the pod bay door

:: Taking a few days off from posting didn’t help all that much. I’m still knee deep in e-mail (aka electronic messages), although I did get the number from 65 to somewhere under 40.

Today I perform in a Mother’s Day concert with Amelia (click the pic on the right). The concert is at 2:00 pm, at St Luke’s Anglican Church, 8424 95th Avenue. $10 at the door if you’re looking for something to do with Mom, or otherwise. A few days later, Amelia is off to Vienna for a few weeks, to visit her brother and his family, and take a break from Edmonton life.

It was quite nice yesterday, warm enough to sit outside for coffee with a good friend I hadn’t seen for at least 18 months. There is a dusting of snow on the ground this morning, and the temperature is -2C. Enough with the sub-zero weather, already – it’s MAY, dammit!

:: It is another late night. I am very restless. Just finished a lovely phone call with a good friend in Florida; it’s nice to visit on the phone, with someone who lives far away and talk about whatever. Tomorrow I am driving to Jasper to attend the ALC, where I am co-presenting a session on blogs with Geoff.

:: This is hilarious: Cindi posted a link to The Cowbell Project, a growing database of songs that feature a cowbell. Inspiration for this idea seems to have come from the infamous and brilliant SNL parody of Behind The Music, about the recording of Blue Öyster Cult‘s Don’t Fear The Reaper, which featured Christopher Walken as a high-powered record producer encouraging Will Farrell Will Farrell to play with more passion, advising him that “I need more cowbell”

:: Last night’s episode of Law & Order: SVU starred Marlee Matlin as a researcher who is put on trial for helping someone commit suicide. While being interrogated, she tells Detective Munch that she “has a blog”. What fascinated me was no further explanation is offered in this scene, i.e., neither Munch nor Tutuola asks, “what’s a blog?”

It’s another small piece of evidence that blogs have entered the mainstream of pop culture, and the term “blog” has entered the vernacular. The episode authors decided that spending airtime having Matlin’s character explain blogs to the detectives wasn’t warranted – fans of the show would understand, or ignore the reference.

Speaking of Law & Order and blogs, The Ledger is a blog devoted primarily to the flagship series at the moment. The site’s creator is working on writing “detailed summaries for each of the 320 (and counting) episodes of the original series.” When this is completed, he’ll turn his “the 170 episodes of SVU and Criminal Intent I haven’t written about yet.” He’s written summaries of at least 170 episodes from the original series so far. Having started in December 2003, that’s a lot of work in a short period of time.

Jerry Orbach is leaving the original series :-(, but he will be appearing in the third spinoff, Law & Order: Trial by Jury., hopefully as Lenny Briscoe. The Gothamist was there when he filmed his final L&O scenes. Also referenced is this amusing article on being addicted to All Things Law & Order.

:: Recently I joined Foster Parents Plan, and information on my sponsored child arrived in the mail last week. Her name is Welalo, she lives in a village called Lama Tessi, in Togo, and is in third grade primary school. She lives with her sister and mother, in a small brick house with a straw roof.

Her village has no electricity, and her home has no plumbing. In lieu of a washroom, her family must use and open field or public area for their needs. Welalo’s family gets their water from a open well approximately one kilometer from their home. To cook their food, they use an open fire, fueled with wood, and their house is lit with kerosene lamps. Despite the foregoing, the documentation sent to me indicates that the familes in Welalo’s community live a rich cultural life, telling and listening to stories, talking with friends, and listening to the radio.

Needless to say, as I sit in front of my Dell computer, with lights on, drinking cold water from the fridge after eating a satisfying meal of meatloaf with fresh vegetables and bread, reading about how Welalo lives puts my life in a perspective I hadn’t considered before reading about her and her village. I really, really don’t know how good I have it, living in Canada.

:: I mentioned previously that my friend in Winnipeg, Tony, began a blog a couple weeks ago. Tony is in the midst of difficult times, and he is showing great courage in detailing this on his site, something I’m not sure I could do myself. I have avoided writing about Certain Things on this weblog since its inception, issues too painful for me to write about publicly. Tony is choosing to do so, and I applaud him for his effort, as I believe it can’t be the easiest thing to do. However, writing can be cathartic, and whether or not one chooses to do it publicly, shouldn’t change that. I’ll leave it there. When a friend is in pain, one shares that pain with them – I wish him and Claire well, at all times.

