Across the Great Divide

Back When I was a Word Man.

This is a test of Typepad's audio player, which in my browser doesn't display as a player in my preview mode. It appears to require a right-click on the box to open the link in a new tab/window. But now that it's posted, a play arrow does seem to appear if you hover over the bar with your mouse.

Word Man

New Berlin Wall Gives New Meaning to "Free."

I have run
I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
These city walls
Only to be with you

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

The Associated Press reports  that a massive barrier will block Berliners' view of U2's concert celebrating 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Only 10,000 ticket holders will be allowed by MTV organizers to see today's concert in front of the Brandenburg Gate. Those tickets were made available online — for free.

Apparently, MTV will not force the non-free-ticket-holding freeloaders on the other side of the barrier to stick their fingers in their ears and hum.

The Who Screams, I Scream.

LeRoy Stevens complied “Favorite Recorded Scream” as more than a mix tape of throat-shredding howls from popular recordings. He spent six months finding 74 Manhattan record shops, soliciting their nominations and mapping their locations in the city. So it's more fully understood as a conceptual work that

traces his inspiration in “using the city as a sort of playground” to mid-20th century trickster movements like Fluxus and the Situationists. “Equal emphasis is placed on the process as well as the final product,” he said. In that sense the record stores themselves helped create the work and are also now functioning as its gallery.

Mapping the stores adds a dimension to the work because it honors them as a cultural repository and documents their precarious existence. Some of the stores have gone out of business since the project was completed.

And no, I don't have a favorite scream I can name. I tended unconsciously to filter them out. As a singer, I was trained not to abuse my vocal cords, so even as the front man in rock bands, I left the screams to others. 

*****

But one thing does make me scream — lame infographics.

On his packaging, Stevens straightforwardly listed the scream submissions by order received, showing title, artist and nominating shop, then mapped the location of the stores and also listed them alphabetically. That makes it relatively easy to interact with the layers of information.

Here's a case where designers put together a slick online graphic tied to a database, but actually succeeded in being less information friendly than the record cover and its inserted poster.

 

The site devotes most of its real estate to displaying a US map outlining the states — and then repeating 2/3rds of the map as fill in the lower corner. It's logical to use the map to select your state, but if you click on the state whose economic index you want to view, nothing happens. You have to find the state in the ranked list on the left and click there.

Then the state is highlighted and the data appear in the bar below. Too bad if you want to compare states beyond the ordinal rankings. The big map would be an obvious place to show the index colors, but you can only view one at a time.

The Rain Comes.

Well, That Was a Morning Wasted...

From Hal Davis:

Congress ... in 1924 enacted the Johnson-Reed bill that limited European immigration to just over 150,000 per year with nationality quotas based on the origins of the U.S. population, which heavily favored western and northern Europe, especially Britain. The act required entry visas, with photographs -- another facet of control -- and largely excluded Asians. It exempted most of the western hemisphere so that Mexico could continue supplying western farmers with cheap labor.

— Allan J. Lichtman, WHITE PROTESTANT NATION: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement

From MinnPost, a story on Minnesota's "best and brightest" video bloggers includes Melinda Jacobs, whose other stabs at sincerity, authenticity and attention-grabbing included promoting herself as a flirting expert. She got her start in March after devoting:

two years studying the economics and technology of the industry before jumping into the digital era to do long-form celebrity interviews.
 

Even though she hopes to eventually make a living with online video, she refuses to put ads or product placements into her pieces if she doesn't believe in them.

The Craig Show, also featured, does product placement right, with a Taylor guitar slipped into his golf instruction video. (Maybe he's only hilarious if you play golf.)

And in this, via The Daily Glean,  Michele Bachmann proves herself a much better Autotune singer than Sarah Palin.

Say Again?

MinnPost has a short piece about the celebrity-infused gala sponsored by Starkey Hearing Foundation, which raises money to provide hearing aids to children worldwide. Here's more.

The guest list included "stars" such as Buzz Aldrin, "Incredible Hulk" Lou Ferrigno and Arnold Palmer, who was already in town for the 3M Championship golf tourney.

One local celebrity missing this year was philanthropist and disgraced businessman Tom Petters.

