Since I work in a Windows environment now, and I'm copying and pasting all day, my brain's map of the keyboard shortcuts is messed up when I get home to my iMac. I use ctrl-c and ctrl-v for about eight hours a day and it's bizarre how quickly my fingers forget to use cmd-c and cmd-v at home on the Mac. Argh. 

So I'm a bit of a West Wing junkie. At least I don't watch The OC. I didn't watch Dallas or Falcon Crest or Beverly Hill 90210 either. My tastes are more elevated, you see (yeah right). Anyway, this season The West Wing is dedicated to the "upcoming" presidential election and it's one of the better seasons I've seen. I remember reading some interview some time ago where Martin Sheen or Aaron Sorkin was talking about how the original idea for the show aimed to focus almost exclusively on the White House staff, with the President (i.e., Sheen) only appearing very infrequently. Of course, Sheen's popularity basically changed all that and the President has been a major character in the show. This season, though, the focus seems to have returned to the staff as they've split into competing presidential campaigns. As such, the focus of the show has moved away from the usual importance of the President and various crises of global significance. Also, Alan Alda's role as a Republican candidate is getting a lot of screen time. Combined with what I feel to be the show's usual sharp writing (though the constant wittiness and repartee can get overbearing at times), it's made for an entertaining season so far.

Which brings me to my flight of fancy. If the "current" President is nearing the end of his term, and the show is focusing on the next President, what would it be like to have a Republican-centered West Wing? I have no doubt that the show currently does well with viewers like myself who lean toward the same beliefs and ideas fought for by the current incarnation of the show. But, Alda's Republican character, Arnold Vinick, is made out to be one of those McCain-like "mavericks" who apparently appeals across party lines somewhat. In short, he's not the typical scary vulture Republican the show usually features. Vinick is the Republican nominee, but we're also told the Dems don't have anyone to really stop him. The "election" is going to be close, to be sure, but what if the writers let Vinick win? Because he's a maverick who shares some of the same views as some of the Dems in the show, it's not as though a Vinick victory would be the elevation of Rush Limbaugh to Sean Hannity to the presidency. Granted, it's all just TV, but I'd certainly watch the show if the writers simply decided to keep going with the show but with a Republican White House. It's obvious they'd need some help and practice with the writing so as not to make the Republicans and their views seem cartoonish (real-life Republicans don't think of themselves as cartoonish), but it could be an intriguing show. Also, what if Sorkin and his leftie pals simply "gave" the show to right-wing screenwriters? I couldn't think of any off the top of my head but that's because they don't write for broadcast TV. Surely, though, there are some writers out there who could tell interesting stories, but from a right-wing position. I dunno. Just a thought on what might be... [my apologies for the non-edited-ness of the above. I'm supposed to be in bed by now.]

In other news, the first commercial following tonight's episode was an ad for Maybelline cosmetics, some new lipstick or other. The ad started by asking the question "What do you get when you mix/cross lipstick with lip gloss?" and proceeded to show two sets of lips, one with lipstick one with gloss, merge into each other. It then proceeded to give us a complicated answer to the question -- something about something I don't remember. However, the short answer (and better answer) to the question is really just "glopstick." Sometimes I'm too funny... 

Last day of unemployment today. Gotta spend the time wisely...

So that was Monday (yesterday). Today was the first day at my first real job in over 18 months. It's only a two or three month contract, but it's full time. I'm a web developer for a small hardware manufacturing firm about 20 miles east of Sacramento. The contract is primarily to help them revamp their web site, and troll through html code converting it both to xhtml specs and replacing any formatting with CSS. It's largely janitorial work but I certainly don't mind -- it's nice not to have to make design decisions for a change. It's a totally Windows/Microsoft shop, which is a big change for me, so I was interested to see how Microsoft's Web Visualization Studio thingie held up against Dreamweaver. In short, not so well. WVS is of course feature "rich" (which means it's very complex) and it doesn't do certain things you'd like. I know it's only a beta, but if I drag images from one folder in the site into another folder, I expect the application to automatically update the paths to the images in my html files, don't you? Maybe there's a preference option I haven't looked for yet... Technically, we're using ASPX, but the editing process only involves one "content" cell so there's no programming going on, just endless Find/Replace of <br> with <br /> and so forth.

