audio

They’re called turntablists, and Montreal’s has had some good ‘uns over the years.

Kid Koala: Drunk Trumpet

Dj A-Track: at the ITF

Scratch Bastid: Scribble Jam 07

Dante’s Inferno: Cori reads; Gustave Doré illustrates; and lucid videoifies.

When I was at university, I worked as a waiter at the student pub, Alfie’s. We had DJs, but I used to come in a little early for my shifts, and they let me “spin” a bit before things started up. I usually got around to playing jazzy funky stuff, but I’d often start out with a little bit of the rock, as well as some roll; not big anthems, but those kinds of songs that sort of started you off slow and then got you going. Here’s a trio of wax I remember slappin’ on the turntables.

Led Zeppelin: Over The Hills And Far Away Music (1973)
I love when the big guitars kick in at 1:27 … the rest of the song’s a bit of a let down, but worth it for the big three-chord chop that kicks you in the butt.

Bob Seeger: Night Moves (1976)
Hmm. I’ve never seen this video before, which seems to have been made in the 1990s. Can’t say I like it much. And I’m not sure what I think of this song now, but it’s got a nice gravelly sumpin that works in a stinky bar when you’re setting up before the crowds get there (ps: is that Joey from Friends at 2:05? … I think so … )

The Clash: Jimmy Jazz (1979)
I usually played the studio version from London Calling, but this live version’s got a whole other bit of charm going on (from their 16-night Times Square residency in 1980, I think). A song like Jimmy Jazz is great because you can go in so many different directions from it: punk rock, R&B, jazz, reggae, soul. Man, the Clash was good.

The Astronauts: Firewater (1963)
Looks like a good party. Do you think the guy on the couch is gonna score with that girl? From the movie, Surf Party.

Dick Dale & The Del Tones: Surfing/Miserlou (1962)
Intro is the vocal “Surfing,” followed by the instrumental “Miserlou,” which is a traditional Greek folk song, with versions of it common throughout the Middle East. Here it’s reinterpreted by the legendary Dick Dale, who was born in Lebanon to a Lebanese father and Polish mother. You can hear all those influences in this tune (made re-famous in Pulp Fiction).

The Atlantics: Bombora (1963)
Australia’s best-known surf band. Bombora is the Aboriginal term for waves breaking over rock shelves.

Some real audio treats this week at earideas/wednesday picks: SciFi loses a great one, with the death of Arthur C. Clarke; a beautiful and tragic story of death in the Mossdale caves; and the mystery of Bobby Dunbar.

[thanks to Matt for the tip on dunbar]

Songs about the man of steel:

Laurie Anderson: O Superman (1981)
OK, not really about Superman, exactly…but still, it’s Laurie Anderson.

Crash Test Dummies: Superman’s Song (1991)
The audio’s a bit soft on this one, and I feel like an idiot, but for some reason this tune and video sorta gets me.

REM: Superman (1986)
REM live in 1987, the video’s a bit of a mess, but the sound is OK. That’s Gary Zekley, writer of the original 1969 version, on stage with tambourine.

Earideas Wednesday Picks: US Admiral Fallon retires over Iran & Iraq; Sound Opinions with Butch Vig, producer of Sonic Youth and Nirvana, among others; and Architecture prof Robert Jan van Pelt, on Auschwitz, architecture and education.

Listen here.

This is an audio interview with Janne Vainio, an audio engineer at Nokia, who put together the Audiobooks project at Nokia’s BetaLabs. The project features LibriVox books as the first test books for download, in a special optimized format. From the about of the project:

Nokia Audiobooks is a beta concept that enables you to enjoy audiobooks while on the go. It includes a highly efficient audio compression technology optimized for voice (AMR-WB), a player application for S60 (Nokia Audiobook Player), and an audio converter tool for PC (Nokia Audiobook Manager). Whereas traditional music player applications are optimized for music, Nokia Audiobook Player is optimized for audiobooks, enabling you to browse chapters, set bookmarks, and automatically continue from where you stopped listening last time.

This is a segment from a longer LibriVox community podcast #74, that you can find here.

And here is the interview on its own: http://librivox.hughmcguire.net/communitypodcast/nokiaaudiobooks.mp3

In 2001 a new breed of Velvet Underground-influenced, old-aesthetic rock started rolling out of a few bands. It was old and it was new and it was good again. Here are some of the tunes I remember.

The Strokes: Last Night (2001)
OK, so the Strokes ended up being disappointing. We all wanted them to be gritty kids from the wrong side of the tracks who bashed their guitars together to dull the pain of poverty. Or something. Turns out they’re rich Manhattan kids who went to fancy boarding school in Switzerland, and had drinking problems. Well, what can you do? Who else can afford to be an artist these days? (And for the record, I went to a fancy private school). This video makes things worse: the lead singer, especially, looks like the kind of arrogant prick who continues to be mean to unpopular kids even into his mid-twenties.

And let’s forget for a moment that the Strokes probably exhausted their creativity with that first album. And remember instead what a breath of fresh air it was when it came out, and the sounds of pure, good rock n roll, the likes of which we hadn’t heard since Transformer (maybe), hit the airwaves. It was the rebirth of rock, I was living in New York and it was great stuff.

