The death of the (record) album

If you are of a certain age and music mattered to you, then you remember the days of buying albums at your favorite record store (mine were DeOrsey's and Manassas, Ltd.).

Radiohead's Thomas Yorke recently issued a pronouncement that the band may never make a full-length record/album again, citing that "...it's become a real drag," from a creative standpoint. Sasha Frere-Jones, on her blog at The New Yorker offers this and then, this.

Her take as a musician is that albums are a mere "widget" that is produced to keep record companies happy. She adds,

Only a crazybones would deny the magic of “London Calling” hitting the Earth. But that kind of perfect chain comes along only once in a while, and even when it does, how often do you listen to it in the original order, without interruption? Unless you’ve got lots of free afternoons or long rides, you probably don’t. And most people with more than a few albums like to mix those public documents into private orders that reflect preferences and personal associations.

I would respectfully disagree with her opinion that great albums are an aberation. Well, let me back up a minute. There was a time when bands/artists regularly made great records, and in fact, there is a genius to the sequencing of songs that contributed to the magic of a great album, like London Calling.

Most of the music I listen to regularly, I know the track order and often listen in that order (although, not always). Is that the experience of others? Is this limited to age, as in older music fans prefer order and sequencing and younger listeners are happy with their iPod shuffle play music experience?

It's apparent that the day is coming, I think, when albums and blocks of songs won't matter, and Yorke and Frere-Jones comments indicate that it's not that far away.

I'm curious if readers have a particular record/album that they couldn't imagine life without?

Palin's death panel pastiche

I happened to check the news from New Hampshire, curious about the president’s visit to the Granite State, on Google, at the end of my work day, before leaving the office for home. Curiously, the LA Times, a newspaper with a conservative credo chose this headline, Obama says ‘death panels’ aren’t on his healthcare overhaul agenda, to introduce reporter Christi Parsons’ update for readers.

I continue to find the various angles by which mainstream outlets spin out the news quite interesting, and obviously biased, but not necessarily towards a liberal bent as malicious, misinformed parrots often claim. Here is the lede Parsons used for her 700 word article on Mr. Obama’s town hall visit to Portsmouth.

“Addressing one of the more volatile complaints about healthcare reform that he is proposing, President Obama said today Tuesday that he doesn't want to set up government "death panels" that decide which Americans get health services and which don't.”

Until yesterday, I was ignorant to the furor being stirred up once more by right-wing talk radio concerning President Obama’s attempt to spearhead healthcare reform in the U.S. I had stopped by my parents on my way back to the office from Brunswick. I spent about 20 minutes with them, and as I was getting in the car, my mother mentioned something related to her own healthcare situation, then made an offhand remark about government “death panels.”

I thought, “where the hell did this come from?" I had innocently stopped to pay a courtesy visit and once again, I was about to be sucked into the whirling rotors of the right-wing noise machine and its never-ending Jabberwocky. Luckily, I astutely extricated myself by making a bad attempt at a joke and hopping into my car and I was off. My curiosity had been whetted, however.

Last night, I did some research on the “death panel” topic, and while I shouldn’t have been surprised at how gullible people can be that get most of their news from right-wing talk radio, I was again perplexed and at a loss to ever counter this ongoing misinformation campaign foisted upon many good seasoned members of the U.S. population. Actually, the topic was so taxing, I had to lie down at 8:45 and the next thing I knew, I was snapping awake and it was 11:15 pm, just in time to catch Maine Congresswoman Chellie Pingree swapping Moxie stories with Stephen Colbert.

I’m not sure what makes some people so fearful of their government that they think their president is considering euthanizing them. I actually recognize how incapable government is of getting anything done, let alone killing off a considerable segment of the population. If you want to target your fear at a large institution visiting death on the U.S. population, and anywhere else they set up shop in the world, think McDonald’s, not Barack Obama and his supposed "socialistic" tendencies.

Actually, people like my parents are the last people Palin’s death panels are going to target, because they’re pillars of health, and drain little from the public health system. Thankfully, I’ve made some changes in my own way of living, and losing weight will ensure that if by chance I wake up in the midst of some dystopian nightmare ala Rush Limbaugh’s active imagination, I too will be able to skirt the long reach of a bureaucratic death czar or czarina, or internment at some remote work camp (they're coming to take me away, ha-ha!) being set up as I type away at my keyboard.

Staying on task

Still on my quest to reach my optimal weight (whatever that ends up being). Despite a weekend where I could have gotten offtrack (a Friday night Sea Dogs game, beer and excess junk food), I managed to get on the scale this morning and register another Monday loss.