Yes, it's a commute: about 140 miles round trip taking 2.5 hours in total. I've got to be there at 8 am, so it's a reeeeally early wake-up. Still, the environment is great (sort of like the land of the gnomes, but with four people instead of eight or ten), and our fearless leader is really easy to work with. He doesn't seem to get any sleep though, so I hope my presence helps alleviate that problem soon. Basically, they were impressed right from the interview last Friday and called about an hour later to offer me the contract, a nice feeling for sure. At the time I was also one of two candidates for a web design position at a Stockton company, about 7 minutes from home, so the decision was really very tough. In the end, I went with the Sac'to firm because I had yet to hear from the Stockton company and couldn't afford to decline the Sac'to job on the 50/50 chance of being offered the Stockton gig. The Stockton gig also would have paid about half what Sac'to pays (though they're into the "total compensation" idea so the benefits would have been great). I couldn't really live on half of Sac'to though. Sorry, I've been unemployed for a long time -- I need cold hard cash. Both environments were equally appealing, small companies with good people, but I had to think about being able to pay my bills again and health benefits and 401k's don't pay off credit cards. Sounds blunt, I know, but in the heat of the moment that's what decided it for me. The only drawback to Sac'to (aside from the long commute and related high gas prices) is its temporary nature. There's a possibility for a permanent position once the contract is over, but I'll really have to evaluate that when the time comes.

In the meantime, long hours or no, I'm just happy to finally have found something I can do and enjoy doing it. 

I am a geek now, if I wasn't one before. My geek cred has just shot through the roof. I am so cool it's illegal. Not only have I switched my default browser away from Firefox (currently the browser that all the cool kids use) back to the uber-cool Camino (a small Mozilla-based project solely for OS X), but I'm currently using the super-uber-totally-unofficial-special-G4-optimized build of Camino that all the l33t h4x0rs use. See what I mean? Geek cred: I don't need no more, thank you very much. Seriously though, Camino rocks and I'm always so pleased with its zippy performance whenever I return to it. 

Friday evening was the big performance of the first two parts of Joseph Hadyn's oratorio The Creation. The piece actually has three parts to it, but the first two amount to almost two hours of music so the third part was cut.

We sang well enough. The Creation is a real screamer though -- the choir has about 10 measures of relatively quiet music early on and then it's pretty much bombastic declaration and fugues the rest of the way. We only sing a total of about 30 minutes, with the rest of the time taken by three soloists (the tenor was the best in our case), so we're either standing a lot or sitting a lot. And the lights -- H-O-T. Our choir conductor hired a very small orchestra (musicians are expensive), many of them UOP students or faculty, and they were very good. The harpsichordist was a little wacky though. He's about a billion years old and has been apart of the UOP community forever apparently. He played fine, but he didn't really bother to look over at the conductor a lot of the time and so was either late or early with many entrances. It was funny to notice the conductor scowling in his general direction and I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd walked over and simply told the guy to stop playing. Not a big deal though. Overall, it was an enjoyable time and I've still got a couple of the themes running through my head. I suppose I will now buy a recording of the piece so I can hear the whole thing. 

Over the holidays MEC received a copy of Iron Horse's Fade to Bluegrass album, a collection Metallica songs done in a bluegrass style. Most of the album works really well in my opinion, but he asked me for my thoughts about the whole tribute phenomenon, and then suggested I publish the brief response I wrote. So, without further ado, and for the ages, here it is:

MEC wrote:
> Yes, what's up with those? I've run across several of these recently. Have I just not been paying attention, or are tribute albums becoming more common?

Tribute albums have been coming out in huge numbers in the last several years, beginning with one-off arrangements of rock songs for string quartet. Kronos Quartet's rendition of Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" is the first one I remember seeing in the early 90s. In that case, I think it had something to do with elevating Hendrix to some sort of "artistic" status -- the string quartet instrumentation has the reputation in classical music of being one of the most learned (learn-ed) genres (sort of like the symphony but somehow more interior because of the four solo voices working together). Then again, we can't forget the spate of symphonic tribute albums that were released in the early 90s: London Symphony Plays the Music of the Beatles (or Genesis, or Sting, or the Rolling Stones). Like the string quartet arrangements, the symphony arrangements were also an efforts to both elevate the "tributee" through association with classical music as well as to make classical music seem more hip.

