Day 73, May 28, 2020

Productivity

We all have visions of how productive we could be if things were different. My list includes:

• Reorganize the basement
• Ride my bike every day
• Go for a walk every day
• Start writing fiction again
• Make a solo album
• Make collaborative music videos
• Revise poems into a collection
• Power wash the side of the house
• Get the driveway redone
• Tear down and make a new shed
• Finish raking the yard
• Redo the trail down to the river
• Make a fire in the fire pit, either fire pit...
• Learn a new song, or take a song and make it better
• Respond to the 10 influential album thing on Facebook I was nominated to do by Laura, Daniel, and Claiborne
• Read some of the books on my to-read pile
• Cook something delicious

Clearly, this is not a prioritized list. I suppose I could start to organize it from easy to hard, and that would help a little. But the reality is that the pandemic has impacted us all differently depending on whether one has little children, sick relatives or family members, live by one's self, are in the country or city, if you are working at home or not, have been laid off, are essential, etc.

My own pandemic has been primarily shaped by work, work from the kitchen table, but work nonetheless. My work has very few things that are ever complete, and the things that are completed are replaced by the thing after it, so my job often is a thing of endurance... how long can one sustain one's self until it is too late in the evening or the capacity for more work has left the body. What this then leaves, in the moments that are not consumed with work, is an instinctual response to do things that bring one pleasure.

Here's what I have done:

• Watched Star Trek Voyager, Unorthodox, Ozark, Parks and Recreation
• Gone on a walk, everyday I could, down to the river
• Raked some of the yard
• Kinda organized some of the basement
• Learned 1.5 new songs
• Made or collaborated on a few videos
• Cooked some attempts at delicious things

Lennon

That's pretty much it. Almost all of which were done after work or on weekends. But here's something else I've done that has brought me great joy, I've been watching YouTube videos of live performances. I've watched the Grateful Dead in Foxboro in 1989; Herbie Hancock's Headhunters in 1974; Medeski Martin & Wood from 2005 at the Newport Jazz Festival; Scofield, Medeski, Martin & Wood's Bandemic (pandemic) performance; Joni Mitchell, Pat Metheny, Jaco Pastorius, etc. on the Mingus tour from 1979. They are all stellar performances. And some are so good they make me well with emotion.

It is interesting, for someone who practiced with at least one band every week, played a gig one or two weekends a month (or more), who went out to see local live music almost every weekend, and habitually picked up records at yard sales, antique malls, and record shops, I haven't really had the time or allowed myself the pleasure to discover what is available on YouTube. To be honest, for the most part, until recently, I skipped over or saved for later almost all videos on social media. I have long back logs of bookmarked things I would like to watch at some point, but a full length set, or even a whole concert, I don't think I ever fathomed having the time to indulge in such a thing. 

Claypool

Two things changed the equation. Ok, three things. The first is, of course, the pandemic. Which then instigated this very blog you are reading. And the last was the purchase of my $99 refurbished Bose wireless headphones. While I write my blog, on my 2nd screen, YouTube is playing, the headphones are pressed over my ears, and I am free to watch/listen to Medeski, Scofield, Martin & Wood from 2014 in Chicago while I work on my blog. Every once in a while I have to pause writing and watch the video to see what is happening in a particularly special moment, or sometimes I'm stumped and am unsure where to go next with the blog and I turn to the video for a little while and let the music ride for a little while.

For much of my life, listening to recorded music has been as important to me as seeing live music. In my basement I have an old Thorens turntable, a cassette deck, and a tube preamp feeding an Adcom power amp that leads to a pair of Ohm Sound Cylinder speakers. This is to say, I took listening to music seriously, in an outdated audiophile kind of way. I guess it started during the time when I was a stay at home dad, between the end of graduate school and before I started teaching again. We had moved to Amherst and while I was doing guitar repair and some guitar building, we didn't have a lot of money, but Amherst had a fantastic take-it-or-leave-it section at the transfer station. At the transfer station I found all kinds of treasures, mostly from retiring professors clearing out their offices. I discovered old Harmon Kardon receivers, AR and KLH acoustic suspension speakers, and all kinds of obsolete and interesting gear. Through experimentation, and the help of the internet, speakers multiplied, turntables proliferated, and receivers replicated. When it was nap time, I would walk the stroller into town back when the Salvation Army was tucked behind the gas station and you could get five albums for a dollar, and then cross the street to Mystery Train where the kids spent their formative years sleeping under the watchful gaze of Cynthia and Josh as I thumbed through the cheaper jazz albums.

