The Negative Side

Well, we do live in interesting times.

The G8 and G20 are coming to a Canadian city. Darn it. Vastly inconvenient, and probably somewhat dangerous, too. Not to mention expensive.

Here's is one interesting and negative technology angle: I heard on the the radio that our government - federal? provincial? - is considering jamming cell phone signals in the downtown area during the meetings. Not enough to ask people who work in business dress to dress casually instead so they do not become targets of violent anti-business protesters. No...cell phone communications will be disrupted so violent anti-business protesters (or worse) can't set off bombs. And the upside of hosting these conferences is...?

Next item on the weird side: The World Cup starts tomorrow (or so). I heard on the radio that Twitter is trying to gear up for the onslaught of people cheering on Twitter in real time...the figure I heard is 65 million of them. Is that expected TV viewers? Fans? Twitterers? All at once? Talk about jamming! How will the system handle that? And the network of systems? How does that compare, I wonder, to regular volume? Maybe the government won't have to do anything because Twitter traffic alone will impede cell phone communications (or smart phone communication at least) during the G8 thingy. I guess it will force a kind of rush on improving the technology once the problems are revealed, and that will at least be interesting.

The marigold says nervously:
The more I hear the news, the more I want to read...hmmm. Dickens? No. Austen? No, not quite. Tolstoy? Noooo. Thackeray. Yes!

Responses from the Future

What a lot of cool conversations I have had as a result of my last post.

First cool thing: I was out with a friend who is an iphone adept. This is the person who sort of lobbied for me to get an iphone, and finally convinced me to get one by showing me the birding app possibilities. Not a birder, but someone knows how to connect with my buttons. We were walking in a park, and I stopped to listen to a bird, whose song I could not recognize. I was saying how someone thought I had been describing a birding app that worked like Shazam: you let it hear the bird, and it identifies it. That would be WAY cool, but sadly I know of no such app. I had only been talking about the birding app having recordings that you can play to identify or even call birds. Cool enough.  "Why don't you just record this one?" this friend said. "Doh!" I said.  I never thought of holding out the phone to record a birdsong, and then playing it next to my birdsong identification CDs. What an awesome idea! What an opportunity missed that day! (Bonus: you can save recordings to Evernote (see my sidebar to check out this super cool shareware program with an on-line+mobile app. I could put them right in my Evernote nature journal. OMG.) (Also: feel free to develop such an app, or to tell me about one if it exists.)

Second cool thing: a visual artist and teacher that I am friends with told me she loves dance and music more even than visual art. She also told me she plays tennis HARD. Then my thoughts came around to the practice of art as a kinetic activity, too. I love the idea of "the gesture of the artist", and consider it one way of defining something as art. Of course, as she pointed out, ballet is an archaic form (like opera). She proposed Cirque du Soleil as the newest form of dance. What a provocative thought that was! I had had vague thoughts in that general area, like about figure skating, but never actually managed to define it so clearly. It makes perfect sense. Cirque has taken out many of the circus-y parts, and kept the physical parts and the music. Some related thoughts: there is a continuum of athletic activity that runs from dance to, shall we say, football. In my view, anything where there is a judgment of artistic merit - leave it outside competition. Scores or times are the hallmarks of the athletic activities suitable for competition; artistic merit is for the arts - all about personal response. So despite an identical level of athletic demand on the body, I think gymnastics and figure skating do not belong in the Olympics any more than ballet does. To come back to the starting point, figure skating is hugely popular in a way ballet is not - really it is another new dance form, too.  More thought required. (PS I am interested in the current, but I love the archaic.)

Third cool thing: I have been thinking about how my friends act as a digest for the internet, previewing content, and sending me the most interesting stuff. So much better than me trolling around for hours getting tangled in the marginally interesting, and then one of my friends sent me this link to Seth Godin's blog entry "Are you an Elite?" Now here's a guy who understands me, and my friends, and my blog-readers. We just have fun exploring ideas and technology and information and culture, and we love to share that, and just as Seth says, there is a remarkable modern ability for us to access each other and all that stuff we love. The other point he makes that strikes me as key is this:

"The challenge of our time may be to build organizations and platforms that  engage and coordinate the elites, wherever they are. After all, this is where change and productivity come from."

Selfishly, I want organizations to build platforms that engage me, (hello iphone) but I also want that for my kids to enjoy and for the happy future of humankind on planet earth.

