The ever-interesting Lara St. John on Wagner and Madison Avenue’s idea of what constitutes “classical” music. Okay, I admit I ranted to her about it, but i’m grateful to her for the research and the writing. C’mon Rick Rubin, you can do better than that!
To all those who took the time to comment on my little Game of Thrones essays this spring, I thank you. I regret to have had to stop making them public after the first few dozen, since some commenters who disagreed with me also seemed to have a serious problem with the fact that I am female – which is, of course, irrelevant to the matter. In the spirit of parity, I chose to stop publishing them all – even the non-misogynistic intelligent ones. But moving on…..
SONOS
Virtually parallel to the HBO debacle is one from the wireless HiFi company Sonos. They decided to buy a $4 million Superbowl commercial in 2014, representing in color how your house can have all different sorts of music wafting through it. They hired the hirsute hip-hop honcho Rick Rubin to create a 30-second spot featuring classical (in blue) hip-hop (red) and…
As a lifetime listener (truly) and longtime producer in the radio vineyard, I’ve heard lots and lots and LOTS of stories. But every now and then one comes along that stops you in your tracks. Like this two-part series on Marketplace, which has it all: powerful writing, editing, and delivery, terrific use of audio, and an original and important topic that almost never gets discussed in the mainstream media.
And what personalities, and what sound bites the give us! Entrepreneur Jim Jacoby: (“A company that needed to be profit driven and hit certain numbers… and I was trying to [save] the world… those two things are hard to square,”) obsessive motorcyle designer JT Nesbitt, (“If Jim hadn’t shown up I would be serving you lunch,” and design expert David Lenk, who utters perhaps my favorite lines in all of Part 1:
“You can walk through any flea market aisle today and find a Sunbeam blender or an Emerson fan or Bakelite Zenith radio from the late ’40s to early ’50s and, not only do they look good, they probably still work.”
But, said Lenk, things started to change in the mid-50s. “The Harvard MBA grads started fanning out with their evangelizing of planned obsolescence, and finance became more important than corporate traditions of design or quality. And by the mid 60s it was all gone. It’s just junk.”
Gratifying to see that I’m apparently not alone in my thinking, either — these are at the moment the top two most-popular stories on the show’s site. Kudos to all involved for a great piece of radio.
And, yeah, I remember picking up lots of old Zenith radios in the yard sales of my youth…and they all worked splendidly!
“People really haven’t been riveting for quite a while,” said Mary Grieco, metals control engineer for the Massachusetts Department of Transportation. “It’s a learning curve for everybody. There are no specifications anymore that tell you how to rivet, so we make the best engineering judgment on how to do it.”
On the heels of the excellent Marketplace story discussing the decline of – and the attempt to, er, “kick start” – American Industrial Design, comes a fascinating story in today’s local rag explaining just why it’s going to take so long to refurbish the iconic Longfellow Bridge spanning the Charles River between Cambridge and Boston. Turns out it’s all about rivets and rocks … or to be more precise, the elusive, prized Rockport Granite – “The Granite of Character.” Worth a read!
Description of Rockport Granite, taken from Sweet’s Catalogue of Building Construction, 1915
Sure, Gwen Ifill gets the headline….but check out the other “Over The Top” performances by other PBS programs too…including, I’m happy to say, Great Performances…
Count me among the LED- compact flourescent haters for home lighting, so it was fascinating to read a story in today’s Boston Globe (cribbed from the New York Times) about two startup – get this – light bulb makers right here in Massachusetts. Yes, the demand is there: As the story relates,
Incandescent bulbs — whether leftover store inventory of standard lights or halogen models that meet the new regulations, which went fully into effect in January — outsell other types by far at big-box stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s, lighting executives there say.
One of the new bulbs is called Finally, created by a Babson College grad named John Goscha who also came up with Idea Paint, the dry-erase whiteboard-type stuff that permits you literally to scribble all over the walls – and recently installed in many a ‘GBH conference room. Turns out Goscha was a hater too:
Unhappy as a consumer with compact fluorescents and LEDs, he said, he decided to pursue making an alternative. “I thought, ‘I don’t really want those, and there have got to be other people who don’t want those either,’ ” he said.
The Finally folks have term their bulb “Acandesence,” to explain their use of a hepped-up nano-sized version of old-fashioned induction technology found in your common long-running electric motors. According to a review in the tech blog Gigaom today,
The big upside of the Finally bulb is that the company says its quality of light is similar to an incandescent — a warm solid glow — but without the crazy-high LED prices. Many consumers hate CFLs, because the light can be such a low quality, and until very recently LEDs have been in the two-digit dollar prices. The Finally bulb is 75 percent more efficient than an incandescent and lasts 15 times longer.
But before the Finally bulb hits the stores (still waiting, it seems to clear a plethora of regulatory hurdles), it may be beaten to the punch by another new bulb type – the VU1, which according to the Times article,
uses a technology like that of cathode ray tubes in televisions, a “state-of-the-art 1940s technology,” …in which electrons hit a cocktail of phosphors on the glass, which then glows.
The Vu1: Coming Soon to a Big Box Near You?
‘Course, they have their own name for this new-old technology “Electron Stimulated Luminescence™, or ESL. Whatever. Here’s hoping these better bulbs-in-theory open to, er, glowing reviews. Time to cue the Hank Williams...
