Bomba Charger

2011-06-15T08:26:00.002-05:00

Blog is on a temporary hiatus. If you're interested, I sometimes update new posts over here

http://bombacharger.tumblr.com/

5!

2010-12-29T21:46:00.004-06:00

Kid, as always, you turn summers in my mind! Happy birthday, little darling!

2!

2010-11-19T20:59:00.004-06:00

Megan turned 2 today. My sweet little joy machine, how we love love love you madly!

Walking In the Woods With Megan

2010-10-10T21:35:00.025-05:00

A rare day. 10-10-10, duly noted. Add to this the idyllic weather. The last week here in Chicago has been poured from a rare vintage of early October. Crayola blue skies, a sun far less steeped in its summer humidity and a sudden storm of dry, crunchy leaves flaming out in burnt oranges, pear-like yellows and occasional rockets of red. Stunning.

There's a lot of green still up in the canopy, though the last week has seen a riot of new colors making appearances-- and there's no real mistaking Earth's particular tilt right about now and the bummer of a meteorological predicament this inevitably puts the Midwest in. The trees are losing their hair, those bushy green heads are being shed in preparation for winter's hard bargain. It's a tough yoke to hitch up to each autumn, knowing what's coming.

But sometimes when we're lucky, like we have been this year, we get a visit from Indian Summer. A fond farewell to the temperate, to open windows and bare feet. It's bittersweet, sure, but lovely, too, with summer coming back to visit us in early October. It's almost too much!

Cathy and I took the girls over to the 19th Annual Harvest Festival at the North Park Village Nature Center where we met up with friends and enjoyed lunch in a shady spot packed with a convenient cluster of picnic benches. It was here I ate too many Lays potato chips with very little regret.

After lunch, I took a walk with Meg. While Cathy, Abby and our friends were busy making scarecrows ("some assembly required"), I trailed my fierce little girl as she burned a path along one of the Nature Center's many kick-ass trails.

(Right): This is Megan launching our adventure. As you can see, she began in this inflated little walk she's been doing of late. She lifts her legs up high and stomps them out wide, taking big lumbering steps. It's a determined little walk and very sure of itself.

(Left): The path's at the Nature Center are well groomed with woodchips and gravel though they've done an amazing job of creating within its 46 acres something that feels completely of itself. Some think of nature preserves like this as havens, respites from the stresses of modern urbanity though I'm less interested in perpetuating the "historic opposition between things urban and things natural" then I am in recognizing that "cities are fundamentally embedded in natural environments." Part of what makes a preserve like this so special, I think, is the urbanity of its context, that such an expanse of protected/managed preserve exists in such close proximity to the urban areas built up around it. In any case, Megan's face here is all business.

(Below): Meg climbed a hill. It was warm (mid 80's), dry and quiet and she was thrilled to be leading the charge. Was this the swell of fatherly pride stirring in my breast? Well, when isn't that being stirred up? My fierce little Meg charging up the hill while I followed, a stupid grin on my face as I cheered her on and compulsively snapped pictures.

(Right): I like the horizon tree tops and blue sky in this picture, how it captures the impressive expanses the North Park preserve contains in its confines. It's definitely a showcase, a well groomed outdoor museum highlighting the ecological diversity that once dominated the landscape of Illinois as recently as a couple hundred years ago, just as it had for thousands of years prior. Then, of course, lots of folks arrived and got the bug to settle throughout the state and either farm the hell out of it or industrialize! The landscape changed. As Joel Greenberg wrote in his fantastic A Natural History of the Chicago Region, the formally "seamless mosaic of waters, wetlands, prairies, shrublands, and woods" were overcome by a new force, "one with the power to impose upon the landscape a uniformity that is now virtually complete." And so we lost our natural heritage.

(Left): The trail Megan took eventually led us to marshlands with lily pads clustering lazily on the pond's surface. According to Greenberg, Illinois has lost roughly 95 percent of its original wetlands to the forces of modernity. Flooding, of which the Chicago region enjoys its unfortunate share, is one unfortunate manifestations of this loss. Greenberg tellingly writes, "it matters not not to water whether the lowest point on the landsccape is a marsh or a basement."

I held Meg's hand and had a Rainbow Connection moment. I imagined a scenario where I contacted the Park District with a proposal for an outdoor soundscape exhibit examining bucolic landscapes like this by offering sonic examples of their place in popular culture. Well, cinema in particular. I liked the challenge of remixing various elements from the sound designs of dozens of films set in similar settings and letting them mingle with the areas actual acoustics for a couple hours over the course of a few nights. A sonic happening with all-weather speakers tactfully hidden throughout the area. Maybe somewhere in mix you'd hear the opening plucks of Kermit's mellow banjo among other cultural signifiers. I'd get a grant to do it, right?

(Right): This was about where Meg ran out of gas. It was hot, she'd been fighting a big wallop of a cold like a champ all week and I think she suddenly concluded being trail leader was no longer all that cool.

(Right): So I took my little Meg up in my left arm. I said the right words to put an end to errant tears and lead her back to Mom because that's what my girl needed. On the way back to Mom we talked about what we were seeing and I found myself pleasantly surprised by the easy serendipity of it all--of Cathy giving her full attention to Abby and the making of a scarecrow while Meg and I drifted off for an amazing half-hour walk through the preserve before joining up with them again. It felt like a well-oiled little family. It felt lucky and on days like this I'm filled with simple familial joys again and again until I'm brimming. Domesticity never felt so right or so close to perfect, both charmed and fragile.

September17, 2010: Late Summer Sun

2010-09-17T18:54:00.003-05:00

Mid-September already? Girls are all downtown, and I have the house to myself for the next hour. A Great Lakes Brewing Co. Oktoberfest and iTunes shuffle to keep my company.

Snapped the above shot with Hipstamatic (Bettie XL Lens + Ina's 1935 film= a winning combination) right after I got home around 6:30 tonight. Golden Hour light streaming through the house and a deep silence about the abode made for a wonderfully becalmed moment.

Late Summer Sonic Harvest

2010-08-20T20:37:00.008-05:00

Music cleaning out my ears, satisfying my soul and putting a shake in my hips this year.

Nuggets of the Golden Age of Gospel, a 4-CD set of rare gospel covering the years 1945 through 1958. I keep reaching for this one like a cool glass of water. Or, as in my own case, a nicely chilled Diet Coke. Sometimes 4 a day. That's 48 ounces too many. In any case the songs on this compilation have been our Sunday morning sermons for the better part of this past summer. Here's what I love: Hammond organs, gritty reverb washing over chugging guitars, swinging snares, pre doo-wop harmony beds and most of all, one soulful, sanctified lead vocal after another reaching up for glory hallelujah.

-Another favorite from this year is Pastor T.L. Barrott and the Youth For Christ Choir SINGS! and their awesome self-released 1971 gospel-soul album, Like A Ship...(Without A Sail). The great Chicago based reissue label, Numero Group put the title song from this album on their stellar '09 compilation Good God! Born Again Funk, and it just about knocked my socks off. Holy smokes! It's got, without a doubt, one of the most exalted choirs you'll ever hear. The whole album was just recently re-released by another reissue label, Light In The Attic, and the whole thing has been easing our souls of late.

The most welcome return of the year has been The Books new album, The Way Out. Along with Matthew Herbert, nobody else has done more for advancing the art of sampling.

But I'm equally smitten by the videos Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong of the Books have made to accompany their live performances. Flea market video finds, old super-8 home movies, oddball news footage and edited to perfectly syncopate with their music. The films and the songs follow the same groove. There's a lovely lo-fi aesthetic to it all while its carefully executed edits and syncopation owe more than a little to Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi and the flood of hyper-edit remixing folks have been posting to YouTube over the last few years.

On the video below for their song, Take Time, the editing is breathtaking in its execution. If anything, for the patience and time it must have taken to edit it all, an inspired collection of found-videos micro-looped to ride the songs rhythm. It's odd but equally rousing, slapstick silly at times watching the jerky movements of people repeated in rapid-fire little stutters, though surprisingly sweet. And ambiguous enough to allow the viewer to make their own story. When I saw The Books in concert a few years back at the Old Town they performed their whole show with video accompaniment and, not surprisingly, I loved the whole thing.

Double Rainbow Guy

2010-07-20T21:00:00.009-05:00

Despite myself, I've come to adore Hungrybear9562's emotional roller coaster of an encounter with a double rainbow. It's one of those remarkable home movies that drifts a while through YouTube (this one was at sea for roughly 6 months) before unexpectedly going viral. It just takes the right confluence of events, the right catalyst to see it, and suddenly 6 million people have tuned in to witness your ravings. You decide to sell t-shirts. Hell, why not?

In Hungrybear's encounter with double rainbows we experience epiphany, wonder and, surely, a very potent hallucinogenic, while one man unexpectedly confronts transcendental rainbow action from his backyard somewhere in Yosemite. It's almost impossible not to laugh while watching the video. His reaction to a double rainbow (and here it's important to note that if ever there were a better cultural signifier for all things fantasy and moon beamed then a rainbow, I'm not aware of it) is so terrifically sincere. I find myself conjuring his background while I watch what I've come to call "an overflowing": you know, like he played a lot of D&D back in the day, and when you walk into his house the air is probably thick with comic book pulp and there's maybe even a framed life size portrait of Gandalf the White hanging charmingly above his fireplace, and admittedly, this last one would be audacious and worthy of applause. But according to a recent p rofile in Fast Company (thanks, Internet!) he's living in "Yosemite raising Queensland Heelers and wild turkeys." Though he certainly does nothing to dissuade us of our bias in the profile, the fact that he looks vaguely of Hurley--heck, the fact that the whole video could best be described as "hurley-esque," has its own little pop-cultural shimmy to it.

Of the original clip below, it's definitely another to add to the rapidly growing cannon of amateur video documenting the hallucinogenic experience. What I think I like most about this one is how it follows an almost textbook-like narrative--how succinctly it captures the experience of being terrifically high and stumbling into a moment of unexpected beauty. From shouts of joy and laughter to a sobbing, quivering heap in no less then 3 minutes. It's as cleansing as it is spiritually uplifting.

Plus folks are tossing it up into auto-tuned Euro-cheese, so it's hard for me not to love this more then I probably should.

The Deer In The Wood

2010-06-12T21:34:00.015-05:00

We finished reading Little House In the Big Woods to Abby last night. Cathy and I have been taking turns over the last month reading a chapter or two each night to her before bedtime. We were riveted by tales of spooky panthers chasing grandpa through the darkest woods; of the explosive moment where Laura slaps her sister Mary because Mary insists her hair is prettier; and the delicious scene where Pa returns home from an outing to collect honey, pretending he hasn't had much success, only to surprise Ma with buckets and buckets of the stuff!

I had forgotten, in the 25 or so years since I first read it, the wide-eyed cinematic splendor of the books final chapter, The Deer in the Wood. You might remember? Pa lays a deer-lick trap in the forest and spends a crisp autumn night camped out in a tree with his gun. He's going to bring his family fresh venison and whatnot, whatever unfortunate critter comes sniffing and licking about long enough so as Pa can put in a good shot.

But Pa goes and completely forgets the reason he's there: to bring his family fresh meat! We know from previous chapters that Pa doesn't waste any time when it comes to providing his family with their fill of meat. He's a fierce customer, a frontiersman providing for his family, and a damn good shot.

But Pa is instead overcome by waves of fellow-feeling for nature and its noble creatures. He can't bring himself to shoot a single one of the animals that falls prey to his mighty deer-lick. He ends up having this wonderfully becalmed transcendentalist moment as cozy as the accompanying Garth Williams illustration. It's a lovely piece of writing.

Though what really makes the final chapter sing isn't Pa and his inner-Emerson at all. It's Wilder herself, describing the moment she first awoke to the present, announcing "now is now. It can never be a long time ago." Its a firework of a line, the surprise of Laura awakening to the sweet, irreplaceable now of things. Like Pa, she's overcome by the moment, of the pause before the past is past and the future beckons. I need to check this book out!

A Modest Attraction

2010-05-21T20:38:00.009-05:00

The lawn on our new house in Edgebrook is a little mangy.

I've been mowing it about once a week for the past month and it's thick with dandelion, rogue clover and struggling Kentucky Bluegrass. It looks tidy for a day or two after I mow it.

Most of the lawns in the neighborhood are lush and tidy. They're shampooed and conditioned then tended to by weekly lawn and yard maintenance crews. I see them when I'm home with the girls on weekday afternoons. A couple trucks pull up, mulch is spread, twigs are plucked from shrubs and large industrial mowers give the lawn a nice manicure.

These kinds of lawns are a convention that few stray from and a relatively new one at that. They date back to at least the 1870s, if not earlier. In his amazing book, Crabgrass Frontier, Kenneth T. Jackson writes of the origins of the modern day yard:

By 1870 separateness had become essential to the identity of the suburban house. The yard was expected to be large and private and designed for both active and passive recreation, in direct antithesis to the dense lifestyle from which many families had recently moved. The new ideal was no longer to be part of a close community, but to have a self-contained unit, a private wonderland walled off from the rest of the world. Although visually open to the street, the lawn was a barrier--a kind of verdant moat separating the household from the threats and temptations of the city. It served as a means of transition from the public street to the very private house, as a kind of space that, by the very fact of its having no clearly defined function, mediated between the activities of the outside and the activities of the inside.

By the time of the post-WWII housing boom, this lawn care vision reigned supreme and millions of new home buyers invested in all the tools and accessories that came with its upkeep. Our own garage is testimony to this.

These lawns look great, don't get me wrong. Folks have managed to do all sorts of amazing things with their lawns, and those I find I like the most always seem to convey a peaceful stillness. They stir memories of my own suburban upbringing, my parents lawn and my grandparents lawn in North Olmsted. I respect and empathize with the kind of love they can inspire in their owners.

That being said, I'm looking forward to removing our front lawn next spring. The usual concern that comes with suggesting such a thing is the neighbors might somehow take offense, see it as blemish on the otherwise unspoken agreement to keep and maintain well-groomed lawns. But that's not it at all. In the year or so since I worked on the documentary about the Morton Grove Prairie Nature Preserve I've wanted to turn whatever ended up being my lawn into a showcase for the plants that used to cover roughly 2/3 of Illinois just a couple hundred years ago.

I'll admit, I've become a little obsessed. I'm thrilled by the prospects of landscaping with native plants instead of keeping up with our current mowing regimen. What we're envisioning will be nicely groomed and well tended. It won't be freaky, unruly, pagan or fountain-endowed. It won't frighten children or make dogs growl. I have no doubt that we'll make good and attentive stewards! My genuine hope is that it'll make a nice contribution to our neighborhood, mabye even become a modest attraction. We'll sell t-shirts.

Skilling Heralds Warmth

2010-03-28T01:58:00.005-05:00

Dear Tom Skilling and Tribune Weather Center Team,

This forecast is outrageous, my brothers! There's so much short sleeve and open window potential here. Folks will grill and it's going to smell awesome. And I especially like that you're currently predicting a late-day thunder storm on Saturday. Too much! I imagine listening to the thunder rumble overhead from the comfort of my living room. The lights might even flash off and on in our house after one of those thundery hullabaloos and we'll reach for some flash lights and candles, just in case.

Who can I blame if this forecast turns out to be wildly inaccurate?

.

Roger Ebert in Esquire

2010-02-20T20:36:00.027-06:00

Chris Jones' profile on Roger Ebert in this month's issue of Esquire is one of the best things I've read so far this year. For real!

A few years back Ebert lost his lower jaw to cancer and along with it his ability to speak, eat or drink using his mouth. Though luckily, for him and us, he didn't lose his ability to write. And Ebert writes a lot these days. And not just about movies, though he still writes as passionately and eloquently as ever about them for the Sun Times, but sharing more of his own stories now, taking intimate stock of his life while engaging in this remarkable hands-on way with his readers, interacting and responding to their comments and becoming, in fact, their readers as well. It's hard not to be inspired by just how far he's expanded his presence as a public writer.

Though what ultimately makes Jones' profile so engrossing, is how well the piece conveys the happiness, this genuine sense of contentment, Ebert has found through the way his writing has evolved in the three years since he lost his lower jaw. Ebert's enjoying, at age 67, this amazing writing renaissance. There's a real spark to his writing, a more personal and intimate side to it that often has nothing to do with movies. He's politically feisty, frequently hurling witty ripostes via Twitter (and Ebert is, I think, one of the masters of Twitters 140 word limitation) at whatever conservative pundit, politician or religious leader happened to raise his Liberal ire just then. He posts often and while I'm watching the girls and checking in on Twitter throughout the day, Ebert's posts read like a tonic. He's very good at it.