White Stripes: Fell in Love with a Girl (2001)
While I can’t help feeling the Strokes were somehow phony (even if that first album was and still is a winner), the White Stripes were something else: raw and real and creative in ways hard to believe considering their instruments are limited to a little drum kit, a big guitar, and a crazy voice. Fantastic, challenging yet straight music, wonderful songwriting and a great video by Michel Gondry.

Franz Ferdinand - Take Me Out (2003)
A couple of years later come Franz Ferdinand. I first heard them when they played this tune live on some British awards show: the looked and sounded so sharp, like a mix of the best of ska and good punk (aka Clash), with a new, precise sound to their chops.

Chris Hughes wins with his entry of Life is Life, by Opus. Truly the worst song in the world.

Beer and cookies will be offered, for free, next time Chris is in Montreal.

Writer/director John Hughes had a string of movies in the eighties that were definitive for a certain-type of middle class North American early-teen (ie. a type like me). They were usually about angsty high school seniors, rich kids (mostly cool jerks) and their less-well-off school mates (alienated music-lovers with soul), and usually a Romeo-Juliet story of love across class that cannot be. Here are a few vids from those soundtracks (somewhere i have a few of these on tape).

Simple Minds: Don’t You (Forget About Me) (1985)
from: The Breakfast Club (1985)
The greatest (?) of all John Hughes films …

Charlie Sexton: Beat’s So Lonely (1985)
from: Some Kind of Wonderful (1987)
Charlie Sexton was, apparently, a guitar prodigy. He pretty much disappeared from public view after this album, Pictures for Pleasure, but continued working with other artists, including David Bowie and Bob Dylan. He also produced my old Blizzarts pal Peter Elkas’ album, Wall of Fire.

Echo and the Bunnymen: Bring on the Dancing Horses (1985)
from: Pretty in Pink (1986)
Pretty in Pink was probably the most alternative of the Hughes movies, and I owned this soundtrack on tape. It had all sorts of great stuff on it, including the Smiths, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, New Order, Suzanne Vega.

Here are my candidates. Please submit your own. A committee of editors from the Friday Mixed Tape team will review and make an Official pronouncement in one week.

Huey Lewis and the News: Hip to Be Square (1986)

Phil Collins: Sussudio (1985)

Starship: We Built This City (on Rock and Roll) (1985)
The amazing this is that this band was once Jefferson Airplane, who performed this. Someone once said to me, which rings true here: much of the eighties can be explained by waaay too much cocaine.

Just got this email, from Radiolab, about the best thing going in audio these days:

Dear Hugh,

I see you’re a Radio Lab fan. I also see you’re up in Montreal, so you probably won’t be able to make it, but I wanted to let you know that Radio Lab’s Season 4 Premiere Listening takes place tomorrow (Thurs) at the Angelika Theater in NYC.

More info at www.radiolab.org & www.wnyc.org/events/93353, in case you you’d like to tell your readers about it.

Thanks,
David

This week from Earideas Wednesday Picks: on Glenn Gould’s radio masterpieces, funny politics trumpeted from the UK and New York, and trying to answer the question, “what is time?”

Been a while since I wrote a longish piece on LibriVox. Peter Kerry Powers, a Professor of English and chair of the English department at Messiah College, wrote a piece about audio books, and LibriVox, here. I commented on that post, Peter answered here, and this was my comment to on his second piece (i’ve edited it slightly, some of it is in direct answer to Peter’s stuff, so you might want to check out what he had to say, but I think it all should make sense on its own):

i’ll defer to your analysis of dickens, but the wider point is that the roots - some ancient, some more recent - of text literature is oral. so “reading” is a particular type of experience of literature, but not the only one, not the oldest one. as to the value of these different experiences of literature, I think that’s up to those who experience it to decide and describe. Certainly reading text and listening are not the same thing, but how one values one or the other is surely a matter for the individual to assess. If audio books *result* in a decrease in (paper)text reading, then I will be with you in decrying the loss of a certain type of skill and experience, one that cannot be replaced by listening (or by reading online for that matter). But I don’t think it’s the case that audio books result in less reading; I suspect the opposite, but I have no proof of that.

As for myself, some of my own most formative experiences of literature involved my mother reading to me: RLS’s Kidnapped; The Trumpeter Swan; Stuart Little; The Hobbit; and countless others. It never occurred to me to criticize my mother for stumbles, substandard reading or non-NPR intonations. Some of the philosophy behind LibriVox is a recreation of that interaction: not a professional performance of a text (there are plenty of those available), but instead an intimate experience of someone reading to you - with all the little warts and idiosyncrasies that come with intimate readings.

For someone who aggressively promotes this philosophy, check out Miette, an occasional LibriVox volunteer, and one of the first audiolit podcasters in the universe. She is at once “professional” in sound and approach, and also intimate and personal. Her stuff is very much: Miette reading to you; rather than Miette performing a text. See:
http://www.miettecast.com/

The other issues you’ve raise all relate to a common problem - this is true of much of the web in general - which is a misunderstanding of what LibriVox is for. Mainly, you are looking at LibriVox as “provider of audio books,” in the model of a traditional publisher whose job (at least as it is usually understood) is to produce books that readers want to purchase.