On Friday, I spoke to a group of graduates from a training I helped recruit for, held at CMCC. This group of precision manufacturing trainees completed a rigorous 12-week program, and my topic was reinvention, a topic that is familiar to me.

Making changes in our lives continues to be a necessary requirement as the world continues to change. Yet, so many people resist change with every fiber of their being.

Change is difficult, and I'm not always open to all possibilities. I am trying to be as adaptable as I can be, however, and roll with things more often.

Shuffle play Friday

Music may, or may not be the universal language. For me, however, music plays an important role in life, helping me over some of the difficult parts, and sharing in the good times.

I don't have the time to develop a longer post, so for the sake of throwing up some paint on the wall, here are some tunes that I'll be listening to, as I wind down the long work week.

Kings of Leon-California Waiting

Southern rockin' good 'ole boys who've hit it big after paying the requisite rock and roll dues. I actually don't know much about them other than each time I pick a KOL track at Last.fm, I'm never disappointed.

Nada Surf-Blizzard of '77

Nada Surf, who could have been just another one hit wonder when "Popular" broke them to MTV Nation back in the summer of '96, instead, have perservered and carved out a nice rock career of literate songs, and catchy melodies. "Blizzard of '77" is one of those tracks that will have you longing for winter snows, and school cancellations.

Hot Tuna-Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning

One of my all-time fave bands, I've seen Hot Tuna live several times and met Jorma Kaukonen. In fact, Jorma shared some guitar tips with me (not that they've done me much good, given my woeful chops) at Raoul's Roadside Attraction, a former Portland musical hotspot that is sorely missed~RIP

My Dad is Dead-The Only One

Mark Edwards is MDID, a veritable one man band. MDID was one of my Guided by Voices era discoveries, when GbV opened me up to the rich rock and roll vein of Dayton/Cleveland area bands, through Robert Griffin's Scat label.

Edwards has since relocated to North Carolina where he continues to toil in obscurity, churning out solid output, which now spans more than two decades. Highly recommended.

BTW, Edwards has a blog that he updates periodically.

Loud Family-Idiot Son

Former Game Theory frontman Scott Miller's band. Another amazingly talented, but sadly neglected rock genius, ala Mark Edwards. Miller writes smart, melodic power pop (I know, too cliched) that the world should know about. Instead, poser bands make the millions and Miller toils away in California obscurity.

Happy Friday, all. Rock out and rock on!

Cheapened Communication: The Lost Art of Writing Letters

If you’re over the age of 30, you surely remember the thrill that once accompanied receiving personally addressed correspondence—once known as letters. It might have been a letter from a friend that had moved away, a favorite aunt sending a check for your birthday, with a handwritten note, or some other form of entreaty that arrived via parcel post.

The advent of email was trumpeted with much fanfare, and the usual ballyhoo that attends each subsequent technological advance. Email was supposed to usher in a new dawn of communication, making it easier and simpler to communicate regularly—yet, another “democratization” in interpersonal relations and correspondence, as if letter writing was the communications equivalent of living behind the Iron Curtain. With this attendant ease of communication has also come an ease by which members of society now feel compelled to unload what’s on their chests, often without much thought and reflection. You can witness this regularly when you read online news articles that allow comments, or blog posts at blogs that have a good deal more traffic than mine. At least letters allowed some measure of time to cool off, reflect, rethink, and possibly tear up that angry note or letter before mailing it. Email allows us to hit “send” as soon as it is composed.


What has happened over the past five years is that people rarely even send an email anymore. First there was MySpace, where you could add friends by the mouse click. Then, it was Facebook, and recently, Twitter. Now, communication is more truncated than ever, although few people seem concerned about this.

One of my favorite books on our cultural downward descent was Morris Berman’s, The Twilight of American Culture. Berman clearly depicts the intellectual decline of the west with a prophetic urgency. While there are those cultural critics that think this downward spiral can be halted, and even reversed, Berman’s pronouncement is dire. There is no reversing the trend and little we can do to arrest the corporate clutch of our communication that has become ubiquitous.

There are those who consider Berman too dark and depressing and prefer to remain in denial. Books like TTOAC aren’t for those types. They remain ensconced in their cocoon, informed by reality television, video games and WIRED articles.

On the contrary, one of the most intriguing aspects of Berman’s book isn’t any hope of a cultural revival, but what he characterizes as some hope for anyone that desires to find meaning in a culture that’s rapidly disintegrating. It’s what Berman refers to as the “monastic option,” and he calls those who accept the charge as “new monastic individuals,” or NMIs. The monastic aspect is a nod to medieval monks who retreated from conventional society in an attempt to preserve its literary and historical treasures.