:: The Harvard/UNC study on downloading, mentioned earlier, is in the news. One of the authors, Koleman Strumpf, an economics professor at UNC, thought the paper, The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis, written with Felix Oberholzer of the Harvard Business School, would be of interest to a handful of academics, and nothing more. Instead, its release, in draft form, has touched off a flurry of responses and uproar, most of it coming from the music industry. The RIAA released a six-page response (which, despite my best searching efforts, I cannot locate on their web site anywhere), saying that “The results are inconsistent with virtually every other study”, and asking “”If illegal downloading is not the cause of the precipitous decline in sales of recordings, what is?” Well, duh. Where does one begin? From newsobserver.com:

There could be many causes for the decline, Strumpf said. The economy is weaker. More entertainment choices might be drawing consumer dollars. Radio consolidation has reduced variety.

He says the industry’s response amounts to, ” ‘We have 20 studies, they have one.’ If 20 or 100 or 1,000 people say the sun revolves around the earth, it doesn’t make it so.”

Two years ago, Strumpf and Oberholzer-Gee set out to research the matter. Strumpf’s interest was piqued by the Napster trial, where the recording industry alleged copyright violations that led to the demise of the pioneering Web site in 2001. In the testimony, experts argued that music downloads had to be the cause of slumping sales.

Strumpf read the studies they cited. They were horrible, he said.

“I was like, ‘Boy, this is pretty amazing,’ ” said Strumpf, a Philadelphia native. “Nobody has done a serious study.”

Translation: Strumpf and Oberholzer read the industry-sponsored studies, and realized that they were a collective crock of shyte, most likely scientifically unsound. Strumpf also notes that his paper is not complete, and the reason it was released was so that the two researchers could get feedback, which is happening in spades. Of course, one other reason that sales have dropped is that so much of what the Big Labels release these days is CRAP!

:: This small, unassuming blog posting, about a tag with washing instructions in French and English, has generated at least 354 comments, and 86 trackbacks.

:: Spammers, knowing no moral code or caring about anyone or anything, continue to astound and confuse. On my work-related blog, we keep receiving spam comments, which means I need to continually run Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist. The next version of Moveable Type will deal with this problem, hopefully in a permanent way.

Regardless, here is an example of the kind of bad, broken English that accompanies most of these spam comments:

Furniture, covered by the dust of ages and crumbling with the rot of honey dampness, lowered my insert spam product here. In truth, much as the owners of cats depended these unstressed folk, they hopped them more.

Er, what?

:: I volunteer again tonight at one of the Juno-fest venues, The Power Plant, which happens to be two buildings over from the library in which I work on campus. It promises to be rather uneventful. I’m one of the two media contacts assigned to that venue, and as of this writing, no media have booked any time with any of the acts there tonight. I will be there from 8:00 pm – 2:30 am or so, which is really 3:30 am, as DST starts tonight.

:: Has anyone noticed that searches on Google seem to be taking longer than usual, of late?

:: Alan Kellogg is one of my favorite local newspaper columnists (and a kind soul – he agreed to return with two Steely Dan t-shirts for me, when he saw them play at Roseland in NYC last September. You see, I had neglected to buy the shirts when I saw The Dan in concert at The Gorge in August, a few weeks earlier. But I digress…) Alan’s April 1st column analyzed the Federal Court ruling on downloading music in Canada. (Warning: the column will remain online for just one week, as the Edmonton Journal maintains a seven-day archive only. Very frustrating and annoying.) The point that hit home for me the hardest, however, wasn’t about the impact this ruling will have on the music industry, whose sales were heading downhill before Napster came into existence three years ago. Rather, it was Alan’s straightforward take on record stores:

“Many mall record stores are simply terrible, with limited stock and clueless staff“.

That was my emphasis on clueless staff, not Alan’s. I might add that the clueless staff are not restricted to mall record stores, either. Long before downloading caught on, I began noticing, probably in the mid-90s (slightly post-grunge) that service in A&B Sound and other Canadian chain stores was riding the down escalator – staff, when they weren’t busy comparing piercings and tattoos, could barely be bothered helping me find a record that wasn’t in the best seller racks. Such interactions usually ended with blank stares and shoulder shrugs.

