B.W'd.Y.G addendum

A quick and bloggy addendum on looking for edification in all the wrong online places:

As I continue to trawl/troll Blogspot for distant voices of reason, I am frequently reminded, for one, that this is asking a lot no matter the medium, but also that the analytic/speculative/critical orientation remains very much a preoccupation of a tiny woolly-headed minority of thinkers, even (or is it especially?) now that it has been institutionalized and co-opted.

In plain English now, I am rather taken aback not so much at any lack of literacy or erudition but rather at the sheer number of "book reports" that people have written and posted, summaries of other authors' work which are in and of themselves accurate, grammatical, well-proofread, etc., more so in fact than we have been led to expect from The Internet, but from which any whiff of original analysis or insight is, let's say, conspicuous by its absence.

There is a specifically journalistic version of this wherein some bygone writer/thinker is exhumed in order to be offered as an antidote to or perspective on some current political event. In this there is at least some gentle stirring of analytic thought, some positing of a connection or juxtaposition between two ideas or ideologies; but if you have in fact already read the book which the author wishes more people nowadays would read (in other words, if you are like me in that you only go looking for original thought online after grinding away at a fair bit of your own), then for you these are still "book reports" which rarely take note of anything you have not already noticed yourself. I often go online hoping to find out what I have not noticed about a given work I want to cite or write about. I am finding that this bet doesn't pay out very often or very well. (I hasten to add that academic journals on the whole, and I really mean this, are not much better, not unless the article in question is a true landmark document. I have the best luck with physical books published before the PowerMac. I am quite underwhelmed by just about everything else.)

I believe it was Ms. Wright in 11th grade IB English who quite explicitly weaponized "book report" as an epithet and a piece of negative advice. We were therein admonished to understand the difference between writing a summary of a book and writing an essay about the ideas presented in the book, and about our own ideas about those ideas. We were also made to understand that many high schools out in the suburbs practice grade inflation while assigning less rigorous work than we would be doing, and that if we thought this unfair then it was tough beans for us. I've lived to have mixed feelings about the overall effect that all of this rigor had on me for the ensuing decade or so. But PHHS really did have some great teachers who "get it."

That said, I think that grade inflation and general soullessness is at best half the answer to the present riddle. My free-wheeling speculation is that the "book report" is, consciously or otherwise, just a more erudite and better-proofread version of clickbait. "Book report" bloggers are more likely to have something for sale, literally or figuratively. And, while it may of course be countered that summaries of Erich Fromm books are never going to get as many clicks as a well-curated cat video, I'm not sure that this conclusively rules out my theory.

Among my central interests here, which do not include cat videos even though I enjoy them as much as the next guy, it is not too hard now that google supplies some pageview data within the dashboard here to make some educated guesses about what kinds of posts might get the most attention. Ever since I posted it, my transcription of Wayne Shorter's Pinocchio has been by far the most viewed page on this site, often doubling up on the next closest competitor. A really terrible essay that I wrote for a class at CalArts, on Ligeti's Lontano, posted as a placeholder during a Blog Month, is always near the top. I would of course prefer it if Against the Literary Imperative or any of the essays on Mumford's Art and Technics were the most viewed; but I suppose I would have to delete everything else to make that happen, and even then this would be a lowering rather than a raising of the tide.

There are many other possible explanations for the "book report" phenomenon: a genuine desire to create something more accessible than the books themselves, any of a number of esoteric personal motivations, and, of course, the mere conceit to original thought in absence of any real ability to toss it off. But I do wonder if clicks are not part of the equation and if desperate slacker college students are not in and of themselves a formidable mass of clickers.

Bro, where'd ya go?

The first time I heard or read the word "blog" was when I over-heard it on the radio while trying to work on something else. Some glib NPR infotainment piece about blogs, their rise and potential fall. Circa 2004, give or take a year. The funny thing is, something quite glib was uttered in the course of this puff piece that immediately captured my attention and imagination. This was solely responsible for my first aborted attempt at blogging, consisting of exactly one post which, if memory serves, was very much like post #1 here. A few years later I tried again and it stuck.