What Berman is talking about is creating “zones of intelligence” in both a private, as well as local ways. He maintains that it is important that these monastic activities be kept out of the public eye as much as possible. He specifically picks on simplistic efforts like “fifty ways to save the earth” and “voluntary simplicity,” to name two. Berman cites Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and the “book people.” It is about adopting a “guerrilla” way of life. I found his ideas intriguing back in 2000 when the book first came out, and his prescriptions ring truer now, almost a decade later.

What could be done to adopt our own monastic option? What if a small band of monastic individuals made a pact to write letters periodically, possibly once per month to one another? I’ve heard of others who have done similar things. We could return to mailing articles to one another, cut from newspapers, or copied from a magazine, much the way these things happened before people began incessantly forwarding links.

****

Technology has resulted in a truncated style of communication. The nature of technology lies in its ability to reduce all things to a binary function—the number one, or a zero. This makes communication, and in particular, correspondence, transactional vs. remaining relational.

Most human beings have a gregarious side. Our evolution has incorporated storytelling and narrative as part of our development. Anthropologists have discovered remnants of early communication involving elements of stories, even if these were just pictures on the wall of a cave.

Writing letters has been man’s preferred method of communication, at least since the invention of paper. Historians have been able to piece together the lives, and develop portraits of important men (and women) primarily by sorting through their letters and correspondence. David McCullough’s delightful book on the life of John Adams relied heavily on Adams’ letters, back and forth between Adams and his wife Abigail, with Thomas Jefferson, and other historical figures that are now revered, who happened to be contemporaries of Adams.

I don’t know what will happen to history and those men and women living during our current epoch, a period of emails, Facebook wall postings, and Twitter. Will it be possible to reconstruct a life 100 years out into the future, if nothing tangible remains? What kind of archiving of email correspondence is taking place? If an ISP has records of your communication today, what happens 25, 50, or 100 years out, given the possibility of mergers, acquisitions, or the disappearance of the ISP, displaced by some newer, more effective communications platform?

Will historians acquire an alternative means to capture people’s correspondence? What becomes of history at that point, and does anyone even give a damn about it?

I don’t want this post to devolve into a philosophical exercise. It does concern me on several different levels, however, including technology’s obvious orientation towards altering our ability to remain connected to our past. I see this as one of technology’s most serious negative implications, its ability to sever our tether to who we were.

I’ve been ruminating about what could be done to enhance Berman’s model of new monasticism, and letter writing might be an entry point to becoming a new monastic individual, or a NMI. Choosing to be a member of a small group of letter writers, sending off a letter, possibly once per month, handwritten (or not, depending on whether you still have some semblance of penmanship remaining), one or two pages in length, dispatched to a post office box, roadside mailbox, or apartment letter-box seems like an exercise worth considering. An added benefit might be the anticipation of receiving a delayed response in the form of a letter, which takes time to travel from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon.

One of the challenges to aging in our own time is the rapid acceleration of change. Change no longer brings improvements, like moving from ice box to refrigerator did for food storage, or the reductions in physical labor required to live, where bodies wore out by the age of 55, or 60 (hence the age of retirement being 65). Granted, even those kinds of improvements wrought by technology could bring contrary opinions about benefit. Unless you subscribe to the belief that all technology is suspect, we might agree that technology did bring improvements in quality of life. Of course, there are those like John Zerzan and others who present ideas positing contrarian views about technology and its impact on civilization. I’ve read Zerzan, Derrick Jensen, and others. Their points have some appeal, but that’s fodder for another day.

My point here is that the acceleration of change and technology’s reach, have far exceeded our capacity to regulate and set parameters for the benefit of all of us, not only the elite. I think of the reach of technology today and its impact on our ability to preserve basic privacy, if we choose. Governments around the world can track and monitor everything we do, or say, and our own vote whether to participate, or refuse, has been usurped by the onslaught of change.

Writing a letter won’t necessarily alter technology’s relentless march forward (or backward, depending on your orientation), but it might allow us a periodic reconnect with the human side.

I’d be happy to get the ball rolling by writing a letter to the first five people that send an email with your name and address. Once you receive my letter, I hope you’ll consider sending back a letter response of your own.

In my way of seeing things, this reestablishes a more human (and maybe, humane) way of interacting and communicating.

[A regular reader points out that I have no listed email, which might be a problem if you would like a personal letter. I'll use an innocuous email for obvious reasons (spam and all that other good stuff connected to "benign and altruistic" technology); here it is-- mediadrop04 (at) yahoo (dot) com, remember to replace the (at) with an @ and the (dot) with a .--Jim]