO Daniel Ek spoke to the crowd, but he was just so,…so rational in all his answers about why Spotify was successful, what it would offer users directly and what it would partner with others to do. I couldn’t help myself, I was completely mesmerized.

Also:

1. Al Franken is still bringing the smart and funny, even though he is now a serious Senator dealing with lots of heavy issues.

2. Music journalists: You are only worth the audience you bring.

3. Facts and figures courtesy Ariel Hyatt via Greg Kot: “U.S. album sales in 2008: More than 115,000 albums were released, but only 110 sold more than 250,000 copies, a mere 1,500 topped 10,000 sales, and fewer than 6,000 cracked the 1,000 barrier.”

There is a fleeting moment in Bright Star, Jane Campion’s quietly powerful film chronicling the last year or so of John Keats’ life, when the poet reports that two people wrote glowing reviews of his new collection of poems. They were both friends of his, he is careful to mention. Then there were a handful of mixed appraisals and “four hostile” notices. Someone listening to this account, trying to be encouraging, asks Keats if that means it’s selling well then, and there is an awkward silence.

It was an eerily familiar set of events, a conversation I’ve seen play out among well-meaning strangers to the new music community in multiple scenarios. Now, of course, the people in the movie theater knew going in that Keats would die young, feeling like a failure, but that eventually he would come to be respected as one of the great poets of the Romantic age (and if they didn’t already know it, it would be pointed out to them before the closing credits). But it got me thinking about the divide between the composers I know today who are hoping for a similar immortality/recognition of their genius after the fact, and those not expecting anything of the sort. It’s not a hard and fast line, of course, but there’s a break around maybe age 35. I wonder if as people age and start sensing their own mortality they necessarily change their tune on hoped-for success past death, or if it’s an external societal thing–a shift we might attribute to the digital age. Along with our shrinking hope for the scope of potential fame, has the ephemerality of “content” made us skeptical about the lifeline of our art?

You can lip sync with it, Kanye can, um, advocate for it, and babies who can’t even walk yet can dance to it on national TV. Maybe “Single Ladies” is the video of the year?

Personally, I like how this crew slowed down, sat down, and made a whole new version.

Okay, I’m not really sure Heidegger changed my life, though I do remember samples of his work being part of my existentialism survey course and can recall animated conversations about them over coffee after class. But how much of the knowledge and training that I have used to build my life can I consciously grasp and enumerate by source, the origins now well buried in the slow and steady chisel work of a nurturing liberal arts education? If I had spent my days under a rock or in a lab coat, how different would I be today? How much of what we idealize as our humanness is bound up in our genes, and how much in the mind we develop through our study of the world around us–in the consumption of literature, philosophy, music, art, and the surrounding conversations that lead to more questions and ways of seeing?

I kept coming back to these ideas and personal self-analysis as I read Mark Slouka’s education policy-poking essay Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school in Harper‘s September issue. Slouka is looking at what we teach our children these days and why, because he sees the fetishization of math and science in current education standards, and he’s worried–particularly due to the assumption that math and science are what students need (and only need) for our nation to excel in the global marketplace. He argues that when all lives are valued only in terms of dollars and cents, workers who can endure boring and rote tasks (and earn great SAT scores) will be, on paper, much more valuable to the engine. Poets, not so much.

But that’s terribly short sighted if we also buy into the idea that the future will be all about the “creative class”. Slouka notes that our army of cooperate office workers are indeed having some trouble keeping up on the communications end of things, and that’s dangerous to a democracy when you think about how much we as a society rely on gifted writers and orators (and filmmakers and musicians) to challenge power. So it seems this is an issue that it’s vital we reframe and consider in terms of political health and civic life before we stray too far, no matter how hard it is to push back against the balance sheet instincts of American companies fighting for their profits in a tough economy. Math and science can’t be all there is. A philosophy degree is not an idyll pursuit. We need the humanities.

Why? Because they complicate our vision, pull our most cherished notions out by the roots, flay our pieties. Because they grow uncertainty. Because they expand the reach of our understanding (and therefore our compassion), even as they force us to draw and redraw the borders of tolerance. Because out of all this work of self-building might emerge an individual capable of humility in the face of complexity; an individual formed through questioning and therefore unlikely to cede that right; an individual resistant to coercion, to manipulation and demagoguery in all their forms. The humanities, in short, are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values. There is no better that I am aware of.

This, I would submit, is value–and cheap at the price. This is utility of a higher order. Considering where the rising arcs of our ignorance and our deference lead, what could represent a better investment? Given our fondness for slogans, our childlike susceptibility to bullying and rant, our impatience with both evidence and ambiguity, what could earn us, over time, a better rate of return?

(full article)

And if you find yourself getting as stirred up by this discussion as I did, you have more reading to do.

Mind the Gap has just been alerted that this blog is in the running for a Mobbie, the Baltimore Sun‘s first annual stab at “recognizing Maryland’s Outstanding Blogs.” Whether you are a Charm City resident or not, you can chime in your support for this or any of a whole host of interesting Maryland scribes here.

Don’t know much about Baltimore? If the city’s name makes you think of The Wire, and then John Waters, and then you draw a blank, well this is also a chance to blow up some preconceptions about the city’s cultural life. Vote early, vote often (seriously, you can click daily), and learn about all that Maryland has to offer you–besides the crab cakes.

I crawled into bed at 9 p.m. last night with my laptop and a box of tissues feeling pretty pathetic, but by 9:20 p.m. I had pretty much forgotten that I had a head cold and couldn’t breath properly because Glee (on FOX for those with TVs and Hulu for those who can’t stick to a normal schedule) is just that over-the-top awesome. After finally losing all hope that Gossip Girl would ever return to the ridiculous levels of word sparring that made me love it, I think I have a replacement, folks, and the jokes are even arts related! Also, hello a cappella transition music (did I just hear Mozart’s Requiem slide into a Journey classic?), not to mention the dancing footballers!

And yes, it’s corny and unrealistic, but possibly the show’s most ingenious hook is that it reminds us all of how we lip synced to pop tunes in our bedrooms to deal with the everyday dramas of high school while fantasizing that the whole school was our audience. In Glee‘s case, for better and worse, everyone really is watching.

I couldn’t believe that my fellow AJ bloggers weren’t already in on this high school musical, and indeed sounds like Chloe Veltman is also ready for her audition.

For those on deadline today, a rather lovely diversion: Icycle

And for those as coordinated as I am who will never see the higher levels of the game on their own skills, here’s a glimpse.

That cool. That style. As if we needed more evidence of the ways NPH rocks or reasons to adore him…

What a villain.

And while we’re discussing culturally interesting players in our 21st century, here’s Jonathan Ames.