Also Cool: back in August of last year Ebert wrote about discovering the Scottish company CereProc, developers of "the world's most advanced text to speech technology," while browsing the subject online. It turns out , working with Ebert, the company is currently beta-testing software that will allow Ebert to draw from a decent sized database chock full of quality samples of his voice. CereProc simply raided the archives, drawing from the thousands of television hours and DVD commentaries Ebert had logged over the years, carefully cutting, pasting and post-editng so he can now draw from these recordings, reassembling them in whatever way he chooses. With speakers and a computer he'll be able to more actively partake in conversations. His voice will be heard. Eventually CereProc promises Ebert will be able to add simple commands to give greater or lesser intonation or emphasis to his voice, a closer approximation of how we actually speak. Ebert sampling Ebert. According to the Guardian, it'll be debuting on his upcoming Oprah appearance. I'm excited for the guy and can't wait to hear it.

E.B. White and Mortality

2010-01-17T00:15:00.009-06:00

I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father. This sensation persisted, kept cropping up all the time we were there. It was not an entirely new feeling, but in this setting it grew much stronger. I seemed to be living a duel existence. I would be in the middle of some simple act, I would be picking up a bait box or laying down a table fork, or I would be saying something, and suddenly it would be not I but my father who was saying the words or making the gesture. It gave me a creepy sensation.

from Once More To The Lake, E.B. White

One of my favorite essays from high school English class. Read it again a few nights ago while packing up books for our upcoming move. It left an impression when I first read it, though I was primed for it having been an ardent fan of White's Charlotte's Web from 4th Grade on.

I don't know what I admire most about the essay. It's a gentle but never saccharine meditation on an old childhood vacation spot in Maine White's family would visit each August. And it's a deceptively gentle essay, plump with White's descriptive aplomb and storytelling gracefulness. But it's also a darkly ruminative meditation on the passage of time and mortality. It deals frankly with how one's memory for a cherished place or time and the nostalgia such things are inevitably seasoned with, are made sometimes to confront a raw and disparate present.

The essay is also one of the finest, most aspirational examples of how to employ foreshadowing effectively. There's a beautiful thunderstorm White describes at the end of Once More To The Lake that masterfully frames its final paragraph. It's the essay's ending, "the chill of death", that I remember the most.

4!

2009-12-29T18:42:00.003-06:00

Congratulations to Abby on the successful completion of her 4th orbit around the sun! You are loved madly little girl, and yes, you will always be my baby.

Fired Up, Ready to Go, Wearing Christmas Red!

2009-12-23T20:09:00.006-06:00

Whatever you may think of the 44th President of the United States, and no matter how history may ultimately come to judge his tenure as such, the above photograph is one for the ages.

According to the caption on the White House's flickr page, the President and the First Lady are greeting "Edith Childs, from Greenwood, S.C., in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House, during a holiday party, Dec. 4, 2009. Childs coined the campaign slogan "fired up, ready to go."

What I like best about it is the decked-out (literally!) head-to-toe Christmas red of Child's outfit. She popping out of this photograph like a chestnut on an open fire! The First Lady looks elegantly 50's retro. And the President is caught, somewhat awkwardly, coming in for what looks to be a spirited embrace of all that red. Or he's doing a Ray Charles imitation. Behind them, serenely staring out from his framed vantage above the fireplace, is George Washington.

I think she's a little bit crazy

2009-11-21T21:53:00.010-06:00

Of all the things I've read with Abby, nothing has quite matched the fun we've had reading Shel Silverstein together. We fell hard for Where the Sidewalk Ends earlier this year, in the spring. It was Cathy's old copy. We liked it so much that one morning this past June we made our way into one of our favorite bookstores and picked up a copy of A Light in the Attic. We needed more of the stuff. Both were favorites of mine as a kid. The Giving Tree, too. Part of the childhood literary cannon.

One of our early favorites was The Sitter from A Light In the Attic. You remember it. Crazy Mrs. McTwitter, the babysitter who thinks "a baby-sitter's "supposed / To sit upon the baby."

As a kid, I think what I found most appealing was how nutty and invitingly subversive Silverstein's poems and illustrations were. That still holds up today. Both Abby and I love Mrs. McTwitter's super-fried perm, her dotty stare and those little baby legs so winkingly splayed beneath her well-rounded bottom.

Another One of the Best Things To Ever Happen to Me Turns 1

2009-11-19T20:35:00.003-06:00

Happy 1st birthday my beautiful little drooling girl. Your Daddy loves you madly!

Waltz with Bashir

2009-10-25T11:17:00.008-05:00

Finally got around to watching Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir last night. It's an animated documentary that attempts to clarify what film critic Jonathan Murray rightly pegged as Folman's, "at first apparently insurmountable, personal confusion as to his physical and moral proximity to the massacre of defenseless Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut."

So probably not your typical Saturday night popcorn film. The subject matter is harrowing, fraught with the anguished, often nightmarish, memories of Israeli veterans. In an interview from this past spring in Cineaste magazine, Folman said he was "interested in the memory of the (Sabra and Shatila refugee) massacre as seen by the common soldier." Hoping to accomplish that, he interviewed on camera a series of one on one conversations with several fellow veterans/friends on a sound stage, the raw footage and dialogue from which he then used to storyboard the documentary and animate it.

There was something initially off-putting about Waltz with Bashir's use of Flash for its animation. I thought it lacked fluidity. It's a cut-out style of animation similar to what you see on South Park or those Terry Gilliam made for Monty Python's Flying Circus. According to the film's art director, David Polonsky, the possibility of animating the film entirely in computer generated imagery or in the more classical cel animation style was never even a possibility given the film's limited budget. In a great interview with Polonsky about the film's animation process, he says:

The characters were sketched and scanned in Photoshop, then copied into Flash and dismembered into hundreds of tiny pieces to allow for complicated movement, while the backgrounds were Photoshop that were exposed to after-effects, and then the whole film was given a thick layer of after-effects. And there was a little bit of 3-D (CGI).

For the first few minutes I found Flash's lack of character fluidity, the stiffness and puppetlike demeanor it gave to the film's many animated narrator's distracting, especially given the gravity of the subject matter. But as the documentary progressed I was won over by how ingeniously Polonsky and his small team of animators worked with those limitations, creating an animated film strikingly of itself.

The breaking up (or dismemberment, to be more exact) of those character sketches into "hundreds of tiny pieces" that were then animated with Flash is perfectly befitting of the film's preoccupations with the fluidity of memories, dreams, fantasies and the subconscious. It gives everything a protean, dreamlike quality.

Adding the the formal innovation was the decision by Polonsky to take photographs of the actual environments (buildings, tanks, cars, roads) the veterans in the film are describing and adding them in as background details. It creates a highly effective visual incongruity, with the hyper-realism of the environmental photographs (given a touch of after-effects), mingling with the Flash rendered character sketches of the veteran's recollections.

Abby and Dorothy Ashby

2009-10-23T22:35:00.009-05:00

Because suddenly one night this past summer it became essential that Abby be given the opportunity to zip herself up in an old sleep sack she had long since outgrown, and then have her picture taken, that we're lucky enough to have this little memento. I love it. Not only for the joy in Abby's face and her celebratory touchdown arms. But for how her feet and shoulders have drawn the sleep sack into a taut triangle. Though I probably love it most of all for how it never fails to remind me of the cover of Dorothy Ashby's soulful album, The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby.

It's all about the rugs they're posing on. Though Dorothy Ashby looks like she's flying on hers, sweetly plucking some cosmic grooves from her harp while flying the space ways to pick up the dry cleaning. It's more about the colors the two pictures share then any similarities of pattern. It would be sublimely weird, though, to discover Ashby posing in a clearly overgrown sleep sack on the album's back cover.

Safe As Houses

2009-10-17T23:16:00.011-05:00

I've wanted to read this book for about 10 years now. I finally bought a copy and cracked it in late August. I've found it to be the perfect tonic for getting over the fact that we've had o ne of the coldest October starts in 133 years. Even better, it's a great read about a subject I've had a big crush on for a long, long time. The suburbs and me go way, way back. The one I grew up in, Bay Village, is a woodsy little coastal suburb in Northeastern Ohio that shares its northern border with Lake Erie. It's proximity to the Lake is undeniably its best attribute, though it's not without an interior magic of its own. A nice little chunk of the Cleveland Metroparks hugs the coast toward the center of Bay where it's home to one the largest public beaches on the West Side of Cleveland. Once, in the 80s, however, Better Homes and Garden's successfully shamed many of us teenagers by rating Bay Village one of the nation's safest suburbs.

We Meant to Give This Past Summer a Proper Send Off

2009-10-11T00:39:00.008-05:00

We meant to give this past summer a proper send off. But then autumn went cold and gray on us early this year. It sidetracked us. We were feeling a little bitter. We wanted to bitch about the unfortunate bouts of mid-western weather we have to put up even though we know we're whining and agree that, yes, complaining about the weather is boring.

But then that big old settlement of gray moved back into the sky above us. It makes everything look a little murky. There's been too many northern air masses forcing us to turn the heater on over the last couple weeks. I liked that it had been off since June. But the change between summer and autumn was horribly abrupt. It's a little embarrassing actually.

But we're ready for this year's batch of slush, gloom and cold winds that truly suck! We're putting our phenology hats on and becoming a "citizen scientist" observers on the National Phenology Network. For real. We'll report our seasonal data findings here. Our family phenology journal for this winter and spring promises to make Aldo Leopold's look petty.

Manny Farber On Howard Hawks' Red River

2009-10-03T23:45:00.007-05:00

Very excited to see Library of America has just published a new anthology of Manny Farber's film criticism. Not only because I've cultivated, as book collector and reader, something of a fetish for many of Library of America's finely crafted hardcover titles. (Though it should be noted that their Farber anthology is not part of the regular Library of America series and come with "its own unique format and binding.") But because Farber's writing on film is so striking in its originality and finely stylized acuteness. His film writings ignore things like plot summations in favor of these brilliant, finally crafted declarative bursts. Sometimes it's a dazzling paragraph like this one about Howard Hawks' "ingeniously lyrical" Western from 1948, Red River:

Red River as a comment on frontier courage, loyalty and leadership, is romantic, simple-minded mush, but an ingeniously lyrical film nonetheless. The story is of the first trip from Texas to the Abilene stockyards is a feat of pragmatic engineering, working with weather, space, and physiognomy. The theme is how much misery and brutality can issue from a stubbornly obsessed bully (John Wayne, who barks his way through the film instead of moving), while carving an empire in the wilderness. Of the one-trait characters, Wayne is a sluggish mass being insensitive and cruel-minded on the front of the screen; Joanne Dru is a chattering joke, even more static than Wayne, but there is a small army of actors (Clift, John Ireland) keyed in lyrically with trees cows, and ground.

A Few Notes On Home Interiors, Hardwood Floors and the Accoustics of Place

2009-09-17T23:56:00.016-05:00

Went back to Bay Village, Ohio this past weekend with Cathy and the girls. It's my old hometown and my parents still live in the old house I grew up in. I shared my old bedroom with Abby, which since my Mom is what you might call an interior design hobbyist, no longer looks anything like my room did when I stopped being its sole occupant. It's got what I'd describe as a Cape Cod cottage feel to it. Rustic with a hint of a welcoming beach. Lake Erie is less than a 10-minute walk away, after all.

The whole house has this rustic cottage feel to it now. I'm still not used to it. My Mom's a bit of an art and craft show junkie. She'll go and buy things like folksy Halloween figurines made from twigs or antique Kris Kringle's that look quaintly Pennsylvania Dutch. Where once most of our house was covered in carpet, the two main floors are now entirely hardwood. Without the carpet to absorb sound, the acoustics of the house have radically changed. More echo. Voices carry further. The house creaks more.

I was more attentive to the sounds around my parent's place this visit. I was trying to capture them with my video camera and microphone. Some representations of the sounds that best defined certain places in and around my parent's place. I've always liked the fact that a thin strand of woods (thick and enchanted when I was a child though sadly neutered of most of its trees now) is all that separates my parent's home from the local public elementary school. It's where my two older brothers and I attended school back in 70s. It has a couple playgrounds on either end of it, and when you're sitting on the porch off my parent's room you can't help but be charmed by the sound of playground chatter gently drifting over the trees.

It's become this kind of culturally shared sonic cliche, a nostalgic signifier, the sound of children playing on a playground. You hear it, and Hollywood audience tests have no doubt proven, that over 90% of us feel this particular sound is indicative of something both innocent and wistful. It gives us a joyful ache and our response to it is practically Pavlovian. None of which should detract from just how great this sound really and truly is at its most authentic. I like that a live soundtrack of playground chatter has been playing a 180 school-day gig behind my parents house for several decades now. It's one of the main protagonists in the soundscape I spent my formative years in and I don't think it's too far a stretch to imagine how it played a key role in shaping my own fascinations with ambient sound and sound design.

Autumn Rising

2009-08-29T00:02:00.007-05:00

Something to do with all this late August rain and the quirky little cold front that's mischievously mimicking October. There's a more then a little autumn creep in the air this weekend.

Guralnick, Elvis and YouTube

2009-08-15T23:28:00.010-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about Peter Guralnick's amazing Elvis Presley biography since finishing it last week. One of Guralnick's gifts as a biographer is his ability to completely disappear behind the narrative. The storytelling throughout the two volumes of his Elvis biography are guided by the words of Elvis, his family, friends, girlfriends, gurus, doctors and the objects and documents that surrounded them. You get to know and appreciate the accomplishments and shortcomings of an Elvis blissfully free of all the pop-culture detritus (not entirely unjustified) that's cluttered so many assessments of Presley.

Presley's unmaking came in the form of an intense four-year slide into polypharmacy and its attending dependence on a near grotesque amount of medications readily administered by celebrity smitten doctors. The pathologists who examined the lab results from Elvis's autopsy found, according to Guralnick, "the detection of fourteen drugs in Elvis' system, ten in significant quantity. Codeine appeared at ten times the therapeutic level, methaqualone (Quaalude) in an arguably toxic amount, three other drugs appeared to be on the borderline of toxicity taken in and of themselves." You could have gotten high just licking Elvis the dude was so pumped full of drugs.

I find it fascinating that Elvis' cultural ascendancy coincided with (and was propelled along by) the spread of home televisions into the living rooms of large swaths of the U.S. That's where so many people first saw him. It used to be that catching a glimpse of any of this footage after it first aired meant you were either a media scholar happily burrowing through an archive or simply lucky enough to catch a repeat of the original.

Now, of course, a pretty sizable chunk of Elvis video culled from TV guest appearances, specials and movie clips is being posted on YouTube, Google Video and other video hosting sites. A huge spectrum of televised popular culture is available online, legally or not. I'm smitten with the idea about the potential this has to democratize media access with Youtube and other file hosting sites acting as informal (and unstable) archives. Sometimes a copyright holder will go after these videos and hosting sites like YouTube will dutifully remove the video at the copyright holder's request often ignoring the fair use considerations of the poster. I have no idea how aggressive Lisa Marie and the Estate of Elvis Presley are about challenging copyright infringement and fair use but there's a lot of Elvis clips out there.

In any case, in '68 Elvis made Christmas special for NBC. The producers were committed to getting Elvis back to his roots. He hadn't performed live in years and his recording output over that same time had largely consisted of schlocky soundtrack albums. They brought in Scotty Moore, the guitarist who played on Elvis's seminal Sun recordings from 54-55 among others to capture a kind of informal jam for the program. Here's a great, smoking clip from the '68 special on NBC of Elvis performing a spirited version of That's Alright Mama.

