Broadcasting Live From Our Block Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

Robbins Barstow's Disneyland Dream

I'm a fan of Internet Archive, a "non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format."

Part of that noble mission includes Our Media, "an initiative devoted to creating and sharing works of personal media." That includes home movies, both old and new, good and bad. I've long been fascinated by video's contribution to family folklore and have come to cherish the Super-8's my Dad shot of my own family.

Corey Doctorow at the blog Boing Boing brought my attention to one of Our Media's gems, a 1956 home video made by Robbins Barstow, father and husband of one of the 25 lucky families to win the national Scotch Brand Disneyland contest--a week-long, expenses paid vacation to California and, of course, Disneyland.

The video's summary reads:

In July 1956, the five-member Barstow family of Wethersfield, Connecticut, won a free trip to newly-opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California, in a nationwide contest. This 30-minute amateur documentary film tells the fabulous story of their fun-filled, dream-come-true, family travel adventure, filmed on the scene at Walt Disney's "Magic Kingdom" by Robbins Barstow.

For a piece of amateur documentary filmmaking, it's beautifully crafted. Given that Barstow himself made it himself, it demonstrates a surprisingly canny understanding of narrative construction and editing on the fly. I suppose he could have spliced some of the footage together later (my Dad did some splicing about 15 years back on some of our own Super-8's), but I imagine much of it was simply shot linearly, the scenes filmed planned out by Barstow beforehand. And the amount of collaboration, especially at the beginning of the documentary when the family's neighbors gather round their car en mass, throwing confetti and seeing them off on their grand adventure, is pretty remarkable. And while Barstow, along with his wife Meg and his three children, is behind the camera for numerous scenes, there are just as many others where somebody else, one of those neighbors, a willing flight attendant, a Scotch Brand representative or a kind, willing stranger must have shot the footage, following Barstow's directions.

The recently added, enthusiastic narrative by Barstow himself (I'm not sure when, though a reference to the trip being "40-years ago" makes me think it must have been added sometime in the late 90's, if not 1996 itself), is perfect. Accompanying the visuals, Barstow lovingly retells the story of his family's Scotch Brand sponsored vacation. It's loving, corny, modest, completely lacking in irony and sprinkled with a gee-whiz vibe that's completely endearing.

Completely inspiring stuff.

Close To The Edit

I've been happily reading Michael Ondaatje's The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. It's a series of nicely freewheeling conversations Ondaatje, an author of some repute (good or bad, I don't know), had with the respected film editor/sound designer and all around polymath, Walter Murch. Ondaateje, who wrote The English Patient, became friends with Murch during the making of the film adaptation of that book. Murch was the film's editor and played an active role in helping to shape its overall sound design.

The book is winningly casual and Murch is completely game, wise and answering Ondaatje's questions with those elegant, perfectly formed paragraphs that I find myself both jealous of and thrilling to. The gift of highly articulate, maddeningly interesting gab.

In one of their conversations, Murch explains the decision behind not playing any music during the infamous restaurant scene of The Godfather where Pacino's Michael Corleone murders the police Captain and Sollozzo.

In the hands of another filmmaker, there would be tension music percolating under the surface. But Francis wanted to save everything for those big chords after Michael's dropped the gun....It's a classic example for me of the correct use of music, which is as a collector and channeler of previously created emotion, rather than the device that creates the emotion.

To which I found myself nodding my head in vigorous affirmation. I can't tell you how many films I've seen that have made my teeth ache with an overload of musical frosting. These scores have all the bombast of an advertising jingle, their mission being to make the viewer feel something the narrative hasn't already managed to accomplish on its own. This is either because Michael Bay is directing or simply because the film should never have been rendered into existence in the first place.

My favorite films have musical cues that do just that--they collect and channel previously created emotion and they remind me of the breathtaking power of music and occasion. There's this great, magical music moment in one my favorite films from last year, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's Ploy, where a hotel maid who's just had some very naughty relations with the hotel's bartender lays back on the bed she's just made, turns directly to the camera (the first and only time a character addresses the viewer) and lip-synche's a wonderfully languorous, post-coital Thai pop song. It's completely unexpected and yet a perfect, even giddy encapsulation of what's just come before it. The music acts as an exclamation mark. It's funny, touching, sexy and devastatingly charming.

Biting Fingers and Cultural Mimicry

I love it. There's a YouTube video called "Charlie bit my finger- again!" with over 16-million views and almost 21-thousand comments. And once you watch it you'll know why.



