Ancient Geek Joke Unearthed

Found this while researching an article I'm trying to churn out today. Gave me a chuckle:

What were HAL's first words?

"Good morning, doctors. I have taken the liberty of removing Windows 95 from my hard drive."

(per Arthur C. Clarke, via an Irish programmer living in Paris)

Oh No I Discovered YouTube

Trying to find the Kevin Federline video, didn't succeed. Haven't watched Lonelygirl episodes yet (got to get back to singing, just taking a leetle break) but did manage to see this pretty funny parody of Beyonce's Crazy in Love. They filmed this in their house and side yard, which is the joke here. Turns out the girl who does these video parodies is Bre, an 18-year-old Nigerian American college student who lives in Texas (self-described "Performer / Aspiring Media Designer & Cosmetologist"). Yep, found that out from her MySpace page. OK, back to work. Hope the neighbors won't mind.

Gifted Adults?

Very interesting post by novelist/journalist/musician/runner/mother Alisa Valdez Rodriguez. I sympathize with the feeling of not fitting in, though I'm not sure I'd make the same diagnosis--for myself, anyway. I always assume everyone feels out of step with the world in one way or another. However, I think she's suffered an onslaught of Internet negativity due to her position on Castro, which diverges from the usual Cuban exile mentality. One thing I do agree with is her assessment of her young son as gifted. He sounds amazingly intellectually advanced. Here's a snippet (about her, not her son):

After I left the LA Times six years ago - and wrote a long, private resignation letter that certain people (journalists of modest intellect, generally) still like to bring up - I did not understand exactly why I was SO out of step in the workplace and world.

Now, thanks to the wonderful, difficult journey I've undertaken in the effort to understand my son, I know *why* I am perceived as crazy by certain people: I am a gifted adult.

Let me say first that I wish they'd come up with another name for high cognitive ability. "Gifted" has the wrong connotations. It implies ease, joy, blessings, snobbish superiority. In fact, giftedness is a real condition - as real as it's opposite, mental retardation - wrought with a host of issues that make life tricky for most gifted people, myself included. The difficulties lie primarily in the inability to fit in, and in the repulsion those who are unable to comprehend what we are saying seem to have for us and our notoriously open methods of expressing ourselves.

Evidence-Based Management, Shmevidence Shmased Shmanagement

During the decade I spent toiling in the land of Dilbert, I used to muse about how to evaluate employees--and how to be evaluated. To my dismay, results rarely seemed to be rewarded by promotion and acclaim. Getting shit done certainly helped you rise up initially, but staying afloat depended on how hard you played the office game. When I was laid off and sent to a retraining program to learn how to get another job, a test revealed that I lacked the gene required for making inane decisions rapidly. While I harbor no executive ambitions, it had never occurred to me that key to becoming an executive, according to this diagnostic tool, was the ability to quickly choose a crappy course of action and cling to it. Analysis paralysis was bad, I was always the first to agree, but I had thought leaping without looking was bad too. Not so, experts have found.

My point? Read this article by Jane Smiley (I think my dad sent it to me, thanks), "The CEO President."

Runner's World Turns 40

The 40th anniversary issue of Runner's World is really well executed. Reminded me of when we put together our 20th anniversary issue of my old magazine. But they have a nice metaphor to take advantage of, with masters' running starting at age 40, so they profiled a bunch of record-holding oldsters, from 41 years old to late 80s. One of them is a jazz trumpeter/marathoner who's played with Stevie Wonder and many other greats.

As I looked at the picture of one woman who appeared in her 60s, tanned and fit in shorts, a "fitter over 50" T-shirt and a neat cap of silver hair, I was thinking her skin looked like it had suffered from sun overexposure. Then I read the caption and find out she's in her 80s! Amazing. Exercise is the fountain of youth. She said a kid wrote to her, "I hope you keep running until you bite the dust!" And that's what she intends to do.

Look at the Size of This Guy!

He's 4 months old, 16 lbs. or so. Actually smaller than his big bro was. So funny how they flesh out. As I commented to a friend, babyhood is the only time in your life when cellulite on your thighs is adorable.

Losing--and Finding--The Artist's Way

There are so many things I think about posting but there is too much to do and think these days--even though I might have enough time to write if I didn't waste it here and there, I also am trying desperately to focus on my upcoming CD project (and write several freelance articles to keep the lights on). One way I waste time is by reading. Not good reading. Compulsive reading of nonessential information (magazines, Internet, newspapers). One person who has identified reading as a potential problem for artists is Julia Cameron, in her magnificent book, The Artist's Way.