The event always features luminary musical guests, including Garth Brooks, John Mellencamp, Tricia Yearwood, Michael Bolton, and Dionne Warwick. This year's acts included Gladys Knight, Tony Bennett and Elton John, who gave an hour-long show.

I heard a few years ago that someone hob-nobbing with one of the bands asked how the event consistently got top names to perform. The expenses must cut into the amount raised, she mused.

"Hell, no," responded a band member. "We love doing this because we all use the products ourselves."

Tempus Fugedaboutit.

Orchestra Hall is coming in for a makeover.

Architecture critic Linda Mack, who served on an advisory committee for this project, once described Orchestra Hall as an example of "1970s let-it-all-hang-out brutalism." New York architect Hugh Hardy's design "was a product of its era," she said Friday. "It was avant-garde in its time and meant to be more accessible, but I don't think people embraced it. It's hard to find someone who says, 'I adore that lobby.'"

Sounds familiar. I myself am a product of my era, and my lobby has fallen into disrepair.

As Tom Waits once wrote, "I'm big in Japan." But stuff changes, and at a certain point, you don't get to change with it.

When the ceiling sound cubes of Orchestra Hall were still being plastered, I was putting the finishing touches on a special section I wrote for the Minneapolis Star that was to accompany the opening of the new building. In those days, I wrote as Charles R. Quimby, because it seemed like newspaper readers might take my criticism a little more seriously than from a guy called Charlie. Charles R. had tickets on the aisle whenever he asked.

As another Tom wrote, "The sky was the limit."

The supplement contained a general orchestra history, plus profiles of all the past conductors and an interview with a violinist who'd served under all of them. I also covered how the construction company was both intrigued and a little disturbed that all the building's mechanical systems were exposed. 

As one of the Star's arts writers, I got passes to the opening concert. We were standing around in our dress-up clothes drinking champagne, which made the let-it-all-hang-out lobby look pretty decent.

But my prevailing memory is of the music critic, who shall remain nameless, who showed up in a powder blue outfit the likes of which we had never seen. In fact, the style was so brand new and avant-garde, he could wear it without irony to this major cultural event and no one would even know until he told them that this groovy new ensemble was called a leisure suit.

If they have an opening ceremony for the updated hall, I would hope there's a curatorial display case for that baby.

 

Looking at the building today, it may not be obvious how much time has passed since it was new and adventurous. But my face over that special-section byline and the powder blue leisure suit make it clear that something was due for a change.

Wit and Learning in Equal Parts.

"Young Cons" displays wit and learning in equal parts, with a dash of the mandatory braggadocio thrown in for good measure.
– Scott Johnson, Power Line

Can't argue with that statement.

What happens when two Dartmouth freshman (with a Dartmouth man's rhythm and freshman's command of political philosophy) lay down a hip hop conservative anthem?

Why, they get praised right and, well, right.

We will be hearing more from these two remarkable young men.

I couldn't believe how funny it was and how biting it was. I was just laughing about it all day.

If this were a goof, surely there’d be some sign — an obviously jokey line, a bit of comic overacting, something.

Young Con Josh Riddle said "his views are 'more valid' because of the diverse influences that contribute to his conservatism."

The inaccurate manifestations of conservatism cloud the real mettle in its core. Flawed politicians lay on both sides of the political spectrum, however, we believe the core conservative principles of Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King Jr.¹, and arguably Jesus² are the flag-bearers of the true conservative movement.

They say their goal is not to pursue a rap career, but to get young Americans involved in politics.

Good call, lads.

References:
1. "Was Jesus A Conservative" http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2258938/posts
2. Martin Luther Kings Conservative Legacy http://www.heritage.org/research/americanfoundingandhistory/wm961.cfm

Sorry, I Can't Help But Watch the Wreck.

United Airlines travelers in Minneapolis Friday morning did not want to board their flight to Chicago as this story unfolded from the monitors broadcasting CNN. [No embedded video here as CNN code hijacks my formatting.]

As a woman drove around Long Beach for about half an hour, like OJ on meth, passengers hung out in the boarding area, hoping for some resolution before they had to turn off all their electronic devices. Airline staff had to make a special appeal to get them on board.