When you run out on a Blogspot, as I ran out on my firstborn, eventually it is resorbed into the cybervoid. You do get a friendly notice from the hivemind at google long before resorption is imminent. This has happened only once with Fickle Ears, and it practically made my heart stop, which is pretty embarrassing but also sums up well where things stand for me vis-a-vis anyone giving two shits about anything else that I've done. This blog project is now my hipster-nerdverse answer to Second Life. This was not the plan, but this is what has happened. McLuhan was quite correct to call these things "extensions of man," though I prefer "projection" because it more fully captures the aggressive aspect which is bound to be part of the equation for a washed-up high school athlete. This blog gets read about as often as my symphonies get played, but I believe in it, most of all because, just like that breezy NPR story said (or like I now imagine it to have said), the blog is a diary and a soapbox and a therapist and a record-keeper and perhaps a few other things, all and none of these things all at once, oddly able to shapeshift in spite of being, seemingly, a rigid, backward, slightly clumsy technology of failure, a technology of the millennium which with full millennial irony almost immediately ceased to have any obvious resonance with everything its sibling technologies have wrought. Meanwhile, I am a typical only child, and I'm here to stay.

Apropos of such a failure, no two people use these little monsters in quite the same way, and this makes community and exchange far more elusive than McLuhan seems to have thought it might become, depending I suppose on what exactly you understand "village" to mean. Lewis Mumford idealized the "neolithic" village as the most stable, secure, peaceful existence mankind has yet known, and so lashed out at McLuhan like a cornered animal. They were both prescient in their own ways. But neither got all of the details quite right.

There are only three other blogs that have really, really resonated with me. One of them, speaking of malign prophets, is Professor Gann's Postclassic, and when I say it "resonated" I mean to evoke a cast iron skillet falling off the stove during an earthquake rather than the gestalt of a clean orchestral tutti. Still, Gann is just about the only person writing about music who actually is all the things his right sidebar says he is. This makes his fieldwork invaluable even for someone who occasionally finds his positions absurd. Better a scholar courting absurdity than vice versa, I think. I'm not going to provide a link though, because if you're reading this the percentage chance that you've already been there is in the high nineties.

Daniel Wolf's Renewable Music has been a much more enjoyable horizon-expanding experience. Daniel's writing style also very much appeals to me and has influenced my own writing greatly, unlikely though that may seem. Unfortunately even with Daniel's help I didn't really understand exactly what The Radical Music referred to until I got to CalArts. (Or did this merely distract me with an academic caricature? Hmm...) I am not an experimentalist, nor all that Radical of a musician, and I have very precisely articulated/rationalized reasons for why I am not these things. But the funny thing is, in absence of full context I have always been able to read the writings of experimental musicians and think that I agree with every word. I've had some odd, very adolescent false starts this way. But I do owe Daniel quite a debt not just for providing raw information and for generating plenty of "heat and light" but also for exemplifying in quiet eloquence what a civil internet might look like. Daniel is the reluctant virtuoso of the blog whose example guides much of what I do here, though again I realize that probably sounds inexplicable and perhaps also is unfair to him. Influence works in funny, indirect ways.

Both of these blogs seem to have gone dormant, happily without yet being gobbled up by the streetsweeper, but for years now rather than the mere months which are customary for all of us. Predictably given my tastes and purposes, Gann's project does feel more or less complete at this point, while Wolf's feels open-ended and inexhaustible. Gann once confessed to being wary of repeating himself, a problem which every blogger has if we're being honest, while Wolf's purview itself seemed to ensure a certain ludic unpredictability very much in the spirit of the musical work he makes and writes about. As a reader I don't miss the pressure of keeping up, but now the disappearance of these two curiosities, both of which kept me on my toes in a way that a rigidly empirical orientation cannot, is felt as a palpable absence in my personal intellectual theater.

