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Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Wiki Me
I think I might be one of those uptight people not completely on board with the whole open-source wiki thing. For instance, every time I see a wikipedia entry presented as a source I raise that left eyebrow just a bit, and wonder how correct the thing actually is. Of course I'm just as guilty of linking to wikipedia as the next guy, but it's clearly disingenous, because as I do it, I tell myself that I would never use it as an actual (or at least sole) information source if I ever really wanted to research something.
Of course as I sing out loud that information pooled from the world at large and not from vetted "experts" (at least I have the decency to shudder at the word) might contain (gasp) mistakes, I do remind myself that every "published" encyclopedia I've ever huddled over in a high school library was itself riddled with its own mistakes, misperceptions, biases, or outright lies—the publishers simply never bothered to own up to them.
The wikis I tend to like are the ones attempting to build a categorized reference source for a specific & interested group ... like Nikk Pilato's Wind Repertory Project. Nikk e-mailed me about this last year, and I think it's a fine idea. I've edited some of my pieces there myself, and I honestly wish Nikk success with it, because not only is it completely unbiased in its classifications, but it seems like it might be a useful source for many—in the model of the American Music Center's online library (formerly NewMusicJukeBox).
One example of the kind of open-source fuzziness that gives me pause is the wikipedia entry on Concert Band. I stumbled on this sucker yesterday while checking out the usefulness of the new search engine cuil.com1 by key-wording myself. (Yeah, that's right, I do that, too. Just like you.) So finding this entry was curious ... why would my name be in it, exactly? And then I scrolled down to the section on the Late Twentieth Century Through The Present...
John Corigliano, Karl Husa, Vincent Persichetti, and ... me? I'm clearly not important enough to have my own page though, as I know others are. (There are apparently wikipedia rules about those kinds of things ... you need to be at least this famous to ride the roller coaster.) And yet, there I am. Flippin' weird. My guess is whoever authored the entry is a) a fan, and so therefore b) someone I know. Not knowing enough about how to dig into the authorship trail on wikipedia, I'm stumped.
Of course, now that I've shown that, anyone can just go in there and delete my name. Which is kind of the whole wiki point, of course. The self-correction thing. It's also why my eyebrow is still raised.
1The verdict on Cuil isn't good, by the way. It kind of blows big chunks and is way not ready for prime time. At the very least, they need to get their thumbnails straight. As much as I'd like it to be, that is not me playing soccer.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
It's mine It's mine
While happily researching all things mid-Century "Beat" last year, I fell in love with a book by a Swiss-born photographer and friend of all the usual Beat suspects, Robert Frank. Frank traveled the country in 1955 and 1956, and in 1958 he published the resultant photographs in a collection titled The Americans. Every single image is stunning and illuminating, and I knew when I was writing My Hands Are a City that they must be involved in the overall project somehow. The book is quite famous (I actually first saw a few of the photos at an Art Institute exhibit in Chicago), but at the time, the only way I could set eyes on the actual thing was courtesy of the New York Public Library's Mid-Manhattan Branch...reference section. I could not find this flipping book anywhere. No bookstore, used, new, online, or in Portland, had a copy, so I sat there at the big table in Midtown and enjoyed, taking care to burn the images in my head as much as I could. That evening I set an alert with Amazon to find a used copy for me, but over the last year, I never found one for less than $250. After I saw it for $500, I told myself I'd hit Purchase if a copy ever turned up for $150.
The plan of course is for My Hands Are a City to pull double-duty as the third movement in a multi-movement mammoth on the same musical (and extra-musical) themes. After I finally saw the book I thought (as any sane person would) "Well there's my second movement", and so in the last couple of weeks I've been mulling hard about what shape that might take. One day after sketching some things I went outside for a break. I got myself a gyro. I didn't want to go back up to the studio just yet, so I thought I'd browse a little at the Barnes & Noble across the street, but I couldn't bring my gyro inside so I peered at the display window while I lunched.
And there it was. Staring me in the face. A new, 50th anniversary edition. I ran right in at bought one of their last 2 copies. At full retail. And I didn't care.
It's even better than I remember. Especially 'cause I own it.