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The will to reconnect
Jan13
It doesn’t seem right to have the purchase of a new device be the reason for me to return to a long form blog post here on PIBC. I’d hoped it would be a return to art, music or poetry; still, an opportunity to share my thoughts about this needs to go beyond the restraints of micro blogging and, though long dormant, I still pay for this space.
Right before Christmas, my long suffering Blackberry Pearl 8120 went on a trip around the inside of an HE washer. Saturated and well spun, it took a few days for the moisture and confusion to begin departing the chassis. Like an elderly man, it recognized the media card, then didn’t, then did. It froze like a potted plant in Calgary. When it began to work again it would reboot in the middle of calls, the middle of words.
I spent more than a few years traveling the world with the spartan operating system, yanking out the battery on crashes and freezes, using other peoples workarounds in order to attempt to be real time with those on laptops and other devices. I can’t begin to tell you how amazed I was with the Blackberry push technology, the speed and reliability it had for email. I once found myself within a Roman Coliseum in Pula, Croatia in 2007, sending an email from my laptop and hearing the whoosh of the Apple Mail notification followed in one second by the vibration of my Blackberry. Think about the routing for a second; My laptop to the production office wifi to the local Croatian telco to the internet to Google in the states to Blackberry in Canada to Tmo to the cell provider in Pula to my Pearl in about one second. That’s insane.
The sad part began as the real time revolution began, some of us using Google Talk to follow our Twitter stream through a mysterious and legendary myth called “Track“. This would be May 2008 and I stood in Dublin, Ireland at the RDS Arena, an equestrian center used for concerts for many years. I put a few keywords into Track that day and watched in amazement as realtime tweets came out of the 20,000 people in front of me and into my phone. In experimenting with certain keywords in certain newscycles, I was able to crash my phone in some spectacular ways.
Well, now Track is just a story early adopters tell their grandchildren when they want them to fall asleep but it was a clear sign to me of how underpowered handheld devices were for the oncoming data stream. The Blackberry became clearly web challenged as the first iterations of the iPhone showed that the phone was (clearly) the least of its features. I, like many felt attached to the microscopic keyboard, the ability to have multiple conversations going on, IM, Text, Email, photos going out and coming in. I got to a point when I knew a crash was coming, a flash site locking the hourglass in an endless topple, the battery removal and reinsertion just another keystroke, doing it all without looking, the reboot period just a commercial break of sorts.
As contrarian as I was about the iPhone not being what I needed or wanted and ATT being what it is, I bought an iPod Touch last year for a two fold reason. First, I was going to use it as a Skype phone around the Pacific Rim (I did and it was quite able) and also so that I wouldn’t be totally ignorant of the OS experience. It’s a great media player, logical, small and reliable. The App aspect was slow to become as important but it was rather remarkable to have the mobile experience of getting the software you need when you needed it.
Oddly, I ended up using the Blackberry on my Pacific trip for 2 things and one was remarkable and the other, expensive. The Wifi/UMA section of the Pearl made it possible to turn off the cell broadcast antenna, hit free wifi on the streets in Australia and Japan and make all the free international calls I wanted. Find a McDonalds, stand outside, join the hotspot, wait for the red UMA indicator and dial away. The other was the casual data access I made in Australia over the cell system, which for YEARS in Europe never got metered or billed and created a wallet breaking roaming charge I’d never incurred before. Expensive lesson.
So here I am a week into my Android experience, comparing it to my BB experience (the Jensen Interceptor of the internet, minus the speed) and to my Apple knowledge (not a deity, not a demon, just a really well crafted only show in town). In my industry, we deal with multiple operating systems from many vendors. We have some standards like MIDI and some formats that became prevalent so that the competition would include it just in order to be used. The real parallel is to the digital rack gear of the 80′s and 90′s, when companies like Roland, Yamaha, Korg and Lexicon had very clear ideas of how you were to navigate through the endless pages of parameters with a 2 line LED screen and a scroll wheel and “enter” button.
It wasn’t unusual to work for people who stayed with one kind of gear because trying to figure out the OS was just such a waste of time. The use of the Atari ST computer along with the early Macs began to bring a more uniform GUI experience to musical gear. As music software for sequencing, programming and recording evolved, the Mac desktop became the palette that many techs and musicians became comfortable with (to be fair, some of the best keyboard techs I know were multi-platform and did a great deal of work on Windows, due to the huge market share they held in those days).