For all the time (too much perhaps) that I once spent bouncing off the walls of the blogosphere, there is only one other blog I would truly count as an influence. I spent only a very brief time with it, but it made a strong impression. Returning for the first time in a decade, I was sad to find that it has long since been resorbed, or possibly intentionally removed, and sadder yet to find the Internet Archive seemingly not quite in sync with the Blogspot way of organization. And yet, if you use the URL followed by the year you can indeed find your way to most of Stanley J. Zappa's It Is Not Mean If It Is True (Attack Attack Attack) and therein you will find plenty to chew on.

ee.gg.

[Update: criminy, these archive.org links work only on desktop, not on mobile. WTF?]

Peek-a-boo! Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening!

Adorno, Phoebe Snow, and the Colors of Spring--Emo Mix

Business Extending Peacefully

The Illusion, The Understanding

Exchange Value Destroys Use Value

The Truth About Tuxedos

Large Fry, Small Fry

10/10/11. God is Dead. Occupy Wall Street. Shit On Police Car. Wipe Ass with New York Times.

EYES RIGHT! Sgt Shamar Thomas, USMC and The Revealation of Self-Production and The Unity That is Realized in Precisely that Spontaneity

Forcible Retardation, Pinched Hatred, Neurotic Stupidity and the Genius of Children.

Capitulate Before the Superior Power / Purchase Spiritual Peace

Sensory Pleasure Turns into Disgust / Displacement of Feelings into Exchange Value / Neurotic Mechanisms of Stupidity in Listening / The Arrogantly Ignorant Rejection of Everything Unfamiliar

Whereupon Teddy Drops A Chocolate Yule Log on the Ambivalence of Retarded Listeners, Jazz Administrators and Pattern Based So-Called Improvisation

The Younger Generation, Rowing for the Older Generation

It's weird, but something about SJZ's presentation of Adorno just feels right. It's a well-staged collision between Adorno and the punk aesthetic, the kind Greil Marcus tried to bring off but couldn't without looking like a douche. The medium is the message, and there's a message-message too. It works. The liberal use of highlighting is especially crucial. I have already started stealing this idea and intend to continue to do so. No "anxiety of influence" here. But do go to the source.

This is also awesome.

And I'm not the least bit ashamed to say I totally agree with this.

Finally, please don't neglect to enjoy the order-from-chaos aspect of the labels list. Beef-Beethoven-Beheading! hipster-Husserl-hypocrisy! Pink Martini-piss smell-Plato! In a world where even fleeting moments of happiness are elusive, this makes me smile. Bro, where'd ya go?

Sticking with the Village motif, I decided to get tribal and do some googling confined to the domain blogspot.com. Lotta people were all over Wordpress when it first came on the scene, and it would be years after that before the Blogspot got any kind of comparable makeover. I confess that I did consider bailing. Nowadays I'm inclined to double down on the hipster-nerdverse aspect and remain on the present platform. I do take pleasure in having a deep archive even if most of what it contains is execrable rubbish. But I also sincerely despise slick packaging, which I'm pretty sure is exactly what the leavers were after. Happily there's still plenty of heat and light being generated by my tribe in a no-to-low-frills sort of manner. Some interesting shite that I managed to dig up:

Ever heard of Justus Buchler? The name sounds like a joke, but it's dead serious, and quite compelling.

Part 1

Part 2

Roger Bobo, the GOAT himself, is blogging strong! I especially recommend this short post, after which you can safely skip approximately 73% of the overwrought muck that I've posted here over the years.

Also of this variety, re: judging competitions:

There were groups that played perfectly together and projected no musical personality whatsoever. These groups, absolutely amazed by not being advanced to further rounds, were invariably the ones who would approach the judges, demanding an explanation as to why. Trying to explain was not easy.

A tired subject perhaps, until the last sentence. The rare wisdom is all in the last sentence.

And of course no excursion in brass would be complete without the gearheads trying to ruin everything.

I wrote the essay, "Specters", about some of the interesting people, those who would follow the various orchestras that I had played in through the years in our rehearsals and concerts.

