The Penultimate Word

A live performance of Canteloupe Island

I just finished The Life and Death of Classical Music, by Norman Lebrecht, a book I blogged about earlier. The title is a misnomer - the book is really about the glory days and ultimate coming to grief of the big classical record labels. Lebrecht documents the power trips great conductors like Karajan, Stokowski, Toscanini, Solti and others were on, how their rivalry caused many of the same works to be recorded over and over (and over and over - there are over 500 recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth for example).

The classical recording industry destroyed iteself. Its hubris, disconnect from the market, and complete failure to come to terms with the internet doomed it. For all that, the book is a good read, because the characters in it - the musicians, producers and record company execs - were such outsize characters.

Lebrecht also lists what he considers the 100 best and 20 worst recordings ever made. These lists are always subjective. There are a couple of recordings I think should be on the list of 100 that aren’t there, but he does list many recordings I don’t have that I would like to add to my collection. The list of 20 worst is just a hoot.

If classical music is your area of interest, this is a good book to have.

This is a performance of William Bolcom’s Graceful Ghost Rag, recorded at the Kerrytown Concert House right here in Ann Arbor, by the piano and violin duo Philip Ficsor and Constantine Finehouse. The recording is a little rough, but the performance heartfelt. Ficsor and Finehouse call themselves American Double, and have just released a CD of the complete works of William Bolcom for violin and piano.

Was your Turkey Day a total disaster? Was the bird so underdone it jumped off the platter and ran out of the room when you brought out the carving knife? Was it so overcooked it made Death Valley look like a rainforest?

Well, fear not! Jon Singer has the foolproof formula for cooking a turkey:

For a turkey of greater than ten pounds, the roasting time should be equal to 1.65 times the natural log of the weight of the bird in pounds, cooked at 325 F.

Easy as π!

(From Making Light)

The New Yorker has a excellent article profiling Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. Gelb, appointed to the post last summer, is thoroughly overhauling the company, making it more accessible and theatrical. One of his first efforts was to broadcast live matinee performances in high-definition video to movie theaters all over the world, which have been watched by around 325,000 people. I have seen several of these and they are really good. The Met is also on the web, with 100 performances dating back to 1937 available on Rhapsody. He is venturing into territory never penetrated by the Met before. It turns out that Novak Djokovic, Serbian tennis player and opera fan, had been introduced to Natalie Dessay, French soprano and tennis fan, at the US Open. Gelb arranged for Djokovic to watch Dessay rehearsing Lucia and took him on stage when she was done. Photographs of the two quickly appeared in outlets ranging from the LA Times sports pages to ESPN. The encounter is now on YouTube.

These and many other efforts have raised the Met’s cultural profile and, more importantly, increased ticket sales after six years of decline.

It seems to me that one of the many reasons for the decline in the number of people listening to and performing so-called classical music is that too often its presentation is too stuffy, stand-offish and insular. I really like Gelb’s efforts to get the Met out to the wider culture, and very encouraged that they seem to be working.

Although this incident ended well, it took far too long to resolve.

I use Norton AntiVirus, the subscription to which expires every year around this time, but renewing it this year was just a huge hassle. There is a link to their renewal site on the web, but the link does not include the product you are renewing, you have to look it up and enter it by hand. The list of product names they have on their website does not exactly match the product name I use, so I had to guess which one on their list was the one I had. Then you fill out this form, give them your credit card number, and they email you an order confirmation. This is where things got frustrating.

The email confirmation said that I need to enter the subscription key/renewal code into the Norton software to renew it. But the email I received did not contain the renewal code. I poke around in several place, but can’t find it. So I go to their support website, and it says the fastest way to get support is to do a web chat with an analyst. So I click on the chat link, and it informs me that it does not work with Fireforx. So I open up Internet Explorer, go to the support website, click on the chat link, and it wants to download Symantec chat software. So I download and install the chat software, and now the download process informs me that I have to reboot my computer. Now I’m pissed - this is taking way too long.

But I reboot my computer, fire up IE, go to the Symantec support website, click on the chat link, and then wait around 5 minutes for a support analyst to show up. An analyst named Sanjeev finally shows up. Fortunately, his written English is just fine and there are no language issues. He asks me a bunch of questions, some of them irrelevant (like what kind of internet connection do I have), but he does renew my subscription on Symantec’s servers without requiring me to enter the still missing renewal code. So it ended well, but start to finish this took around an hour and I have neither time nor patience to mess with stuff like this.