I mention this because there were moments back then when you had a moment of “oh, so THAT was what the programmer was thinking when he did it this way” when you went from a Yamaha piece to a Roland piece. I’ve had a few of those with the Nexus One and the Android platform.
There were early moments when the lack of uniformity and shortcuts built into the desktop, the browser and a few of the apps began to sour me from the N1 as I compared it to the soft key dance of the iPhone/iPod.
“Why move the clutch and the brake? I’ve always driven this way…”
In Formula One auto racing, the controlling of gear shifts have gone from the old school 3 pedal manual H pattern experience, to semi-automatic, sequential shifting to hand controller, computer clutching gear selection. The steering wheels on these cars are more like high end game controllers…
(take a look at this explanation…)
understanding_formula_one_2008_steering_wheel
than what they were before…
A back button that can get you out of any path a step at a time is not a bad thing. You want to bail out, the home window button is always there. Having a dedicated menu button work on all areas is helpful and educational too. The trackball, though I’ve been using them for 20 years, is a little bit lost on this device but provides a 3D message indicator to see across the room.
I was really bugged by some of Google’s lack of widgets for the services I use. Then I realized that they use the browser as the engine for many things. Bookmark the mobile version of Google Reader for instance, put a shortcut on the desktop and you’re golden. No memory for a widget, nothing to load. It already lives on the cloud.
Google Voice has been mentioned as being the big draw here and I will not be a detractor. Being able to funnel your voicemail, texts and numbers into the Google eco-system for someone who travels as much as I do is a big winner. I’ve gone weeks without checking my voicemail overseas because I was afraid I’d lose my house for roaming charges. It’s a non-issue now as long as I have an internet connection at work or the hotel. Also in the very loud environment I exist in, seeing Google’s best guess at the transcription of the voicemail is very handy; you could put my phone through a Marshall amp an I’d still not get the message. Now I can…and the spamku errors of the lightly grayed guesses are very entertaining.
It’s interesting to see how Google’s apps differ from Loic’s or Amazons, let alone the developers who are giving it their best shot. There are those that are missing entirely at this point, Buddyfeed, Kindle, Tweetie and the like. With an increased user pool, developers will make it happen and Google will tweak more sugar in and out of their pastry named systems.
A few apps have been crashy like Ustream but for a person who carried a Crashberry for many years, it’s unreal to have gone a week without pulling the battery… though I could if I wanted to or needed to. I can also carry a second one for heavy data flow days…sorry.
I am a little disappointed that no accessories were ready when they released it; skins, spare batteries, chargers, cradles, etc.
I am enjoying having a high powered mobile device that does nearly everything I need it to. I’m about to give it a partial test by leaving the country and shifting to primarily wifi for a few weeks. I’ll let you know how that goes.
I have read many accounts of musicians and non-musicians over the years of the moment when their paradigm was shifted, their mind blown, the door opened by hear a particular song or artist. Some of these are typical while others are more obscure. The Beatles, Coltrane, Hank Williams, Miles Davis, Hendrix… they all end up being mentioned a lot. I was raised in a drummer’s home and actually went to school to be a drummer; you’d think that the person who did it for me would be one.
Actually, I have to admit the person who did it for me was Jeff Beck.
In 1976 I was listening to either WCCC or WHCN out of Hartford, CT, the two rock stations we could pick up in Western Mass. They played classic rock and as it was in those days, the formats were a lot looser…as were the DJ’s and the program directors. They would on Sunday mornings play 4 blocks of a half hour between 10am and noon of an artist, uninterrupted. Sure, it might be Lynyrd Skynrd or Led Zep but sometimes it was something new, different and really good. I was exposed to NRBQ, Nils Lofgren, Chick Corea (with Steve Gadd no less!) and other acts you will never hear on American commercial terrestrial radio again.
I can’t remember the song that was first but I would have to bet it was “Blue Wind”, the duel between Jeff Beck and Jan Hammer. These guys were fierce, loud and apparently from another planet. It was actually in rotation, a guitar instrumental with trading solos, Jan’s jagged yet perfect drumming, outer space synths and that guitar, that guitar that didn’t sound like any other. I bought “Wired” probably at White Knight Records in Great Barrington and brought it home.