He also wrote a blog post about post-secondary education and what it means now and going forward, an article we have discussed in our family quite a bit, called THE COMING MELT-DOWN IN HIGHER EDUCATION which is a very clear statement of something I worry about for when my children get there. Here is the key point he gets to on this:

"The solutions are obvious... there are tons of ways to get a cheap, liberal education, one that exposes you to the world, permits you to have significant interactions with people who matter and to learn to make a difference... "

Read: allows them to access organizations with platforms that engage them as elites. He refers his readers on to a book: DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education by Anya Kamenetz. This is a book to get on for the Kindle reader app on my iphone, for sure. Yours too? If you  haven't read it already, it is also time for you to read A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. You can search my blog for my review of the book, or use the hot link under Links to Writers in my sidebar. Seth Godin and Anya Kamenetz are there now too.


Now the marigold wonders nervously:
What about the negative side of the technology that allows us to live in the future? That calls for another post.

Music for the Future

Lately two exquisite pieces of music have come to my attention, harbingers of the future of music, but built on the history of music.

The first I'll mention is Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir performing his work Lux Arumque, a choir recruited, and taught over the Internet, and then recorded by their own webcams and edited into a performance. Stunning to look at, stunning to hear, and doesn't it sound like Allegri's Miserere? (I have provided the link a performance by the King's College Cambridge, who seem to own the bragging rights for their performance. If you look down the comments, someone has provided the [awesome] text in Latin.) Props to the Beethoven Lives Upstairs series. I first heard Allegri's music on my kids' Mozart's Magnificent Voyage disc, and I fell in love with it immediately. I even bought it from itunes to have on my iphone. I often get a chance to recommend this series and I do so by saying any music lover of any age or expertise can learn something they didn't know about the music or the composer by paying attention to these stories.

And then there are Felix's Machines, by a young guy called Felix Thorn, who cannibalizes his family's piano, adds some household objects, and drives the resulting instruments by his computer. He says in Wired UK "I look at the advantages of what machines can do. People must realize you can extract emotion from them, and enjoy the music they produce." The music is delightful. Yes - and emotional.

Meanwhile,  I had a chance to be a guest with some friends at a fundraiser for a project that also mixes past and future: Paola Marino  is a video director using the medium to interpret opera arias in a trilogy of short videos. While the videos are pretty cool, but what is really exciting is standing in a small room while an opera singer sings. The power is enough to raise the hair on the back of your neck, and that is the level of musical thrill that I am always hoping for. I am guessing that Paola's goal roughly fits in what with I am always on about in having opera work in the 21st century: Use what is universal about opera, in this case choosing as a theme for her series "Desire". Integrate it with modern technology, in this case video (manga works too - see my tags). Add a dash of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies: "Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify", and you have cool 21st century opera. (See Fun, Cool, Funny on my sidebar to use an Oblique Strategy to problem-solve for yourself.)

The young opera singer who features in this trilogy can also be seen in another version of Carmen, a performance she did at a benefit to attract young people to the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto. Watch Lauren Seagal  exploiting her gifts.

But there's more: digital video and YouTube are providing a brave new world of interesting music experiences.

I heard about this one at the music school I attend. By this I mean listening whenever I can to the CBC Radio 2 program Shift, with my radio-hero, host Tom Allen. He has a twitter feed - the first one on planet earth that almost interests me - and a blog where this clip is also featured, although I can't figure out quite where. He also happens to be a trombonist. This is a little homemade video by a Russian bass-trombonist FEATURING the trombone part of Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto, quite possibly the best-known piece of classical music written in the 20th century, and that's exactly what makes it effective. Music you can hum along to, with just one instrument pulled out. I don't play in an orchestra, and probably neither do you. OK, well I know some of you do, but...how else would I ever get this perspective? And it sounds great! Only in a world where a guy can set up his camera (or phone?) in an orchestra pit, and then post it to YouTube could this ever be possible. I LOVE the future of music.

Then, of course, I had to show my kids the video and tell them my favourite Rachmaninoff story - that although he wrote and performed this music, at a certain point he decided that the new young guys could play it BETTER THAN HIM and he stopped performing it. So, we looked up Rachmaninoff on YouTube, and he is there. Sadly it seems he was too early for there even to be film-to-video performance clips, but there was an audio recording of him performing his 2nd piano concerto from 1929 by RCA Victor with his favorite orchestra: the Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski conducting, and what do you know - the part he pulled out of the music sounded very much like the trombone pattern! Unbelievable, and would we have even really noticed that if he we hadn't watched the trombone part first? Incidentally, there are video clips of Van Cliburn playing this concerto, and his is the performance I grew up listening to and loving, plus performances by Kissin and Lugansky, two current Russian pianists filling these big emotional shoes. Love them, too.

