Friday, October 26, 2007
Gruen's Dolls
Okay. Now I get it. The New York Dolls are an essential and important link in the history of Rock 'n Roll. They are Lou Reed's love children. Joe Siegel, in a vintage tv news clip likens them as a cross between Rolling Stones and Alice Cooper. That clip came from Bob Gruen's All Dolled Up, a compilation of 40 hours or so of video footage that he did of the Dolls back in the seventies. Greatness in rock 'n roll is as much a visceral response of the nervous system as anything else. This is why low fidelity bootlegs are just fine documents of the great bands quite often and murky black and white half inch serves the subject well here in Gruen's film.
I once saw Johnny Thunders back in the early eighties at Club Noize on Union Avenue in Portland. I remember the show as loud and that I had a kind of teeth-grinding response. NY Dolls, MC5, Iggy and the Stooges. Bands I don't listen too very often, but I am oh so glad they existed and kicked out the jams.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:08 PM
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Monday, October 15, 2007
Videos of Micheal Wesch
The Machine is Us/ing Us
And
Information R/evolution
These were discussed at InfoCamp. Check them out!
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:19 AM
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Part of the highlight of going to InfoCamp this weekend was the act of getting away. and there were many highlights besides the day and a half in the sessions themselves.West Seattle. Before this weekend I have hardly spent anytime on that side of the bridge. It reminds me a lot of the Westmoreland and Sellwood neighborhoods in Portland. It took a little while to get used to, but in this visit I discovered the importance of three main arterials: Delridge, 35th, and California. The latter full of cool and funky commerce, but still feeling very neighborhood-like.
I walked down to watch the end of a high school football game on an almost-crisp evening. The game had just ended. The victorious team's band was playing "Another One Bites the Dust."
I crossed the street and poked my head into a local watering hole where a cover band had mostly taken over a room with pool tables playing a cover of Santana's Evil Ways. ("Oh Girl, You have to Change, Baby") Somehow that is not what the evening called for.
Instead, I went back to the hotel and discovered a cable station called Classical Arts Showcase Once a week they put out an 8 hour clip show of mostly vintage classical music, opera, and dance performances. I let it play on the television most of the time I was in the room. My favorites were some Paul Robeson clips and the extravagant classical stagings from fifties television shows. I have to write various entities here at home and get this thing on one of our cable access bands.
I also completed Diana Abu-Jaber's memoir "The Langauge of Baklava" and was able to find a Greek restaurant on California and had their Saturday night lambchop special where chops were seasoned with lemon and herbs, similar to her descriptions in the book.
But maybe most memorable was a walk in the dawn fog at the West Seattle Golf Course. The heavy fog created a wonderful mood and it was quite amusing to watch the duffers tee off into a void of whiteness.
posted by well-executed buffet at 5:57 AM
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Sunday, October 14, 2007
What an excellent October getaway! Info nerds take over a big chunk of a community center without an agenda: Just a whole lot of energy and their laptops. In fact my favorite visual from the Info Camp conference were a dozen laptops waiting for the Plenary speaker gleaming on 20 row portable seating that reminded me of the Rose Garden's Theater in the Clouds seating arrangement.The folks who pulled this together had a great vibe. It felt a little like the Hardy gang putting up a show in the barn. Intros on Monday were an interesting mix. It felt like a full spectrum of Information and web related experts, usability, libarians and info specialists from public and private sectors. To the best of my knowledge, all of the twenty or so slots for sessions were taken up by folks who volunteered with good ideas. Some were demonstrations, some were discussions of technology and information-related questions.
Youngstown Center is a converted school building that the McMenniman's would have been pleased to have had in their properties. The Conference room sessions from 4-6 had wonderful sundown light filtered through pull-downs and augmented by light from one of the bigger LCD monitors I have stared at for any length of time. But most importantly, was the literate, well-shared discussions on Information Overload and social tools for libraries.
Sam Wallin of Ft Vancouver Library who gave the Social Tools session is correct. There was an excellent energy to yesterday's conference. I felt it was in the the highest tradition of Internet-like sharing.
There are lots of folks I wish had been able to make the trip to Info Camp , Among them: Sam Wallin's former classmate, Zachery Grant, Kitty Mackey and Joan Carey of Clark's library staff as well as our friends from WSUV's DTC program. I plan to include multiple dispatches and links as I re-enter a post camp world.