*****

Then there was the saga of Billy Bob "I'm a Drummer and Music Scholar" Thornton, whose vanity project crumples at the slightest emanation of a penumbra of a hint of an allusion that his vanity project might be a vanity project.

After BBT did a number on a Canadian radio host and audiences protested, his band came down with the flu. If you watch the video of the interview, you can see his band mates getting sick.

Creative Creative Destruction.

The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers, goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.
— Joseph Schumpeter, Creative destruction

Sunday afternoon, like many other Borders Books sometime customers, I received an emailed sale coupon. After this desperately discounted Christmas retailing season, 40% off everything didn't seem like much of a deal. Since they were a closing a store, shouldn't the bargains be even greater?

It didn't matter, since the fine print noted the store they were closing was in Sacramento. Turns out this was not an invitation to jump on a plane or click through to the website.

It was just a mistake by another company circling the drain as its entire industry restructures into oblivion.

If moving from browsing dusty and incomplete local stores to zipping through seemingly limitless virtual storehouses was the extent of the change to the book business, I'd still be saddened, but could appreciate the trade offs of more titles for less immediacy, of lower cost for a different shopping experience.

Thirty-odd years ago, I had a small business selling used books out of the house via the national network of sellers that subscribed to Antiquarian Bookman. The weekly publication listed books customers were seeking. Shops and independent book scouts like me scoured the fine print for titles we had for sale. We'd scribble our price on a post card along with a shorthand description of the edition and its condition. Weeks later, we might make a sale, which we would package and send to the retailer.

Today, that process is nearly instantaneous and includes not just the book specialists who know what they are selling, but amateurs who just want to clean out their shelves.

I'm not sure winding the book business down to zero is precisely what Schumpeter had in mind when he said:

But in capitalist reality as distinguished from its textbook picture [what counts is] the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization (the largest-scale unit of control for instance) – competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives. This kind of competition is as much more effective than the other as a bombardment is in comparison with forcing a door...

As the bombardment continues in the distance, you can hear authors rhapsodizing about Kindle.

"This is the future of book reading. It will be everywhere," says Michael Lewis. And maybe he's right; the e-book reader (really a personal Amazon purchase kiosk) might be everywhere. 

But what about the books?

As David Streitfeld wrote, more is changing than the way of buying books or what what physical form they take. Creative destruction is moving upstream to the publishers and closer to the creators. It's getting harder to make money from the original creative product.

Streitfeld finds online dozens of copies of a newly published paperback he's seeking available for as little as one cent, plus shipping.

How much do I want to pay, and where do I want that money to go? To my local community via a bookstore? To the publisher? To the author?

In theory, I want to support all of these fine folks. In practice, I decide to save a buck.

He buys a hardcover edition for 25 cents.

Jon Pareles describes how the process has evolved in pop music, where the destruction of local record stores is only the tip of a melting ice berg. Songs and entire albums are being produced with licensing, not listeners, in mind, because that's where the revenue is.

Selling recordings to consumers as inexpensive artworks to be appreciated for their own sake is a much-diminished enterprise now that free copies multiply across the Web.

While people still love music enough to track it down, collect it, argue over it and judge their Facebook friends by it, many see no reason to pay for it. The emerging practical solution is to let music sell something else: a concert, a T-shirt, Web-site pop-up ads or a brand.

Gillian Welch described it, too.

Everything is free now,
That's what they say.
Everything I ever done,
Gotta give it away.
Someone hit the big score.
They figured it out,
That we're gonna do it anyway,
Even if doesn't pay.

But writing a book for free is still a very different decision than recording a song or putting up this post — even a thousand more in a year. Investigating a corrupt administration involves a different commitment than opining about someone else's reporting.

This lament is not new, and for now the amazing access we have to a still-unfolding proliferation of content makes it seem consumers have made the better bargain. The creators can play or be destroyed.

But perhaps we, too, are being creatively destroyed, little by little.

Consuming an entire book may soon seem as archaic as sitting still for the recitation of an epic poem or memorizing the catechism.

Or discovering a creative artist who is not yet a capitalist.