It might be easier to consider LibriVox not as a publisher, but rather as a library, at least as far as our relations to the listeners are concerned. That is, you would not go into a library, pull out five random books, and say, “I didn’t like these books, this library is no good, the books here are all crap.” This is the same impulse people have when they say: “bloggers are self-obsessed, they rant and rave and have bad grammar, and I will never waste my time reading blogs because they are stupid.” … It’s true that some blogs are stupid, but not true of any I read, not true of this blog. So the problem is not “blogs”; the problem, among others, is that people don’t know how to find blogs that they like reading. And they are faced with a similar problem you express about LibriVox, because they say: “Well, you say there is good stuff on blogs, but how do I find it in the sea of crap?” You and I know the answer, but it’s not so clear how to express the ways to “find” good blogs to read in a general sense. In the non-web world, when you open a newspaper, you are guaranteed a certain quality/type of writing by the masthead; ditto when you open a Penguin Classic or a Vintage Paperback or when you walk into a certain section of the books store. The web world works differently, and the “guarantee” is delivered differently, in my case from something like “network authority.”

But getting back to LibriVox, our objective is:
“To make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet.”

So we evaluate how we do things based on that objective. And partly for reasons of various kinds of idealism, but also in large part for pragmatic reasons, we’ve decided (rightly, I think), that criticism, ratings, particularly bad ratings are a hindrance to our objective, not a help. The main reason is that recording texts is difficult, and putting them out into public is a traumatic and sensitive thing for many people to do. Criticism, especially unsolicited negative criticism, turns people off from recording. But, we have an objective, stated above, and that objective is not: “To make the best audio …” or “BBC-quality audio …” Rather our objective is to record “all public domain texts.” We need all the help we can get, and we do what we can to “protect” our readers from harsh criticism that will stop them from participating.

So in fact, I think it is entirely fair for you to say that (some) LibriVox recordings are dull. Or annoying. Or both. I agree with you, or rather, that has been my experience of some LibriVox recordings. But I have the same experience with any random collection of text or audio books or music or art. And that’s what LibriVox is, a random collection. If fact, I personally find random collections of professionally-read audio books have a much higher quotient of dull and annoying than a random collection from LibriVox, but that’s my personal preference about style: humanity over professional performance. And certainly for me, it is totally incorrect to say *most* LV recordings are dull or annoying.

A few points of interest come out of this:
a) there are plenty of professional, “high-quality” audiobooks available for a price; our books are free if anyone wants them (and if they don’t, no matter)
b) if you compare our catalog to older “free” audio lit projects, projects that DO have high “standards” (eg literalsystems.org), our catalog is much bigger … which means that we have provided a resource, that would not be there otherwise, for those who want it. whether people like or use the resource or not is another question.
c) in our large catalog, there is an impressive amount of beautifully-read stuff, searchable by reader, some great ones include: david barnes, andy minter, karen savage, gord mackenzie, kara shallenberg … the list is much longer.

So the *result* of our fundamental policy to take all comers, and turn away no one, results in a strange catalog filled with lots of stuff that sometimes *is* dull, or “badly” read, or hard to listen to, for some people, especially if you are expecting a certain style of audio. But that does not mean that these more idiosyncratic readings don’t have any value. And our approach also results in a large number of good recordings (mine, for instance, I think fall somewhere between badly-read and good … they seem worth doing to me; certainly my more recent ones are “better” than older ones); and a surprising number of extraordinary recordings, that I would put toe to toe with any professional recordings.

Now your problem is finding the good stuff, and I sympathize with it. I think we could/should probably do something like an informal “recommendation” page. But again, if you look at our objective, helping people find good LibriVox stuff is not our “job.” …Our job is to make the audio, and make it available for free. .

It’s the “job” of the rest of the web to start sorting out this resource we are providing, and sorting the good stuff. Metafilter is a work-around starting point, but eventually someone will put up a site that sifts thru librivox audio and finds the really good stuff. And if you follow links from our catalog page, you’ll get to the Internet Archive, where our audio is hosted, and there you will find some ratings. But we don’t publicize that.

There is more to write on the relationship between ratings & an open project like LibriVox, but the ink in my pen is running out, and I wanted to touch on a couple more of your points.

In particular: “To some degree I think he’s suggesting that Librivox is really more like a blog service where readers can express themselves via recording.”
This is another misreading of what we are up to. LibriVox has a particular objective (quoted above). It is not for self-expression, etc., tho that might motivate some people. It’s got a very particular purpose, to provide a complete library of public domain books, in audio format. So, people are motivated to pitch in for lots of different reasons, but our decision-making about how or why we do things always has to answer to our objective.

“It’s also the case that in reading a published work, the reader puts himself/herself in the position of performer/artist who is interpreting the work of another artist.”
That is one way to look at it. You could also say, “the reader puts him/herself in the position of human who is doing their best to make a public domain text available in audio format.”