Home and Place

2009-08-08T23:35:00.013-05:00

"A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image."
-Joan Didion

"There are as many intimate places as there are occasions when human beings truly connect. What are such places like? They are elusive and personal. They may be etched in the deep recesses of memory and yield intense satisfaction with each recall, but they are not recorded like snapshots in the family album, nor received as general symbols like fireplace, chair, bed, and living room that invite intricate explanation. One can no more deliberately design such places than one can plan, with any guarantee of success, the occasions of genuine human exchange."
-Yi-Fu Tuan

Been way too overwhelmed with ideas of late though barely the time to see any of them through. Video stuff mostly. I'm happily going into pre-production mode and preparing to finally film the documentary I've been wanting to make for a few years now exploring some of the inchoate ideas I've had about "home" and "place." My focus is going to be Bay Village, the suburb I grew up in. My parents still live in the same house I grew up in, a place that I feel great affection for. I'm still intimately and intensely attached to it. It's my favorite archive. I feel a kind of loyalty to it that I don't with many if any other places. It's a symbol of my early self and in some ways, especially as Cathy and I are searching for a new home, its influence still deeply resonates. So there's that. How to creatively document how my current ideals of what constitutes "home" were indelibly shaped by the formative years of adolescence I spent residing in this house. What's the character of this sentiment? Yi-Fu Tuan wrote, "Space is transformed into place as it acquires definition and meaning." So I look forward to exploring concentrically, from my first home, to the block I lived on, to the the relatively small radius where I spent the most time and the places that have gone on to exist most powerfully in my imagination. What are its intimate places, and how are they shared, amongst peers or even across generations, down through time?

And how to tell a story about home and place that's indicative of a certain Midwestern upbringing? A short documentary that might be of interest to more folks then just my family, friends and those who grew up in Bay Village. What's the best way to frame that and tell this story in a little under 10 minutes? Right now I like the idea of exploring these ideas concentrically, moving from the home I grew up in, extending to the block my home was on (and the woods behind it), extending to my hometown (at least the portions that I spent the most time in and so have taken on the most significance), eventually radiating outward to encompass a little of both Cleveland and Chicago. (I think it's important to explore, too, how these places, as Yi-Fu Tuan writes, "can acquire deep meaning for adults through the steady accretion of sentiment over the years." Attachment to place as a function of time. 10 years of time as a child are very different then 10 years spent as an adult. (This, according to Yi-Fu Tuan, is one reason why we can't go home again).

So begin with the house. You hear my parents talking about buying the house. I'll interview them over a couple bottles of red wine. I'll include some old photographs. Pictures on the stairs of the kids at Christmas. Birthdays. Graduations. Holding old photographs up and framing/ blending them into their current appearance. The mesh of the past with the present. What inanimate objects do my parents still have that reverberate with the most meaning? The grandfather clock, certain Christmas ornaments, the curve of the stairs? Then I'll extend to the block I lived on. What are its landmarks? Dover and Douglas. The old public-library. My elementary school. The small patch of woods running behind our house. How violent summer storms seemed to me as a child with all those tall old trees hovering over my parents house (you can't see the roof of their house using Google Earth it's so obscured by trees) precariously bending and violently rustling their leaves! Scared the shit out of me. Chicago's thunderstorms have always felt meek in comparison.

Yi-Fu Tuan is the guru of place. So, we'll end with with the quote that probably best encapsulates what I want to convey:

"A homeland has its landmarks, which may be features of high visibility and public significance, such as monuments, shrines, a hallowed battlefield or cemetery. These visible signs serve to enhance a people's sense of identity; they encourage awareness of and loyalty to place. But a strong attachment to the homeland can emerge quite apart from any explicit concept of sacredness; it can form without the memory of heroic battles vis-a-vis other people. Attachment of a deep though subconscious sort may come simply with familiarity and east, with the assurance of nurture and security, with the memory of sounds and smells, of communal activities and homely pleasures accumulated over time. It is difficult to articulate quiet attachments of this type."

Elvis Is In Your Nutty Butty

2009-07-18T23:10:00.006-05:00

I've been reading the second volume of Peter Guralnick's terrific Elvis Presley biography, Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley before going to bed the last few nights. And here's where I'm at: when Elvis was 29 he met this hairstylist named Larry Geller. Geller introduced him to books like The Impersonal Life, Autobiography of A Yogi, The Initiation for the World and Beyond the Himalayas. Elvis devoured them and asked for more. He'd study them, underlining passages that really resonated with him and then he and Geller would spend evenings in, Guralnick writes, "extended bouts of philosophical discussion." Eventually this spiritual nourishment, a diet that included everything from the autobiographies of gurus to books on cosmology, numerology and metaphysics, leads to this beautiful passage on page 200:

He felt a new serenity in his life. To the guys it seemed more like madness, and they felt increasingly alienated, resentful, bewildered, and angry all at once. Elvis appeared to be leaving them with his almost daily visions, his tales of going off in a spaceship, his delusions of being able to turn the sprinkler system of the Bel Air Country Club golf course behind the house on and off with his thoughts, his conviction that he could cure them of everything from the common cold to more serious aches and pains by his healing powers. To Marty he announced that a bird's song had turned into the voice of Christ, and under other circumstances they might have been tempted to commit him to a doctor's care, but reason told them that he would come out of this obsession, too, just as he had come out of all of his other momentary impulses and infatuations.

I'd love to believe Elvis really could control the sprinkler system.

ALA Round Up Part I

2009-07-17T21:19:00.007-05:00

The American Library Association held its annual conference at McCormick Place this past week. Each year thousands of librarians (public, academic, media, legal, commercial, archival, international, etc.) come together to take in what, ideally, functions as both a symposium on the state of the library circa 2009 and a sales pitch. And if all goes well you're to come away with a head full of new ideas and some decent swag.

So last Saturday morning I headed out via the Red Line from Bryn Mawr to Cermak-Chinatown and hoofed it about a quarter mile to McCormick West. The first program I attended was Technology and the Developing World sponsored by ALA's Library and Information Technology (LITA) division. Matt Keller, the Director of One Laptop per Child's Europe, Middle East & Africa outreach was there and described how they've managed, largely through the evangelizing efforts of its founder, Nicholas Negroponte, to deploy over 1 million laptops, with over half distributed throughout Latin America. A good reminder as any that the digital divide is an international one.

From there I headed over to the 10:30 program, The Future of Libraries, but was disappointed to find it being held in one of McCormick's smaller conference rooms. It was already at standing room only capacity. I staked some ground directly near the entrance but didn't stay too long. The first presenter had a decent PowerPoint presentation exploring some of the demographic information I've already been tracking closely myself concerning youth and their digital media habits. It felt like a good time to explore the stacks.

There's a lot of product in the stacks. Libraries, in all their many faceted, budget-strapped glory, support a vast wing of our media industrial complex. Not surprisingly, the high-tech (and often cost-prohibitive) vendors had some of the plushest displays on the floor--comfortable chairs for chatting with a representative, big digital displays of their latest software and prizes. Ah, prizes!

I stayed pretty clear of them. I was happiest walking the publishing wings--small academic distributors with fascinating books on film (where I bought what looks to be a potential candidate for the definitive biographical work on David Lynch), international relations and assorted media related treatise by think-tank gurus. Academic books, especially those fortuitously embedded in collegiate curriculum's, are notoriously overpriced. But dagburnit it if they don't publish some of the most alluring looking coffee table books on art movements, film retrospectives and the like. The mainstream publishers, on the other hand, offered the most swag--tote bags and the occasional free advanced copies. Some sold books as cheaply as they felt they could without losing their dignity.

At 1:30 I made my way to the recesses of far, far away McCormick South where the program Political Engagement: Facilitating Greater Participation in Civil Society was being held. It was remarked that it was not without a certain irony to have the program on civic engagement held in the furthest possible conference room. About 50 or so attendees were engaged enough to attend.

The focus of the speakers was firmly on what the role of libraries is in encouraging civic engagement. I was particularly keen to learn more about what each speaker had to say about the role public libraries play in helping to guide and support active citizens. The ideals of citizenry, of a well-informed, civically-engaged public actively engaged in our democratic experiment, was at the center of the conversation. The idea of civic-literacy was discussed. Nancy Kranich, a former ALA President and current Lecturer at the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies out of Rutgers University, spoke the most directly to the role libraries should play in creating and sustaining active citizens. She made a good case for the need of libraries to be more active in the role they play in nourishing civic literacy.

My last Saturday program was Libraries and Obama's Information Policy. I was most excited to hear what Gabriela Schneider, the Communications Director for the Sunlight Foundation, had to say. The Sunlight Foundation, she explained, is all about getting government information online as quickly as possible. It's about providing tools that help all of us "be our own best government watchdogs, by improving access to existing information and digitizing new information, and by creating new tools and Web sites to enable all of us to collaborate in fostering greater transparency." She offered a number of interesting links to web based applications that track various areas of potential government malfeasance.

Jim Jacobs, Data Services Librarian Emeritus at the University of California San Diego, discussed how the kind of focused collections libraries offer is a quality service in an era of "access to everything." There's a growing movement of thought surrounding the library as filter discussion, one that's increasingly focused on how librarians can act as guides by effectively leading information seekers through the information thicket to what's most valuable.

On Sunday I was back for the 10:30 program, Inspiring Young Citizens: The Library as a Forum for Engagement. The panel of speakers here focused largely on how literature can act as a catalyst for civic activities. I realized just how strongly the Civil Rights Movement resonates throughout so much Children's Lit. It's easily one of the best and most inspiring examples of the kinds of change active citizenship can lead to. I'm definitely more interested in how new media can play this same role, though this program's bibliocentric focus offered some decent models for flushing out that role.

The second and last program I checked out on Sunday was the Division President's Program for LITA, Make Stories, Tell Stories, Keep Stories. Erik Boekesteijn, Jaap van de Geer and Geert van den Boogard from Delft Public Library (sometimes called DOK or the Library Concept Center) in the Netherlands. I like these guys and their Library a whole lot. DOK is, and I say this without hyperbole, the future of libraries. Or at least my library. I'm fascinated by what DOK is doing in the area of public library content creation and their commitment to helping their patrons tell their stories and share them with their community. To help do that, DOK offers a pretty stunning collection of technologically advanced storytelling tools. DOK, in its mission, content and design, is hyper-modern in all sorts of the best kind of ways. They recognize, more then any other public library out there, that their patrons are hungry to tell their stories and of the vital role librarians can play in helping them to do just that. They realize, too, that the norms of literacy are being challenged, are evolving-- that our communities/patrons, especially its youth, are engaging with new media in ways that actively construct (or create) "their social and cultural worlds." We need to be a part of that, and soon.

Libraries, public libraries especially, are already in the business of storytelling. And our future patrons aren't just passively consuming content, they're creating and distributing it, sometimes to thousands, even millions of people. There's a civic function inherent in , I think, the role libraries can play in assisting their patrons with content creation and I think DOK has helped to more fully explore it. It opens up all sorts of doors for helping to facilitate community building and the possibilities for collaboration. In our missions to supply the information needs most relevant to our communities needs, we have the opportunity to help it share the most important story--its own.

On Monday I attended the 10:30 program Privacy in an Era of Change: Privacy and Surveillance Under the New Administration. One of the speakers on the panel, Craig Wacker, the program officer for the Digital Media & Learning initiative at the MacArthur Foundation discussed how research like the Digital Youth Projec t has demonstrated just how pervasively digital media like social networking and video sharing sites have become fixtures in the lives of young people. He talked about how young people aren't perhaps as compelled as they should be by privacy concerns and asked us to think about how we define privacy for them.

At 1:30 I attended the program My, those novels are certainly...graphic!: Libraries, comic books, and censorship where Neil Gaiman, one of genres most popular writers, joined a panel of 3 others to discuss graphic novels and censorship in libraries. Great audience (librarians like Neil Gaiman and graphic novels) and a great discussion. I especially liked hearing about the various cases the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund has been involved in.

On Tuesday I headed to my last program, Many Stories, Many Options: Pushing Out Your Digital Content in New Ways where Jesse Seay, a radio producer and sound producer for NPR and Vocalo.org spoke. As a sound design geek I really enjoyed hearing what she had to say about getting quality audio recordings from interview subjects as well as the role audio editing plays in shaping narratives. She revealed that much of the laughter we hear from the brothers Magliozzi on NPR's popular Car Talk show, for example, is edited in after the fact. Vocalo.org, a controversial radio experiment supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (and, not surprisingly, supported by a grant from MacArthur Foundation among other granting institutions) is targeted at attracting a more diverse, younger audience. It recognizes, as I've already mentioned, that young people are telling their own stories, using the web as platform to create, edit and distribute their content. According to Vocalo.org's About page:

Vocalo.org is media YOU make and there are a lot of ways to make media. You can use your telephone to call in and leave us messages with your favorite stories. You can attend our "Make Your Own Audio" trainings or use our online tips to learn audio production. You can upload videos, music, interviews, and commentary, all of which could end up on the airwaves during our l ive broadcast at 89.5 FM.

Again, I'm more interested in how video (as opposed to radio) can help our communities tell stories though there are many parallels here. This program offered further evidence of how much the media ecology is changing, with user-generated content production becoming more and more central to the experimentation with and evolution of new media literacies that many (though not all) of today's youth are actively engaged in.

I'll end by quoting at length from the recent report, Kids' Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures:

What is unique about the current media ecology is that photos, videos, and music are closer at hand and more amenable to modification, remix, and circulation through online networks. In the past few years, it has become common for personal computers to ship with a basic kit of digital production tools that enable youth to manipulate music, photos, and video. This means that media content is more amenable for creation and manipulation. In addition to the new genres of creative production that are being afforded by digital media-creation tools, we see networked publics as affording a fundamental shift in the context of how new media are created and shared; media works are now embedded in a public social ecology of ongoing communication (Russell et al. 2008). As is common when new media capabilities are introduced, it takes some time for literacy capacity to build and for people to come together around new genres of media and media participation that make use of these capabilities. Given that it is only in the past decade that multimedia production tools have become mainstream as consumer technologies, we are now at a transitional moment of interpretive flexibility with regard to literacy and genres associated with the creation of digital music, photos, and video.

So Refreshing! The Lilting Hit Sounds of Africa

2009-07-05T16:20:00.005-05:00

A summer mix. Download it here.

o1. Madina: Rochereau with Orchestra African Fiesta
02. See You Later: Lemmy Special
03. Bokme: Momo Wandel Soumah
04: I Jool Omo: Ginger Johnson
05: Onye Ikekwere Mekeya: Godwin Kabaka Opera's Oriental Brothers
06: Mensu Koraa: Professional Uhuru
07: Lily Express: Gwigwi Mrwebi
08: Beer Club: Orlando Six
09: Mandela: Abdullah Ibrahim
10: Eddie Quansa: Peacocks Guitar Band
11: Dagna: Bembeya Jazz National
12: Black Beats: Meda Ho Mawo
13: Solo Jump: Specks Rampura
14: Wano Tulimuba: Charles Sonko with Equator Sound
15.Pole Musa: Nashil Pichen & Peter Tsotsi
16. Lisie: Bantous De La Capitale
17. Pauline: Docteur Nico & Orchestra African Fiesta
18. N'daya Paradis: Tabu Ley Rochereau
19. Ugali: The Tony Benson Sextet
20. Mouhamadou Bamba: Orchestra Baobab
21. Naweye Toro: Ali Farka Toure Toumani Diabete

Ceremony for Blueberries

2009-07-05T00:15:00.006-05:00

You no doubt have already sensed it, a certain tingling around the edges as June shuffled off to make way for the ripe summer days of July and the long awaited arrival of National Blueberry Month! In fact, with 2009 it's now been 10-years our nation has set aside the month of July to recognize nature's purple antioxidant.

Harvested from April through early October, though reaching their peak, their bright bursting zenith, in July, the blueberry has long made its home in innumerable summer pies I've enjoyed. Cathy's been perfecting one blueberry pie recipe of late that gives the filling a hint of lemon zest that really brings out the fruit's freshness. It's pretty awesome.

In his awesome The Penguin Companion to Food , the late food guru Alan Davidson writes that it's only recently (1920) the blueberry was commercially cultivated, with selection and breeding "aimed not only at size but also a pleasing combination of acidity and sweetness."

How rarely we celebrate the food we eat. When National Blueberry Month was first proclaimed in 1999, the hope was that citizens would recognize and celebrate the blueberry "with appropriate ceremonies and activities." Which makes me wonder just what inappropriate blueberry ceremonies might look like.

Photo: Maria Sibylla Merian, Raupen wunderbare Verwandelung und sonderbare Blumennahrung, 1730

Big Art Emerging: Super-8 Stills

2009-06-27T22:04:00.009-05:00

Took a few screen shots tonight, with various degrees of success, from the DVD transfer of my Dad's super-8 footage. That's a still of my Dad above, emerging clearly refreshed from some body of water during the course of some family vacation somewhere. Like most family vacations, beaches were involved. We went to Cape Cod a lot in the early 70s.