Sadly, the stories of an old man who played in the Moscow Youth Orchestra when Tchaikovsky would bring by a new score by to hear the orchestration or another old man in another part of the world had a big part of his life rewriting symphony scores with all the inaudible orchestration deleted, do not hold the same interest as rotary vs. piston valves or "Is Bigger Better?" To me that's sad.

Everybody now, in your best millennial tween voices: SAAAD!

I love that our GOAT has brains and heart as well as chops.

Elsewhere...

A super-interesting 8-part series begins here. A taste:

Prewar Modernist architects had looked back to the look of cleanness of white undergarments that signaled a actually clean body (in contrast to the earlier look of white linens that had simply covered a dirty body). In the postwar years the material abundance made of industrial manufacturing changed the game once more. JFK, the president who committed America to landing on the moon, changed suits as many as four times a day, often went through six fresh shirts a day, and habitually wore a girdle to the point that his muscles atrophied. Mid-century Modernist fashion designers,who were the first to extend their couture brands to mass market merchandise, were now returning the early Modernist architect's gaze. But they were not admiring architecture's look of cleanliness, they were admiring the rigid structure.

Through the above site I found my way to this one:

Robertson conducts a large and varied cast through a long time and a complex plot with great skill to a most satisfactory click of closure. But, Hames argues, the difficulty of integrating the characters' lives with a political history that mostly consisted of tiny conventicles and ceilidhs in literally smoke-filled rooms and debates in widely unread periodicals, and that now and then took public form as 'set-piece' events in parliaments and streets, can defeat even the best novelist – even though Robertson was himself on those marches and in those rooms. It's a problem familiar in science fiction: one reviewer cited refers to Robertson's 'info-dumping', a term from the lexicon of SF criticism.

I am quite ignorant of the principals but not the principles, hence this was logged at once in my personal card catalog of meditations on the lie that tells the truth.

Here is an intelligent and erudite examination of a work which is fundamental to my own bloggerel.

Elsewhere...

Abstract comics!!

This made me just the slightest bit homesick, emphasis on the sick part.

Critics taking a beating? Bibliographical use of the comments feature? I'm there.

Exhaling...

Just as the best places for Raising A Family are not/cannot be the best places for an artist to find a fertile balance of arrogation and humility, so I have often aspired to emigrate from the parochial intellectual climate of the here-and-now to a self-curated intellectual community of online scholars. "Small pieces, loosely joined" in the coinage of one popular author. The ideal seems unachievable and the need remains unmet. In the bigger/scarier city I settled in as an adult, from which the so-called Family Millennials and their as-yet-unborn entropy machines are said to be fleeing in droves, superficially it seems possible to find almost any other variety of human company one might desire. The reality is that even after uprooting and moving across the country, certain structural obstacles remain. I can confirm, against my abiding pessimistic streak, that the aforementioned "small pieces" are indeed in evidence, both online and IRL. Not surprisingly in hindsight, it's the "loosely joined" part that has remained elusive and seems impossible. That is cause for as much skepticism and despair as even I am capable of mustering. As a co-worker and scarred LA veteran once put it to me, there's no "scene" here because there's no "community." A continent's worth of great players does not make a scene if said players are too spread out, spread too thin, and spread too far up their own buttholes. And now, adding insult to injury, we've been forced even further apart and, assuming we are able to return to our non-scene at all, will be confronted with the historic ruins of a dead civilization, something much trickier and traumatic to confront than mere scorched earth from which spontaneous regeneration is more assured. The online world, meanwhile, was already imploding even before the Plague. The social media have become less rather than more differentiated. To become even "loosely joined" to anyone or anything on the internet is now the greatest hazard rather than, as it was once imagined to be, the whole point of the thing. So, I will continue to shelter in place, to append "site:blogspot.com" to any google queries which otherwise prove to be overbroad, and to feign optimism to the extent possible under the circumstances. Feel free to share anything you've been reading or writing lately in the comments.