Now I know you’ll probably say I am picking at semantic bones there, but the first motivation/role is not the same as the second, and they will result in different approaches to recording, and different results. And you can argue with me about the “value” of the first or second motivation, but in the end it doesn’t matter because I (and, generally, people who buy into what LibriVox is trying to do) disagree with you. And you might further say I (and the rest of the gang) are wasting our time, but it is our time to waste.

Now if *everyone* said: “you’re wasting your time,” I and others might start scratching our heads, and wondering if this open project idea was kind of stupid after all. But we get enough emails & blog comments from people saying: “wow, what wonderful work you are doing,” that it’s easy enough to shrug the shoulders at those who say otherwise. And, amazingly to me, our audio books get downloaded thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of times. For instance, Hobbes’ Leviathan, published by us 2 days ago, has been downloaded 1,671 times! In 2 days! … Which, you, as a writer of books will recognize is the kind of number that DOES appeal to the ego and excitement of the people who participate in LibriVox, for all sorts of non-altruistic reasons. Which is fine, because that kind of excitement helps us with our objective.

Finally, to Puccini and Pavarotti, if I were them, I would be horrified to know that someone was telling people to stop singing in my name. That doesn’t mean I want to listen to bad opera, but there are so many reasons people don’t sing opera any more, so many reasons people don’t read any more, so many reasons people don’t celebrate literature, and I don’t want to be another contributor to all the things that discourage reading (or opera). I would much prefer to find ways to help encourage people to share literature, to discover great books - and mediocre books too - and to spread literature, to get closer to text, to reading, to the sounds of words and the ideas behind them; in the case of LirbiVox those people are behind the microphone, and on the other side of earphones…

And in its essence, LibriVox is not about audio books, it is about people, of all types and all skills, reading and recording public domain texts, and making them available for free for anyone who wants to listen. We work hard to help that happen, and whatever happens next is something we spend much less time worrying about..

Hope you had a good Valentine’s Day. Here’s some tunes to make the moments last:

Sade: Smooth Operator (1984)
Another song I loved as a kid, got embarrassed by as a teen. But now I think Sade was on to something. Smooth Operator indeed.

Barry White: Can’t Get Enough of Your Love Babe (1974)
I knew nothing of the Velvet Voice before this tune was featured on the Simpsons, I think the episode with Michelle Pfeiffer, but not sure. Anyway, after I heard Barry White, nothing was ever again the same.

Marvin Gaye: Let’ Get It On (1973)
This live, lovin performance beat out the slick video for the 1982 hit, Sexual Healing.

I listen to lots of audio, my preference being radio documentaries while cooking. Yesterday I listened to the best thing I have heard in ages, a piece by WNYC’s RadioLab called Space:

In the 60’s, space exploration was an American obsession. But the growing reality of space has turned the romance to cynicism. We chart the path from then to now. We begin with Ann Druyan, widow of Carl Sagan, with a story about the Voyager expedition, true love, and golden record that travels through space. For a dose of reality, astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson explains the Coepernican Principle and just how insignificant we are

Listen here (on earideas). It’s fabulous.

I might be wrong, but I don’t think ever in the next couple of generations will we see someone like Fela Kuti, afrobeat legend, rebel, dissident, and one-time Nigerian Presidential candidate. Fela seemed to straddle the harsh present of the sixties/seventies, with something ancient … in a way that no one now would be able to do. With television everywhere these days, there are few if any corners of the world left where ancientness grows naturally - all of it has been touched by the modern. Maybe I’m wrong, and I’m no expert in world culture (and, after all, Fela’s mother was a feminist activist, and his father a Protestant Minister); but regardless, no one making modern afrobeat comes close to this kind of raw power. I’m not sure that there is any musician in the world that has this kind of charisma - brutal, violent charisma, but undeniable (see the second vid, especially).

Fela died in 1997 of AIDS.

Fela Kuti: Army Arrangement
“I have death in my pouch. I can’t die. They cannot kill me.”

Fela Kuti: Live in Calabar
Not sure the title of the song. This footage was filmed for a movie by Cream drummer Ginger Baker (which I believe is the source for the previous clip too). This one is intense, check especially the dancing from about 4′00″ and on.

Fela Kuti: U. Be Thief

I know Mitch has a youtube music video problem, just like me (in fact, I may have given him his first taste of the sweet sonic tonic of nostalgia). Anyway, a while back I asked if Mitch wanted to guest curate a youtube mixed tape session. He said: hells ya. Took me a while to post it, but here it is, straight from the Man in Black (and by the way, if you want to find the gold, a little hint, it’s at the end):

Wednesday Guest Tape: Eighties Hard Rock
Definitely one of my guilty pleasures and the music I grew up on (there is still some shame in this, I admit). Here are a few that might be more obscure. You have no idea how many hours I’ve burned on YouTube reminiscing. I’ve found some gold and cheese while on my journey. I’ll leave it to you to decide which is which below…

Slaughter – Fly To The Angels (1990)
While Slaughter came after the eighties hair bands (or more like the tail end), you can’t deny that lead singer, Mark Slaughter, had a crazy unique voice as proven in this recent acoustic version of their power ballad hit, Fly To The Angels.

