This is a piece I wrote for The Scent of Light. Since it soon became clear that I had more music than would fit on a CD I didn’t end up finishing this one. The title is Two Sisters: Hope + Sorrow, and I wrote it with Rahim’s Iraq in mind. In fact I was going to ask him to play an oud solo after the bass solo, and then I would have recorded a guitar solo after that. This is a rough mix of an unfinished recording, but you will recognize the beginning, which we have played as an introduction to Duende del Amor (from Solo Para Ti) for a few years now.
Touring:
We are considering a look back at 21 years (3 x 7) of music. A Greatest Hits show of some kind. Current favorite idea: setting up a Bingo cage (((preferbly an old one, with a microphone catching the noise of the balls turning in the cage))) on stage, containing balls with the names of 40 popular songs from the 25 or so albums I have released. When the time comes, I might call upon you to help us select the 40 songs. At the beginning of the performance, and in between songs, I would turn the Bingo cage to select the song to be played. Depending on the venue perhaps an audience member could be invited to turn the Bingo machine. The band would have to learn 40 songs, but that could be done with a couple of weeks of rehearsals. The set, perhaps 15 songs per full performance (((meaning, not in clubs))), would be different every night!
Album releases:
I will finish the re-working of The Santa Fe Sessions for a Spring release. We will also record a new album, which will contain the new piece we started our performances with (((most recent tour))). I think Stephen Duros will have a new album in 2011, well worth the wait! And I have found a very promising, and completely unknown, guitarist who lives in Turkey and France – one of his parents is French, the other Turkish – who will make his debut on SSRI next year.
Wild sunset last week. One can see the rain in the distance: That’s a water bottle, standing on a rug, in front of a lamp.
What things that are around today are most distinctively 21st century? What will be the answer to this question in 10 years?
Click here to read Tyler Cowen’s picks. Interesting choices, possibly right on, but not very exciting, are they?
P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Crowdsourced curation, reputation systems, and the social graph Crowdsourcing is the only curatorial/editorial mechanism that can scale to match the increased ability to produce that the Internet has given us. As the former “consumers” become “producers”, we’re going to see better and better implementations of reputation systems, and better integration with our social graph, because they are the only mechanisms that are feasible, but also because we just love to share. Twentieth century mechanisms for curating/editing are built for a top-down, mass-production age, and they can’t keep up with us, the former audience, as we make the leap into production.”
Hm, I am not looking to have a mechanism, based on reputation systems and a social graph, tell me what to watch, read or listen to.
The Internet is not even twenty years old. What will it look like in a hundred, in five hundred years? Will comments keep accumulating at the current pace, meaning that each item on any shopping site, each video on YouTube, will have been littered with millions of comments? Will comments older than twenty years be deleted automatically? Will people, those who have survived climate change, water scarcity and so on, still use an Internet of some sorts, or will it have disappeared altogether? We stopped using it, because it didn’t work. Just a big bathroom wall, really, with scribbles and taunts and insults and advertisements from billions of people.
The fine art of dampening strings, or specifically stopping particular notes from ringing and thereby colliding with the other notes that you do want. I learned much about this by watching Jon play bass. The fingers of both of his hands are constantly refining the sound that comes forth from his instrument, adding a slow vibrato here and dampening a string that would otherwise clash with the next harmony.
You can observe this constant vigilance in classical guitarists like Julian Bream. While one finger of the left hand goes to a fret to define the next note, another finger is poised to dampen the string that rang the last note.
I recommend renting a DVD of Bream playing guitar as it is most interesting and educational. (((You might also observe how he bends certain notes to create harmonies that are in tune… the well-tempered scale is a compromise, especially on a guitar, and you will notice when you play an E major chord followed by a C major chord that the G-string, if tuned for the E chord, will sound off when playing the C chord and vice versa.)))
And the faces he makes while playing guitar are very entertaining, also.
This, of course, is most important when changing keys, but is always a good idea because even strings you haven’t plucked or struck with the right hand will ring sympathetically. By dampening those strings you focus more attention to the notes you are playing. Things become clearer, as if a fog has been lifted.
Spoke to a young man who works at the Coyote Cafe yesterday. He told me something that is as true in the music business as it is in the restaurant business. Eric DiStefano, who is the owner and chef, told him he would always rather hire a young sous-chef who had a couple of years experience cooking than somebody fresh from cooking school. While the latter might have more theoretical knowledge, it would be unknown whether s/he is able to deal with the enormous stress levels that rule the kitchen of a successful restaurant, while the former is known to be able to cope and can quickly be taught the recipes of the chef. Not unlike soldering, I suppose.
There are lots of books about the music business, and they really don’t convey anything about the experience. Hustling gigs, dealing with some of the shady characters that populate the music scene at ever corner, performing, traveling, living on a bus with 5-16 people (((yes, some crew busses are known to carry nearly twenty people, 12 in the bunks, and the rest in the lounges…))) and so on. There is no school for this. There is no try, only do, as Yoda says.
I think people love the idea of the “wisdom of crowds” or “collective wisdom” or “smart mobs”, because it makes them feel part of something larger, and it makes them feel smart, part of the smart crowd. I totally don’t buy it. It’s an illusion peddled by many on the net, some of whom make a lot of money writing books and giving talks on the subject, mostly cobbling together contrived examples to prove their point.
Here is another TED talk about the collective brain, by Matt Ridley – TED loves this sort of talk! This emphasis on the collective devalues the individual contribution. Why pay an inventor or author or musician, when the collective can surely create something equally great. If s/he won’t create that piece of music somebody else will. No need to support the artist. Hm, take an hour to listen to Beethoven’s Ninth and then consider whether ANY crowd could ever accomplish a symphony like that. A crowd might work well up to a certain point, but only an inspired individual can scale that mountain.
I grew up thinking of large groups as mobs, and I still do. Part of that notion certainly comes from going to German schools in the Sixties and Seventies, schools which emphasized teaching their pupils about Germany’s Nazi history, but I have seen similar crowd-mentality all over the world.
Crowds shine when an individual makes them shine. That individual can make the crowd shine or turn it into a a hellish example of the worst humanity has to offer.
The other night I had a dream in which nerds in Google uniforms, which looked a lot like the uniforms of Mao’s cultural revolution army, smashed printing presses and music stores, chanting songs that denounced all prideful individual efforts at creating, and praised the scanning of all books and digitizing of all music so that henceforth books and music will simply be recombinations and mashups of ALL stories & music that ever were. They smashed violins, just like Mao’s cadres did in the Fifties, and yelled you won’t need this anymore when all music is digitized, cataloged, analyzed acording to mood and tempo!!
This sort of communism of ideas that pervades the internet is even more surprising in a country that is unable or unwilling to have social health care or a decent public education system. Oh, and isn’t it interesting that computer science it taught in public schools, while art and music has been cut out altogether or cut back to nearly nothing!!
I actually find individual versus crowd arguments to be similar to the absolute versus relative view-points of spiritual discussions. They are postures, intellectual exercises that, in their extreme forms, are silly. One side will not work without the other. Both need to exist side by side, or rather one cannot be without the other. In the end I always arrive at the truth that they are one and the same, indivisible. Two sides of one coin. No, even that is two dualistic a view.