Over time, my collection of obsolete audiophile gear winnowed down to a few favorite pieces, and then eventually those few pieces were banished to the basement music room (old audiophile gear is large and unsightly to the untrained eye). Just to give you a taste of my geekdom, the Thorens turntable has spring suspension like the old AR turntables. I removed the old arm and armboard and installed a phenolic board drilled for the more modern Audioquest tonearm. I removed all the automatic arm lift mechanisms to make the table entirely manual (all the mechanics involved in lifting the tonearm at the end of a record add perceptible levels of noise). The Ohm speakers are omnipolar designs with what is traditionally the front of the speaker pointing down into what is basically a sonotube. Sound radiates 360 degrees off the back side of the speaker with only a small tweeter marking direction. While not as precise as some of the more modern speakers, the Ohms are beautifully balanced speakers with an amazing sense of space where, with the right album, you can sit in the room with your eyes closed and nearly see the quartet seated on the stage. They are realistic enough that once when watching a movie with those speakers, when a fly buzzed across the screen, Jessamyn's dog snapped at the air.

So, listening to music, and spending time listening to music was important to me for a very long time. Long enough that I have three Ikea shelving units stuffed with albums. But more recently, music has been relegated to my phone and listened to mainly in the car, but even that was supplanted by my Audible subscription. 

Matt and Brandee at the 413

It has been a pleasure to return to listening and watching music. Except for the rare exception (in recent years, Wilco's Solid Sound festival, Funkadelic, Lennon Claypool Delirium, the Green River Festival, Dinosaur Jr shows, Tanglewood) most of the performances I've been to have been local bands in local venues where you can reach out and touch the performers as they pass around a tip jar. We are lucky to live in an area with phenomenal musicians of almost any genre you can imagine. You can go out any night of the week and see amazing talent... or you used to be able to. In any case, returning to music via YouTube allows me to relive the kinds of concerts where you got to see your musical heroes play in venues that were ordinarily basketball arenas, football stadiums, and hockey rinks. Certainly not the most acoustically friendly environments. But on YouTube I can see all the things one could never see in person, and while not gut shaking loud, it is clear and enveloping between these earphones.

I suppose for younger people it is laughable that I am just making this discovery now. I know one of the fears for many performing arts venues has been the loss of audiences willing to attend live performances because they can experience these things in the comfort of their homes. And there is something really wonderful and magical to be able to see these things at home. But now, more than ever, it has reawakened the desire for me, once it is safe to do so, to go out and experience the big live show, to allow myself to be over taken by the music, to pull out my earplugs and lose them in my pockets. To close my eyes and feel the music in my body. To dance with everyone else in the room, the bar, the hall, the lawn at Tanglewood. To transcend a moment and touch something hidden deep inside.

Good night,

Leo

Slowmo Chickens

From Our Friends:

From the Pioneer Valley Game Developers:

Blender is hardly a new 3D creation application, but it has gained a lot of notice among game artists in the past year since version 2.8 was released.

If you haven't tried Blender recently (or if you'd like to learn more about version 2.8!) please join us Sunday, June 7th at 7pm on Twitch and learn more about Blender from 3D Artist and Professor of Game Development, Ezra Cove at the next MAKE TALK PLAY!

We'll kick off the stream at 6:45pm, but the panel starts at 7pm. To join, simply click here:
https://www.twitch.tv/anothercastledev

From Creative Commons:

This past month, the world celebrated International Museum Day, with a focus on equality, diversity, and inclusion. At CC, we recognize the role of cultural institutions, particularly museums, in preserving and sharing the world’s cultural artifacts and knowledge. That’s why we support museums through our openGLAM and copyright policy efforts, as well as assist them in implementing open policies and practices. (Like the Smithsonian!)

Below, you’ll find two posts exploring open access at cultural institutions in more detail—and don’t miss our recent post on openness at NASA, the latest in a series exploring open policies and practices “in the wild.”

From MassPoetry:

The Poetry Coalition, a network of 25+ poetry organizations coordinated by the Academy of American Poets, has launched the Poetry Coalition Fellowship program, a program that will offer paid fellowship positions to five fellows per year who will each assist a different Poetry Coalition organization for twenty hours per week over the course of a forty-week period. All positions will be remote.

The five organizations hosting the inaugural Poetry Coalition Fellows beginning this year are CantoMundo, Cave Canem, Kundiman, Mizna, and Split This Rock. Applications are open now until July 15th.

For more info, see the Poetry Coalition's website here

From the American Council on Education:

Race and Crisis at a Crossroads

Join ACE and American University for an interactive learning experience on June 22 that will focus on taking action on the intersecting issues of race and crisis management in higher ed. The foundation for this experience is a three-year study of the racial crisis at the University of Missouri in 2015-16, and of the resulting lessons learned by the campus community.

Today's Online Teaching Tips:

From It Gets Better:

Our EduGuide for the Academy Award-winning film Moonlight is now available in Spanish. Click below to access both the English and Spanish-language versions.

From Higher Ed Jobs:

Soft Skills and Online Learning: Why Should We Care? 
by Russell S. Thacker 

College students often gain as much between their classes as they do within them. That's not to say the classes aren't excellent, but simply that much of our learning occurs in ways we don't expect, such as through sidebar conversations, internships, and leadership roles in student organizations. Such experiences teach students soft skills, but what happens when higher education for millions of students is suddenly reduced to a virtual Zoom or Blackboard connection? How do students continue developing their interpersonal skills and building their social capital?