the pod bay door

:: I spent last weekend volunteering, for the 13th year, at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival. The lineup this year was very strong, in support of the 25th anniversary, and included Bonnie Bramlett, Rodney Crowell, Ani DiFranco, The Dixie Hummingbirds, Jerry Douglas, Lucky Dube, Michael Franti and Spearhead, Dick Gaughan, The Handsome Family, Wanda Jackson, Natalie Merchant, Earl Scruggs, Martin Simpson, The Strawbs, Chip Taylor and Carrie Rodriguez, and Hawksley Workman. I am on the Performer Hospitality crew, and had possibly the most enjoyable festival ever, working with my friends on the team, and assisting and working with amazing, friendly performers.

I tend to be restless at the festival, and generally don’t like sitting for long periods of time. As a result, I see little of the music, but hear a lot of it, as my work area is backstage.

On Sunday night, August 8th, David Byrne and the Tosca Strings closed out the 25th annual EFMF in grand style. Byrne is in the midst of his My Backwards Life Tour, in support of his new album, Grown Backwards.

Byrne’s set featured a number of classic Talking Heads tunes, intermingled with songs from his recent releases. He sang at least one song in Spanish, and accompanied himself on guitar a few times. His percussionist, Mauro Refosco, played many diverse and intriguing beats, and his rhythm section of Graham Hawthorne on drums and Paul Frazier on bass was flawless. Tour photos of the band are here.

The show began with “Road to Nowhere“, which Byrne described afterwards as a song he wrote for the Republican National Convention. Despite playing in Canada, the quip drew considerable laughter – it’s not like we don’t know what’s happening below our border! While not familiar with his newer work, I felt the songs he performed from his recent catalogue to be interesting and compelling – I wanted to hear more even though I wasn’t familiar with the music

Byrne knows his fans want to hear a selection from the TH catalogue, and while he can’t play them all (Burning Down the House, my favorite, wasn’t offered), he delivered the aforementioned Road to Nowhere along with And She Was, Izimbra, Life During Wartime, This Must Be The Place, Once In A Lifetime, and of course, Psycho Killer. 27 years later, he made it sound new. As for Once In A Lifetime, I still ask myself, “how do I work this?” I don’t have an answer yet.

I enjoy performers who engage themselves with the audience, and Byrne works in this way. He introduced each band member at one point, injected a few comments throughout the set, and thanked the audience, some 10-12,000 strong on the hill, for their support. He seemed to be genuinely enjoying himself. The mix was very, very good, thanks to vigilant preparation by his production team and the festival front-of-house team. The sharp and well-defined sounds created by the Toscans often left me with goosebumps.

When a band has many members, the placement of each is a critical component, contributing to the show’s success. I have seen many stage arrangements, in which a percussionist or supporting musicians were virtually hidden from site. I appreciated Byrne’s choice of layout (as seen here in a picture from the Rome, Italy, performance): he take centre stage, of course, surrounded by his rhythm section, with the strings at stage left, and the cellists on a riser. There is an intangible excitement experienced when watching a string section play in unison, and the audience is given the opportunity to do so here without sacrificing quality or presentation.

The tour continues, with at least 28 more dates in the USA. If it makes it to your town, I hope you get to see it. I would also highly recommend the Edmonton Folk Music Festival to anyone with diverse music interests. The festival, now entering its 26th year, continues to bring to Edmonton each August, musicians who offer a wide selection of styles and genres. Tickets for the next festival should be on sale on June 1, 2005. See you there!

This post is also available at Blogcritics.com.

This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs (and aggregation sites) are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).

The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet. (Permalink: http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html) — results and comments about the experiment appear at that location.

Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate — the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.

The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e (Note: this replaces the longer, original GUID — listed below — which didn’t format nicely in narrow column layouts. Those sites still using the longer GUID will still be found in the data set).