This still of me was taken from footage of me running around the porch off my parents bedroom, sometime in the spring of 1973. That's almost a white boys fro I'm sporting there, an impressive accumulation of curls that I wore with a minimum of care throughout much of my childhood. By high school, with varying degrees of success, I tried to tame it with a hairbrush. I even flirted with mousse.

This is Robin, she looks all of about 2 here, sitting on our kitchen table and communing with and delighting in the lamp directly above her.

Lastly there's this shot of Randy and Mom from those heady days in the mid-70's when she was frosting her hair. I like this period of my Mom's long and varied hair history. These old stills have a patina that makes them particularly suitable for a certain EP cover aesthetic. My Mom, with her frosted hair and impressive white collar action, even looks like she could have been playing keyboards or the tambourine (maybe even taking lead vocals on one track!) for the band who would have released the EP with this as its cover.

I started a Flickr set for these super-8 stills and a few others here. With any luck I'll expand on it over the summer.

Abby Is the Iggy Pop of 3-Year Olds

2009-06-14T00:05:00.009-05:00

Abby will sometimes run around the house in a pair of tights with no shirt on. It's what mermaids do. Abby's mermaid names are either Ariel or Magdelena and she's been swimming around shirtless for a while now. Less now then she once did. Back in February or March she'd swim the murky mermaid depths wearing only her tights just about every day. I'd turn the heater up a degree or two. We made her wear a shirt to bed, though even that would end up discarded on the floor next to her bed.

A shirt's on now more then it's off. But it still comes off from time to time when that old mermaid feeling overcomes her. It was during one of these moments of mermaid whimsy that I recently broke the news to Abby that she was like the Iggy Pop of 3-year olds. She immediately wanted to know who this Iggy Pop character was. So later, when Megan was down for her first nap, we watched a couple Iggy Pop videos on YouTube. I was quickly able to demonstrate that Iggy Pop was just this singer who felt more comfortable performing his songs for folks while naked from the waist up. Both Abby and I respected that.

So now, in those increasingly rare moments when Abby feels compelled to take her shirt off and become a mermaid, I remind her that she's still like the Iggy Pop of 3-Year Olds. A couple days ago she amended that title to something more befitting. "Daddy, I think I'm like the mermaid Iggy Pop of 3-year olds." And she is.

When Not Listening To Country Music Seemed Like Good Common Sense

2009-05-30T23:09:00.006-05:00

My ears started perking up to the sounds of more traditional Country music right after Cathy and I moved back to Chicago from Berkeley in the winter of '03. The Country music of the 80s and 90s hadn't exactly inspired further exploration. Country was a genre that I had previously ignored with what I felt, with great conviction, was simply good common sense.

But I was wrong. Like any genre, country music has an unwieldy, sprawling family tree. One of the branches I've enjoyed most centers around what was happening in the late 60's and early 70's, when rock began to explore country music in earnest. Gram Parsons teaming up with the Byrds for Sweetheart of the Rodeo along with Sneaky Pete Kleinow's amazing pedal steel guitar contributions , the Rolling Stones all over on their 4-album run from Beggar's Banquet through Exile On Main Street, Buffalo Springfield, what Bob Dylan and the Band were doing both together and apart, the Grateful Dead's one-two punch of Workingman's Dead and American Beauty and a whole lot of what Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were releasing then, though I'm more fond of their solo releases then anything they did collectively.

Here are the Stones performing a fantastic live version circa 1972 of Exile's Sweet Virginia, as good a country rock hoedown as you'll ever find from this time. The sax gives it more of an urbane polish then it probably needs (but I still like it), and like so much of the Stones best stuff, the song's practically bursting with swagger.

Telling Grandpa Ernie's Story

2009-05-23T21:31:00.006-05:00

Not long before my Grandpa Ernie passed away, my brother Greg had the good sense to sit down and talk to him with a video camera rolling. I've never watched it, but my parents burned a DVD of it for me this Christmas. I'm looking forward to seeing it, I just haven't had the time to clear a space where I could really watch and listen to it with the attention it deserves.

The picture on the right is from his wedding day. It strikes me as odd that I have no idea what day or year their wedding was (1940? 41? 42?) or where it was they married. It was in spring or summer I'd guess by my Grandpa's outfit here and the lushness of the trees across whatever body of water he's using as a backdrop.

I plan on taking this DVD of my Grandpa that Greg shot and editing it down to a 10 or 15 minute documentary. Ideally I'd refine and shape a story by gently editing (see Studs Terkel on the fine art of the interviewing edit) and adding some complimentary footage--photographs, super-8 and maybe my own narrative and video additions. Might be a good test for Final Cut Express. I have it, but I'm afraid to take a look under its hood. It's a potential Pandora's Box, I tell you!

I realize, too, that I keep talking all this personal documentary smack and have yet to produce one since the Obama documentary. I have a good as an excuse as any with Megan's arrival, though I don't think it would be setting my sights too high if I tried to complete 3 of them before summers end.

The Psychedelic Teeming

2009-05-02T22:58:00.008-05:00

Leafing through some meteorological books in the Library this past winter, I serendipitously stumbled across a blurb about phenology. Not phrenology, mind you, but phenology, which the USA National Phenological Network has nicely defined as:

the study of recurring plant and animal life cycle events, or phenophases, such as leafing and flowering of plants, maturation of agricultural crops, emergence of insects, and migration of birds. Many of these events are sensitive to climatic variation and change, and are simple to observe and record.

It's that last bit that I like the most, the part about how easy it is (with a little foresight and discipline, mind you) to become more mindful and aware of all the climatically inspired "events" going on around you... and to record them! Aldo Leopold's daughter, Nina, has continued on in her father's spirit, keeping highly detailed phenological records of her family's property in Sauk County, Wisconsin . And after emerging from the bruising of another 6-month Chicago winter, with a final insult courtesy of mercury-dropping lake-effect winds, I like the idea of looking for new and interesting (edifying even!) ways to engage with the unruly climatic variables of where I've come to make my home.

What I think I like most about phenology is how it reframes the way we engage or observe the natural world. There's a strong spirit of collaboration at its core that I like a lot too, with citizen scientist networks actively pooling their observational data together on plants, animals and landscapes.

I like the idea of being more attuned to the subtle and not so subtle phenological events. Especially now. There's phenology going on everywhere. It's crazy with the teeming in Chicago right now. It's this lysergic kind of green--there's a psychedelic aspect to just how vivid some of the greens are. The flowering on all the trees especially. It's a shimmering pool-bottom green.

Like most, I've always found this time of year to be one of the most naturally dramatic. These first 4 months have been the wettest on meteorological record (my little Megan has begun her life in a deluge), so those days, like today, where the sun managed to sustain its presence, have had a drama all their own.

And not surprisingly, I really like that phenology is concerned with the recording of these changes. Not just through writing and statistical record keeping, but through a visual record. The next step, then, is to make a short documentary about phenology for the Library. I'm hoping to storyboard this one, too. Something about checking out a book from the Library and by reading it becoming (suddenly!) aware of the phenological events happening all around me. Ending with a little nature trip. Got to be funny. Too little humor in the pedagogical bent of citizen science. Too little humor in the Library. Got to work on that one!

Drift

2009-04-26T17:51:00.003-05:00

You can download my album here. (It's free.) Finished it sometime last summer and had hoped to make more hard copies. But making hard copies takes time I no longer have, and whose listening to CDs anymore, right? In any case, enjoy.

Edith's Cousin

2009-04-25T23:56:00.009-05:00

As purely an object of affectionate feminist sitcom kitsch from the heart of the 1970s, I had thought Bea Arthur understood there was no way she could have gone and given up her earthly bonds today at the age of 86. But old sitcom stars do of course age behind the frayed curtains of syndication. They're are dozens of them right now in L.A., their fragile health being carefully tended to and their obituaries being written in rough draft. Their great sitcom gigs are still drawing in viewers, 30 or 40 years on now, and helping to anchor ads for gardening shovels and local furniture stores. You'll be a little surprised to discover just how old they've gotten when they too shuffle off.

But 86. Man, that's a damn good ride Bea.

The Art We're Making

2009-04-04T23:33:00.001-05:00

The Art We're Making
Originally uploaded by chrisbreitenbach

Mixing As A Hobby

2009-03-28T21:52:00.008-05:00

Looking to fire up Pro Tools again soon to deep fry some new mixes. More volumes of Summer Reading Music I suppose, taking advantage of multi-tracking and adding dashes of subtle ambiance. Mixing for the hobby of it. Like knitting. Like bird watching. This is how we relax these days.

Got a few compilation ideas brewing--one highlighting South African Jazz, another taking an off-the beaten-trails focus on 80's alternative--you know, releases from the 80's that haven't ossified into the U.S. pop-culture cannon--not the Pretty In Pink soundtrack (not that there's ever been much wrong with that compilation other then it's a wee- bit played out).

Anyway. What else? Other mix ideas:

Another volume of Summer Reading Music accompanied by the subtle undertow of crickets and leaning toward a focus on late 60's, early 70's English folk, so much of which has always reminded me, sonically at least, of the English countryside at its July ripest...moments after a thunderstorm. More Joe Boyd then Bronte, though. It's definitely of its time, this strain of English folk, and all the better for it. More light then darkness, though some of its best songs are practically bursting with autumnal melancholy. Nick Drake lives large here.

I'm pretty sure that music mixes are made for fiendishly selfish reasons. Well, that's not entirely true, because of course we want people to listen to them. But they're also a chance to immerse yourself in the music, right? To really give something a good, honest listen. Lately, I've found that the best close listening I get is driving to and from work. The Prius has a decent stereo and when driving alone I've gotten pretty good with quickly balancing the front and back, left and right speakers so they practically caress my ears. The only thing messing with my equilibrium are Chicago's potholes, an ungodly amount of which harass my route home. They're a double-whammy, these huge ass potholes, causing who knows what kind of unfortunate damage to the undercarriage of our car while adding an unwanted percussive element to my carefully calibrated mix. Our city is coming up short on resurfacing dollars. Tent cities are appearing in the larger potholes.

I call this route home "developing country roadways." DCR for short.

Tell Me About It, Kid

2009-03-07T22:46:00.002-06:00

Megan yawning after a day of serious tripping.

3D All Over Me: Virgin Purity, the Jonas Brothers and the 3D Experience

2009-02-27T22:07:00.007-06:00

Like so much else these days, the rapidly sinking ship of the U.S. newspaper industry has been obscured by the iceberg the global economy smacked into roughly 6 months ago. But sinking it is, and with it the livelihoods of its journalists, among them foreign correspondents, investigative reporters, policy wonks, columnists, and media critics. Entire professions, the entire culture of the livable wage writing life, is disappearing before our very eyes.

It's those film critics still barely holding on to their current gigs (and if they're really lucky, their work is widely syndicated) that I end up feeling the most pity for. With the economy increasingly coming to resemble the mythical Sword of Damocles, it's these writers whose future I feel, tonight at least, the most trepidation. And pity. I can't help but feel deeply depressed and agitated over the prospects of, say, Chris Hewitt, the movie critic for St. Paul's Pioneer Press, having to sit through Jonas Brothers: The 3D Experience. After all, there's a full-scale recession going on and his fellow film critics are being flushed down an economic black hole. His job could be the next on the chopping board for all he knows, and yet he can still somehow call up the courage to write this:

...the staging of the nattily dressed brothers' show is agile and full of fun little gimmicks. They're energetic performers and their songs are catchier and smarter than most acts of this ilk.

And then there's Roberto Boca, the Denver Post's Pop Music critic, equally giving himself over to the Jonas Brothers and coming away with this:

In a struggling music economy, the big screen can be big money — for the right acts. And the Jonas Brothers are exactly that.

In the end, I can appreciate that Hewitt is prepared to cut the Jonas Brothers a little slack, willing to admit their finely calibrated, super wholesome showbiz product actually has a little melodic dazzle to it. But Boca's (more cynical?) assessment seems more honest. Hewitt's is a nice piece of workmanship, a template review shot through with the kind of pragmatic acknowledgement of and pandering to its audience that this line of cultural writing encourages. It's safe--he's not some film critic who wants to watch subtitled films and discuss mise-en-scène. Boca, however, is far more willing to own up to the fact that the Jonas Brothers is a piece of cultural detritus , so trifling as to be of no greater consequence then the cash it so advantageously rakes in. It's another in a long line of boy band franchises, culturally fascinating to be sure, but ultimately inspired by the muse of commerce.

Neko Case and Her Pianos

2009-02-20T06:46:00.004-06:00

As though I needed more evidence to prove just how freakin' cool Neko Case truly is, there comes this photograph from last Sunday's profile of her in the New York Times Magazine. She's sitting at one of a half-dozen pianos (all in "various states of disrepair) she picked up via Craigslist and is recording a track from her upcoming album. Oh, and it's all happenning in her new barn in Vermont. That's beyond cool. That's sublime.

Looking forward to the new album.

Sunsets

2009-02-18T19:23:00.011-06:00

Sunsets from the last 4 nights. Top is from tonight. Second one is from Tuesday. Below are from Monday and Sunday. Perfect weather, too. High 70's during the day, low 60's at night. I find it odd that even in what is arguably one of ritziest cities in Florida, I can't help but think this entire state is seedy.

Ouch!

2009-02-08T15:45:00.003-06:00

From Speaker Pelosi's office, this scary graph:

Reacquaintence and Identity: Miss Veach is a Peach

2009-01-23T22:33:00.010-06:00

I had lost this photograph about 20 years ago. It's my first class picture. It's my Kindergarten class and was taken, as you can see on the menu board propped up in front of us, in 1976. And while I had managed to hold on to all my elementary school class photos for grades 1 through 5, I had somehow lost this one. But here it is again. One of my former classmates unexpectedly returned it to me by scanning their own copy of it and posting it on Facebook. I'm in the third row, third in from the left. I'm wearing what pretty clearly looks like a navy blue sweater with a stitched downhill skier on it.
I recently finished reading some essays about youth, digital media and identity. Most of them discussed how youth are exploring,expanding,probing and challenging their identities using new digital media production and distribution tools. The essays focused primarily on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace or YouTube where millions of youth are providing social scientists of every ilk with the meat of their tenure . I thought, if today's youth are busy with the basics of digital identity creation, how is Facbook (and that does seem to be the current hub for this activity) allowing my own generation to explore the history of their own identity? How are we using it to collectively explore who we once were and especially, what we've become?

The popularity of Facebook makes reacquainting simple. The rediscovery of so many people you had begun to expect you'd never hear much more about other than a passing word are suddenly reappearing and aggregating all sorts of personal information about themselves and putting it on display, a kind of show and tell. And I mean that in the most optimistic sort of way. I remember running into an old high school friend 10 years ago and listening in awe while she gave me the lowdown on who had married and those adventurous few from our class who had been brave enough to wade into the murky depths of parenthood. Now those very people are reorganizing digitally, their lives, their new middle-aged identities being haphazardly stitched together through status updates, photographs, article postings, groups joined, books read and videos posted. Quite a few of them are now firmly ensconced in parenthood. But your concept of them, of who they are and how they relate to you, draws from memories you formed 10, 20 or even 30 years ago. So there's this terrific little jolt when you learn a little about who that person has become. On Facebook, their profile picture usually offers the first clue. For many of these profiles, my own included, there's a picture of a child. Sometimes they're posing with the kid(s), a partner, or their family. They all say, "Here, at a glance, is what I've become." Sometimes people have gained a lot of weight.

There's a nice little nostalgia trade active on Facebook. Everybody is scanning old photographs and posting them. High school photos mostly, but family photographs too. They sometimes kick off little conversations. I wish there was more video. It's around, but rare.

This Kindergarten class photo, for obvious reasons, is the best and most endearing piece of the Facebook nostalgia trade that I've come across. I'm lucky to have nothing but the warmest memories of that class and Miss Veach, the Bea Arthur-like woman standing somewhat drably amongst us little munchkins and who was our teacher. Her personality was anything but drab though, even if her outfit from that day wasn't particularly flattering. I remember her being a woman in charge, and yes, her personality was even a bit like Bea Arthur's in Maude. She was Maude-like; bold, a touch acerbic but ultimately warmhearted and maternal at her feminist core. Many of us peed on the floor of her classroom, but I'm not going to name names. When I was in first grade I drew a picture that I was allowed to take across the hallway and deliver to Miss Veach. I don't remember what the picture was of though I did get to present it to her in front of her entire class. It all felt so heroic. After taking my picture, she put an arm around me and explained to her current batch of Kindergartners that I was one of her former students who had since ventured forth into the more refined elements of first grade.