Then...glancing at the other suggestions on YouTube, we noticed a video labelled Rachmaninoff had big hands. Just watch it.

MAKE WAY FOR DUCKLINGS

This week I saw for myself the principle of Make Way for Ducklings. Remember the old book by Robert Mccloskey? It was a beautiful 2010 moment. One of the major highways into my big city was stopped almost dead in a long patch between two exits. A little late, as usual, I checked my iphone satellite link-up traffic watch app. Yeah...full red on the stretch I was travelling, but luckily, not on the highway I was trying to connect up with, expect a 15 minute delay. Then suddenly, there she was, right beside me on the shoulder, a lovely mother duck with about 10 teeny-tiny ducklings waddling calmly behind her. As I was fumbling for my phone to take a picture, the traffic started speeding up, and I realized that this little family WAS THE REASON FOR THE TRAFFIC JAM!

The joke about this city is that it has two seasons, winter and road construction. It is aggravating IN THE EXTREME to find a new blockage to traffic flow every couple of days, causing a new traffic jam, another reason to be just a little late.

Never in my life has a traffic jam been the best part of my day, until the day of the ducklings.

Now the marigold is wondering nervously if they all made it through the long trek to the next break in the barrier that would allow them to walk back off the highway. I hope so, with all my heart.

LibraryThing Early Review

Illustrado
by Miguel Syjuco



I am always looking for the thrill of reading from a culture I am unfamiliar with, so I jumped at the chance to read a Man-Asian prize-winning novel by a Filipino, albeit one living in Canada, and with advanced degrees from a couple of big-time schools. However, I am unimpressed. The faux-document-pastiche style is not new, and I find that Syjuco has not handled it adroitly nor is the treatment particularly humourous or ironic. Somehow, more interesting than the book itself (to me, at least) is the question that came to mind while I was reading it.

This book got me thinking about colonialism. I have always thought we are still living out the colonial era, and someone suggested to me recently that we will, in a way, never leave the colonial era. It encompasses the past 500 years of world history.  Perhaps it will never "end". Where actual colonies have become obsolete, the feeling is like the son killing the father - everything is done to obliterate the influence of the colonial, in a way that attests to the strength of the influence.

What really got me wondering is that this book is written by an ethnically Spanish Filipino, not an indigenous Filipino. I was disappointed. Canada is one of the countries that has accepted many many Filipinos, a little bit through the back door, as caregivers. They are seeking a middle-class life unavailable to them in the Philippines, and they now form a large and stable community here. The children of these workers are integrating everywhere, but that had not happened in my generation. I thought this book would satisfy my style of thrill-seeking curiosity.

So, the book violated my expectations, and when I realized it I started asking myself why.

I am a Canadian, and I don't consider the only interesting or authentic cultural voice of Canada to belong to the indigenous people. Nor do I expect it from the United States or Mexico or Australia. Or Brazil, for that matter. And, it must be said, there are indigenous writers to be read in all these countries, but they stand alongside a multiplicity of immigrant voices, albeit many with hundreds of years of history. Yet there are certain places where writers of European background feel colonial, even when they have been established for many hundreds of years.

For me, I found out, the Philippines is one of those places. Shall we say, so is all of Africa, with the exception of South Africa, which was colonized differently? The middle east and far east have never really been colonized, although there are some small spots - Israel comes to mind - where an immigrant voice is natural. The Caribbean is different again - the actual natives wiped out, the colonialists sort of chucked out, leaving behind only a flavour, and the dominant population descended from immigrant slaves seems to own the native voice.

So, what is the difference? It isn't really the class difference between the colonialists and the natives - historically all the indigenous groups were treated with disdain - although it is somehow more marked in this second group. I was stumped for weeks. I finally thought up an answer. Maybe it is a numbers thing: where the colonial population overwhelmed the indigenous, the colonial voice feels native. Where a minority (or slim minority) of colonialists maintains a separate superiority over a majority (or vast majority) of the indigenous, it feels wrong. The numbers idea also explains the Caribbean situation.

The marigold's nervous questions are these: Is that enough of an explanation? And I feel I have to ask myself should it feel wrong? Is it perhaps not just a kind of honesty? We are here, we colonized, we did not integrate, but we neither did we obliterate.

And maybe it feels wrong to me because another of my ideas is that Canadians are deeply and truly egalitarian. More so than all but the most northern of Europeans, more than Americans, and South Americans. Maybe my view is a minority one, not even common to other westerners.

I think Syjuco means to discuss the ambivalence of his cultural identity, but it was that identity itself, not his art, that piqued my interest. I can't recommend the book, but I welcome any comments on this idea.