In 2000, when I had my first son, I read through the book on my producer/songwriting teacher's recommendation. I dutifully performed the exercises. And much of my subsequent success creatively (through action, education, courage and vision) is due to that book. If you don't know what you want, if you are afraid of what people think, if critics have wounded you, if you're hobbled by jealousy, if you don't know how to improve, if you think you're too old to live your dream, if you hide your light under a bushel, if you waste your creative energies by processing all the words and data the world throws at you--you need to read The Artist's Way. It is sad that people believe "those who can, do; those who can't, teach," when in fact, teaching is an art. Perhaps we don't appreciate teachers because so few virtuosos exist. Nonetheless, Cameron's lovely, clear prose and well designed structure are considered by many to be her masterpiece, even though she, too, would prefer to focus on the "true" art she writes in the form of screenplays, poems, novels and songs. Perhaps too many multi-step self-help tomes are out there, inviting comparison. Trust me, this is a great book. I have thanked Wayne many times for telling his students to read it.

Interestingly, Cameron's own life has continued to churn with drama, even post-Way. According to Los Angeles Times coverage of her recently published memoir, mania and depression have plagued her:

Until now, this tentativeness has been kept secret from her followers, the struggling professional actors and writers of L.A., New York and Chicago and the dreamers everywhere else. In the book, Cameron characterizes that decision as one of survival. She had work to do and seminars to teach. And remarkably, it got done despite the breakdowns.

The first big one came in the mid-1990s just as she became known as a recovery guru, after the end of her second marriage to Mark Bryan, her inspiration for writing "The Artist's Way."

"Cast as a 'spiritual teacher' and desperate for answers myself in the wake of the loss of Mark, I embarked on a series of ill-considered fasts," she writes of that time. " I went as long as a week or ten days without solid food. I went for very long walks praying with every footfall. Although I didn't see it at the time, mine was a punishing" regimen.

This search eventually led her to London, where she began writing her first musical, this one about Merlin. Things soon started unraveling.

Cameron stopped wearing her glasses and contacts, because "with nothing and no one to care for, who needed to see clearly?" She did yoga obsessively. She succumbed to delusions so intense that during one of her aimless walks in Regent's Park, she wrote, she became the victim of a "very gentle rape." Later that day after Bryan reported the incident, the London police arrived at her door, took one look at her "giant bird's nest" of an apartment and led her off to a mental hospital. She was diagnosed as manic depressive, which American doctors later said was wrong. Cameron still hasn't gotten a new diagnosis.

Provided she isn't making it all up (as today's memoirists are wont to do), it appears that Cameron's life path holds more artistic promise than her inventions. Not that that's a bad thing. Think of David Sedaris and his parents and siblings, who (according to him) live screwy lives that he chisels into absorbing vignettes. Few can get away with this device, granted. But no one achieves artistic success without discipline--the Way.

Is Free Tablature Illegal?

According to today's New York Times, music publishers are suing free guitar tablature websites for violating the copyrights of their guitar tab books and songbooks.

"Jacqueline C. Charlesworth, senior vice president and general counsel of the National Music Publishers’ Association, would not comment on the legality of specific sites, including Ultimate-Guitar, but she said she had seen no international licensing agreements that might make free United States distribution of guitar tablature legal."

This is ridiculous. As copyright law currently stands, lyrics and melodies are protected intellectual property. Thus, sheet music or lead sheets cannot be freely duplicated without obtaining the rights to do so from the publisher (be it a company or an individual). However, chord changes are not protected. Some have argued, conspiratorially speaking, that the fact that grooves, beats, chord changes and bass lines are not protected by copyright has discriminated against African American musicians who came up with them, while songwriters and lyricists have earned well from their stake in the works. There's some truth to that--honestly, many of today's hits are more a function of the overall groove than the melody or lyric. However, that also discredits the legions of black composers who have published their songs. The implication is that music's intellectual property is disproportionately owned by corporate interests and European American writers. Well, that may be true, but in any case, I don't think it's relevant to this argument.

On the other hand, the harmonic structures of popular music are quite universal, so determining who first came up with a chord sequence derived from, say, the blues, would be difficult if not impossible.

Tablature is just a form of chord chart. The versions that are out there, mostly submitted by individuals, are of widely varying quality. Speaking as a musician, however, it's often quite useful to see lyrics and tablature online, especially for songs that are out of print or foreign. I still own shelves and shelves of music books, and often will invest in sheet music (purchased online or from a book store) once I've found something I like online. This seems like yet another desperate grab for cash from corporations dismayed by the democratization of information online.