Today Is For Them

2009-01-20T16:16:00.005-06:00

Because Past is Prologue

2009-01-17T23:37:00.006-06:00

Men may differ as to the particular form of governmental activity with respect to industry or business but nearly all are agreed that private enterprise in times such as these cannot be left without assistance and without reasonable safeguards lest it destroy not only itself but also our process of civilization.
-Franklin D. Rossevelt, 1934

More About Libraries and Digital Storytelling

2009-01-16T19:55:00.008-06:00

In the pre-Internet days of multimedia publishing, pioneer digital storytelling enthusiasts showed people how to digitize the old photos in their family albums, interview their relatives and digitize the interviews, then arrange the audiovisual elements into a narrative, often with voiceover narration. While this technique can be applied to personal genealogy and history of pure entertainment, digital storytelling, when used to construct a narrative presentation of true historical events, personages, and geographical locations, is one way of introducing students to participatory media, to the communication basics of compelling narrative production, and to local civic affairs. Journalism doesn't have to be global. Hyperlocal journalism that delves more deeply into local events than mass media does can also serve as a springboard for civic engagement.

I had been reading these MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning books online and enjoying them quite a bit before realizing just how badly I wanted to actually hold one of them while I read it. Not just because I can establish a more meaningful, in-depth dialogue with a text when its medium is a book with tangible weight and scent, but because I wanted something to covet as an object, to hold this nifty little collection of essays exploring so much of what had been kicking up all this dust in my own head the last few years.

Howard Reingold's essay, "Using Participatory Media and Public Voice to Encourage Civic Engagement," from which the above quote comes from, deftly explores some of the issues concerning youth, civic engagement and digital journalism/storytelling that I've been haphazardly exploring over the last few years. Namely I've been kicking around how we take these elements and make them part of our library programming. What would such programming look like? A series of workshops? What are our goals? Do we explore this first with a round-table of local teens? What do we discuss and are they even interested in the first place? I'm pretty confident they are. In fact, the hyperlocal journalism Reingold mentions is already happening in after school and community-based programs lucky to have, more often then not, foundational support.

Public Libraries aren't looking to stir the pot of community controversy (their very existence is often controversy enough), but I do think they have a vital role to play in offering their patrons with the tools necessary to tell their stories (even controversial ones) and, ideally, engage their communities. Because after all, once the story has been crafted, it needs to find its audience. Which is why I've also been kicking around so much dust thinking about DIY marketing and distribution models.

Cold Marathon

2009-01-15T06:02:00.004-06:00

I'm up early. Had a dream that I was running a marathon. The course was a large, somewhat ramshackle hotel. We ran the hallways. Much to my frustration I ran off course, confused by the media covering the event. Or something like that. I awoke up angry, blankets tossed aside. Sleep had fled.

It's cold out. The heater is kicking on every few minutes. I'm listening to Abby on the monitor and can tell she's thinking about waking up. Soon I'll be a mermaid.

The Dregs Of Winter

2009-01-11T21:42:00.005-06:00

Looks like a good time to start work on that summer documentary I've been kicking around. Though our little Winter baby probably has other plans in store for me. A little late night walking of hallways maybe? Definitely. Most definitely.

Those Hands Belong To You!

2009-01-09T23:04:00.005-06:00

At a little over 7-weeks now Megan is beginning to take some wonderful movement away from the basics of feeding, sleeping, pooping and crying. There's something very obviously primal about this first stage, for both the baby and the parent. Your life becomes consumed by the pure necessity of keeping both the child and yourself afloat. You slog through it, exhausted and amazed. Wonder is tempered by ample handfuls of the mundane.

Megan discovered her hands a little over a week ago. All that involuntary hand movement, a kind of infant interpretive dance of flailing, bonking and impassioned conducting, has been slowing up some as Megan pauses more and more frequently to stare at her fingers before placing them determinedly into her waiting mouth. The discovery of hands as boob proxies.

3

2008-12-29T21:51:00.003-06:00

Why John Lennon's (Just Like) Starting Over is a Delicious Proustian Donut

2008-12-09T19:02:00.009-06:00

(Just Like) Starting Over reminds me so palpably of being a child that it's become one of a handful of my most powerful sonic Madeleines. I love it not just for its slick melodic sheen (hello 80's reverb!) and pop craftsmanship but for how it stirs the Proustian particulars of being young and awakening to the world.

It reminds me most powerfully of the summer of 1981. It stirs up a set of powerful memories associated with the summer my family spent a month vacationing at the Chautauqua Institute in Bemus Point, New York. Bats would occasionally get trapped indoors and have to be chased out with broomsticks. One lazy afternoon I watched Bjorn Borg playing at Wimbledon on a little black and white TV my brothers had wisely seen fit to have accompany us on our travels.

The Institute was and still is, a gated arts-community, a privileged summer resort created over 100 years ago with the purpose of spiritually nurturing and equipping Sunday school teachers before it rapidly expanded to encompass the secular arts and the importance of life-long learning amongst the well-heeled. In the summer of 1981, I had just turned 10 years old. I had a small clock radio I had picked up at a neighborhood garage sale. It looked similar to this.
There was a small single speaker that always crackled on with a second or two of feedback before settling in. And there was this song, an ode to Lennon's fealty to mid-life domesticity (it was released October 9, 1980, Lennon's 40th birthday) and its accompanying commitment to monogamy and child rearing. It went to #1 in both in the US and UK just a couple weeks after Lennon's murder.

Megan Marjorie Breitenbach

2008-11-20T07:33:00.002-06:00

Born 11:16 am, November 19th. 8 pounds, 21 inches. Welcome to the world little baby girl!

What We Do When We're Waiting For Our Little Sister

2008-11-18T13:49:00.001-06:00

Wine For Later

2008-11-18T10:14:00.005-06:00

Took a walk yesterday afternoon to help coax the baby along. Didn't work, though Abby fell asleep. We stopped at In Fine Spirits and Cathy, whose been dry for the better part of the last year for obvious reasons, chose 5 bottles of wine. We're looking forward to sampling them over the holidays. Cathy won't be able to drink much given her breastfeeding responsibilities but I've promised to pick up the slack.

Lou Lou's House of Christmas

2008-11-16T14:16:00.010-06:00

My Mom took part in the Bay Village "Homes For the Holidays" tour yesterday. The Plain Dealer, Cleveland's last daily, ran a nice story on the tour earlier this week, focusing on my parents house. That's my Mom sitting in our living room. You can read the article here.

This is our dining room. My Mom and Christmas have a long and fascinatingly complex history. Entire rooms in the basement of this house are filled with holiday decorations. I used to warn my Mom that come the following Christmas I would be discreetly placing price-tags on each of these decorations, taking out an ad in the paper and working a cash register in our kitchen as I opened the house for retail sales.

That's our house. Well, my parents house. They moved there a few months shy of my second birthday in 1973 which means they've lived there for close to 35 years now. I haven't lived there since the summer of '93 or '94.. But I love the house deeply. My interest in family folklore, in the idea of place and in first wave suburbs (built after WWI and before WWII) all stems from this house. In fact, my very idea of home, or the one I'm trying to create with Cathy and Abby, finds its roots in this home.

I'm the second caroler from the left.

Here's my favorite quote from the Plain Dealer article:

Mary Lou is not the only one with a hobby that will be evident to tour-goers. There's the little matter in the living room of the 7-foot-high, 7-foot-wide 1916 Wurlitzer band organ, acquired about 12 months ago by Art Breitenbach, a collector of such musical instruments.

Band organs most often were found in the center of carousels, providing the musical accompaniment to carnivals and amusement parks.

"There's no volume control," said Mary Lou, a tad dryly. Art, sitting near the meticulously restored organ, just smiled.

Disciple of Sun Ra

2008-11-16T10:43:00.005-06:00

Election Day

2008-11-13T07:52:00.003-06:00

I'm hoping to roll out a lot more of these more personal mini-documentaries over the course of the next year. This one, this awesome slice of history, was too good to pass up. And while its dedicated to Abby and Sean, its impetus was the passing of Studs Terkel, whose spirit was right there in the streets of Chicago with us.

Super-8

2008-11-08T22:25:00.006-06:00

The Breitenbach family draws names each Christmas. It works like this: around autumn somebody will be inspired to rip up several small scraps of paper, write the various names of the Breitenbach Family Singers on them, hastily fold them and finally ask a volunteer to step forward and choose names for the rest of us. You're then responsible for providing a Christmas gift for that relative. A lot of families do this. There inevitably comes a point when things like leaving home, graduating from college, moving and starting a family all conspire to make the purchasing of gifts for each member of your birth family and their progeny (to say nothing of your own offspring) completely infeasible. Us Breitenbach's have gone from 6 to 15 (soon 16!) in less then 15 years.

So one buyer, one receiver. We keep the price to what seems an appropriately modest cap of $75. My Dad drew my name this year. When he and my Mom came to visit a couple weeks ago I told him exactly what I want. About 20 years ago my Dad borrowed a film splicer, combed through his grocery bag of 30 or so reels of Super-8 family films he shot from the late 60's through the early 80's, and combined some of what he thought was the best footage into a couple larger reels. I want him to digitize those suckers! Film stock is notorious for giving itself over to the ravages of time-- it decomposes, its picture begins to fade, it threatens to crumble. Given my love of the grainy poetic texture and glimpses of family folklore Super-8 films reveal, I'm worried about the state of these reels.

Besides that, I have no idea what's on these films. We had a projector and screen. I remember my brothers, fleeting amateur Super-8 auteur's themselves, playing these films down in our basement in the late 70's. But it's been over 25 years.

Freedom From Fear

2008-11-08T08:53:00.002-06:00

I began David M. Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize winning book Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 the other night. In a queasy parallel with our own economic woes, it begins on the cusp of the stock market crash of 1929, an event that ushered in the Great Depression and all its consequent hardships. This massive economic disruption, Kennedy points out, also came to symbolize the end of an era of massive and prolonged industrial expansion.

The old adage, "may you live in interesting times," seems particularly apt in describing the tectonic social and economic shifts that occurred during the first one third of the twentieth century. Kennedy describes a study commissioned by the Hoover Administration, Recent Social Trends, that sought to detail the many aspects of American life at this time. This included, according to Kennedy:

the Great War, mass immigration, race riots, rapid urbanization, the rise of giant industrial combines like U.S. Steel, Ford, and General Motors, new technologies like electrical power, automobiles, radios, and motion pictures, novel social experiments like Prohibition, daring campaigns for birth control, a new frankness about sex, woman's suffrage, the advent of mass-market advertising and consumer financing. "These," the researchers declared, "are but a few of the many happenings which have marked one of the most eventful periods of our history."

Astounding, to say the least.

Yes We Can Can Can!

2008-11-05T18:08:00.003-06:00

That's what I'm talkin' about. So, so sweet.

Vote

2008-11-04T10:18:00.004-06:00

We voted this morning. We're feeling very good about it.

Halloween 2008

2008-11-03T08:46:00.005-06:00

After the trick or treating, Abby was allowed to pick two pieces of candy. She prolonged her sugar buzz by choosing a couple suckers.

Adult Indie Contemporary Balkanization

2008-10-26T10:55:00.006-05:00

The mix of music at Uncommon Ground last weekend: Andrew Bird, Tom Yorke, Sufjan Stevens, The Shins. It's cozy and closer to 40 then 30. It's hip, too, or definitely still wants to me. The flow of this mix is predicable though and I wouldn't mind a surprise or two. But as a culinary soundtrack and general ambiance generator, it does a perfectly agreeable job.

Who are we missing here? Wilco. Nick Drake. Cat Power. Iron & Wine. The New Pornographers. M. Ward. The Roots or Common or Erykah Badu. Or The Roots feat. Erykah Badu. Al Green with the Roots as his backing band. Yo La Tengo. TV On The Radio. The Flaming Lips. Feist. Who else can I balkanize into the mix?

I'm making a sweeping generalization here, but I'd guess that most of the folks buying the above albums or heading out to see these artists live are over 30. And probably not much older then 40. What other demographics? Predominately white. Over half married and with children. More then 2/3 with college educations, a quarter with a grad school degree. Eat out frequently. Left leaning. Still buy CD's but increasingly comfortable with downloading.

For the most part, that's me. But I haven't bought a CD in over a year.

October's Gonna Go Out Like That

2008-10-26T10:38:00.005-05:00

If October goes out like Skilling and his meteorological gang at the Tribune are currently predicting,
then I may very well have to help Abby eat some of her Halloween candy.

A Name For Late October

2008-10-23T22:02:00.012-05:00

"Daddy, Mommy usually puts a little olive oil in that," Abby says to me as she hands over a bottle of straight up cooking oil she's pulled from the lazy Susan while I'm busying about making us some oatmeal this afternoon. I adore how she's teaching me how to cook, just like her Mom.

That above photo of Abby and me plays tricks with time. It's cliche to say children cause time to fly, but until I had actually lived this cliche myself I always met the sentiment with a shrug. What's most surprising is witnessing just how fast a child really does grow, both physically and cognitively. It's ridiculously fast. It was only a couple years ago that Abby was just beginning to talk. She had no real desire to walk, but man could she crawl. Now, of course, she's helping me cook oatmeal at lunch, offering helpful cooking hints and all the while pretending to be a mermaid.

We're a month out now from the baby's due date. Additionally, Cathy and I reached name consensus this morning just before she left for work. Today we named her. A name free of any bad associations and with its own family folklore.

This is my favorite picture from the first few hours after Abby was born almost 3 years ago:

Both my girls looking beautiful.

Death And All His Literary Friends

2008-10-18T18:00:00.000-05:00

I've had a pretty good run of fiction reading of late, reading new authors whose books have sat neglected and forlorn on my shelves. It's not their fault that I haven't read them until recently. Reading takes time. And while I'm reading, I'm also impulsively checking Library shelves, Amazon's catalog or a bookstores latest display. I'm using my library or credit card and surrounding myself with more words then I can keep up with. That's just fine. I happily admit to my book fetish, to my conspicuous consumption of pulp, a love bordering on awe for finely chiseled sentences laid out one after another. No doubt part of that fetish is delayed gratification. What will I read next? What should I save for later?

There's something intensely gratifying about stockpiling a small library of unread books. Or maybe it's just the end result of something impulsive, this insatiable need to have an abundance of books around me. Or maybe it's just odd. Sometimes I'll pick one of those unread books off the shelf and leaf through it, pausing to read a passage at random. I adore the luxury of those books, their covers still uncreased. Choosing what to read next is made simple. All these unread books have already gone through the filters of my own bias, my own literary predispositions. They all look like they could be very, very good. The reviews I read certainly sold me. Or the other books I've read by that particular author were amazing. Or, why not? if it won the National Critics Award, the Pulitzer, the Booker Prize, I'll give it a try. Sometimes, rarely, I'm so shallow as to allow a books cover or publishing company or its prominent New York Times Book Review blurb to persuade me of its possible merit.

And lately, almost everything I've been choosing has been wonderful. And gummed up with death. At least, what's governed the narrative of the fiction I've read of late and given it a special urgency or a palpable air of melancholy can be directly attributed to deaths all encompassing thematic shrug. In Cormac McCarthy's The Road, for example, death is everywhere. In grisly basements scenes, burned out forests and most devastatingly of all, the novels heartbreaking end. In Jose Saramago's Blindness death is again in a grisly basement, lingering in the hallways of an overcrowded asylum and promising to snuff out all of humanity two opaque eyes at a time. In Colm Toibin's The Master, death intrudes on solitude and after much introspection becomes material for the novels of Henry James. (Sounds dull, but it's anything but.) And lastly, in the book I just finished reading, The Line of Beauty, because the protagonist is so young, so coked up and alive and surrounded by the pampered privelege of Thatcher's ruling Tories, death is nowhere. At least not until the very end. Then it intrudes and causes the rather spectacular downfall of our protagonist in the form of AIDS.

