The Fix

I hope to have actual content, soon.  In the meantime, I’m testing out the technical aspects of podcasting. Click it! Play it! and let me know how it worked for you.

 

 Hello out there! [00:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Another ’seat with a view’, this time on Charles street in downtown Toronto. It seems that one could assemble an apartment’s worth of furniture just by keeping an eye open, and collecting bits here and there.

See also: The most spectacularly situated piece of abandoned furniture which I’ve seen to date

The Aeroplan website is endlessly frustrating. Just when you think you’ve got what you want, they yank the carpet out from under you– ha! You’ve got your flight all picked out? Well, in the 2 minutes that you took to make sure it was the right one, it vaporized!

Today when I’d done battle and emerged, bloody but somewhat victorious, I saw this farewell graphic and realized how ridiculous it is, and yet how much it explains…

This week, I’ll spare you my further thoughts on freedom in performance, and instead point you to an excellent piece on billtron.org which touches on the issue as it existed in Bluegrass music.  It was inspired by the author’s stumbling upon a quote by Bill Monroe, grandfather of bluegrass music, who said of a fellow musician,  “How can Roscoe go out on stage without any idea of what he is going to do?”

Roscoe Holcomb, a self-taught musician, plays a unique variation of claw hammer banjo. Here we can begin to understand how the music of Bill Monroe and Roscoe Holcomb differ. While Monroe and all of his band members perform in a thoroughly-rehearsed and predetermined manner, with only the slightest room for spontaneous musical decisions and individual embellishments of their instrumental lines, Holcomb’s performance technique creates an expectation for and ease of spontaneous improvisation throughout the music, both at the structural and ornamental level.

-from  billtron.org

In this exhibitionist Web2.0 world, it’s de rigeur to flash your tastes, your occupations, your creative output, and your personal statistics in various areas.

For the music obsessed, LastFM is the perfect stage. It’s a hub for analyzing your musical listening habits, linking you up with like-minded consumers, and best of all, for discovering new music. But it also tabulates your weekly statistics and presents them to you in tables, charts, and colourful charts, which you can post on your other Web2.0 social networks.

That way, people will be aware of your musical tastes as they peruse your photography, read your prose, see who your friends are and…. sigh.

Here are the artists I listened to a lot over the past week: