Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Mixtape CD liner notes...Side B!

Still shaking off the post-finals lethargy... But with Summer I starting today, it's time to shake things up and get cracking.  And so... the "middle six" of the AL Central mixtape!


7. "Big Little Baby" by Reverend Horton Heat--A novelty track that can't help but give up the giggles itself from the opening line.  This is from a freebie sampler CD from a Bloomie record store that itself is long gone... For the record, L is well under 6-feet tall...



8. "Madavu the Man" by Aki Nawaz--Another Bloomie-era track!  I used to regularly buy the most-excellent British glossy world-music magazine Songlines to fuel my "Planetary Caravan" shows on WFHB.  Digging around for info onNawaz, I stumbled across this super BBC series w/ the late John Peel, as he travels outside London Town to see the scenes...



9. "So Beautiful or So What" by Paul Simon--The closer / title track from last year's super super disc.  Every track a winner.  Essential.



10. "Home Cooking" by Tony Allen--Mr Afrobeat himself!  More echoes of spinning global music on community radio... This is one of those songs that works on so many levels...



11. "All I Need" by Al Green--This is a record I played incessantly the summer we moved to Cape Cod.  Also essential, beginning to end.




12. "Snatch It Back and Hold It" by Junior Wells--I read about Wells in an "essential blues records" kind of book, and dutifully picked up the record on the North Shore a few years back.  Buddy Guy plays on this--I got to meet him last month briefly in Chicago at his blues club!  High five!



Next time: Side C!  Tracks 13-18 complete the cycle...

Friday, May 18, 2012

Mixtape CD Liner Notes...Side A

What's the knave's way to jump-start some writing?  Liner notes, of course!  Seeing as SJ was my only documented reader for William Gibson post, and seeing as I owe him liner notes for the mixtape I finally sent out this past week, that's what we're going to do...The videos are all different versions than on the disc--and the Devo video is off the rails altogether...but you'll figure that out soon enough...
          ~bpi


1. "Answered Prayers," David Sylvian--How's this for an atmospheric opener?  My Sylvian fandom can be traced back to Gustavus days, with a dub of Gentlemen Take Polariods on a D-90 cassette.  My first copy of this song was from the Minneapolis Public Library vinyl stacks in the early '90s--truth told, this tune has been kicking around on my end for two decades or so!  Still, the Eno-esque waves of sheen never gets old.  Not an official video, and a little happy on the fx, but it works...



2. "Laisvė tavyje," Andrius Mamontovas--At least song is from this century (I think).  AM is the Lithuanian singer-songwriter--he's the whole package.  He fronted Foje, the biggest band Lithuania has ever seen--and probably will ever see--until they hung it up in 1997.  I should have gone to their farewell concert, but I blew it--and that's another story altogether.  This was a "We Are The World"-type LT fundraiser--the video has no visuals, but a vocal mix of a number of big names in LithPop.



3. "Rudy With a Flashlight," Rainer Ptaček--super Tucson blues guitarist who died in 1997.  Is it becoming clear that I'm not getting as much new music as I used to?  Hmmm.  I have a lot more to say about Rainer this summer--hence the blogging warm-ups!  The clip has Evan Dando singing--this is from the tribute / fund-rasing CD The Inner Flame...



4. "If You Ever Go to Houston," Bob Dylan--The newest track of the lot, by the oldest singer of the lot!  Go figure.  I think this song could go on for an hour, and I'd be more than content to keep riding that hypnotic, accordion-fuelled chord progression.  What does Bobby Z have left in the tank?  We wrote him off too soon years ago... Here's a cellphone bootleg from from two years back:



5. "What We Do," Devo--The best part of their "comeback" release a few years back was their online marketing campaign.  I still like to show my media research class their focus group research video...



6. "So What," Miles Davis--I'm pretty sure I've played this record more than any other I have since coming to Massachusetts.  Lots and lots of grading...lots of grading.  Miles makes it all go down just that little bit smoother, you know?  I always play this for the first day of classes--a little playful antagonism never hurt anybody...



Thanks for stopping by!  Next time: Side B...

Friday, February 3, 2012

William Gibson's particular flavor


What writers do you rely on? Whom do you go back to again and again for soul-satisfying poetry or prose?

Such writers seem all the more important as our lives seem to find a sixth gear, despite ourselves. Such writers can help us slow down (just a little), make us think (just a little), make us reflect (just a little).

Have a look at my recent reading list, and you can see a few of my "usual suspects": Milan Kundera, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut. And here's someone else I've been revisiting this year: William Gibson.

I read Neuromancer (1984) in school, loved it, and never followed up on it. I guess I was more focused on other key SF titles (Foundation, The Martian Chronicles, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Dispossessed, etc.) than going terribly deep on this or that author.

But that's starting to change: I just read Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing (1990) in an attempt to jump-start some of my own writing; I'm in the midst of picking through Arthur C. Clarke's short-story collection, More Than One Universe (1991), which I wanted to re-read before gifting away; I'm half-way through my Library of America volume of Philip K. Dick novels. So it goes.

I went back to Gibson this year: first with the future-past, post 9/11 novel Pattern Recognition (2003), and now with the collection of short nonfiction Distrust That Particular Flavor (2012). I got Flavor home from the library yesterday, and I find myself already 1/4th of the way through it...

You get Gibson's homage to Takeshi Kitano, entitled "The Baddest Dude on Earth," originally written for Time Asia in 2002. You get Gibson bluffing a vision of "The Web" in Rolling Stone circa 1989. And you get amazing little nuggets popped off to Forbes (of all places) you really never had a chance to see otherwise.

Here, in "Dead Man Sings" (1998), he opens with a thought that reverberates Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978):

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

If you're a fan of William Gibson, you need to check this one out. If you're not a fan of William Gibson, you still need to check this one out.

Busy, busy, busy.

Friday, January 13, 2012

Podcasts: a dying medium?

I'm a podcast guy.

More times than not, if I'm going running or working in the yard, and I'm firing up the Nano, I'm listening to podcasts rather than music. The simple logic, I suppose, is that while I can read and grade to music, I can't multitask to the point of following the argument of an essay along with the conversational thread of a podcast simultaneously...

I was really bummed a few years back when Lietuvos Radijas closed down their daily English-language show (and podcast!) "Radio Vilnius." (Full disclosure: I wrote and presented for RaVil in 2000-2001 while conducting dissertation research.) I still have the last week of the show in my iTunes--and I still can't bring myself to listen to those final broadcasts. Someday.


Over break, I found myself listening to the last podcast of the New York Times' "Tech Talk," a show I've listened to regularly in the past few years, in conjunction with teaching "Media Literacy" (COMM 311). (I also subscribed to, and admittedly underutilized, their "Music Popcast.")

It seems like the Times is redoubling its efforts in terms of apps, utilizing a "freemium" model: for instance, allowing access to a limited number of stories, but requiring payment (either a la carte or as part of a subscription) to access all areas. I'm planning on checking out their election app for the iPhone, for instance--but I'm hoping they repackage their technology hub in app form quick-like.

The Times is in business to make money, of course--they clearly feel that the opportunity cost of producing free audio content as a means to move folks to the paper itself (either physically or online) was too high. If this trend plays out across commercial producers, then podcasts become the realm of public broadcasters like the BBC ("Click") and NPR ("This American Life"). Of course, the former has had to rebrand in the last few years, being tied more closely to the TV show of the same name; and the latter regularly solicits donations above and beyond station membership to sustain its availability...

The web radio situation has actually gotten better, rather than worse, in recent years. It's not like we're stuck listening to UVB-76, right? For instance, our system no longer crashes if we try to bring in Lithuanian pop station "Lietus," which is a big deal in our household.

Still, the days of the free podcast (at least in the form we've had in the past decade) seem numbered. Perhaps the app environment, in which podcasts are more aggressively bundled with other multimedia content, will once again carve out a creative space for this flavor of audio content delivery.

Monday, January 9, 2012

Reboot

New Year's resolutions are always dicey, so this week's blog reboot comes with no promises to either me or You. Still, if the endgame is more regular writing on top of Life Otherwise, it needs to start somewhere.

So it starts here.

I guess I was most excited about blogging in the pre-Facebook days, when the idea of generating a personalized website seemed far-out and progressive. Now it seems like another (slightly creaky) spoke in the social media wheelhouse. Still, it seems to me that as an outlet for regular and public writing, blogs still have their purpose.

The potential is still there.



So in the spirit of potentials, here's a short-list of three things for me to do this semester to personally increase professional (and therefore personal) satisfaction:

1. Regular writing. Blog as mental stretching exercise...but work on upcoming conferences necessarily opening up into larger projects. Like Blur says, "Yes, it really really really could happen."
2. More face-time. With students, this means scaffolding conferences into larger assignments, revisiting the notion of the Ron Christensen Memorial Oral Final Exam, and leaning on my advisees for more than 15 minutes a semester of "quality time."
3. Manage the inbox. Getting my personal email inbox down to double-digits was a personal victory. The goal is to do the same for the university address. Let's just say that there are miles to go before I sleep.