Whitesnake – Is This Love? (1987)
Singer David Coverdale cut his teeth in a later version of Deep Purple before launching Whitesnake. You probably remember the original videos from that era with Tawny Kitaen.

Can’t Wait For The Night – Brighton Rock (1986)
OK, this is not the acoustic version, but when I found this on YouTube it took me waaay back. I think they were from Niagara Falls…

Hear N’ Aid – Stars (1985)
This was the hard rock scene’s response to Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” and USA for Africa’s “We Are the World”. There are some great vocal performances and who can deny how metal Rob Halford from Judas Priest is? (look at how he dressed for the studio - really, the metal world had “no idea”?).

As we head into the 2008 US Presidential race, here are a few videos to inform the foreign policy debates.

Edwin Starr: War (1969)
The song inspired by the original title of Tolstoy’s War & Peace.

Bruce Cockburn - If I Had A Rocket Launcher (1983)
Apparently, someone once asked Eddie Van Halen: “How does it feel to be the greatest guitarist in the world?” And he answered, “I don’t know, why don’t you ask Bruce Cockburn.” At least that’s the story I’ve heard. I had the pleasure of seeing Bruce in concert in Sudbury once, and it was amazing. Bruce is famous for his lefty protest politics, but he’s also a fantastic song writer, and, of course, no slouch on the ol’ guitar.

This tune is about the dirty war in Guatemala in the 1980s (supported, of course, by the US and Canada); but those face and bodies could be in any number of countries today.

Sgt Barry Sadler: Ballad of the Green Beret (1966)
And, lest I be accused of bias against war, here’s the 1966 hit song, that was number 1 for five weeks on the billboard charts.

Oops, forgot to point to this week’s best audio, Wednesday Picks from Earideas: This week: Karl Rove on the presidential race; evolution, the human brain, and economics; and the New Yorker’s new poetry editor, Paul Muldoon, talks music and verse.

[link…]

Some tunes from my days at university.

Rheostatics: Christopher (1990)
I loved these modern Canadian artrock progsters. I’ve seen them live more than any other band, and I guess I have most of their albums too.

Skydiggers: I’m Wondering (1993)
My roommate Matty used to say, “I don’t get why everyone likes this band, it sounds like girl music to me.” (He liked to smoke hash and listen to Pink Floyd and Sabbath). But I always thought they were the Canadian REM, and their live shows were always great. If you wanted to go to a costume party dressed as a Canadian university student from the 1990s, this would be a good video to study.

Spirit of the West: Home For A Rest (1990)
This is the song that unfailingly got every Canadian human who went university in the nineties out on the dance floor jumping up and down and screaming out the chorus, “I’m so sick from the drink, I need home for a rest … take me home!“. What a weird video … they’re a little bit less rock n roll/pogues than the lyrics would lead you to believe.

This week, TV theme songs.

Greatest American Hero
I can’t really remember this show all that well, but I sure remember the song.

The Littlest Hobo
To meet my cancon requirements. [Also: another shower favourite] … for my international readers, Littlest Hobo was a Lassie-esque show about a dog that wandered around Southern Ontario, solved mysteries, and then, just when the thankful families were about to put out a nice steak for him, they’d turn around … and he’d be gone again.

Knight Rider
Michael Knight & KITT edged out the Dukes of Hazard in the competition, with the Romanian judge awarding Dukes a shocking 3 for technical merit. Dukes is appealing the decision. [On a personal note, I must say I’d forgotten what a bad-assed theme song this show had. No wonder I loved it].

The eighties were a difficult time for the human race: so lost, so confused. This confusion came out in the music, in the dancing, in the haircuts, and most especially in the rock videos. But throughout those dark days, we were always learning new things, learning old things… learning to spell, for instance. This week, three songs to spell by. I consider this something of a musical sandwich: the worst of the eighties with an interesting musical combination from the nineties in the middle, though that 90s tune is of course a throwback to earlier, simpler times.

Every time I take a look at pop culture in the 80s, all I can think is: too much cocaine.

Hall & Oates: Method Of Modern Love
The hair, the videography, the dancing, the lyrics. The spelling. This song has it all.

John Lee Hooker & Van Morrison: Gloria
A serious interlude in an otherwise … difficult … selection for a Friday Mixed Tape. Irish big-lunged boomer, Ivan Morisson, Van the Man, along with one of the greatest, late bluesmen, John Lee Hooker, singing Van’s song.

Freeze: AEIOU (and sometimes Y)
Watching Hall & Oats in the first video, it is hard to remember that they are actually respectable song writers who knew how to craft a tune - even if they seem to have spent more time crafting their hairdos. Freeze, however, is another thing altogether. I am not sure there are any redeeming qualities to this video, except the strange nod to BMX and breakdancing.

from earideas.com comes the earideas wednesday picks, three great bits of audio from the past week. this week:

some wacky quantum science, a good old fashioned podcast with every quirk you might like, and an onion report that made me laugh out loud.