The bluegrass tribute idea is a mixture of the string quartet elevation in that it uses an instrumentation quite different than the original rock instrumentation, and the general tribute album concept of other musicians paying "tribute" to a well-known musician/band with an album of covers. From what I've seen the two types (different instrumentation vs. usual instrumentation) are released in generally equal numbers, and it's a strong-enough market that there are already tribute albums to Britney Spears, N*SYNC, and Justin Timberlake. It seems you haven't achieved cultural greatness unless you've had a tribute album recorded for you (or three or four in the case of Metallica). Sure, it's all an incredibly silly marketing scheme on some level, but then again cultural value judgements have always been a mixture of art and commerce.

Pete 

Gosh it's been a while since I've posted an entry in this category -- October 1st was the last one. Anyway, I came across Magnatune while reading an MSNBC article on Larry Lessig's Creative Commons concept. Magnatune is a record label based online that's actually experimenting with some of the copyright/licensing ideas outlined by CC, and apparently they haven't gone under yet. There are of course several other online distribution methods out there that also aim to level the playing field between creativity and commerce (CDBaby is perhaps the most well-known) by offering distribution infrastructure and a remuneration scheme far more generous than traditional record labels. However, the catch in each of those methods (Magnatune included) is that artists need to foot the bill for the actual recording process. The relative accessibility of powerful recording tools has obviously made it possible for folks to do their own stuff and have it sound good as well, but it's still an up-front cost borne solely by the artist. The main difference between Magnatune and something like CDBaby, and what seems to make Magnatune a "record label" is it screens submissions in order to use its promotional resources more effectively. Anyone can pay the sign-up fee and send a bunch of CDs to CDBaby -- they're not in the business of promoting an artist's career beyond providing them with some pre-formatted web space and access to a streaming server. And, in exchange for $4 of each CD sale you're in. Not so with Magnatune though. Your music has to at least have the potential for some kind of financial return, some kind of market that's worth expending effort to acquire and capitalize on (whether it's in terms of traditional album sales or soundtrack licensing).

All of this is interesting enough, but what caught my eye while browsing their sales statistics was the huge presence of classical music among the top sellers. It's a common fact that straight-up classical music has become one of the least successful styles commercially over the last couple of decades or so (classical and jazz continually vie for the bottom of the barrel), but on Magnatune this past week half of the top ten best-selling albums had some connection to classical music and the venerable early music guy Trevor Pinnock even leads the pack with a Rameau opera. All of that isn't as interesting as my next observation, namely the healthy amount of medieval and renaissance music not only on the label but selling well. I was struck by this because if there's a lower level below the bottom of the CD barrel, it's occupied by med/ren albums. This wasn't exactly the case five or ten years ago though, as the broad attractiveness of various incarnations of medievalism flowed through culture: Hildegard is only the most well-known example, but early music recordings absolutely exploded in the 1990s producing an amazing amount of modern recordings of a bunch of very obscure music. From an educational perspective, music history classes would no longer have to suffer through wooden just-the-notes-ma'am recordings inevitably featuring a lot of shawms. As an early music aesthete myself, my collection was largely gathered during those years and it seemed every weekly trip to Tower was met with a new batch (15th-century sacred was my priority then). Then, as the new millennium rolled around, the well dried up for obvious economic reasons. Did we really need this obscure mass by Brumel when we already had this one? Even in the golden days it was obvious some recordings were more pet projects of individual scholars with access to some graduate students willing to form an ensemble than anything with a real chance to recoup its production costs. Of course we were happy to have that obscure Brumel mass recorded at all, pet project or no, but the economic bubble was increasingly obvious before it finally broke.

And so, at last, I'll tell you what caught my eye about Magnatune. The economics of recording are cheap enough that grants can conceivably be written to cover the cost, and there is somehting of a label mechanism to at least provide something of a wheat/chaff separation. Joe Musicologist with a love of Brumel doesn't need to worry about selling nearly as many CDs in order to secure support from a label. Sure, he's got to have product with some sort of potential, but with Magnatune the overhead is minimal and we still get a decent recording of our friend Brumel that also contributes to the greater human library of knowledge. Of course, everything is moving online, but Magnatune's success so far with "classical" music tells me that the future of obscure early music recordings is particularly online.