The songs and performances of that album are part of my DNA. The liner notes, the photos, the Epic logo… they all are as fresh now as they were then, my comprehension a little better now of the technical aspect of it but the visceral, emotional, primal connection was there from the get go. This guy had attitude, attack, delicacy and recklessness in spades. The album “Jeff Beck Live with the Jan Hammer Group” came next and might have come off my turntable once or twice in the next 2 years. I actually wore that one out and bought a second. His breaking into “Train Kept a Rollin’” in “Blue Wind” was so fucking gnarly I want to play it for every young guitar player who thinks he’s a bad ass to show him what a Strat can do.
I was lucky enough to see him the first time on the “There and Back” tour in 1980 at the Curry-Hicks Cage/ University of Mass in Amherst. That album and particular quartet was a pretty serious extension of the direction that “Wired” and “Blow by Blow” started, maybe a bit more slick but still a sight to see. The Cage was an old hockey rink which the local fire marshals didn’t allow smoking in probably due to its flammable appearance. They had college ushers running around with little sand buckets grabbing cigarettes and joints away from the crowd. The thoroughly mundane Michael Stanley Band opened and then there was a lengthy delay until Beck hit the stage. I know it was long because they played 3 entire albums before the lights went down and, despite my ingestion of pollutants, I remember all of them: Little Feat “Down on the Farm”, UK’s debut album and their second, “Danger Money” (funny what we remember and forget, isn’t it?)
The lights went down and out they came. I was already a huge fan of the drummer Simon Phillips and have continued to be intrigued by Beck’s relationship to drummers. They seem to fuel his fire and the good ones send him into the upper atmosphere. It was loud. Anyone who has seen Jeff play know that his presence is a combination of limitless swagger and indifference, so many of the licks and moves he created, if not modified for his generation and beyond. The term “Reckless Precision” I first heard as an album title for Tuck Andress but it sums up Jeff’s approach sometimes. He’s not infallible or perfect, he reaches, he pushes his guitar to the limit and coaxes and thrashes the most delicate notes and the most obscene wails and crashes out of it.
What would be considered a show off move ends up being the perfect punctuation for a phrase, like finishing the line on “Freeway Jam” by bouncing the butt of his Strat off the floor for a tone like a 4 car pileup. He also knows as many ways to bend a note as anyone I’ve ever seen, between his mastery of the whammy bar, using his palm to move the floating bridge, his able fingers, the slide or inverting the guitar, sticking the headstock into the floor and leaning into it (don’t try this at home!!!).
In the hour and a half he played that night he did it all. But the funny thing is this memory from 29 years ago was nearly 20 years into his career and kids, he ain’t done yet.
As the music business began to bloat and then whither, Epic would release a record every now and then, a strange anomaly akin to the old roster at Warner Brothers, when Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker kept prestige creative acts on their roster despite their limited sales. Jeff’s album “Flash” was an attempt to commercialize him in an era of MTV, while he made appearances with Tina Turner and Rod Stewart, produced by Arthur Baker. It didn’t really appeal to either side of the fans, the fusion nuts or the music video pariahs. It still had glimmers of his fire, though heavily coated in 80’s dreck.
When “Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop” came out, all was then well with the world. A trio album with drummer Terry Bozzio and keyboard player Tony Hymas, it left the space that his guitar needed to breathe, twist and burn. The monster riffs of “Big Block” still kick the ass of anyone in its way. The real find was a track called “Where Were You”, his take on a melody he became infatuated with after hearing the Bulgarian Woman’s Choir Le Mystere des voix Bulgares. The most vocal of his performances, the trem bar that is so overused and dive bombed by others becomes the breath and pain of his ethereal voice. For guitar players, it’s a master lesson in the virtually impossible. He was still showing the youngins who was boss if they had the brains or the balls to listen. The tour with the bass-less trio was a double bill with Stevie Ray Vaughan, a classic pairing that I sadly missed in LA as it was the only day in 3 months I had a gig.
They say if you want to get Jeff to walk away from a conversation, start talking about guitars. If you want to get his attention, bring him a part from a 1932 Ford. He loves cars, old hot rods, working on them and getting his hands dirty. He has nearly damaged those amazing hands doing it and to me, it would be a tragedy except he would have been doing what he truly loves when he’s not onstage.