The above GUID enables anyone to easily search Google or other search engines for all blogs that participate in this experiment, once they have indexed the sites that participate, which may take several days or weeks. To locate the full data set, just search for the any sites that contain either the short GUID (above) or the long GUID (for your reference, the long GUID is a single 72 character string comprised of the following segments put together with the white-spaces removed:
as098398298250swg9e 98929872525389t9987 898tq98wteqtgaq6201 0920352598gawst — they are listed here as different segments so that they will format better in narrow column layouts.)

Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post (see URL above). (Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.)

INSTRUCTIONS

To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and then answer the questions below, substituting your own information, below, where appropriate. Other than answering the questions below, please do not alter the information, layout or format of this post in order to preserve the integrity of the data in this experiment (this will make it easier for searchers and automated bots to find and analyze the results later).

REQUIRED FIELDS (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)

(1) I found this experiment at URL: http://alreadygone.blogspot.com/2004/08/testing-meme-propagation-in-blogspace.html

(2) I found it via “Newsreader Software” or “Browsing the Web” or “Searching the Web” or “An E-Mail Message”: Browsing the Web

(3) I posted this experiment at URL: http://www.podbaydoor.com/

(4) I posted this on date (day/month/year): 03/08/04

(5) I posted this at time (24 hour time): 20:38:00

(6) My posting location is (city, state, country): Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):

(7) My blog is hosted by: Moveable Type 2.661

(8) My age is: 53

(9) My gender is: Male

(10) My occupation is: Public Services Librarian (Engineering)

(11) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: Awazu, Sharpreader

(12) I use the following software to post to my blog: MT, Zempt, w.bloggar

(13) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 11/07/02

(14) My web browser is: IE 6.0.2880

(15) My operating system is: Windows XP

:: Haven’t been in much of a writing mood lately. This is a long weekend in Alberta. I saw Ripley’s Game last night, on DVD. Directed by Liliana Cavani with a score by Ennio Morricone, it is an overlooked gem of a movie from 2002, starring John Malkovich as Tom Ripley, the character created by Patricia Highsmith, and featured in four movies to date. It’s a very good movie, and I have no idea why it didn’t receive a wide general release in North America. What a shame.

:: The Stanley Kubrick Exhibition is on in Berlin. Wish I could attend. I’ve e-mailed to ask about purchasing the catalogue. Available for viewing now, in pdf, is Matthew Modine’s Full Metal Diary, written while filming Full Metal Jacket. Included are a number of his photographs from the set.

Upcoming this weekend is the folk music festival. My brother Chris, and friends Tony and his daughter Claire, will be staying at my place while they attend the festival. Chris is also volunteering. Expect little if any blogging this year week. I am otherwise uninspired these days.

:: Mark Fiore is a former political cartoonist who now works on political animation. His latest offering is a jab at the Democractic National Convention. More of his animated cartoons are available on his site.

:: The Emmy nominations overlooked Ian McShane for his outstanding work on Deadwood, but the Television Critcs’ Association righted that wrong by giving him the award for Individual Achievement in Drama. And ya gotta love The Daily Show winning the award for Outstanding Achievement in News and Information, which prompted Jon Stewart to say the following: “We’re not real,” Stewart said. “There must be some kind of mistake.”

:: Derryl sent a link to this brilliant parody of album covers, from the Photoshop Phriday page on Something Awful:.

Imagine a world where music is marketed in an honest fashion, where instead of pretentious titles you get a straight and accurate description of what you’re getting, where there is truth in advertising. Now imagine you have a million dollars and you’re giving it all to me. I believe in the power of imagination, and thusly I believe I’m going to be rich. But until all that money arrives, take a look at these handsome images contributed by our pristine collection of forum goons. They decided to strip away the fancy titles by yesterday and today’s top artists and say what’s really going on. I think they have a better handle on the music than even some of the musicians.

:: So, the sixth season of The Sopranos won’t appear until 2006.

