I'm just downloading these to listen to over the next few days, so I can't speak to their quality yet, but I'm betting that Chris Lydon has done his usual exemplary job of bringing out the eloquence of his interviewees in this collection of dialogs on Coltrane, in which he talks with Ben Ratliff, Amiri Baraka, Alain Pacowski, Bill Pierce and Michael Harper (107 MB altogether, about 1:45 of Real School). As for me, I've never fully appreciated jazz of the Coltrane era --I know there's plenty of nourishment there, but I've never devoted the ears to the effort to grok the essence. High time, I suppose. Anyway, it's REALLY nice to have Chris Lydon back again. I've missed him during the Summer Hiatus, and I am eagerly anticipating what he'll do next.
remind yourself of John Fonda, then watch
Alas that there aren't more video clips of this, my favorite bogus band:
My use of YouTube has been pretty spineless: I sometimes check Viral Video Chart (mostly for outrage or Zeitgeist, which seems the same thing all too often... ), I use YouTube's keyword search for obscure people and instruments and musical genres, and I grab the occasional clip and save it to the Hoard (where it basically sits around, untagged and unlinked), and sometimes I Embed a video in a page or a blog posting. I've scarcely used the 'Favorite' button, and until today I confess that I wasn't inspired to even think about social uses... but (via The Programmable Web) I stumbled upon Walter Rafelsberger's Metaportal der Medienpolemik, which mashes Dapper and YouTube to construct an RSS feed from one's YouTube Favorites. Here's mine, for anybody who might be interested... and I vow to use the Favorite button more systematically.
My recent immersion in digitizing vinyl (lately it's been Greek stuff from the 1930s) has put me in mind of the problems and possibilities of managing collections of sound, musical and otherwise. An hour of BBC Four on British dialects, based in an archive of hundreds of recordings of WW I British POWs in Germany, hints at a huge task of digitization and a delicious prospect of analysis.
Anybody in the Ed Biz (and especially anybody interested in Anthropology) ought to be watching this space:
Digital Ethnography...but I see just 120 or so subscribers to the RSS feed.
Can't remember where I grabbed this one, but clearly highly relevant:
I'm a bit out of the habit of following Jon Udell (divergent worlds I guess, he at Microsoft and I in splendid otium), but don't miss today's The Once and Future University and the Wesch video to which it points:
I continue to be GLAD that I'm not trying to deal with colleges and faculties and libraries anymore. Really glad.
This one thanks to a link from WFMU's Beware of the Blog:
Musical argonauts need to keep their eyes and ears peeled for the ummmmm unexpected. Today's prime candidate: Paul Dateh's Hip Hop Violin in duet with Inka One (via Doc Searls, who got it from Steve Woolf, who is probably hipper than you or ... ). Turntablism isn't a genre that I've paid much attention to, but that's pretty much due to my limitations and blindspots.
My friend Daniel pointed me to this six minutes of Danny Gatton:
Whew.
I've been rolling like a spaniel in dead fish in PLAYLISTS and REAL AUDIO ARCHIVES from WFMU's Transpacific Sound Paradise: Popular and unpopular music from around the world with Rob Weisburg
...and I hardly know where to begin with YouTube stuff I've run into in the last day, but try these:
Annabouboula on Night Music (and catch the instrument at 2:05)
early 60s -late 50s Greek nightclub: Xiotis bouzouki performance
...and for extremes of kitsch, consider Alexandriani Felaha, with Audience Participation (the Levis company has a lot to answer for...)