He has taken his interest in electronica and made some records which sound modern and purely Jeff at the same time. He has been touring a bit more often and has had some rather amazing band line ups from a musician standpoint, people like Jennifer Batten, Pino Palladino and Vinnie Colaiuta have had the chance to tour with him. His current band is remarkable, with Vinnie, the young Australian female bassist Tal Wilkenfeld and Jason Rebello. A recording taken from a week of shows in London has been released called “performing this week…live at Ronnie Scott’s” which shows he has just gotten better and better. There is now also a DVD from the same club run which includes some guests like Eric Clapton, Joss Stone and Imogen Heap. The real attraction here is getting to see what Jeff can do with the guitar, stuff that mere mortals can attempt to do but never will flow like the beautiful liquid fire that seems to emit from his fingertips.
I highly recommend either or both of these documents to musician or just plain listener alike. If you don’t like instrumental music or “jazz-rock fusion”, don’t let it stop you. There is something for everyone… unless you don’t like electric guitar. And in that case… there’s nothing I can do for you.
On the weekend of April 4th, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, OH. A ceremony of presentations and performances occurred that night and was broadcast live on Fuse TV. I was fortunate enough to be there for the rehearsals and the event. It was amazing to see my employers inducted and to be a part of the show, but to me, being able to watch and listen to Jeff that close was one of the highlights of my career. If any guitar player besides Hendrix ever deserved to be in the Hall of Fame, it would be Jeff Beck. And now it’s official.
But we already knew that.
The Energy of Community
Aug08
There has been an ongoing conversation the past few days over at Newsgang Live, a conference call/podcast that I sometimes participate in. I suspect it’s actually been going on since it’s inception earlier this year. When Steve Gillmor opened the doors to people outside the Gang (well, Calacanis did, but Steve always could have flipped the switch), this somewhat open source roundtable began to find its feet behind the Democratic primaries and Twitter. I have participated as my schedule allows and also done my best to listen whenever I can; I miss a few either way.
This group has begun to develop a voice of its own, distinct personalities and interest points that usually start around political news and end up either at an unexpected vista or in the weeds. The risk you take with an amorphous group and no clear format or topic is the chance for either the freedom to go wherever the group needs to go or total anarchy. Steve is good with making sure that his opinion is heard; some will use this as a starting off point or react to it like a magnet pole charged oppositely, compelled to go directly away from the point of contact.
Recently Steve has left the group to its own device, chiming in when either the ship starts taking water or lifting into the sky. The effect here has been both chaotic and strangely stimulating, others having to assume roles they either haven’t had to or didn’t want to. For the most part, everyone wants to talk about what they personally want to talk about. The political types are up on the latest news and angles; the tech types are watching the flow and looking for workarounds. The interesting part to me is those who are attracted to the intersection points, who, like Steve, see it all as one big organic organism that may be too big for anyone of us to see the connections or perhaps too simple for those of us who tend to complicate every equation.
I often expound my thoughts on how groups and group energy can be focused or wasted depending on either the effort or mutual release of control by the group. I work in a business where I see crowd control and crowd manipulation on a grand scale. The efforts to control a crowd for safety or efficiency often look futile; when the kids are released from the ticket line in order and told to walk orderly to the pit, they often ignore the security and each other, running with total abandon to secure the spot they want, that they feel they are entitled to, that they feel is threatened by the person behind them, often putting themselves in harms path. The container fills much like a bathtub, the low points filling first and leveling off as physics allows. In the time before the show, the crowd amuses itself with games, including chants, cheers and doing “the wave”, all requiring the ability to interact with others.
The next example is a little different. A good performer with charisma can make a crowd do things with a simple hand gesture, a funny look, an outrageous action. More often it is with words or a melody that the most powerful effect is reached, often songs that a group as a whole knows very well and has an emotional attachment to. The group moves as a single organism, sings together as a single voice, maybe not at pitch but remarkably close to either what their brain remembers from a recording or the reference of the sound coming from the speakers.
(from Wikionary)
- energy (plural energies)
- The impetus behind all motion and all activity.
- The capacity to do work.
- (physics) A quantity that denotes the ability to do work and is measured in a unit dimensioned in mass × distance²/time² (ML²/T²) or the equivalent.