:: In anticipation of the upcoming release of the remake, I watched the original 1962 version of The Manchurian Candidate tonight. A highly respected and regarding political thriller, I had to stop and rewind the tape occasionally to review the dialogue, often turning on the closed captioning to ensure that what I thought I heard was correct. The strangest conversation has to be when Major Marco (Frank Sinatra) meets Rosie (Janet Leigh) on a train, and after she lights a cigarette for him, and they begin talking, standing between two of the cars. They discuss football, US states, her name, and railroads. Early on, Leigh, speaking about the railroad, says, “I was one of the original Chinese workmen who laid the track on this stretch.” It’s an absolutely bizarre line in the script, and is left hanging for the remainder of the movie; are they speaking in code to each other? The complete transcript of this scene is on this page. Roger Ebert alludes to this odd exchange in a 1988 review of the movie. It’s a great film, and I’m looking forward to the new version. Other movies seen in the past few days: Anchorman, The Clearing, Spider-Man 2, Before Sunset, The Jack Bull.

:: Remember Live Aid? Twenty years later, it will finally be released on DVD.

:: I am still searching for meaning. I’m not sure what matters anymore. Do you have any brilliant insights? I’d be thrilled to hear from you…

:: Last Friday, July 16th, I spent time visiting with my friend, Jason Pascoe, who lives in Kitchener-Waterloo ON. I had not seen him for some years, and we had a good time catching up and eating diner food at C Kelekis’ Restaurant, a legendary greasy spoon on Main Street in Winnipeg. Chris Kelekis began operating his food business from a pushcart in 1918, and opened the restaurant in 1946. He was decades ahead of McDonald’s with his shoe-string french fries. For many years through to present day, his daughter, Mary, has managed the operation. As usual, I had my hot dog with bacon and cheese, shoestring fries with gravy, and a Coke. Diet out the window!

On Friday evening, I attended a pool party with my high school cohorts from the 1971 Windsor Park Collegiate class. Held at the Oystryk home in Southdale, about 15 of us had a blast, eating Chinese food, swimming, and ending the evening with a rousing Beatles singalong in the tv room, with me on guitar. The members of this group were not close friends of mine when I was in high school, but that doesn’t matter. They were responsible for organizing the 2003 reunion, the year our class turned 50, a hugely successful event. Now, we are developing strong friendships as a result of the reunion and subsequent parties, and all future trips to Winnipeg will include my WPC homeys. They are fantastic people.

The same day, I visited my mother in the St Boniface Hospital, after her surgery. She was in the hospital until today, and is slowly recovering from what the doctors determined to be bacteria destroying the ligaments and tissue in her left shoulder! I was so annoyed and angry when I learned this. Before I went to St John’s, the week before, I had returned home one evening to find my mother in tears from the pain in her shoulder. I felt so damn useless at that moment. My dad and I were left wondering why the doctors couldn’t determine what was happening until she was six weeks into the pain. I cannot imagine how hopeless she felt, and how intense the pain was. However, better late than never, I suppose, and the operation was performed by one of the top orthopedic surgeons in Winnipeg.

In any event, she is recuperating slowly, and now has a PICC line inserted through a vein in her arm. A PICC line, or Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter, is placed through the skin and inserted into a vein in the arm, and moved through the vein until it reaches the large vein that enters the heart. Through the PICC line, intravenous medication is delivered directly to the heart.

On Saturday, I drove for 14 hours back to Edmonton in scorching heat. With each successive trip, I find the drive slightly less tolerable and a bit more annoying. When I drive to Winnipeg from Edmonton, I take the Yellowhead Highway (now considered to be the “northern route” of the Trans-Canada Highway) all the way to Portage la Prairie, where it connects with Highway 1, some 45 minutes from Winnipeg. I drive back Edmonton on Highway 1 to Regina, then up to Saskatoon on Highway 11. The Regina-Saskatoon run could quite possibly be the most boring 2.5 hours of anyone’s life, but at least it is a divided highway. Between Regina and Winnipeg, there remains ~162 kms of two-lane highway (west of Virden MB to east of Sintaluta SK), one of the many National Embarrassments of the southern route of the Trans-Canada Highway.
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