Maybe it's when he decides to tempt fate by putting his finger so brazenly in Charlie's mouth...again! Charlie, who can't be much more then one if even, is more then happy to chomp on that thing because it's what he does. He's chomping on everything he can get his little teething gums around. Charlie chomps on this big brothers finger, regretfully releases it before checking to make sure big brother is still of one piece and then, with an amazing sense of timing, waits a few perfect beats before busting out a big old mischievous finger-chomping laugh.

And of course there are remixes or remasters cropping up in its wake. The guy playing the big brother who gets his finger chomped in this one is particularly good , though nobody seems to be able to really nail Charlie.



I suppose if you want to get a peak into how teenagers are riffing on the user-generated content of others, especially those that become Internet cultural phenomenons like this one, you could do far worse then to spend a few minutes checking out some of the remixes, remakes and remasters that have appeared in the original Charlie video's wake, most of which have nicely managed to rack up thousands of their own views.

HBO's John Adams Bummer

I initially had high hopes for HBO's John Adams miniseries, an adaptation of David McCullough's excellent biography of the stout and certain little man who was to be our nation's second President. Sadly, the first couple episodes haven't exactly inspired me to want to bother with the final 5.

The first episode of the series, largely a demonstration of Adams' iron-willed commitment to the rule of law ("a government of laws, not of men," said he), isn't all bad. Paul Giamatti, the go-to for stout and portly roles, portrays Adams with competence if not much else. When appropriate, which the producers seem to have thought often, his eyes grow suitably misty at thoughts or speeches conveying justice, liberty and other self-evident truths.

Joining Giamatti in teary-eyed semblance is Laura Linney as Abigail Adams. A good deal of the success of McCullough's biography came from his powerful, expansive portrayal of Abigail Adams-- of her fierce intelligence and the political acumen of the council her husband (and Thomas Jefferson, among others) relied on--here, at least in the first couple episodes, she's regulated to uttering maxims and sharing her husbands bouts of lachrymosity. Linney, a better and more nuanced actor then Giamatti, does well with her cameos, but the series as a whole is devoted to our founding fathers. Linney's Abigail dispenses wisdom, scrubs floors and stares off into meaningful horizons while tending to the children and homestead.

Another check against the series comes from an abundance of fussy and downright goofy camera angles. The series' cinematographers (Danny Cohen and Tak Fujimoto, according to IMDb) fuss with the introductory framing of numerous scenes, placing the actors on oddly tilting floors, or as viewed through the spikes of a fence, the crease of a curtain or the partitions of a window, all of which has the jarring effect of calling attention to itself. "Look," it seems to say, "these were very topsy-turvy times, were they not? And, look, here we find ourselves catching a sneak of Abigail and John reading behind the curtains of their bed!" You might as well have had Linney reach up and grab the boom mic while they were at it. It's a pretty glaring intrusion on the narrative and any suspension of disbelief.

Still, Stephen Dillane's Thomas Jefferson is pretty great--both otherworldly and wise. And Sarah Polley arrives somewhere over the course of the remaining 5 episodes as the adult Abigail "Nabby" Adams, smallpox-inoculation-gone-terribly-astray-survivor and daughter of John and Abby. Neither, though, are probably enough to bring me back for any more servings.

Muxtape For Early Spring

You can listen to the 12-song mix in its entirety here. How long, I wonder, before this service gets the clampdown? And is it really necessary, or just the latest shiny audio streaming option? It is remarkably easy, I'll give it that--from registration to uploading takes only a few (simple!) steps. It's like the Flip Video of audio streaming--less is more.

In any case, here are my accompanying liner notes:

1. Mozambique Nightjar Singing in Sandy Scrub on Banks of Zambezi, Zimbabwe- Chris Watson (from the album, Outside the Circle of Fire): A couple dozen beautifully recorded environmental recordings from Chris Watson, a former member of the post-punk band, Cabaret Voltaire.

2. Keyla- Tabu Ley Rochereau (from the album, The Voice of Lightness): One day soon, despite this winter's stubborn refusal to gracefully bow out and make way for an Obama-like spring, Abby and I will open multiple windows so as to get a nice breeze soughing through the house. We're so looking forward to that. We'll make sure to have this song on when we do.

3. Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa- Vampire Weekend (from the album Vampire Weekend)- The whole album has a throwback feel, a nostalgic patina of early 80's post-punk and, as this song lovingly pays homage, Graceland/Rhythm of the Saints-era Paul Simon. There's even a shout-out to Peter Gabriel.

4. Expecting To Fly- Buffalo Springfield (from the album, Again): An early Neil Young production with a stunning bit of introductory orchestral/studio experimentation. Jack Nitzsche, who helped construct walls of sound as brilliant as anything Spector or Wilson were doing at the same time, produced. The whole album is worth your time.

