Pinterest is the new Vogue, or How I Spent My Summer Vacation

                               VS

For a long time I have wondered about fashion and magazines and reading time and beautiful photography and prices and old media versus social media and also what to wear today. All these concerns intersect in my world.

So - for starters, if you are reading books, you don't have time to read magazines and vice versa. That's hard for me, right there.

Then, the fancy fashion magazines are great for photography, but don't really help you decide what kind of shoes to get this fall, and when they do indicate what kind of shoes to get this fall, I find I am not keen to spend the $950 it takes to get them. (These are Gucci, and they are great, I must say, but who is able to afford that? How can one follow advice to buy these?) 

And also, I don't care what any fashion magazine has to say about issues. Not any issues: not clitorectomies; not body image; not art: not arts funding; not what men want; not how women combine work and motherhood; not what Michelle Obama is wearing today. Can you honestly say you care? I'd rather read about what Elizabeth Bennet is wearing, or Katniss, or Frankenstein's monster.

(Worth it, right?)

NOT ANY ISSUES. Actually, this is my main media concern, social and otherwise. I don't care what any people I DON'T KNOW think about any ISSUE. It's boring.

I once read (probably) that the reader is the product sold by the publication to the advertiser. Check that again. The READER is the PRODUCT SOLD BY the PUBLISHER TO the ADVERTISER. True. Also true for all televison, and quite certainly some movies and books. If that does not disembowel one's respect for content, nothing can. It's a frame as old as Latin: Cui bono? Who benefits?

When I was a kid, I loved magazines, started at 13 with Seventeen magazine, (I actually remember this cover), graduated to Vogue and the New York Times Sunday edition at 16. I have had to continually edit my collection of torn-out reference pages to bring it back to relevant and also to prevent drowning accidents. See comic below.

I've posted this brilliant Wondermark comic before, and I will help my children mutate to live as bibliophibians but not as ... uh ... magazinophibians ... journophibians ... cartophibians...I think you get my drift.

But for the past 10 years I have increasingly felt a gap in the area of my brain that used to derive pleasure from following fashion in magazines. I still love clothes - love designers - love buying clothes (and art) from artisans who are not only theorizing but touching and making the product with their own hands. But magazines...nada. A couple are OK–Lucky and LouLou come to mind–practically no stories, affordable realizable fashion, but they still have pages and pages and pages that are not interesting to me, like all that advertising which is really what pays the bills. The entry price of the magazine is to provide tangible proof to the advertiser that future consumers of their product will actually see the ad. And now even they can hardly give them away on paper. (I mean, a $3 subscription?)













That brings us to the solution: Pinterest. I follow both these magazines on Pinterest.

I sell Pinterest to all my friends as a magazine you curate yourself. Curation is the buzzword of culture these days, and here it is again. I find streams and content that sync well with my tastes and interests. It flows past easily, and in 2 seconds I can fish out content and place it an organizational structure that has meaning for me. (Funnily, tagging is not part of it. Pinterest is for visual people, not book people. Words are not important. Images must be repinned to appear in two places, advantage is not taken of the infinite ability of one image to appear via its tags in 20 categories – actually the board IS the tag.)

Pinterest has revitalized the fun of getting dressed in the morning, of shopping for white jeans, of checking thru my mother's jewellery box for vintage brooches. It makes it feel cool to support and celebrate a local designer with little media presence...without the time-wasting of pages full of ads, full of current-paradigm issues, full of commentary, full of images for the otherwise inclined.

Plus, it gave me the nerve to buy spray paint for some storage tins, and make a small macro photography studio, and find the right glues to properly repair things around the house, and make little presents with my kids by hand...

In addition (she lectures on and on) Pinterest is safe - populated mainly by non-predators (shall we say); the social contact is actually minimal as there is little or no chat space; the social and political content is negligable. I don't worry about my kids collecting pictures of hedgehogs, or dollhouses. They may run into the f-word or tatts or men's chests, but that's about the limit. We can talk about it. They won't be shocked.

Finally, there are some fun infographics about what good business it is to appear on Pinterest - more click-thrus to purchases than on any platform, more time spent per user, more actions per user etc and this compared to Tumblr (OK) Facebook (bleh!) and Twitter (bleh!), for example. It's the new asses-in-seats, and I recommend you get it while it's hot.

The marigold wonders nervously if she should include links to said infographics? They change all the time, and the summary is stated...

LibraryThing Early Review

Pazuzu's Girl
by Rachel Coles

Although the name is not catchy, this book definitely is! The story of a mortal-ish daughter of an ancient god has been done - think Neil Gaiman, think Rick Riordan - this was still original enough to read and enjoy, And...a character in the book is a D&D player who recognizes Pazuzu, (and the antagonist, Lamashtu, his "ex-wife") lifted into the book and into Dungeons and Dragons from ancient Assyrian and Babylonian mythology, so the title itself may actually attract some readers.

I found some of the writing quite awkward, and some of the exegeses into politics a little under-developed and unnecessary both, but I think it could be suitable for editing and publishing at a different quality. (I'm thinking of the Trylle trilogy by Amanda Hocking here.)

It also began to feel like a gaming environment, with the names and alternate names and overlaid histories, and world-wide geography. Having read and loved ReamDe by Neal Stephenson, I have a new appreciation for that part of culture, which is not my home, and I think the feeling of traveling there in this book was part of its appeal for me.

And although the title character is a teen-aged girl, and the book indicated as Young Adult, one of my categories of interest, there is really nothing that restricts this book to kid readers, which is another pleasure. YA literature is often so programmatic, trying to teach thru a fictional setting, hitting a matrix of Politically Correct qualities, and this book had none of that vibe.

Once again, the very convenience of having the e-book version on my phone was a pleasure, and the book kept me great company while I was spending a lot of time in waiting rooms without my own stuff. After the last couple of e-book duds, it was refreshing to find a little unexpected nugget of quality. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and looking at a phone full of writing and games, I chose to keep reading Pazuzu's Girl. There you go! Uptwinkles!

Book bonus feature: some cute attention to the world of butterflies, if you like that kind of thing.  Which I do. Needless to say. Then why am I saying it?

LibraryThing Early Review

Domina: Society's Ilk
by Edmund Alexander Sims



My trip through E-books has been like eating too many sugary snacks.

You never know where the thrill of the unexpected comes from: by definition you can't chase it, but sometimes you stumble across it. I have absolutely reveled in the frontier feeling of reading current e-books (by which I mean neither classics nor literary fiction in an e-version). It makes me feel like I am sharing in what must have been the thrill of the first Victorian pulp publishing, or the first detective pulp or the first of the sci-fi pulp. These are highly individual, unpolished, self-published (or nearly so) and cheap. Super fun. More exciting than roaming a bookstore or a library.

Additionally, you all know by now that I’d rather be offended, even by faulty or irregular grammar, than bored by mass-marketing.

However, with this book, I found myself scraping the bottom of the barrel. It was below even my accepting standards on all accounts. Silly, pretentious, unintelligible. Unreadable. Unfortunate evidence for the old saying: you get what you pay for. A free sample of a book that retails for $1.99. Never mind. Time to go on a diet.

The marigold wonders nervously if this is perhaps a diet tip that can be turned into a book. No?

LibraryThing Early Review

The Textile Planet
by Sue Lange




It took me a while to catch up with the process of reviewing an e-book. First I found it, in iTunes. Next item on the agenda was finding it and opening it on my iPhone. Then: reading it and reviewing it. I loved the idea and hoped it worked.

A friend finally tipped me off to the real advantage of reading an e-book on an iPhone: when you stop reading (and touching the screen to turn the pages) the book, which is the light by which you read the book, TURNS ITSELF OFF! Is this  not the ideal way to read in the middle of the night?

Once I got into it, I gave this book a try, and right away it showed itself to be a kind of new category: distaff-dystopian. Shall I create a new tag in LibraryThing?? Must rummage around for that.

In the end I found that this book gave me an insight into how short the curve is in e-book publishing. It was actually like reading a promising but unedited manuscript. Lange created a fully realized future universe, but the book needed a strong hand to rein it in a make it a complete winner.

For example, the narrative voice moved smoothly between an omniscient narrator and the stream-of-consciousness of the main character. It was interesting that way, and it worked well. except for the stumbles which could have been fixed. The F-word appeared in full several times but also as "what the eff?" but neither phase of the voice demanded a euphemism.

The characters were believable, but the dialogue was naturalistic to the point of sloppiness, ("Don't try that ol' guilt trick.") with slang of exactly TODAY ("You got the shaft, didn't you?") mixed with self-conscious futurisms ("It was a faster boat, one equipped with a turbo time driver...") Huh?

And there were other glaring anachronisms, as when a character preparing merchandise for inter-galactic shipping marks them with sticky notes and a sharpie–brand-names pin-point-able to our time–while the writer also made up future trade names and marked them with an ®, in itself something that seems like it might not last 100 years let alone 1,000.