And now I've gone and picked up Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs because I need something autumnal, the fall equivalent of a good beach read. I've never read any of his other books, but I know Russo sets most of them in small towns. Bridge of Sighs, not surprisingly then, is set in upstate New York. I'm about 100 pages in and the jury is still out. Russo has something, enough of a command of his storytelling to keep me hooked if not consistently engaged. But death, nonetheless has already been introduced. 'Tis the season, I suppose.

Moving Beyond Local Weather, Traffic and Crime

2008-10-10T21:45:00.011-05:00

One of more interesting side effects of traditional media's current struggles (declining subscriptions/viewership, fragmenting audiences, decreased ad revenue and, hence, operating budgets) is a resurgence of interest and discussion about local news coverage. While many local newspapers are, among other cost-cutting steps, having to scale back on overseas news-gathering bureaus, relying more and more on the outsourced reporting of Reuters and the Associated Press, there's an optimism, forced or genuine I'm not entirely sure, in their dedication and ability to report on local matters in a way that other news outfits (the nationals like New York Times or USA Today) simply can't. Granted, this local news isn't sexy, it's not creating the news cycle narratives like the nationals are able to, but I do feel like I've read and heard numerous local newsroom representatives and analysts (columnists, editors, bearded professors) waxing about how "nobody can provide the kind of local coverage like we can."

A whole page dedicated to the weather? Tom Skilling's got us covered at the Tribune. Reviews on the bands playing next week? the Reader's got a new pullout section! Want to know about the latest accessory, gadget or hip new restaurant? Time's Out Chicago's proven system of operation is ready with a blurb. The latest budget crisis, South Side shooting or North Side sexual assault? The Sun-Times Metro section.

Especially in urban areas, people are turning to a variety of sources--print, radio, TV, online, to get their fill of local news coverage. Personally, I depend on the local coverage provided by the likes of the Reader, the Tribunes Metro section (or did that morph or merge into something else entirely in their new design upgrade?), Time Out Chicago, online sources like Gapers Block and aggregators like EveryBlock and outside.in Chicago. Taken together, these sources help me with understanding and more fully engaging in what's happening around me. I also watch a smattering of local TV news in the morning and at lunch. It's focus can be distilled down to local weather, traffic, sports, crime and entertainment offerings. There's not much of merit, though PBS Chicago does have some admirable Chicago based programming, key among them being Check Please with sommelier Alpana Singh.

And joining these more established media sources in their local reporting are millions of amateurs. I find that tremendously heartening. A nascent citizen-based journalism/grassroots media movement is afoot. These are people, many without any journalistic training, who are leveraging social media tools to offer expanded or more intimate local news and human-interest coverage. More often then not, this grassroots media is print based. Increasingly, however, my own interest lies with those who are using video to create and tell interesting/informative local stories. What I want to know more about are the various platforms they're distributing these stories on. Yes, YouTube is one way to distribute, and studies show that, especially amongst younger audiences (though trending to older demographics as well), there's been a re-allocation of how we spend our media time. Younger audiences, for example, don't just consume media through the more traditional outlets of print, TV and radio, but via platforms like YouTube. Amateur content is being created and others are actively consuming it. But YouTube is more free-form, its mission is more anything goes, and so I'm increasingly interested in those distribution platforms or organizations that seek to cover more hyper-local human interest stories or provide more civic-minded content as well as have missions that include training people with how to use the cheap tools at their disposal to create meaningful content and ensuring it finds a broader audience.

I'm most interested in how public libraries can do just this.

I suppose what I'm talking about can be (and has been) called hyper-local content, stories about developments, events or people in communities that all demographics have a hunger for but are rarely, if ever, covered by traditional news outlets. Online, as discussed, it one distribution platform that folks have been using, but increasingly telecommunication companies like Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner are competing to provide hyper-local news via their cable outlets. In a paper published earlier this year, Adam Thieren and Grant Eskelsen wrote:

Many cable television providers have jumped into the local TV news business and provide a wide variety of local public affairs programming. A 2004 report by the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation (RTNDF) found that “millions of Americans can now tune in to regional and local news on more than 30 cable channels across the country.” The RTNDF found that these local and regional cable TV news and public affairs channels provide “non-stop local news” that is “as local as local news can get.”

Are they creating their own content, or are they open to the kind of content a library might produce? And just what would a library produce? Well, this:

Hopscotch

2008-09-25T21:27:00.009-05:00

The film that's given me the biggest kick of late was Ronald Neame's 1980 Walter Matthau comedy/thriller, Hopscotch. Reminded me a little, in the best possible ways, of Hal Ashby's amazing run of 70's films (of which I'm an unabashed fan), a similar tender, free-wheeling way of telling the story coupled with gorgeous attention to detail. The location shooting throughout Hopscotch is almost worth watching the film alone, and Criterion, those relentlessly genius bastards of rendering prints ravaged by time and neglect back to their original glory, give these location scenes a bewitching warmth.

But what really delighted me most was the chemistry between Matthau and his co-star Glenda Jackson. They play old spies and even older lovers, each smitten with the other and always a step ahead of their bumbling Russian and American pursuers. Matthau's character, Miles Kendig, a fed up CIA operative, shacks up with Jackson's Isobel, a former spy and lover (married, but now widowed, thus igniting the flame anew--and the scene where they first meet again manages effortlessly to be both urbane and folksy, it's sly and filled with warmth, establishing a delightfully giddy, goofy rapport Matthau and Jackson sustain until the end of the film) and begins writing a tell-all memoir that promises to embarrass the covert and morally dubious operations of several countries.

While Matthau's Kendig writes he listens to Mozart. Numerous scenes show albums of Mozart being placed onto a turntable, of tapes being placed into a cassette player and the play button being pushed, of a stylus gracefully meeting vinyl. Almost all the music in the film is diegetic, that is, the music helping to sustain and propel the narrative is represented in the scenes as they're being played out. Unlike the hardcore diegetics (of which much is still to be written), the represented music is allowed to dominate the mix, in fact, it becomes the only sound. That's pretty normal for most Hollywood films but rarely do you get to see the soundtrack being chosen and played by a character in the film. I really liked that.

Video Approaches

2008-09-23T14:43:00.002-05:00

Beginning editing of my first Library video tonight. Filmed material at Morton Grove Family Fest this past Saturday and came away with a few lessons:

-Approaching people and asking them to be on video is difficult. This is probably made more complicated by how amateur our setup is. We're not polished TV news reporters with a professional camera crew in tow. We're wielding a little video camera on a flimsy tripod. How do we make our amateur status work for us?

-Getting teenagers on video at an event like Family Fest is impossible. If you're under 18, we need a guardians consent. Teenagers don't hang out with their parents at public events.

-Mentioning you work for the Public Library goes a long way toward putting people at ease. I noticed that protective veneer folks put on when solicited in public fall away once we mentioned who we were. We're your friendly neighborhood library, that's who.

Abby Napping, Dad Enjoying Rain and Sounds of Dorothy Ashby

2008-09-08T14:20:00.004-05:00

Abby's napping. Perfect early October afternoon visiting Chicago a month early. Cool, damp winds making their way through the living room windows, gentle rain falling and promising to continue through the evening. Listening to iTunes Shuffle Play and everything is sounding remarkably good. But it's Dorothy Ashby's Wax and Wane from her excellent 1970 release, Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby, that's completing the soundtrack.

Post Apocalyptic Road-Trip

2008-09-04T14:48:00.002-05:00

The structural ingenuity of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Road, draws its power from the classical elements of earth, wind, air and fire. A father and son travelling through bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape in search of warmth, of something better, are repeatedly beset by nature at its cruelest and most unforgiving. They huddle under a plastic tarp to hide from the rain and snow, build fires to ward off the cold, cover their faces with sheets to strain the ash from the air and long for an earth rendered whole again.

The Road is fiercely bleak and relentlessly unforgiving. There's not an ounce of sentimentality. The grief enshrouding it is nearly unbearable. But what ultimately sustains the reader, I think, what keeps us going and makes it worth our while, is the relationship between the father and son that lies at the center of the book. It's in this relationship that McCarthy weaves a powerful accumulation of riffs, motifs and themes that he controls with breathtaking precision. At the root of this father-son relationship is the universal love of a parent for his child and of a child's love for his parent. It's one of the oldest stories we know, and McCarthy's prose and themes have been justly called biblical in both their severity and tenderness. And there's no doubt of the severity found in The Road. Humanity, what's left of it, has seemingly resorted to anarchy and cannibalism, the sky is impenetrably gray, the landscape fire scorched and hope, whenever it threatens to flicker, is promptly extinguished. McCarthy's genius, however, is to subject this elemental severity to the love between the father and son and our own hope, as readers, that such love would continue to exist undiminished in such a bleak place. There's a fierce undercurrent of tenderness in The Road, a light in all its darkness that the darkness can't quite comprehend. A heartrending tenderness that, despite itself, rises up out of the darkness. It's not triumphant, this love, it's not a balm or eventually victorious in banishing the novel's unrelenting darkness. It just is because it knows no other way.

One telling exchange towards the novels end, as the father and son stumble through the darkness in search of their shelter, offers a telling glimpse of this unbending compassion:

I can't see.
I know. We'll just have to take it one step at a time.
Okay.
Don't let go.
Okay.
No matter what.
No matter what.

At the risk of hyperbole, The Road is a masterpiece, a work of fiction both devastating in its effect, powerful in its momentum and deeply satisfying in its conclusion. That, my friends, is why we read!

Third Trimester

2008-08-28T06:08:00.002-05:00

Cathy entered the third trimester last week. All is well.

Killer Bob Is Full Of Secrets

2008-08-23T22:54:00.005-05:00

My sister, who will be spending her Labor Day weekend with us, is as yet unaware that she'll be asked to talk about the terribly creepy guy you see here on the right crouching behind Laura Palmer's bed.

Creepiest television moment ever?

Mine at least. Like a lot of folks, I found the whole aura and mystique of David Lynch's Twin Peaks, the melancholy ambiance of its 50's style decor and rustic setting, the gorgeous ache of Angelo Badalamanti's perfectly empathizing score, its gorgeous actresses pertly costumed in soft cashmere sweaters, pleated skirts and bobby socks, Kyle MacLachlan's career defining turn as Special Agent Dale Cooper--I found all of this intoxicating. Never more so then during its initial 7 episode run in the Spring of 1990, when Lynch and his co-conspirator Mark Frost left the question of Who Killed Laura Palmer shrouded in its own web of nutty dream logic. It was never better, perhaps, then at the conclusion of its third episode and the now iconic dance of the dream man.

That There Is My Pa

2008-08-15T20:48:00.008-05:00

My Dad and I spent a week at the Chautauqua Institute last month. That's Dad in the picture above, enjoying the amazing breakfast we grabbed most mornings on the porch of the Tally Ho. Now the Tally Ho not only throws down some outrageously delicious Swedish pancakes, it's also host to one of the Institutes best (and, so far as I could tell, only) nightly dinner buffet's.

The way to go with the Tally Ho buffet is to do it take out style. You can fill your styrofoam containers to your stomachs content for, as the above sign informs us, just "$6.95 per pound." But what's a pound if the food isn't any good. And that's what really made the Tally Ho so endearing, the food was amazing. It should be known that there is a positive dearth of eating options at the Institute. I wondered while I was there if the Institute shouldn't broaden its pedagogic mission to include a culinary school, a summer residence for budding chefs to come and study with with some of the arts best teachers. And of course they'd test their new culinary tools on the no doubt adventurous tummy's of the Institutes seasonal guests. But the Tally Ho's dinner buffet was a really nice surprise. Always a beautifully cooked fish with a light, tasty seasoning, a few bowls of cool pasta salads and vegetables, the cool black and crunchy green beans being what I seemed to be craving and enjoying the most. There have been dozens of times over the years when, fork full of delightfully crispy green beans hoisted before me, I've exclaimed, "Man, I was really craving these tonight!" I've seen Cathy do it, too.

I got about 20 minutes of footage and 100 or so photographs from my vacation with my Dad to Chautauqua Institute that I plan on making into a video. After not having been to the Institue for over 20 years and having spent a few very idyllic summer there in my "I am immortal but the concept of infinity freaks me out" pre-teen years (now commonly known as tween), I was genuinely excited to go there and see how it, as a place, had changed and how it had stayed the same.

I also got to have some great talks with my Dad in his environment. Though I never felt it right to try and capture these on video. I'm still hesitant to carry on a conversation while wielding a video camera, too conscious of the obvious mechanical, impersonal aspects of it. That'll change, I hope, with a bit more practice. In any case, there's something about Chautauqua that creates a fierce loyalty amongst a healthy number of folks who go there. My Dad is smitten by it though I regret never having a chance to really find out just what about Chautauqua interests and excites my Dad the most.

No doubt, one of the things I'll remember most fondly about my week there is watching as my Dad helped launch the standing ovation given to the young and charmingly histrionic Russian piano prodigy, Alexander Gavrylyuk after his piano recital. My Dad would ecstatically lurch up out of his seat and shout, "Bravo! Bravo!" I think maybe only my sister Robin can relate or fully appreciate how this very action, of my Dad jumping up in the Institutes Amphitheater and expressing his appreciation of whatever performance had just wowed him with, what we thought 20 years ago of as something of an embarrassment, a bit of overly enthusiastic Vaudeville, was magically transformed by this new context. I'm simply 20 years older. Not necessarily more mature, but more willing to give myself over to the moment if it deserves it. More willing to forgive my Dad's quirks. I joined him and gave Gavrylyuk an ovation, too.

I did not, however, shout Bravo.

Kid, You Turn Summers In My Mind

2008-08-15T20:20:00.003-05:00

Copyright and Fair Use

2008-08-15T09:23:00.000-05:00

With millions of people creating their own content and uploading it to the Web in the form of blogs, photographs, videos, music--essentially any form of media that can be digitized--issues of copyright and what constitutes fair use, have been getting a work out.

Some may be aware of the high profile case where a family posted a 29 second video of their toddler to YouTube with a Prince song playing in the background on their CD player. The family was contacted by YouTube at the request of Prince's publisher, the Universal Music Publishing Group, to take the video down as they felt it infringed on the copyright of the Prince song.

And while the family chose to fight back against Universal and what they felt was an overzealous example of copyright protection, the case revealed, if anything, just how uninformed many of us are when it comes to what constitutes copyright infringement and what merits fair use.

That being said, a wonderfully readable new comic, Bound By Law, free and available online, walks those posting video online through the basics of copyright law and that terribly fine line between copyright infringement (bad!) and fair use (good!).

Additionally, American University's Center For Social Media has brought together a panel of experts working in the field of online video to create a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use For Online Video. As its introduction plainly states: "This document is a code of best practices that helps creators, online providers, copyright holders, and others interested in the making of online video interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use."

Video Storytelling Notes

2008-08-08T22:41:00.011-05:00

Looking forward, if all goes well, to creating a series of videos for Morton Grove Public Library over the next year. Short vignettes or mini-features about environmental or green issues serving the information needs of the Morton Grove community. My hope is that these videos will include interviews with local experts about a diverse array of environmental issues of interest, though I admit to a pedagogical bent: the carbon life-cycles of certain household goods, mini-features on insulating your house for the winter and other simple tips for how folks can save on your monthly heating bills, a tour of a recycling center, environmentally themed video essays made by and with our patrons, working with teens to create their own mini-features on the environment, etc... A lot of exciting possibilities.

But how to make these videos interesting? We're competing, after all, with content creators who are better equipped and savvier, for our patrons limited time. How do we make something they'll actually care to watch and learn from? How do we make a worth-while, entertaining, piece of information? More importantly, does the information (noble sentiment approaching) help fulfill our mission to assist our patron's/community's pursuit of personal growth and lifelong learning? Is it a good tool for helping them fulfill that need?

And you can't simply post this video content into a bubble and expect them to come. You have to sell it to them, bring it to their attention and hook them. Right? The most important piece, I think, of vying for and gaining our patron's attention is to involve them, to make them collaborators. I'll need some help in this area.

Part of what I'm most looking forward to is honing my documentary craft. Constructing meaningful, coherent narratives in particular. Additionally, I'm look forward to:

1. exploring how to make the results of these narratives visually interesting (storyboarding, filming with more then one camera, post-production massaging)
2. as well as acoustically stimulating (and getting good sound is my priority right now)
3. graced with charismatic, compelling people
4. finding numerous, quality distribution platforms for the content
4. all that and more.

I've barely even begun, though I can't think of any other endeavor other then fatherhood that I'm having a better time exploring right now. I've got the itch to tell and help others tell their stories using video and seeing what comes of it.