5. Groovin' Time-The Chambers Brothers (from the album, Groovin' Time): Thank you monthly eMusic subscription.

6. Saturday Night Blowout- The John Buddy Williams Band (from the album Calypso Awakening from the Emory Cook Collection): And again we thank eMusic and its great collection of Smithsonian recordings. Though when is eMusic going to provide access to the often exhaustive liner-notes the physical copies of these albums almost always include? Not surprisingly, the Smithsonian site allows you to download a PDF copy of them. I just did. But it sure would be nice if eMusic just provided the link. Even better if eMusic embedded the liner notes in my download and iTunes provided a "liner-note" option that allowed me quick,easy access to them. In any case, recorded live in 1956, this tune is a smoking hybrid of jazz and calypso that knocked me out the first time I heard it. Like me, it's got warmer weather on its mind.

7. Hydragilm Exit-Osborne (from the Daylight 12"): This is near perfect House music. Deep and soulful with a sublime sense of the genres rhythmic dynamics. It's been enjoying some heavy treadmill rotation.

8. Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?- She & Him (from the album, Volume One): M. Ward's albums have always included a handful of rocking country/old-time Americana inspired gems. Working here with actress Zooey Deschanel, Ward's written a slice 70's sunshine pop, as effervescent and dagburn adorable as the woman herself.

9. For Emma- Bon Iver (from the album, For Emma, Forever Ago): Songs like this. What is it about them? The velvety horns? The gentle, building undertow of the guitar? The automatic wistfulness of the title?

10. Untitled Interlude-Chris Herbert (from the album, Mezzotint): I've been reading Michal Ondaatje's The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film the last couple nights while listening to this album on my iPod. Herbert's haunting the same ground folks as Fennesz and Tim Hecker, an extension and expansion of Eno's On Land.

11. A Feeling of the All-Thing- Kelley Polar (from the album, I Need You To Hold On While the Sky if Falling): The first minute of this tracks nicely luxuriates in its vocoder before shimmering into a delicate, summery disco groove.

12. Kappsta 2- The Field (from the album, Pop Ambient 2008): Axel Willner has carved out a this wonderfully characteristic sound for himself, mixing straightforward 4/4 beats and smearing them with and highly textured micro-samples of pop songs. By slowly evolving these micro-samples over the course of the songs, by every so slightly lengthening one or slowly modulating a phase effect over another, Willner's songs come close to a gauzy kind of pop not unlike some of the best shoegazer of the early 90's--My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Slowdive especially, all come to mind.

Linger On Over Here...Got The Time?

This was one of a few dozen albums that helped to create and sustain my teenage personae. Laurie Anderson was and is one of my heroes, an elemental role model during some highly formative years and a powerfully inspirational one at that. She seemed to have a direct line tapping into something terrifically weird coupled with this uncanny ability to effortlessly craft something equally rich and strange out of it. The New York avant-garde had made it to the surburbs of Cleveland. I loved it.

I remember driving with my mom one winter evening in the mid-80's and playing O Superman for her, attempting but never entirely succeeding in conveying to her how much it stirred me. It's breathy, hypnotic repetitions- minimalism at its most poignant and haunting? The birds that come in a little after a minute only to disappear until the songs last? The first burst or cascading synthesized reeds at 2:41? The seductive sing-song of its vocoder vocals? The fat analogue bass at 6:03? (The whole album is filled with wonderfully gritty sine bass.) The seedy sax in the final 30 seconds? The apocalyptic lyrics? We parked in a parking lot and she listened until the end. I don't remember what she thought.

Listening to Big Science tonight, though, it's Let X=X that's rocking my world.

Tom Skilling, Perfectly Avuncular

Tom Skilling, our local weatherman on WGN-TV (Channel 9 if you're in the hood), one of the Tribune Company's several local TV affiliates, is the perfect avuncular meteorologist. Heavyset, balding and relentlessly pleasant, he commands the green screen along with its impressive array of graphics depicting low pressure systems, wind chills and time-elapsed shots of incoming stratus clouds with consummate professionalism and down-to earth charm. There's something folksy and genuine about him. A little nerdy, too.

TV weathermen love to draw from the record book. We've had one of the snowiest, cloudiest and coldest winters on record according to Skilling, and if you're not a passionate urban snow enthusiast, that means it's been a little on the dreary side. Just this afternoon at lunch Skilling broke it to Abby and I that it looks like this March won't be offering us a single 60-degree day. No teaser day! He reminded us that last year around this time we were enjoying a couple near 80 degree days.

I looked over at Abby and groaned. I turned off the TV and we continued eating our hummus.