George Graham's Music Industry Outlook

Just found this interesting article by producer/radio show host George Graham about the overuse of compression and lack of dynamic range on modern CDs. I also really liked his review of the Ditty Bops--apparently, their shows include theatrical details (puppets, costumes) and their U.S. promotional tour is via bicycle (gear travels separately in a biodiesel vehicle). I want to tour by bicycle! Finally, he has an excellent 2005 year-in-review piece about the state of the music industry (growth of the indies and decline of the major labels; genre-specific analysis; the iPod effect; satellite radio and competing formats). Here's an excerpt:

"...seemingly lost in all of this business reporting of sales figures, is the music. The fact is, major labels are releasing bad music. I've said this before, but it bears repeating. In the glory days of the 1960s and early 1970s, the record labels were essentially run by the generation of people who founded them, and they were first and foremost music fans themselves. They were willing to risk a loss on the debut album of a promising artist they believed in, and there was a lot less concern about quarterly profit/loss reports for Wall Street investors. Now, with most of the label part of conglomerates, whose every move is studied by Wall Street, the people now running the labels live in fear of each quarterly report, so there is a great unwillingness to risk money on a new artist if that artist does not score a huge, instant hit debut album. Bob Dylan, Bruce Stringsteen, U2 and so many other major artists of today would never had a chance to make a second album under the current way of doing business. So, they sign and release artists who either sound almost exactly like one who did have a hit, or have connections to a hit artist. Innovation has largely disappeared from the major labels.

...the independent, or "indy" scene is where music is happening. Such releases get almost no play on the corporate commercial media, but it's been a very good year for a wide variety of music, released by small independent often ad-hoc record labels, and frequently by the artists themselves, who are able to sell their CDs directly, often through websites, and earn a lot more money per CD than they ever would on one of the major labels. And in contrast to the seeming implosion of the major label scene, the number of independent releases had never been greater.

...the concert business was not as kind to up-and-coming artists, with promoters booking fewer such shows. I think that says something rather unhealthy about the concert business.

...this may be a byproduct of the commercial media's star obsession. That of course, extends to commercial radio. With so few large companies owning most of the commercial stations in the country, openness to new music is probably at an all time low."

Heike and Vince: Best Wedding Ever!!

At their finest, weddings are a moment for everyone to feel the magic of love and the gravity of commitment. And then, at their best, weddings are a moment of pure joyful celebration.

Yesterday afternoon we all went to Vince's wedding. He's a giant teddy bear, my former duo collaborator, a guitarist and songwriter; he not only played a very important role in getting me to perform my own songs, we also wrote a few together. He's also one of my few friends who has spent some signficant time with my husband, even though it was in Cuba and the two were drunk off their asses and it really pissed me off at the time. [Oops, broke the mood. But it goes to show that things that really upset you fade and can even turn from bad to good over the years.*] His bride, Heike, is a willowy German dancer/percussionist/schoolteacher. The two have been traveling and hiking and going to music and dance camps together for a few years, and are a wonderful match for each other.

The wedding was huge. I'm bad at guessing numbers, but let's say 80 people? Maybe it was less than that. It was in a meadow in Berkeley's Tilden park, and there was volleyball, eating and rumba before the ceremony. Then we all stood in a massive circle, holding hands. Drummers sat in the middle (two of them were John Santos and Carolyn Brandy). The officiant had a perfect mix of formality, inspiration and humor--perhaps I'm prejudiced because at the beginning he had Emilio bring the baby into the middle of the circle, saying "Have you all seen this beautiful baby? Look at his face." There were poems, a dance/song to Yemaya with all the children, and then Heike read her vows to Vince. He, in turn, sang her a song he wrote. It was lovely and moving, though he was emotional so the song took a while to wind up. He stopped and said, "There's another verse," and everyone laughed, but stood in damp-eyed indulgence as he continued.

When the ceremony was over, the dance began. Emilio and I got to dance, and I got to see many friends, including several who went to Cuba with us. I also kicked the soccer ball around with Wayne (he was actually a semipro player back in the 70s). Then, after the latin band had finished a Brazilian bateria formed and we started to samba. Here's the best part: Vince was soaring, just radiating happiness, and he went and grabbed my five-year-old and took him on the dance floor. At first Sebastian went limp, but then he started to dance, and he and I danced the entire Brazilian set, including a conga line. I kept on looking at Emilio, who was holding baby, and pointing at Sebastian and Emilio would give me the thumb's up. My son's first samba! He was a natural, as we knew he would be. When the dancing was over, he said "Wow Mommy, that was so cool!" and gave me a high five. This summer I've sung at a few weddings but this was by far the best (to be fair, I didn't know the other people--and I didn't sing for Heike and Vince. I suppose that's my only regret.).

May they live long and party hearty. And multiply.

*One key to a long marriage is remembering the good and forgetting the bad. Thus, "irresponsible drinking spree in communist country" becomes "male bonding ritual that integrates personal and musical lives." I'm sure there are plenty of equivalents from my husband's perspective--but it's my blog, after all.