I think what could have been useful would have been a rubric to govern future-speak in all its phases–narrative, descriptive and spoken. It would be such a fun project it is almost tempting to just do as an exercise. If only time permitted...

This did turn out to be a fun try at reading an e-book, and how better to enter the immediate future than with a science fiction work on a multi-purpose hand-held device?

The marigold is wondering nervously about "distaff-dystopian".  Am I overstating it as a category? Aside from this book I can only think of The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, yet it seems as though it should be valid as a tag. Are there others? No-one seems to be categorizing anything similar. Help!

Notes from Italy - Good and Bad - 2011

 Good - Food, of course! Burro di Bufala (butter made from buffalo milk [as in the mozzarella]) is awfully good. I think it might be a new product even here, as I have never noticed it in the stores here before. I had read about it in a magazine not long ago, and possibly it is available all over the world by now. It takes a lot to get me to pass up my beloved Burro Sorresino, which comes in an adorable old-fashioned yellow tin, but I had to try it, and it was worth it. Even the butter, on toast, has that slightly “farm-y” taste that I love in mozzarella di bufala. I am keen to try making a spaghetti alla carbonara with it. I love butter with the eggs and bacon of carbonara, even if olive oil might be more authentic.

I am always impressed with the care given to every part of food here. I live in a more northerly climate, in the middle of a big industrial city. Everything is grown elsewhere and shipped in, except for a very few precious items, which can be found in a very few precious restaurants. Food pleasure is available, and must be taken where you find it, but fresh and local, it mostly ain’t.  On the other hand, here everything is fresh and local, and that actually can be so extreme as to limit the menu. It makes me laugh (on the inside) when people are asked to describe what is served at a new restaurant in the area, because the local menu is already set. 

BUT, when you shop at your  little local grocery, the farmer picked the figs (ficchi bianchi - white figs in this case) this morning, and brought them in to his friend at the store (in a kind of gray market transaction). The shopkeeper asks if you are eating the melon right now, because she wants to sell you one that is PERFECTLY ripe right now. The different plums have different seasons a few weeks long and different names, and the nearby town of origin is indicated (or the province of Italy, if they happen to come from that far away – which is still only something like identifying peaches from Niagara in Toronto). The bread has to be eaten today, and all milk is only sold by the litre, and lasts only 3 or 4 days. That’s pretty fresh, and unpreserved.

Bad - Internet access. Will the torture never end???? Somehow trying to arrange for internet access showcases the worst of Italian organization. So much potential, so much openness to new technologies, so much bureaucratic bungling and delay. The past couple of years I have really been excited by the prospect of mobile internet access, and I even bought a device that not only receives a mobile internet signal, but broadcasts to its own little wireless network. Isn’t that awesome for a family of tech users – one little mobile key, powering the internet on a number of devices, and portable to boot? Last year we arrived in mid-July. By the time I purchased the device and tried my best to set it up, fruitlessly, it was already August, the Italian vacation period (yes – all of August) and no qualified help was available. I limped along, at least, with one wireless connection to my device. OK. This year we arrived good and early. I went in good and early to get help setting up the network. No problem. Bought a new sim card, loaded in unlimited data for 30 days. 36 beautiful hours of a mobile wireless network. Then…it died. And the bill had gone home to Canada, and there is no recourse. Now I am in the midst of trying transfer of the sim to my iPhone, in order to take advantage of the access I have paid for, but it does not seem to like it. Of course - the is phone locked! Should I try putting the sim in my old phone, in case unlocking an iPhone buggers it up for use when I return to Canada? Another visit to the stupid store, to figure it out; I almost can’t face it. Many of our favourite bars offer free wi-fi, but…access is complicated and many of the baristas don’t know how to sign you in, and…there are unexplainable periodic interruptions in service, and…we don’t usually go around with computers, for writing, but rather iPhones for jotting. However…

Good – Opportunity to read! I don’t know if it is the heat, or the freedom from the school schedule or the small town pace we are forced to adopt, or our lack of access to TV during all this spare time, but I feel such a sleepy torpor here (is that redundant?) that I spend a lot more time reading than I usually can. I find I am totally able to read whatever I want, no matter how challenging, or silly for that matter. Shout out to Gil here: I finally understand how to enjoy reading an e-book.