I love the fact that my job is, by and large, about storytelling. I know it's cliche, but we are the stories we tell each other, the narratives we construct. And I can't help but think we've reached this very exciting, very interesting moment where people have been empowered by the ease (both technically and financially) with which they can construct, edit and share these stories. Folks are no longer passively consuming media, but creating and distributing it in record numbers. They're sharing, collaborating, sampling, remixing, extending, critiquing, infringing, fair-using and tip-toeing around the stories we tell like never before.

But are they doing it well? No doubt a healthy heaping of it is frivolous beyond even the seasoned hallway cat warding off the helplessly adorable encroaching puppies.

But some of it, quite a bit of it actually, if you're willing to really make a go and really search for it, makes nearly instantly accessible an impressive chunk of the past 200 years of our visual history, both still and moving images. And recently, that includes you and me and not just the so-called professional media. Some of us are starting to do it really well.

I've been astounded by the level of professionalism and visual narrative acuity of the hundreds of so-called amateur videos I've run across on various video-hosting sites like YouTube, the Internet Archive, oodles of Public Library's or Berkley's Center For Digital Storytelling. People are telling some phenomenal stories there and I'm convinced that Public Library's need to be jumping in to help their patrons-- not only bringing attention to the impressive body of work already out there, but informing, teaching and ideally making available the tools with which to create their own stories. The fact that millions of us already are telling stories, with video especially, is as good a proof as you'll find for how radically the way our communities consume and share information (or tell stories) has changed over the last decade.

My particular obsession, if it isn't already pretty obvious, is how we can take advantage of the easy-to-use digital video cameras, editing software and distribution platforms that are out there and help our patrons tell their own stories via this medium. We are, after all, in the business of storytelling. Our missions are filled with noble sentiments like helping assist our respective users/patrons/communities with their thorny pursuits of personal growth and lifelong learning. We can remain idle and pretend that the passive consumption of books is the best or only avenue through which our patrons can learn and grow, or we can acknowledge that a new and exciting information/media movement is afoot and become a vital part of it.

Words We Say, Or Words We Don't Say

2008-08-02T19:00:00.000-05:00

It's been my experience in reading the novels of Ian McEwan, the popular English writer, that he starts strong and ends weak. It may very well be that the beginnings of his novels, Atonement, Enduring Love and the Man Booker Prize winning Amsterdam among them, are invested with such finely chiseled prose and a seemingly effortless command of narrative that sustaining them through to a satisfying conclusion is nearly impossible. Or maybe he just loses the thread, runs out of steam.

But at the risk of giving my inner-critic enough rope to hang itself, I've found McEwan's endings to be too tidy. There's a nagging tendency by the author to abruptly tie up loose ends and provide odd, jarring summaries of the action that's proceeded. Such contrivances deflate and call attention to the narrative at a time when the reader's immersion and suspension of belief should be cresting.

But I keep coming back to McEwan's books because, endings aside, they're compulsively readable and often breathtakingly beautiful. Terrible things erupt out of the most quotidian of events- a child kidnapped from a grocery store, a fender bender that goes terribly awry--and McEwan's wrings the anxiety, tension and grief from these situations with a masters sense of ambiance and control.

His latest, On Chesil Beach, may be his best and most successful yet. And, yes, something terrible does arise out of a quotidian event. A young couple, on the night of their wedding, sexually repressed despite themselves, awkwardly makes their way to the conjugal bed with disastrous results. In fact, this short book, more a novella, has no other subject then the disaster their sexual coupling, its impending failure and its heartrending consequences. And it's here that McEwan's penchant for tidy conclusive summaries is handled brilliantly. For it's in the consequences that arise from the couples failure to sexually consummate their marriage that McEwan shows us how words, those we say and, more devastatingly, those we don't, can heal or tear asunder.

Wordle If You Would

2008-07-23T21:44:00.002-05:00

Oh, hell. Here's my Wordle of del.icio.us tags...

Library Paternalism

2008-07-20T07:00:00.001-05:00

My Dad recently made me aware of this:

Lakewood -- Lakewood Public Library Director Kenneth Warren wants you to know there's nothing private about the 60 public access computers at the main branch.

Every 15 minutes, a staff member takes a stroll around the center to make sure library patrons are not looking at pornography, engaging in illegal gambling or visiting other questionable Web sites.

As somebody who used to frequent the Lakewood Public Library's old digs in the pre-Internet days of the early 90's, as well as being a librarian currently working at a library that neither monitors nor filters the information its patrons are perusing, I can't help but think this is paternalistic at best and chillingly invasive at worst.

According to the Library's Acceptable Use Policy, "Employees are authorized to bring to an individual’s attention any act which will detract from the decorum of the library or will create a hostile workplace in violation of state and federal civil rights laws."

"Excuse me, sir, but that website you're looking at is clashing with our color scheme."

The Library is also considering using software that will allow its prying librarians to monitor what patrons are looking at remotely.

There's a surprisingly, refreshingly civil conversation about this going on here that's worth a peak.

She's Gonna Be A Big Sister

2008-07-17T19:39:00.003-05:00

Everything is good, the baby is perfect and on track for a November 20th due date. Why do I have the sneaking suspicion we'll be eating Thanksgiving in the delivery room? And it's definitely a girl, no question about it. My estrogen levels are no doubt on the rise once again.

Drift

2008-07-03T08:49:00.006-05:00

I've been a music making hobbyist for close to 20 years now. I began by recording on a friends 4-track recorder in the early 90's and slowly, as the technology became more available and affordable, created a decent home recording studio built around Pro Tools and Reason software.

I began making Drift, my latest album for friends and family, in January of 2002 when we were living in Berkeley. Those were very difficult times for me and making music was, as it often is, a source of solace and respite. I never intended it to take this long, though I never had any real goals in mind to begin with. I recorded whenever I was moved to do so, accumulating roughly 60 songs in various states of disarray. Over the years a handful of songs continued to hold some allure, and those are the ones that eventually made it to this album.

It's not perfect (he said with a resigned sigh), certainly not what I had hoped for, and there were times over the last year, as I was happily discarding, that I contemplated simply deleting everything and starting over. Perhaps I should have. There were those moments when I'd find myself asking, "Is this really all there is to it? Is this the best you can do?" It all began to feel stale, more a burden then a source of fun. I was visited by that odious brand of nagging self-doubt that can turn such benign enterprises sour with apathy. I was and am lucky to have had Cathy there, not only giving me more time and space then I deserved to sort such silly things out, but by offering terrifically boosting words of encouragement when I needed them most.

And there are a handful of songs I'm genuinely happy about, songs I'm excited for others to have a chance to hear. They seem to offer good incentives to keep trying. I'm looking forward to recording with my friend Dennis over the next few months, too, hopefully making an E.P.'s worth of pop songs available digitally by the end of September.

Kusturica Doesn't Do Storytelling

2008-06-16T14:49:00.003-05:00

I am against the notion that cinema is storytelling and a film director is a storyteller. Storytelling is for a talk show, not for the cinema. It's one of the aspects of cinema, but cinema is a much more complex picture of the world than storytelling. It's like saying James Joyce is a storyteller, which would be completely stupid. Of course, there are storytellers. But if you read Shakespeare or Chekhov, you cannot say they are just storytellers. They had a story that they turned into a drama. But drama is not the same as story.

-Emir Kusturica, from the book My First Movie: Take Two

Chautauqua In The Summertime

2008-06-13T22:21:00.004-05:00

I'll be heading to the Chautauqua Institution in Bemus Point, New York with my Dad right after the Fourth of July. It's a place rich with family history dating back to when my Mom vacationed around those parts with her family as a child. In fact, somewhere there's an amazing Super 8 from the early 50's of her Dad reeling a fish out of Lake Chautauqua. After my Dad married my Mom he was equally smitten with the place and they took us kids there, often staying a month or more over the summer months in a rented cottage or for a long weekend at the Hotel Lenhart.

The Chautauqua Institution, where my Dad and I will be hanging out for a week, is a fascinating place. It's the holdout (and now a designated National Historic Landmark) of a late 19th Century religious and educational movement that found its inspiration in that throughly American quest for self-improvement. Culture, with a capital C, along with heaping servings of Protestant religious instruction were the guiding lights of its founders, Lewis Miller and John Vincent, when they founded the Institution in 1874. In fact, its original name was Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly.

Now that sounds like pure drudgery to me. But it's not the Sunday School strain that I found compelling (and the sacred was never any real match for the secular in my family anyway) so much as the residue of those enchanted summers I spent there as a child in the early 80's and how they've shaped my own fond feelings for the place in the present. Not having been there in over 20 years, I'm excited to see how it's both changed and been preserved.

My parents gave me a couple nice coffee table books about Chautauqua for my birthday this year. In the preface of one of them, Chautauqua: An American Utopia, Jeffrey Simpson is kind enough to give voice to some of my own sentiments about the place. Simpson feels conflicted with the two Chautauquas that crowd his mind-- the modern, "vital Chautauqua of today," and the "kindly, sleepy, rather shabby Chautauqua" of his childhood. Of that old Chautauqua, Simpson writes:

This was the Chautauqua where it was said that "old ladies brought their mothers." It was a kind, serene idyll, a sort of Chekhov play where private dramas were played out in atmospheres of wicker and ennui.

I mean, the place has over 1200 Victorian cottages, most of them with porches smothered in wicker. I remember those old ladies hobbling up and down the hills. And those little Chekhov plays were being played out by my own family, accompanied by the sound of music students practicing clarinets from nearby porches mixing with the rattle of silverware from a hotel's kitchen somewhere below. I wasn't there for the cultural life, though I suppose I found it anyway at the local Boys and Girls Club, where I became friends with half a dozen or so other kids, most from New York City, for a couple fleetingly enchanted summers.

Eating

2008-06-05T20:48:00.006-05:00

Abby and I headed over to the Lincoln Restaurant to enjoy some silver dollar pancakes and a somewhat embarrassingly humongous Civil-War themed omelet for lunch. I was surprised that I hadn't done this already with her, though eating out with a 2 1/2 year-old isn't exactly what I'd call leisurely. But she was gentle dictator, demanding a few extra dollops of maple syrup and happily chatting away with our waitress. We came home and both took naps.
Taking advantage of the much appreciated balminess, we ate dinner in our backyard tonight, something Cathy seems committed to taking better advantage of this summer. We have a nice little fortress back there, ringed by fences and teeming with green and a raised patio space.

California Split

2008-06-03T14:25:00.009-05:00

Robert Altman had one of the most amazing runs of feature films of any mainstream American director working in the 70's. From 1970's utterly wacky and lovable Brewster McCloud through to 1980's Popeye, are all very good, with a few, such as McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us and Nashville being stone cold masterpieces, as much a product of their times as they are somehow ravishingly timeless. It's not surprising that many consider this his "golden period."

1974's California Split, starring Elliot Gould and George Segal as a couple compulsive gamblers in search of their next big score is one of the very good ones. Altman's love of overlapping dialogue (most of it written just prior to the shooting by screenwriter Bill Walsh) and documentary like ambiance are in full effect throughout the film, allowing the viewer to eavesdrop on conversations in the peripheral of the main dialogue track. And Elliot Gould continues to be a revelation. Was he ever better then in the films he made during the 70's with Altman? For somebody like me whose impressions of Gould were formed by his avuncular character acting work of the 90's and 00's (on Friends and the Oceans films), seeing him in Altman's The Long Goodbye was a completely unexpected surprise. There was a time there when Gould blew everybody out of the water, creating characters that were scruffy, moody, cynical and suave. They took hits and they hurt but they always prevailed. In California Split, Gould's Charlie chews up every scene he's in, often leaving George Segal's Bill to churn somewhat helplessly in his wake.

Broadcasting Live From Our Block Party

2008-05-25T23:45:00.005-05:00

Ran across the Chicago Independent Radio Project (CHIRP), a collective of spirited WLUW castaways looking to nudge Congress into acting on some bottle necked legislation that would hopefully open the FM band to support a more localized, not-for profit form of community radio.

The Bill, the Local Community Radio Act of 2007 or H.R. 2802 for those keeping score, recognizes that the FM spectrum should be opened up to include low-power, community based radio services and programming. And by low power we're talking roughly 10-100 watts. The hope is that with the passage of this legislation schools, churches and other community-based organizations could, if they so desired, launch their own radio programming. Sure, the signal wouldn't reach very far, but I like the idea of having a radio station that only broadcasts out for a few blocks, and besides, what's the harm?

Big Radio is harmed, that's who! All those big, steaming slices of the FM spectrum under their carefully manicured control are going to get messed with by these ruthless upstarts. In fact, all these volunteer based, low-power FM signals coming out of churches, retirement homes and elementary schools are going to cause some serious "interference" on the FM band. Or so the broadcasters and their lobbyist have claimed. A two-year Congressional study concluded in 2000 (see Finding 14), however, that "the broadcasters' concerns were demonstrated to be unsubstantiated."

The Local Community Radio Act of 2007 is currently languishing in subcommittee limbo amongst 73 other Bills. The Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, itself encompassed by the Committee On Energy and Commerce (where they, no doubt, feel your pain at the pump), was referred this bill in June of 2007. Jan Schakowky, my own representative in the House, was one of this bills original sponsors, so it seems like a no brainer to contact her office and see what she can tell me about its current state. Even better to contact members of the Subcommittee itself. Two Representatives from Illinois, Bobby Rush and John Shimkus, are on it. Couldn't hurt to write them and see what the hold up is.

Creep, Frank Zappa

2008-05-24T23:48:00.002-05:00

Frank Zappa, 31, leader of the Mothers of Invention, likes to call himself a "creep," and says his upbringing made him that way.

More here.

Lay Across My Big Brass Bed

2008-05-24T22:12:00.009-05:00

After watching I'm Not There last weekend, Todd Haynes' joyous and playfully clever ode to the many lives of Bob Dylan, I've been, not surprisingly, on a bit of a Dylan kick this past week. I have roughly half of his catalog from the early 60's up through 1974's Blood On The Tracks, so I've been throwing myself and Abby a bit of a Dylanathon, or at least Dylan seemed to be on in the background while Abby and I raced around the house earlier this week.

It took me a long time to get around to actually paying any attention to Dylan. Certainly I was aware of his iconic status growing up, but I always thought of Dylan as a guy who wrote some decent songs that were at their best when covered by others (i.e., The Byrds Mr. Tambourine Man). I was wary. Dylan was such a seemingly ossified 60's touchstone, hallowed Baby Boomer ground. There was no man, just a tired, overly-trodden myth. There was that. And I feared his body of work. I worried that if I fell for Dylan's music and the tantalizing myths and associations that have sprouted up around it, then I'd , as comes inevitably to any music junkie, feel compelled to go about seeking out and listening to all his albums and reading up on the body of Dylan literature. Blood On The Tracks was Dylan's 15th studio album. I suppose I have or have heard roughly 10 of those first 15. I've only read one book about Dylan, and that was his own.

My brother Randy forwarded along a copy of a Dylan mix a friend had made for him not long after we moved back to Chicago back in the winter of 2004. I was ready for it, or at least to listen to Dylan with an open mind. My old friend Dave Walulik and I, back when we were both attending Ohio State, went through a bit of an old-time music kick, checking out old Woody Guthrie and old Smithsonian Folkways CD's from the mighty main branch of the Columbus Metropolitan Library. Dave owned a copy of Dylan's Nashville Skyline and would put it on from time to time around this same time. It fit in nicely with field recordings, union songs and Appalachian social music we were listening to at the time. I remember being shocked to hear how different Dylan's voice was on the album-- he sings with an almost Kermit the Frog like crooning sweetness unlike his infamous nasal sneer. My favorite cut is still the album's lead track, a new version of Girl From the North Country where Dylan shares vocals with Johnny Cash. The whole album is wonderful though, a mellow country-rock album, one of the first of that genre, coming just a year after the Byrds' own Gram Parsons helmed country-rock classic, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and just as good.

Mr. Microphone

2008-05-23T23:19:00.009-05:00

I really want a quality, portable microphone for capturing sound in my documentaries. I've recently fallen under the spell of the Zoom H2 Handy 2 Track Recorder, which according to its product description, "is the only portable recorder with 3 mic capsules onboard for mid-side recording. A directional mic is in the center (mid) and two directional mics (side) are positioned left and right." Oh, that sounds nice!