It’s this kind of crap that drives customers to competitors.

Some outfit called the CQ Press issued a report calling Detroit the most dangerous city in the U.S. This caused much outrage from Detroit city officials. CQ Press says it publishes these rankings to encourage local conversations, which is nonsense, of course - they do it to sell their publications. Have you ever heard of CQ Press before? (This is CQ’s response to the criticism.)

These one-number rankings generate more heat than light. While the statements by Detroit officials denouncing the study are self-serving, they are also correct in pointing out that the average visitor to the city has nothing to fear if he stays out of areas he has no business being in. I go into Detroit frequently, for Tigers and Red Wings games, concerts, the opera, and, lately, jury duty, and have never had a problem or even felt uncomfortable. There is a lot of new development happening downtown as well - both commercial and residentia.l But it is also true that life is really grim for people who live in the high-crime neighborhoods, and denunciations of the study by the mayor and police chief don’t change that.

(Updated 21 November - fixed some typos)

Making Light hipped me to a blog called The War on Photography, which chronicles amateur and pro photographers taking perfectly legal pictures being harassed by law enforcement types in the name of homeland security. This post is about a British tourist threatened by NYC police for taking pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge. Given the vast numbers of picutures available of the Brooklyn Bridge (here are some of mine), no one is going to stop terrorists from doing their worst by stopping people taking pictures. All the authorities are doing in cases like these is harassing tourists and acting like total idiots. It is shameful.

(Updated 21 November - fixed a typo).

So I installed Google Earth today, and am now addicted. Google Earth is a program you install on your Mac or PC which connects to vast databases of maps, satellite imagery, documents, and photos of damn near every place on Earth. It is much richer, a lot more detailed, and has far more capabilities than Google Maps.

The screen capture above of Central Park in New York City does not do justice to what you can do with Google Earth. You can zoom in and get almost frightening detail at street level, zoom out to see the entire globe, pan every which way, look at photos people have taken and uploaded, read Wikipedia articles about places on the map, etc. You can also upload your own photos of places you have been and post them to Google Earth.

The blue dots on the map are the locations where people took pictures. When you click on the dot you can see the picture and read and add comments about it. The orange dots are links to posts on the Google Earth Community about those locations, which you can click on and read. The purple dots are links to Wikipedia pages about those locations.

The only criticism I have is that to post pictures to Google Earth, you have to join a photo sharing site called Panoramio, which is a separate site from Picasa, Google’s in-house photo sharing site, and requires a separate login from the rest of Google’s services. Panoramio, the brainchild of a couple of guys from Spain, was acquired by Google in July, 2007, so maybe Google will eventually merge Panoramio with Picasa.

This is going to be a major time sink.

His humming is a little distracting, but it’s a great performance.

For my birthday I received a book called The Life and Death of Classical Music, by Norman Lebrecht, a music critic and editor. The title is not accurate, the book is really about the rise and fall of the great classical music record labels - Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, EMI, Victor, etc.

Lebrecht is a witty and engaging writer, and his book is filled with anecdotes. One of the funnier concerns the German conductor Otto Klemperer and a Hungarian record producer living in Los Angeles called George Mendelssohn, no relation to Felix. Mendelssohn, trying to get a new record label called Vox off the ground

… grabbed hold of Otto Klemperer, who wrecked his American career with manic-depressive escapades and was heading off to conduct the state opera in Hungary, a rash move in the gathering Cold War. Mendelssohn got Klemperer to record a few symphonies in Paris and Vienna. Back in LA, the pair entered a record store and asked for Beethoven’s Fifth, conducted by Klemperer.
‘Sorry,’ said the assistant, ‘we’ve only got Toscanni and Walter…’
‘But we want Klemperer.’
‘These are the best recordings,’ said the sales guy. ‘Why do you want anyone else?’
‘Because I am Klemperer,’ growled the conductor.
‘And I guess your pal’s Beethoven,’ grinned the assistant.
‘No, he’s Mendelssohn,’ roared Klemperer.
‘Wow,’ exclaimed the clerk. ‘You know, I’ve always loved your Wedding March.’

Quicken Loans is relocating to downtown Detroit. They are looking at two sites, one on the site of the old Hudson’s store, the other where the Statler hotel used to be.

Quicken Loans employs around 4,000 people, so this will be a great thing for the city.