If you read an e-book in bed, when you are tired, and you stop touching the screen to turn pages because you are falling asleep, the BOOK SHUTS ITSELF AND TURNS OFF THE LIGHT, so you don’t have to! Oh yes! I had a some books that I was waiting to get at: a couple of LibraryThing early review titles, and I had bought an indie book from Amazon, on principle, from a girl who wanted to share her writing at the price of a tune on iTunes. You go girl! (This is a screen shot of Amanda Hocking's book on my phone.) And then the book turned out to be fun enough for summer reading, when I got around to reading it last week, that I went ahead and bought the 2^nd book of the trilogy. Then I uploaded a couple of sample books from my desktop into iTunes to sync over, and I plan to grab a couple of public domain classics if I can. Now all of you nay-sayers that say “Oh, it’s too small” and “I could never get used to it”: nonsense. Self-shutting-off-reading-light-and-book in one? Doesn’t get better than that at 2:00 a.m. (Said by a person who has always envied insomniacs their extra reading time.)

Bad – No bird watchers among our acquaintances. I think that Pesaro might be quite a diverse mini-eco-system? bio-zone? –sea and shore and rivers and hills, with quite a large nature park nearby. I feel that the birds have multiplied in number and kind over the years I have been coming, probably due to deliberate action to preserve the biosphere, and possibly by the dwindling of the fashion for hunting and eating them. I have a guidebook, but I find I like to look at a few guides to compare for identification purposes, and I can hear lots of birds that I can’t identify through a book. I need a knowledgeable person to tell me which bird makes that trill I am hearing and what bird makes that croak, and whether those large black-winged gulls that I see, which seem to really be northern birds, do in fact range down here now. On fish and shells, a lot of people are pretty good. Birds – still looking for someone.
(PS This is a Blue Tit, the local chickadee, and I have actually seen and identified one this summer, as I usually do. It is just that my list here is so short, darn it!)

Good – The local art shows look promising this year. I plan to attend an opening at the civic museum on Friday, and I have an acquaintance who told me about a small kind of private museum of works restored on behalf of the city by a local business association, and the "new art" museum in town, Centro Arti Visive Pescheria, which is the old (ancient) fish-market is closing a show of documentary photos (yawn) and opening something to do with Rossini that looks fun (yay!)

Bad – None of the music on offer looks like it will offer the thrill of the new that we have enjoyed other years. The Rossini Opera Festival seems to be scaling back (I imagine it’s all about the money). The ancient music series that we have loved in other years is all out of town, so less amenable to impulse. I might try to catch a performance of Rossini’s Petite Messe Solonelle, which is beautiful, and is usually offered several times by several different performance bodies. I've already missed one, but we’ll see,

Top Five Apps, with bonus features

I have more than 200 books in my house on my to-read pile. Thus, I often think about Winston Churchill talking about the pleasure of unread books, and I finally tracked down the quotation I had in mind, from his book Painting as a Pastime, which I guess I have to put on my to-read list (ie 100 or so more books not yet on my pile):

'What shall I do with all my books?' was the question, and the answer, 'Read them,' sobered the questioner. But if you cannot read them, at the very least handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open as they will. Read on from the first sentence that turns the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.


I especially love the idea: "Arrange them with your own plan...". Is your to-read pile arranged in some personal order? Mine is. It helps me to know where they are, if not what is in them. Churchill was a smart guy. How thrilling to have something in common with him.


I take the same attitude toward iPhone apps. I love scanning over what is available, following up tips from friends or magazine writers, tracing thoughts through to possible apps, and I love downloading them. I love the idea of having research tools available in my pocket when I might need them. I find it all to be a dream-library of potential.


So, when someone asks me what I recommend on an iPhone, I have many pages to scroll through. Finally,  after a couple of discussions with the iPhone users around me, I thought it would be fun to list my top five apps, and have them conveniently arranged to offer people who ask, so here's the list:

TOP FIVE APPS

#1 - Of course - Evernote - free

It holds all your information, and has a desktop and mobile version, and you can also access your information from anywhere via the Internet. It can store lists and text, but also photos and voice and best of all, if you have it on your desktop, under any print menu you can choose the option "save as pdf to Evernote". The pdf document will be OCR-searchable in Evernote, so you can find info in long documents by words that appear in them. Fantastically useful. (And, in fact, I will paste the Churchill quotation above into my "happiness" document on Evernote, so I can read it reassuringly to any other person who worries about buying books faster than they can be read.) PS Thanks K.




#2 - My favourite game - Rat on a Scooter XL (Donut Games) - The best $0.99 you will ever spend.











 It's a great way to kill a few minutes in a waiting room or a parked car. As addictive as they say it is. And I am not a gamer (in case you didn't know that). PS Thanks J.


#3 - Nike +iPod

Totally worth the price of the sensor in the shoe - links to music, history of runs or walks, gives distance and time elapsed, and calories burned AND Lance Armstrong calls you up to tell you when you've completed your personal best mile ever! Sort of.