I think, as a lot of newspapers making the leap to providing video reporting on their web editions are learning, it's ultimately the quality of the sound, rather then the footage, that matters to the viewer. The footage can be kind of crappy, a fuzzy talking head shot of the reporter, but if the sound is cruddy, if there's, say, an overbearing ambient hum of fluorescents buzzing throughout the piece or the person being interviewed is barely intelligible over the garble of the wind making hay of the reporter's microphone, then who really would be compelled to stick around and listen, right? Thankfully, some of the more involved video reporting pieces I've seen lately (and many papers are moving, albeit probably too slowly for their own good, away from simply putting up some lame accompanying video of the author's talking head giving a Cliff-Notes synopsis of their longer written piece) are beginning to demonstrate a more adventurous technical proficiency, complete with crisply composed shots, decent editing and a sometimes stunning overall sound design.

I'm not anywhere near capturing that "stunning overall sound design" in my own stuff, what little I have of it, but I'm really looking forward to exploring it more through some documentaries that I hope to get around to making. Operative words here are "getting around to making." But when I do, one of these includes a series of mini-documentaries, exploring favorite songs. I'd make some time to sit down and interview family and friends, get them to play me their favorite song and talk about it on video. They could do it in a single take (the length of the song, naturally) or a few if that suited them. We'll make it into a seamless whole. They could tell me a story they associate with the song, what the lyrics mean to them, how much the band or the singer or bass line meant to them or they could just tell me about the dinner they had this past New Years Eve.

I'd post them on a video-blog. Begin a series. They could be edited. Certainly I'd make sure that whatever song was being discussed sounded great in the final mix, sometimes in the background of the speakers reminiscence, sometimes in the forefront so as to punctuate a particular point in the narrative. When I'm really feeling the whimsy, I like to think that it might be fun to try and reenact one of the stories somebody tells about their favorite song. And come to think of it, maybe it would be better to stick to just asking one question, to have folks talk about a song and the memory they associate with it.

In any case, I'm attracted to Zoom's H2 Recorder not just for what seems to be its impressive sound capturing abilities (and the 100+ reviews on Amazon all seem to conclude that it's pretty great), but its portability. I like the idea of having the person talk about the song in an interesting place. It could be on a forest trail, along Lake Michigan or from the comfort of their favorite chair. I want to be able to conveniently, easily, capture the intimacies of the speakers voice and the ambiance of their environment. The microphones on most commercial camcorders, while decent, don't do such a good job of capturing this and offer few options for overcoming their modest sound capturing abilities. One of the things I love most about Dust-to-Digital's Art of Field Recording: Vol. I, a stunning collection of American field recordings made by the archivists Art and Margo Rosenbaum over the course of 50 some years, are the interview heavy selections, where you can hear the creak in the chair the interviewee is sitting on or some dog trotting by.

In any case, I'm kicking this idea down the road a ways.

Home Movie Love

2008-05-23T21:51:00.010-05:00

My Dad shot some really great Super-8 home movies from roughly the late 60's through the early 80's. A couple hours of them were transferred (poorly, my Dad and I both think) to video for the occasion of his 60th birthday celebration 6 years back. The whole family got a huge kick out of seeing them, though getting a better quality transfer of this footage, especially while the actual 8 mm film reels are still in decent shape, is something I keep meaning to do.

But poor quality or no, I'm looking forward to toying around with some of this home movie footage sometime in the next month or two, putting together some short video essays exploring Breitenbach family folklore. Like a lot of folks, I'm fascinated by the Super-8 medium, the rich family history found in the scenes they depict (to say nothing of how these "scenes" can take on their own accumulative power over time and come to shape a family's own sense of history and shared experience, in a word, folklore) and the almost impressionistic quality of its grainy picture. Hell, I'm fascinated by how the grainy, color saturated moving images inherent of so many 8 mm home movie footage has been used in any number of Hollywood films over the years (sometimes gracefully, sometimes like a hammer) as a kind of shorthand for childhood nostalgia, authenticity and depicting the nuclear family at play.

Howard Jenkins gave a Patricia R. Zimmerman's Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film a shout-out in his own boundlessly enthusiastic Convergence Culture. I recently picked it and plan on cracking it later tonight. I can't think of a better way to ring in the Memorial Day Weekend.

Zimmerman's book, according to the declarative blurb on its back cover, "the first historical study of amateur film." Sounds good.

Update: And dadburnit if I didn't just come across that Zimmerman was co-editor of another book that I have perhaps completely unjustified high hopes for: Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, a collection of essays exploring some of the more fascinating aspects of amateur film. I suppose it runs the risk of that dry, flaky prose some wings of the academy seem perennially onset with--though I almost find that with any collection of these kind of academic essay collections, you usually have the good luck of finding at one or two voices strong enough to follow further.

When Three Becomes Four

2008-05-12T20:46:00.015-05:00

As Cathy heads into the second trimester, we're making the impending expansion of our family official. It's (we won't know the gender until the next ultrasound around week 20) due around November 20th.

The accompanying ultrasound picture is from this past Thursday. The baby is doing great and, as you can see, is almost all head. At one point he or she ("it" sounds so alien) began to wiggle their arms as we watched the monitor. Seeing this helps to wash away the surreal veneer that accompanies bringing a new life into the world. It's not detachment so much as it's coming around to the ontological gravity of that expanding bump around Cathy's midsection
Here's Abby improvising a nice little song on the mbira about becoming a big sister, with a some riffing on Three Blind Mice. I recorded it with our digital camera, hence the crackle in the sound.

Da Capo's Best Music Writing 2007

2008-05-09T22:32:00.011-05:00

I suppose a good deal of the success of any one of these yearly "Best Music/Sports/Political/Food/Business Writing anthologies, and there are many, is due in good part to whoever happens to be editing it that particular year. So, after neglecting it the past several years, I was pretty happy to pick up Da Capo's Best Music Writing 2007 on the strength of seeing Robert Christgau in the guest editor chair. I've always enjoyed reading Christgau's music criticism, especially his expansive, championing coverage of Afropop. And as a nice bonus, Christgau "as the only full-time rock critic, experienced music editor, or that matter professional journalist ever to assemble one these books," as he's right to point out in his introduction, had "something to prove and only one way to prove it." He wanted the anthology to include representatives of the best music writing of the year. And having read at least three of this anthologies predecessors, it's definitely been the most consistently enjoyable.

Halfway through, two pieces have really stuck out- Jonothan Letham's astounding summation of James Brown and his gift of funk, Being James Brown, and Erik Davis's Always Coming Home: Joanna Newsom, a beautiful account of the making of Newsom's sophomore album, Ys. I'm about midway through Elisabeth's Vincentelli's affectionate, personal essay on the long running chessefest Eurovision Song Contest, Bulgarian Idol, which has inevitably leads me, out of garish curiosity, to YouTube.

Adult Conversations, Toddler Shenanigans

2008-05-03T22:15:00.011-05:00

I. How many conversations have I had over the last couple years where my attention is split, about evenly, between what my fellow conversationalist is saying and what Abby is getting herself into?

Talking with Jason tonight, I found our conversation wonderfully emblematic of this early stage of parenthood. Abby and Sean happily playing at our feet while both of us took turns putting our conversation on pause while we told our respective toddler that toys were not to be thrown and stairs were for walking down, not playing on. You're not a referee really, but something close. Parental responsibility demands some measure of your attention be given over to that creature, that Mary Poppins with a little bit of monkey in her (as I've been calling Abby lately, much to her approval) and whatever mischief they're up to. At this age, they're ripe with shenanigans. Your job, then, as a parent, is to constantly negotiate the space your toddler is in--what's possible within it and what's not.

II. Listening to The Meters' 1974 gem, Rejuvenation, some fine gumbo-pop funk and a perfect way to keep my thoughts on good friends enjoying the soggy fairground fields (it's been raining) of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. In his ArtsBeat coverage for The New York Times, Jon Parales posted this gem today:

In a conversation with Quint Davis, the producer and director of Jazzfest, he mentioned a startling statistic. One of the festival’s marketing surveys found that people who visit Jazzfest for the first time return as regulars for the next five years. That’s serious recidivism.

Funny, because just yesterday I posted about my own five year Jazz Fest run from '96 to '00. I'm looking forward to boosting my recidivism rates in '09.

That's Abby in the accompanying photo above, sporting a hat I bought from a vendor in Congo Square.

New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival

2008-05-02T09:40:00.008-05:00

Reading Joe's Twitterings and the Times' ArtBeat blog coverage (Jon Pareles and Nate Chinen, having too much fun and posting ecstatic updates about it) of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival this morning has been wonderful. I was lucky to go Jazz Fest 5 years in a row from '96 through 2000, though any number of events have conspired to keep me away since. Given that it's hands down one of the best music festivals you'll ever have the pleasure to experience, with amazing music, food and some of friendliest crowds around, I've really missed it. Doubly so since Katrina did its devastating best to drown New Orleans.

It does me right to know Jazz Fest, unlike so much of New Orleans, has bounced back post-Katrina. But it is, as Pareles points out in one of his posts, "precious...because it represents New Orleans’ cultural persistence–which is by no means as easy or as secure as it might look–despite all the changes wrought by Hurricane Katrina."

I'd love to see Jazz Fest broadcast more of its proceedings online. With over 10 stages playing what's almost always guaranteed to be great music, I can't help but think it wouldn't be difficult to make live streams of each of these stages available online. Currently, the local New Orleans Jazz Fest radio affiliate, the amazing WWOZ 90.7 FM, hosts 32 live broadcasts from Jazz Fest over its 7 day, two-weekend run. You can listen to those broadcasts online. But WWOZ is only broadcasting from one tent at a time, and that may not be the tent you'd be enjoying your crawfish etouffé and shuffling your feet in if you were actually at the Festival. You may be catching some high school gospel choir approaching liftoff with the help of the mighty tambourine lady in the Gospel Tent or resting your weary feet over at the Economy Hall Tent catching some old timers stirring up some Dixieland. Why not offer streams from off the boards of each stage?

I can't imagine it'd be too difficult to get some telecom to sponsor the whole set up, to put the necessary infrastructure in place and make sure it ran smoothly. Going online, the user could check out the schedule for the day, pour over all the amazing musical acts simultaneously performing on one of those 10 Jazz Fest stages, and stream whatever caught their fancy. If they liked the performance well enough, they could buy one of the CD's or downloads of the performances that Jazz Fest conveniently makes available. Everybody wins, right?

The Business of Storytelling

2008-04-27T14:41:00.007-05:00

A little over a year or so my Dad mailed me a newspaper clipping of an ad for the Digital Discovery Center, an after-school program located in the suburb just west of their own in Bay Village, Ohio. It looks like a pretty cool place, and the credentials of the couple who own it (backgrounds in childhood development, special education, independent schools) are pretty stellar.

Click on the About section on their site and you learn that the Digital Discovery Center "provides children with hands-on access to sophisticated technology that is often missing from their current school programs. Robotics, digital filmmaking, and photography, and other forms of digital media are exciting new means of communication that captivate children and challenge them to develop their creativity and problem solving skills."

They offer courses in digital filmmaking, stop-motion animation, digital music creation and robotics. It's a niche that I can't help but think public libraries should more aggressively be looking to fill. The joint venture between the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County and the Children’s Theatre of Charlotte, the remarkable ImaginOn, is the best and most exciting example of how public libraries should be responding to the fact that their patrons are no longer simply consuming media. They're creating it, as well. Lot's of it. Films, photographs, fan fiction, blogs, music and remixes. Distributed online to friends, family, and sometimes, mysteriously (virally), a few million of the curious who have followed a link to your YouTube post.

The folks who had the audacity to follow through and actually get ImaginOn built realized they were, at their chewy center, in the business of storytelling. And they realized their patrons, especially the younger ones, were hungry to tell their stories. So ImaginOn does just that. It doesn't matter if they're fictionalized or confessional, filmed against a blue screen or performed on a stage, using stop-motion animation or painted on a canvas, told through a dance or a song. The building is designed to help nurture and create stories by offering the tools, space and support to make it happen. (The above photograph is of one of ImaginOn's two performance spaces.)

Which makes me wonder. Does ImaginOn then archive the material these teenagers are creating? Does that content, with the creators consent, become part of the libraries permanent catalog? Can, for example, one teens ImaginOn supported documentary on skateboarding be accessed and watched (and commented on and tagged) by his peers via the libraries catalog?

I'd love to see a larger body of literature out there about ImaginOn, a Library Technology Report or a collection of essays, heck, a book written by some of its directors or an intrepid reporter. I want to know more about what's working and what isn't, I want to see some of the content that's being created and hear what the kids who created it thought about the process and what they thought of their end results. What kind of collaborating is happening and how is it being facilitated? Can their successes be replicated in other public libraries?

The sheer scale of what they're setting out to do at ImaginOn is almost too overwhelmingly good to be true. For a place in the business of telling stories, it very much needs to share its own.

The Romance of Biking Rails-To-Trails

2008-04-19T23:25:00.007-05:00

As Cathy can tell you, I find the whole rails-to-trails movement--of converting old, unused rail lines into multi-use trails--wildly romantic.

The whole rails-to-trails thing is all about riding my bike. No walking, definitely no jogging and certainly no roller-blading. It's all about me and my bike, the wind in my face and a unknown trail full of potential stretching and winding out ahead of me. It's all about riding those old railway routes, now tastefully, respectfully re-purposed and paved with asphalt and limestone (though I always imagine a dirt road, which somehow feels more appropriately Rockwellian) and getting a chance to ride my bike through interesting spaces not burdened by cars. I like the serendipity of it, too. Of the natural beauty these trails promise. Of the little towns they take you through, perfect, I always imagine, for stopping and grabbing some lunch.

Browsing the smart and unfussy Rails-to-Trails Conservancy site tonight, I fell under the spell of their December 2006 Trail of the Month: Wisconsin's Military Ridge State Park Trail. My romantic notions of rails-to-trails doesn't have time for any pint-sized trails. Anything under 20 miles seems too dainty, too potentially abrupt. The Wisconsin Military Ridge State Park Trail is a little over 40 miles long, which isn't too shabby. Most of it runs along what was once, according to the accompanying description, "the old Chicago and Northwestern (CNW) railway corridor." (See picture above of the Challenger, a train that ran on the CNW.)

And there's this:

It (the trail) flows uninterrupted from Dodgeville to Fitchburg through scenic farmland, woods and wetlands. In between, it meanders west to east through the communities of Ridgeway, Barneveld, Blue Mounts, Mount Horeb, Riley, Klevenville, and Verona.

"Meanders." I like that. The trail meanders. That's nice. After this winter, I definitely need to meander. But really it was this stunning photograph below that sold me:

Its alluring caption reads, "Several long stretches of trees provide shade along the trail." And, wait, is that a dirt road I see?

Close To The Edit II

2008-04-19T00:47:00.003-05:00

Over the last few weeks I've been editing some home video with iMovie. It's a powerful little tool (at least as handy as a good Swiss army knife) and I can't imagine there's a better introduction to basic film/video editing out there. It's consistently intuitive and comes packed with more then enough decent editing tools to give anybody the editing bug. I know I've got it.

Reading the Walter Murch book has been the perfect antidote to my tinkering with the purely technical aspects of iMovie. Murch, as I've said before (but it's worth repeating), is an utterly compelling advocate of film-editing. His answers almost always offer perfectly revealing anecdotes, a scene he edited in Godfather II or Apocalypse Now (where Martin Sheens hypnotically intimate voice-over narration--written by the amazing Michael Herr, whose Dispatches is one of the best, most vivid historical accounts of Vietnam I've had the luck to read--is a good part of the allure the film has for me) and how he came to respectively shape them in the editing room and the affects he hoped they'd have on the films -on Coppola and Puzo's and Milius, Coppola and Herr's-respective narratives.

Editing allows for this near endless opportunities for massaging whatever materials you're working with. The ability to sequence, add musical cues, titles, photographs, voice overs, sound design, animations, among other editing effects--can all be used in service to whatever narrative, whatever story, you're trying to tell.

The goal, then, is to make that narrative a compelling one. I'm still working on that one.

Coming To Chicago This Wednesday!

2008-04-14T17:08:00.005-05:00

Hello, first 70-degree day. Of course, depending on which way the wind blows, those us by the lake may be experiencing the dreaded lake-cooling effect. I'm always a little jealous of those western suburbs this time of year.