“Do you have the new Oysterband album?” “Blue Oyster Cult?” “No, sorry, Oysterband?” “Prairie Oyster?” “Er, no, Oysterband, from the UK, played the folk festival in Edmonton 2 or 3 times?” Watching the staff member “helping” me, the expected shoulder shrugs would follow at that moment, and I might as well have been staring into the eyes of a chicken. Recently, a friend shared with me this story: A&B called him to tell him a CD he’d ordered had arrived. When he went to pick it up, they told him it wasn’t there. Welcome to Customer Service, 2004.

The music industry is in really, really bad shape right now. It has not come to grips with downloading, nor with the fact that is has been overpricing music for years while simultaneously releasing questionable product. Whoinhell wants to keep paying unreasonable prices for crappy music? The industry’s insistence on blaming downloading as the major reason for poor sales isn’t holding up under scholarly scrutiny: a study released this week by researchers at Harvard and U North Carolina indicates that file swapping and downloading has had little impact on the slide in CD sales over the past while:

“We find that file sharing has only had a limited effect on record sales,” the study’s authors wrote. “While downloads occur on a vast scale, most users are likely individuals who would not have bought the album even in the absence of file sharing.”

My own buying patterns have slowed down. Yes, I’ve downloaded some songs, but after an initial flurry in 2001-02, very little in the past 12 months or so. In fact, most of what I’ve downloaded is old material, some “out of print”, so to speak, and a lot of which I own already on vinyl, and want to either hear on my computer, or burn to CD for listening in the car. But another reason I cite for the change is the poor service offered by the chain stores like A&B. Add to that their own dwindling inventories because of declining sales. It’s a bad scene, and I have no solution for the mess it’s in.

April 2 update: Alan’s column in today’s Journal features an interview with Denise Donlon, CEO of Sony Music of Canada. Of note is the following:

“Upon leaving her old job as vice-president at MuchMusic, she declared her first priority at Sony was to aggressively promote new Canadian music.

‘It’s taken longer than I had hoped, because since the day I walked in the door it feels like we were dealing with these other pressing issues. But there are hugely talented artists everywhere you look, for every taste, smart people with a point of view. It’s exciting’.”

A quick check of Sony Music of Canada’s site this morning reveals the following “Featured Artists”: Delta Goodrem (Australia), Incubus (USA), Jessica Simpson (USA), Switchfoot (USA), Lost Prophets (UK), Harry Connick Jr (USA), John Mayer (USA), and a little-known, obscure Canadian artist named Celine Dion. Under “New Releases”, we find: 1) Various – Oprah’s Pop Star Challenge 2004 Cast Album (USA), 2) Nas – Nas: 10 Year Anniversary Illmatic Platinum Series (USA), and 3) Shakira – Live & Off The Record (Columbia, South America.) Aggressively promoting new Canadian music??? As for Edmonton, we haven’t had a major artists in pop music emerge from this city for decades, and there is no excuse for this. I’ve played in bands and with individual artists in town since the mid-1980s – believe me, there is Major Talent in this city, but Big Music continues to ignore it. (PS: Remember, you have seven days to read the column here before it self-vaporizes!)

:: This is too cool. I’m a fan of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. On Eric Alterman’s blog, I saw a link to FootnoteTV, which is a site that provides analysis of a very select group of television shows, including TDS, SNL, West Wing, Law & Order, and a few more. FootnoteTV is part of Newsaic. The site is written and produced by Stephen Lee, a journalist/lawyer, whose intention is to focus on issues rather than breaking news:

“My ultimate goal here is to create a kind of Internet journalism that reaches out to modern audiences in new ways. Ultimately, I want to get people more involved in the news, especially younger people, the kind of people that newspapers and television keep losing. The answer is not more channels or simpler stories; it lies in new perspectives and tools. I expound more on this at length in the Site FAQ.”

So to return back to the beginning, fans of Jon Stewart can read Stephen Lee’s footnotes to each episode here, in which Lee provides background and information on the topics presented in each show. My question: where does he find the time and energy to maintain such a detailed site?

:: Nineteen years after it happened, on July 13, 1985, Live Aid is finally coming to a DVD store near you. I remember the show well, watching it on Much Music, and bemoaning the dozens of interruptions by Dick Clark (who announced Phil Collins as an Academy Award winner, which he wasn’t at that time), and commercials and what not. I still have my videotapes of the concerts. Interesting that it took the discovery of pirated DVDs of the concert to convince the organisers to release a legitimate copy, with proceeds going to Band Aid Trust, which still exists to this day. Here’s another Live Aid website.