What I now offer is a theory I have been playing with for a while to try to explain my own personal energy experience with work. Certain people have the ability to take groups and get them to direct their energy towards them in order to perform at a higher level. This is true with a good team leader or performer. With certain performers I find that I am twice as tired because they require intense focus from every one of us. When energy is processed properly, it can be a positive but draining experience. Sometimes if you don’t stay centered and allow the exhaust of the energy burning process to be removed, it can be toxic. Ask a massage therapist who does a poor job of releasing the tension they removed from a client.
The audience also feeds the performer. A better audience often inspires (fuels) a better performance. The energy fed to the performer is focused and redistributed to the crowd. The artist can either hog the energy or be free with it, making the experience more intense for the audience.
OK, where does this intersect with a podcast and micro communities?
(from Wikionary)
community
- Group of people sharing a common understanding who reveal themselves by using the same language, manners, tradition and law. (see civilization).
- Commune or residential/religious collective.
- The condition of having certain attitudes and interests in common.
- (Ecology) A group of interdependent organisms inhabiting the same region and interacting with each other.
I have personally experienced similar energy transmission within the web community. It may have not been as physical but was certainly just as visceral.
(from Wikionary)
visceral
- Having to do with the response of the body as opposed to the intellect, as in the distinction between thinking and feeling. Often described as intuition; cf. gut feeling, gut reaction.
The people I have met with my connection to Newsgang Live are certainly intelligent and passionate about their interests. While some people become charged over elections, they are not all interested in the details. The same with Twitter and “social media”; I constantly get the dog-watching-a-card-trick face from very engaged and smart people. I know that among us are ADD, OCD and ADHD types who latch onto things hard or just to any bright shiny thing that catches the sun. Perhaps I’ve lived in a tour bus too long or in a city without many friends, but the community I’ve fallen into there is both stimulating and confounding.
Of all the people involved I’ve only met Steve and Tina; that was short and rushed in a work situation but you get a great sense of so much more from a face to face. That said, those I have not met, I still have a visceral connection to, the way we tumble the rocks put before us and find gems that pave the way forward. We are learning to listen as well as trying to clearly express the merging ideas in our heads. We get sidetracked but we seem to keep moving, perhaps some days away from where we’re headed, perhaps in circles, but we are moving.
I again wonder if we need to stand still and listen for answers, the difference between prayer and meditation, the act of group listening an action, not a defeat in a race to be heard or get the perfect spot on the barricade. This is not submission, it is surrender, an action, a choice to no longer fight the traffic and allow the chaff to fall around us, exposing what we’re looking for. Our actions will resume soon enough if I am right about the people involved but these moments of quiet are not only good but mandatory for me. We’ll find the words, the vocabulary, the questions and the answers…
(from Wikionary)
community
- Group of people sharing a common understanding who reveal themselves by using the same language, manners, tradition and law. (see civilization).
- Commune or residential/religious collective.
- The condition of having certain attitudes and interests in common.
- (Ecology) A group of interdependent organisms inhabiting the same region and interacting with each other.
from Gizmodo:
Kyocera KR1 EVDO Portable Router.
A few people I know swear by the new EVDO connection; could this be a way to get around some of these $1000 a day centers that don't want us broadcasting wifi to the touring party?
I have often linked to stories and videos from the blog Crooks and Liars;
it is a wonderful combination of political news from a liberal angle, often with links to great video clips. Sometimes they show the absurd things the politicos say and their Late Night Music Club with some pretty wonderful music video clips keeps the aggregators clicking through the weekend when the DC insiders sneak away for ilicit fun.
The one thing I didn't put together was the fact that one of my favorite sections on the site is Mike's Blog Round Up is done by Mike Finnegan, one of the true masters of the Hammond B3 organ and without a doubt, one of the good guys. You may have seen him play with CSN, among others over the years. We've been on the same gigs a few times and have a mutual friend or two, but to find out that he puts in as much time on the blog as he does was really cool.
Today, he was kind enough to link to Bitterman and say some nice things. I am honored and am glad to return the point… if you don't read C&L, check it out, it's been a good place for Jon Stewart clips, the amazing Jake Shimabukuro video and had a great Wes Montgomery clip the other day…
It sure makes me want to work harder for y'all and dig up more content… it is coming…