[link to: wednesday picks]
[link to: earideas]

In the year 2000, I split up with my girlfriend, and was going to move to New York City in six months, for a new job. I was twenty-six, and I spent many evenings of those six months hanging out, and occasionally dancing into the wee hours at a bar called Blizzarts, owned by my pal Peter. DJ Bliss and DJ T’cha had a Thursday night residency there, whose name escapes me but will come eventually, that was filled with all sorts of good funky tunes, new and old. I hung out at that time with a variety of characters, including Boris, whom I later “met” again thru the net in 2005 (not knowing who he was), “knew” virtually for about six months, before he posted a pic of himself, and I realized that we used to hang out at Blizzarts togther - tho we’d only been hihowsitgoinfineandyougoodcool pals back then.

Here are some tunes I remember from back in the day:

Mr. Scruff: Get a Move On
If you throw a party, and everyone’s sitting down, and you really want them to dance … this is the tune to slap on the hi-fi.

Jurassic 5: Quality Control
Followed by this one.

Amon Tobin: Verbal (2002)
Amon Tobin lived in Montreal for a while (and I’m told he still does, for part of the year). I saw him play a couple of times at Blizzarts.

If you like thought-provoking tech audio, Jon Udell has put up a list of his 2007 Interview’s with Innovators series that deal with: “socially innovative uses of technology.”

My LibriVox interview with Jon is on there.

And for a wider net, Phil Windley lists the top 10 downloads from IT Conversations.

I’ve been listening to tons of great public broadcasting on earideas.com.

And here’s a different view about why “good” public broadcasting is important: with the web, and podcasts, the CBC becomes a calling card for Canada. Ditto Deutsche-Welle for Germany and ARN for Australia etc. The broadcaster becomes a marketing tool and a builder of prestige. This is becoming more important in the networked world, where - for many of my peers, for instance - we can be anywhere in the world to do the work we do. Ditto businesses, scientists, writers and other “elites.” We want them here, in Canada, in Montreal, because really smart people make a country more vibrant and innovative.

I believe that a strong public broadcaster with excellent, thought-provoking content, helps build Canada’s image in the world.

While this isn’t all a public broadcaster should do, this is a new kind of rationale, I believe, brought on by the web; and one that might be more compelling to the business-only decision-making that runs our governments these days.

Note, this applies as well to universities: all universities should put a chunk of their marketing budget towards producing a weekly, high-quality podcast that interviews professors doing exciting research (whether in arts, humanities, or sciences and professional disciplines). I’m thinking of a weekly podcast with content as varied and wonderful as the TEDTalks. That is the gold standard for thought-provoking web content … and should be emulated by anyone who wants to build an image as a place of exciting innovation.

I was just talking with Mitch and Julien about this at lunch the other day; and commented on Mat’s blog to this effect.

Montreal jazz legend Oscar Peterson died this week.

Oscar Peterson & Count Basie: Slow Blues (198? ?)
Brilliant, as Oscar and the Count compete to see who can leave more space for the other genius to fill the room with music; and you have to love the spooning pianos.

Oscar Peterson: Noreen’s Nocturne (1969)

Oscar Peterson Quartet - with Joe Pass: Soft Winds (199? ?)

Kim Carnes: Bette Davis Eyes (1981)
This one held up pretty well, I’d say.

Fleetwood Mac (Stevie Nicks): Dreams (1977)
From the incomparable Stevie Nicks.

(Ike &) Tina Turner: Medley (1966?)
This must have just blown the socks off of the kids in this studio. Tina got more gravelly, and more divaish in later life, and finally turned into a caricature of herself; but there’s something about this old clip - rather than the 80s stuff she did - that gets to the real core. Her mentor and wife-beating ex-husband, Ike Turner, died last week.

Whatever you want to say about the sixties, looking back it was a time of the kind of change I don’t think we’ve seen since. All that came before was called into question, and things that came after were different on a scale that has not been approached again. Sometime around 1980, we went into a holding pattern. [note, I think that the networked world will bring the same sort of cultural upheaval, but we haven’t quite got there yet]. Here are three videos, all in black & white, where the colour was just bursting thru the tight suits.

Jimi Hendrix: Hey Joe (1967)
Does it get any cooler than this? No.

The Monks: Monk Chant and Oh How to Do Now (1966)
These guys were so far ahead of their time (and it seems from the vid that they were so crazy colour *was* actually bursting out of the B&W). The Monks were doing stuff with pop music - feedback, atonal noise, harmonics and dissonance and other weird musicy stuff that … well … that still sounds crazy. They were five US servicemen stationed in Germany, who shaved the tops of their heads and played pop music that would still make record execs nervous.

The Who: My Generation (1967)
This is a bit obvious, I guess, but the Who made noise like no one before them had. The Who is one band that should have kept the suits. They were much better before they got old. And: oh, Keith, we miss you.

This week, in celebration of the launch of earideas.com, (and the earideas audio challenge) songs about lifting off.