Model D has a fascinating article about an outfit called Social Compact based in Washington D.C., which has been hired by Detroit’s development people to measure the potential for retail development in the city. They do in-depth demographic studies for their clients that are much more accurate, and revealing, than the Census Bureau data most development types rely on. Among their findings about Detroit:
* Detroit has 933,043 residents, nearly 62,000 more than the Census reports.
* The average income of a Detroit household is $48,000, as opposed to the 2000 Census estimate of $40,900.
* There is $800 million of informal economic activity in Detroit’s economy each year. This is income like tips, side-consulting, baby-sitting and the like that do not register on traditional market measures.
* The aggregate income of Detroit households, $15.8 billion, is $2 billion greater than indicated by 2000 Census estimates.

What this means is that Detroit is healthier than its reputation, and is ripe for economic development. Good news after all the bad stuff we keep hearing.

(via Ed Vielmetti)

Miles Davis and John Coltrane in a 1958 performance of So What.

The stuff you find while blog-surfing:

… The question at hand was how to find good restaurants, and his answer was to take the city you want to go to and just google up some restaurant names that serve the dish you’re after. Then got to chowhound or another foodie site, and rather than asking about restaurants, you put up an enthusiastic post talking about how you just had the best whatever you’re looking for at one of these restaurants.

At that point, what drivingblind likes to call the nerdfury will begin. Posters will show up from nowhere to shower you with disdain, tell you how that place used to be good but has now totally sold out and - most important to your quest - will tell you where you would have gone if you were not some sort of mouth breathing water buffalo.

If you are a data geek like me you will find this a real time-sink.

Some examples:

1. Top 101 cities people commute into. Troy is #3 in the nation, Greenville, SC (!) is #1. Southfield is #10, Dearborn #28, Ann Arbor #75.
2. Top 101 stingiest ZIP codes. Texas seems to have the most.
3. Top 101 cities with the most Masters and Doctorate degrees. Few suprises here. Ann Arbor is #7, West Bloomfield is #34.
4. Top 101 cities with highest crime index. East St. Louis, IL is is #1 by a large margin, Detroit and Flint are #13 and #14, respectively.
5. Top 101 cities for drinking. Austin, TX is the place to be. No Michigan locale made the cut.

Interesting article in the New Yorker on the promise, and limitations, of efforts to scan, digitize and index all the print books in existence.

Google has been at it for several years, and the results of their work can be seen at Google Book Search. Google has two sources of books for its project: the partner program, and the Library Project. In the partner program Google collaborates with publishers (currently over 10 thousand worldwide) to provide users of ways to search for books currently covered under copyright. In the Library Project, Google is scanning and digitizing as many books as they can in collaboration with great libraries around the world, including the libraries of the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library. This effort is not without controversy (Daniel Brandt is no relation to me).

A rival project to Google’s is the Open Content Alliance, a non-profit venture which is also digitizing whole libraries for web access. This project, wary of the for-profit nature of the Google project, aims to place material on the web without the restrictions imposed by Google.

These projects will bring unprecedented access to an unimaginable number of books, and this is unambiguously good. But there are limitations. From the article:

And yet we will still need our libraries and archives. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have written of the so-called “social life of information”—the form in which you encounter a text can have a huge impact on how you use it. Original documents reward us for taking the trouble to find them by telling us things that no image can. Duguid describes watching a fellow-historian systematically sniff two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old letters in an archive. By detecting the smell of vinegar—which had been sprinkled, in the eighteenth century, on letters from towns struck by cholera, in the hope of disinfecting them—he could trace the history of disease outbreaks. Historians of the book—a new and growing tribe—read books as scouts read trails. Bindings, usually custom-made in the early centuries of printing, can tell you who owned them and what level of society they belonged to. Marginal annotations, which abounded in the centuries when readers usually went through books with pen in hand, identify the often surprising messages that individuals have found as they read. Many original writers and thinkers—Martin Luther, John Adams, Samuel Taylor Coleridge—have filled their books with notes that are indispensable to understanding their thought.

Furthermore, each of these projects has its own database, interface, and limits on the numbers of books it will digitize. Copyright adds another layer of restriction. Will we ever have a seamless, universal library containing the whole sum of human knowledge? No, of course not. But what we do and will have is wonderful.

(Updated 6 November - fixed some typos)

This is Hank Jones, another one of the greats, playing The Very Thought of You at the Berne Jazz Festival in 1989.