#4  - The free Kindle Reader app

Possibly better on an iPad, but still, apart from the many free-content readers that help you pass time in an airport lounge while carrying only your phone, the idea of getting the content you want to read right now while you are waiting in an airport lounge while carrying only your phone is too compelling to resist.


 #5 - App Miner -  free

Searches through apps on a number of categories, in a slightly different way than the app store, but the best is it tells you apps that are on sale, for free or at a discount, and that lets you try things that you would never search for, or know about, or want to pay for to find out about, and it can lead you to other things that you then know about to search for, so it becomes like following your nose through a library.

ALSO RAN

LibraryThing Mobile -  Free, just like on-line - I can look up my library from a bookstore to see if I already own a book I find interesting. It happens a lot. Also good for giving an exact title and author recommendation to someone no matter where you are. Also good for tracking down a title or author you are trying to think of no matter where you are.

App Box Pro - $0.99 - full of little useful utilities that you would otherwise be downloading separately, and paying for separately, and cluttering up your menu with separately. Some that I have used on the fly: tip calculator, currency converter, level and ruler. They have just added a password keeper and I see it has a translator too, although I like specialty programs for that.

Yorkdale - free and I refer to it weekly. No more need be said.

24/7  - free - language tutors and my kids like them too.

Flood-It 2 - free - my favourite of the LAB PIXIES games (just for a break from Rat on a Scooter)

MOST INTERESTING POTENTIAL

Dragon - free - audio search/audio dictation

Ted - free - the Technology, Entertainment, Design video website, mobile version

Canon wireless printer app! Yes! Just bought one of the printers. Can't wait to print wirelessly from my iPhone and iPad.

MOST UNFULFILLED LONGING

Birding version of Shazam. Caveat: I have never yet managed to get Shazam to identify a song, so it might be the same bust for bird song. Plus I am been trying other ways around it - recording birds I hear to my phone - usually too far away to be captured by the mike. Now I have loaded my birding identification Cd's into my phone, so maybe I can go to my best guess in iTunes while in the field and see if it matches. Haven't had a a chance to test it yet. Still trying to decide on which (expensive) birding app to buy. Which provider? How big an area? All in one or multiple for different areas?

I have more than 10 pages of apps (that's a little over 150) but you don't need to know everything I have. Find your own. Make your own list. Send it to me.

The marigold does wonder nervously:
Am I really going to need 130,000 of the 148,000 available apps, as someone has estimated? How many are free? (I try to constrain myself to free, unless it is something of great importance to me. Otherwise, we'd only be eating macaroni at my house. Plain. Would that be good for the children?)

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.

Best List of Best Lists of Best Books, 2009

Phew! Not an easy title to understand.

I love the Powells' Books website. I not only subscribe to the newsletter, I actually read it quite faithfully. I also use it as a source for used text books or specialty books, because they have EVERYTHING and they ship cheaply.

The January 28, 2010 newsletter had their Staff Top 5 of 2009: nearly 40 staff members, from all over the organization, submitted their lists of best books published this year. I loved it because the lists are quirky and individual, not about marketing, but filled with only current books, which is one area where I am always a bit behind. (I would rather read books than book reviews, so the only thing I know about current books is what is displayed at the bookstores, but even then I don't know anything about those books.)

Somehow, if I could copy the entry into Evernote, so I could access it from my phone, it would be a guide to what to read out of what I see in the bookstore. (Here is what I did: I copied the link to the lists into my Evernote note on books to read. In any bookstore I can open my Evernote list and click the link and read the lists. Love Evernote. Link to site is under Fun, Cool, Funny in the sidebar.)

I keep a permanent link to the Powell's site in the sidebar under Reading Links, but I wanted to make special mention of the book lists. I love book lists and lists of book lists and I think this is the best of the best.

More on McCarthy

So...my friend is consuming All the Pretty Horses on audiobook. Sadly, it is not narrated by Cormac McCarthy, which would have actually induced me try another of his trilogy on audio after all. I wonder if he sounds like his laconic characters? However, it is actually narrated by Frank Muller who is an AUDIOBOOK STAR! Who knew there even was such a thing? Wikipedia says: "Muller won the 2003 Audie Award for Best Male Narrator for his reading of Elmore Leonard's Tishomingo Blues".

I guess he has a really "American" voice. And it does pique my interest in the audiobook star reader category. (OMG - what next?) The box is open for suggestions.

The marigold wonders nervously:
How can I be so late getting around to such an old technology? Does that mean I won't understand the iPad?