Peter Schilling: Major Tom (1983)
So of course the real song to put here is Bowie’s Space Oddity, where Major Tom first made his appearance. But the Schilling reinterpretation was a big favourite of mine as a kid, and it does have qualities of its own, including a good proto-techo drum/synth track. And the “4-3-2-1 earth below us …” still gives me shivers.

Europe: Final Countdown (1986)
This would get my vote for the worst song in the history of the galaxy.

William Shatner: Rocket Man (Elton John) (live in 1978)
At the 1978 Science Fiction Film Awards, Captain Kirk “sings” Elton John’s Rocket Man. A piece of surreal, otherworldly … genius. Art of the highest caliber.

Some of the great tracks from the kid’s show.

NOTE: I just put up fridaymixedtape.com … for those of you who don’t want to have to wade through the rest of my yammering, and just want pure music video goodness.

Sesame Street: Lowercase N
If I had a rock band, I would cover this song in every live show I did. “The wind is very still for… the lower case ‘n’” … breaks my heart.

Sesame Street: Pinball Number Count
You remember this one. For some reason, this is a favourite in my (limited) shower-singing repertoire.

Sesame Street: Number 9 (cutie)

Do you have any Sesame Street favourites?

As far as I know, this is the first youtube vid using LibriVox audio. This is DE. Wittkower reading Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism. Music is Richard Wagner’s Rheingold. I’m not sure the providence of the images.

Bring on the funk.

Stevie Wonder: Superstition (1972)
One of the best openings in rock n roll. (And check out Stevie playing this tune on Sesame Street)

Curtis Mayfield: Freddie’s Dead (1972)
A very jazzed out version of Freddie’s Dead from the all-Mayfield soundtrack to the blacksploitation classic, Superfly.

James Brown: Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine (1970)
And the godfather.

Some tunes about books.

The Cure: Killing an Arab (1979/80)
Amazing footage of the pre-make-up-and-crazy-hair Cure, in an intimate live show, singing a raw and moving version of the tune, based on Albert Camus’ existential/absurdist book, L’Etranger (the Stranger). This song is not an anti-arab song, it’s a song about Camus’ Mersault, a young pied noir who shoots an Arab on the beach, and then spends the rest of the novel awaiting his trial.

Kate Bush: Wuthering Heights (1978)
From 1978, comes Kate Bush’s ode to Emily Bronte’s book. Kate was still in her teens when she wrote this song and made the video.

Sarah Polley: Courage (1997)

This is a version of the Tragically Hip song, the original title of which includes the parentheses (for Hugh MacLennan). The song reflects some of the themes in MacLennan’s novel, The Watch that Ends the Night; Polley’s version is from the soundtrack to the “Sweet Heareafter,” Atom Egoyan’s (wonderful) film interpretation of the Russel Banks book.

Because I love good radio, I get very angry with CBC for their bad radio, of which the examples are abundant.

However…I must offer a big public congrats to them for two new shows:

• Spark, a great show about tech and trends hosteb by the so very excellent Nora Young; and
• Search Engine, another fine show about the web and how it’s impacting society, hosted by Jesse Brown

I just listened (on my collectik player, check the sidebar here) to CBCRadio3, Spark, and then Search Engine all in a row… and thought, whoa, is it possible that CBC is actually cool and with it? Well done programming decision-makers (ps when are you going to cancel these shows!?)

I have no idea when they are on the radio, but the podcast urls are:
http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/spark.xml
http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/searchengine.xml
http://www.cbcradio3.com/podcast/radio3/

Youtube just launched Youtube.ca (which resolves to http://ca.youtube.com). So in honour of this annoying announcement (here’s what I think of it), this week we present to you fridaymixedtape.ca:

Chilliwack: My Girl
I actually had no idea that this song was Chilliwack, and hence Canadian. Actually a snappy little number. That’s the nice thing about fridaymixedtape.ca … you’ll always get the best Canadian content, without all that other stuff getting in the way.

Gowan: A Criminal Mind
Ah … Gowan.

Platinum Blonde: Crying Over You
Canada’s most embarrassing hair rock band.

In the past couple of weeks, I went to see some public lectures at McGill and elsewhere: the first was Amy Goodman, of DemocracyNow, giving the keynote at the ReDefining Media conference. Then I went to see cognitive psychologist, Stephen Pinker talking about language and the human mind. Finally, I saw management guru David Maister (choice quote: “just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean it’s easy”) at PodcampBoston.

All three were good, interesting, intellectually stimulating.

But, the question is, given that I can (and do) see Amy Goodman on the net, whenever I like; and given that I can see Stephen Pinker present in video in, say, TEDTalks; and given that I could just read Maister’s book & blog posts; why do I want to go to physically see them? What is the value that I get by actually being there?

I had dinner during PodCampBoston2 with a good group: Sylvain Grand’Maison, Neil Gorman, Julien Smith and Anita from LibriVox. And we were batting around ideas about why that physical presence brings more to you than just reading text, listening to audio, or watching a video.

