Several months ago AZ and I, though the magic of Tivo, watch the 2001 Shane MacGowan documentary. If I Should Fall From Grace. It was an engaging and ultimately somewhat depressing affair, an exploration of a gifted artist struggling to make his way.
You can imagine my pleasure, thus, when in this morning's feed from the Guardian is a piece by Dave Simpson providing a catchup on the Pogues. With MacGowan somewhat cleaned up, apparently, the original Pogues lineup (including Costello-ex Cait O'Riordan) lineup will be doing a small tour of Ireland and England. All the albums have been remastered (released this month in Europe, though it is unclear whether they've been released in the US).
Heartening, indeed.
Over on NerdFilter, Mike Skallas recently posted about streaming radio being the best venue for him to hear Indie Rock.
He has a good point, of course. In most communities radio is owned by conglomerates upon conglomerates, normalising the feed of music to a pablum of the lowest common denominator. Arguably, people like it - advertising and listenership remains high, money is made by those that are at the top of the pyramid.
However, I worry about thinking streaming music is THE solution for the independent listener. In large areas (where you're going to have higher broadband concentration), you also have a fighting chance having community radio at your disposal. Radio where you can often get involved, on some level, as well as consume.
In Chicago, off the top of my head, I can think of four good venues which I'd advocate (and, for the big-box-office-worker, several of them have online components as well).
None of these is full-city in power - WHPK is a South Side thing, the rest are North Side.
Many other communities have their own community radio - I find myself periodically streaming WFHB, KOOP or KEXP into our house.
This is not to say that pureplay streaming services are bad - I listen to those Mike mentions, and have become quite intrigued by last.fm's tying together of my Audioscrobbler neighborhoods. But by ignoring the real world communities we live in, we end up in a walled garden online potentially little different than the large commercial station walled garden of the air.
For further reading on radio, may I commend:
Lorenzo Milam's Sex and Broadcasting: A handbook on starting a radio station for the community - this is a bit of a utopian book, and dates itself in Milam's background as a Pacifica founder, but is both inspiring and insightful on the good that community radio can do.
Matthew Lasar's Pacifica Radio: the rise of an alternative network. This has been reasonably well received, though I confess it is stuck in my to-read pile. Pacifica has had a.... troubled ... history, so insights into it are essential for anyone actively engaged by community radio.
Bruce Girard (ed.) A Passion for Radio: radio waves and community. A collection of essays on community radio efforts, from Inuit broadcasting to Pacifica outreach.
Somewhere in a box of tapes is an old Heat (with John Hockenberry) show that focused on community radio. I'll have to digitise that someday, as it includes some excellent discussion of Zoom Black Magic radio and other micro radio efforts...
A yawp out into the ether, though not barbaric...
Did anyone capture the backchannel logs from CSCW 2004 that was here in Chicago a couple weeks ago? Subsequent to my truncated attendance I was able to keep track through the kind webloggery of several folks
As I recall, Patrick or someone, was going to gather up the backchannel logs into an archive... But I don't appear to have a good contact address. So... Anyone? Ideally they can be run through perplog and archived up somewhere stable... Much as, it may be worth pointing out, experiments with blog, wiki and irc from LISA 2004 have been.
Ideally a little more stable - the LISA links I have saved are not responding this morning... Which is a whole other chunk of the problem with electronic distributed resources, and part of the logic behind greypatterning the electronicLogBook...
Verb that camelcase!
At the urging of Mr Dent I finally got around to updating the core RSS feed of this blog to be full-text; shockingly, it validated just now!
Which reminds me of a whole heaping pile of other updates that need to be made here, which reminds me of other piles of updates to be done. I'm exhausted just thinking about it!
The Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 2004 conference is there in Chicago this week. Being so close, I was able to justify my attendance to those that coordinate such things at work. Since what I work with is collaborative systems (in an engineering sense, but not in an evaluative sense) it was a pretty easy argument, though the actual direction into innovative collaboration - what one would expect at an academic conference - is unlikely.
Work duties reared their head immediately after registration, however, so I'll have limited time to attend. But over the weekend I pulled myself away from hearth and home to attend two tutorials.
On Saturday evening was Herbsleb and Olson's Whirlwind Tour of CSCW Research. Billed as a rapid overview of CSCW concepts, areas and problems, it met every expectation - including that of a whirlwind.
Sunday I spent the day in Analysing Social Interaction in Computer-Mediated Communications Systems. Billed as taught by Marc A Smith and Susan Herring, Herring was ill, so Smith ran the day. I'd seen snippets of Smith's work with Usenet evaluations at MSFT, so this was not a disappointment; in reviewing the notes, Herring's focus on discourse analysis is far beyond my recollection of the linguistics course I took 15 years ago, so I don't know how much more I would have gained by her presentation, beyond more direction for reading.
Sunday's session involved a lot of much needed interaction in the form of discussing projects being undertaken or begun. I'm the odd duck out (my B.A. in English and no structured graduate education in the areas involved - just some hunches and bits and pieces I've picked up along the way from work and lurking), so my ideas aren't as fully developed or underpinned as yet. The other people in the seminar are doing interesting work - analysis of weblog usage by political campaigns, the use of collaborative spaces by artists, and analysis of NASAs use of collaborative tools for mission planning were only the ones I thought I understood.
Both days were brain-fillers; I've got notes and citations galore to jot down, so look for del.icio.us citations to flow through over the next few days between commitments. And then I get to dive into the multi-hundred page proceedings... If you're not in Chicago, there are backchannels open for lurking. Even without going to the meat of the conference, the packaging is delicious!