Last night, when the family was listening to your wonderful rendering of the immortal symphony someone suggested that I put my hand on the receiver and see if I could get any of the vibrations. He unscrewed the cap, and I lightly touched the sensitive diaphragm.
What was my amazement to discover that I could feel, not only the vibration, but also the impassioned rhythm, the throb and the urge of the music! The intertwined and intermingling vibrations from different instruments enchanted me. I could actually distinguish the cornets, the roil of the drums, deep-toned violas and violins singing in exquisite unison. How the lovely speech of the violins flowed and plowed over the deepest tones of the other instruments! When the human voices leaped up thrilling from the surge of harmony, I recognized them instantly as voices more ecstatic, upcurving swift and flame-like, until my heart almost stood still.
Really? Congrats to San Francisco Classical Voice Writer Janos Gereben for this bit of sleuthing – the letter was apparently in the Helen Keller Archives of the American Federation of the Blind. But I’m rather surprised that this story has never come up before – and the skeptic in me wonders is Ms. Keller did not indulge in a bit of a creative flight of fancy. I don’t tend to think of a 1920s-era radio as capable of “surround sound,” but it sure is fascinating notion to imagine that someone who was doubtless as hypersensitive to vibrations as Helen Keller could actually pick out and detect a symphony that way. Can anyone corroborate this?
Kind of amazing to hear the wall-to-wall media coverage of the New York Philharmonic’s trip to North Korea….startling and gratifying to hear snippets of the New World Symphony in the middle of network newscasts. Worth reading: Anne Midgette’s column in the WaPo on this not being a case of bringing Great. Western. Art. to poor benighted souls behind the Bamboo Curtain….
But in Vienna, Austria, there is another image of them: as conducting students. The elite conducting class at the University of Music and Performing Arts there has trained no fewer than 17 North Korean students in the past decade.
Which reminds me of a similar history-making venture I helped to orchestra for NPR in 1999: The Milwaukee Symphony’s trip to Cuba, which was the first time a US orchestra had performed on the island since the Philadelphia Orchestra had been there in 1959. ‘Course, it was a little easier for our NPR crew to move around the country than it was for the delegation traveling to North Korea this week…I remember that producer Laura Bertran even managed to lend some technical and logistical help to the struggling public radio station in Havana to broadcast the concert live on the island. (Oh yeah, they played Gershwin, too….the Cuban Overture, natch) Click here to hear some of the music from similar symphonic excursions in the past, and here for a similar Washington Post story on other “Diplomacy Concerts” of that past half-century.
I don’t know any of the politics involved, but imagining WYPR in Baltimore without Marc Steiner is simply bizarre. If there is any station, public OR commercial, defined by a single personality it would be WYPR and its erstwhile talk-show host. Perhaps that was the problem; I don’t know. But props to the station for broadcasting (on morning drive, no less!) a refreshingly candid and honest account of a stormy Feb. 20 community advisory board meeting about the issues involved. With a transcript, no less. That took some courage.
On the other hand, for the same station to air during afternoon drive a six-month-old repeat of a Mario Armstrong “Digital Cafe” feature? About an Internet startup being Beta tested? With a casual disclaimer that “some information may be out of date?” Incredibly. Lame.
Speaking of public radio: Terrific story by Joel Rose of WHYY on the inevitable move to the Web by niche music magazines. Simple explanation: As record companies decline, there’s no one else to pick up the advertising slack…
It’s nice to see Pete Seeger getting his props from PBS this week, with an American Masters portrait airing tonight on most PBS stations around the country. Except, that is, in DC, where despite Pete being on the cover of the Post’s TV Week, the local pubtv powerhouse WETA inexplicably is running a show a three-year old show on Judy Garland. Huh? I’ll have more to say on Pete in a later post.
I am perhaps the only person in the blogoverse to look at this and think immediately of the shape-note singing tradition that was developed in America in the 19th century. Back then, they used differently-shaped notes to teach people who couldn’t read music to sing; today, thanks to Guitar Hero, all you need are five color-coded buttons….
Okay, it’s not like I’m obsessed with this game or anything, but isn’t this yet more proof of the the game’s game-changing impact? Watch this entire video from the Plasticky Goodness blog on Current.tv and see if you don’t agree….
Now, it looks as if somewhere around 1 million phones have been unlocked without authorization. Of the 3.7 million sold by Apple, only 2 million have been activated by AT&T. The wireless company is believed to hold around half a million, but that still leaves more than 1 million phones missing.
Wow. Where’d they go? Speculation is that yeah, a few of ’em have been hacked for other carriers (workarounds started to appear within days of the iPhone’s release after all), but most of them have been put into play overseas – far beyond any spotty AT & T coverage map, as it were. Huh. Another example of the global economy – both legal, gray, and black – at work. Apple’s attempts to block/lock/and “freeze” iPhones seems to be having the same effect as those RIAA lawsuits are having on P2P file-sharing, too: Or, as Wendy Davis suggest:
Perhaps Apple could escalate the software battle, but it seems inevitable that more workarounds would follow. In the meantime, it would make sense for the company to focus on forging new wireless deals that will result in more choices for consumers.
Roedeo Productions 
You must be logged in to post a comment.