Some theories:

1. 2-way experience
Being there means that you are somehow engaged (or think you are engaged) in a two way communication with someone. I wonder though, in a big lecture hall (both Goodman & Pinker were speaking to hundreds, and I certainly had no sense that they were communicating with me, much less that I was communicating with them) whether this applies. Maybe our subconscious minds trick us into thinking we’d be able to really communicate, even if our conscious minds know that’s unlikely.

2.sharing the experience
Maybe somehow you “get” “more” (more what? how?) from seeing a person live with a group of other people. Is it that you will later be able to discuss it? How does this work?: if you go alone, and don’t know anyone there who you will discuss with later, this one doesn’t make much sense. Maybe it’s something though about being a part of a greater community that shares knowlege? collective unconscious? Hmm, I don’t know about this - though certainly if people you know are going, you’d like to be there too.

3. more information
In person, “more” information is transmitted. This one gets my bet as the most likely, though I don’t quite know what it means. but beyond the explicit information (ie, “here are 7 ways be be effective: make a list, make deadlines…” etc), seeing someone live transmits a richer breadth of information. voice, body, brainwaves… i don’t know. somehow information is transmitted more easily (for me) and with a sort of 3 dimensional context that you can never get from text alone, but more information as well, not contained in the explicit info; for me personally audio is a better way to understand concepts (probably that’s not true for everyone; and for detailed knowledge, text is always better); and video is “better” I think, though I prefer the flexibility of audio - you can listen while you do other things. But live, has something more than all that.

Probably it’s a mix of all three, but i think #3 is the most interesting. But the question is what exactly do you get that is *more* … ? any ideas?

Other ideas:
* seeing someone famous or smart in person gives you some perceived smartness and famousness in the eyes of others … when you tell others about the smart/famous person you saw.
* smartness and famousness actually rub off on you - and you get smarter and famouser by seeing someone smart/famous
* seeing someone live *forces* you to pay attention … you don;t have the same distractions as you would when reading, or listening at home (computers, other people etc).

Any more ideas?

Stan Rogers: Northwest Passage
Try to listen to this without getting all teary-eyed. Sung not by Stan Rogers, of course, but the St. Patrick’s Regional Secondary Chamber Choir Men, in Vancouver.

Gordon Lightfoot: Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald

Tragically Hip: Nautical Disaster

i participated a while ago on Michel Dumais’ Citoyen Numerique. you have to listen through the little player, it’s:

2007 10 11 01citoyennumnerique-ballado
2007 10 11 02citoyennumnerique-ballado
2007 10 11 03citoyennumnerique-ballado

the main librivox part is 03, at minute: 15:15ish. the rest is about podcasting, podcasting in quebec, digital music downloads etc … i make a couple of comments in those parts but not much.

other participants are my montreal podmates: bob goyetche & sylvain grand’maison, as well as journalist Tristan Péloquin.

I’m watching a session at Podcamp Boston on teen podcasting, by kabren levinson of nerdnewsradio.com (started when he was 15, 2 years ago)… the intro was pretty interesting, about Kabren’s experience of NOT getting his session accepted in the original schedule (read his blog post here and the follow-up here… Podcamp, being run by good folks, addressed the issue and gave him a slot).

Did you know there’s a TeenPodcastNetwork.

Quote: “How come teens are never involved in planning teen centres?” … good question. Cool kid.

I loved these three tunes when I was a kid, in the early-to-mid-eighties. I remember them getting lots of play-time on the morning radio station my parents listened to (the stodgy talk radio station, CJAD). So, here were some of my top music choices from ages eight to ten:

Joe Dolce: Shaddap You Face (1980, age 6)
Made it to #1 in Australia & UK, not sure how it did in the US (or Canada).

Taco: Puttin’ on the Ritz (1982, age 8)
Not strictly a gimmick, this is a remake of a Irving Berlin song, but still … well a gimmick as far as the charts go. Made it to #4 in the US charts.

Weird Al’ Yankovic: Eat It (1984, age 10)
A revelation. Reached #12 in the Billboard Charts in the US. Here’s the original Michael Jackson vid, which was also a revelation.

Bessie Smith: St. Louis Blues
Queen of the 20s blues, in the 1929 film St. Louis Blues.

Billie Holiday: Fine and Mellow
Along with sax great Lester Young, the band here features an all-star line-up of luminaries: Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Gerry Mulligan, Roy Eldridge, Doc Cheatham, Vic Dickenson, Danny Barker, Milt Hinton, Mal Waldron.

Nina Simone: Ain’t Got No…I’ve Got Life
Not strictly the blues, but great tune/performance by the great Nina Simone.

This week, some guys who look like they might burst a few blood vessels.

Bruce Springsteen: Lost in the Flood
This one is fantastic…what a build-up.

Van Morrison & The Band: Caravan
Check those moves!!

Joe Cocker: With a Little Help from My Friends

After all the rock n roll lately, i thought i should, well try to get some booty on the floor. So this week, three of the big dance anthems from the late 80s/early 90s, when my own distinctive dance style was just coming into its own. These tracks all share an added characteristic: the egregious use of day-glo backgrounds in their videos. Same director?

Technotronic: Pump Up the Jam
What’s in that pouch, I wonder?