The Sneakernet of Everyday Life

A couple of years after college I commenced sporadic production of a half-humorous zine as an outlet for various petty frustrations with the world of music and musicians. The focus was more personal and quotidian than on this blog, which I started around the same time. Blogging being public and more or less permanent, I have always maintained that the more personal the content the more interesting and unique it ought to be. Ditto regarding any imperative towards expression as that word is broadly and colloquially construed across The Arts. Seems to me that any such imperative is necessarily colored by several more general features of the society or social group in question, e.g. the degree of shared experience, conformity to norms, obedience to authority, and so on. In other words, most of us are not quite different enough from each other for the public airing of even the most intimate details to be the least bit interesting to our various constituencies. (And if a public airing is to be deemed necessary on purely therapeutic grounds, then the offending malaise must be a particularly virulent and contagious one indeed; on which point I must thereby beg your indulgence in suspending judgment of this meta-airing until its purpose has become clear.)

In any case, as the blog has skewed speculative, the zine has become an archive of the personal, and this dovetailed with the fact of the latter's strictly private and offline circulation. I have recently resumed production after a long hiatus and am finding it quite useful in exactly this way. The reason, however, for writing at length on all of this now is to relate a very practical use, perhaps even a necessary one, which has recently emerged and which never would have occurred to me the day I brought out the first installment.

Employers are demanding to moderate what their employees say about them online, and not even a jazz tuba player can avoid falling under surveillance. This was ostensibly the case with a certain car opera recently staged in and around LA by a company you probably haven't heard of, and it is ostensibly the case regarding my current employment with an entertainment franchise you’ve most certainly heard of. Neither of the organizations in question will ever be mentioned by name here, not by me at least, and not by you either if you happen to know me well enough to put all of this together and would like me to be able to address any new developments to the already limited extent possible under the circumstances. They will not be mentioned because as a condition of employment both demand authority to moderate online content pertaining to them, and because one is known to devote significant resources to this. (And really, what quantity of resources is not "significant" when you consider the implications of such policies and the time-is-money realities of running a business?)

For what it’s worth, I don’t have to start a limited-run, privately-circulated, dead-tree social commentary franchise with which to digest, explore, archive and (usually) exorcise the vicissitudes of such personal experience: I already have one as an existential matter if not much of a material one. What I didn’t have before was real necessity for such an outlet ("real" in this case meaning "beyond the personal")¹. Thanks to the new thought police, which, like so many other rhetorical constructions of modernist dystopian thought, has coalesced fragmentarily and incrementally rather than all at once, now I do.

For anyone just devoted enough to my personal concerns to be an earnest and comprehensive reader of both publications, it might be useful to think of the zine as a sort of annotated bibliography in support of the more sweeping generalizations I make here about the professional circles I inhabit, and perhaps also as a way of “blogging” on topics and experiences which would be socially ungraceful and/or professionally damaging to address publicly online. I suppose this betrays my rather cynical view of prevailing norms of social and professional comportment, but unfortunately there is almost always something arising from artists' relationships with employers and/or with each other which really ought to be addressed and brought to wider attention, i.e. for the specific purpose of giving the community a chance to look itself in the mirror. Social grace and professional viability are quite flimsy excuses for forgoing such opportunities: first, because together they amount to very little when compared to the potential chilling effect of the new reality; and second, because, as I am attempting to outline here, it is not impossible to have it both ways given the variety of media and social settings presently at our collective disposal. In any case, there won't be much worldly grace or prestige left to preserve if transparency is ritually sacrificed to branding in this arena as it already has been in so many others. Unfortunately the seemingly ideal online platforms which emerged in the 1990s are in the 2010s now equally ideal for surveillance. Hence the ongoing need for a Sneakernet of Everyday Life.


1. Again, is “personal” necessity ever better than oxymoronic vis-a-vis the act of telling others about yourself? And does the therapeutic value of artistic "expression" really hinge on the act of public presentation over and beyond private creation? Even if the answer is simply, "It depends," these two questions are always worth pondering before hitting the Send button. Ask me how I know.

December (yes, December) is Blog Month

December is Blog Month here at Fickle Ears, which means it's about to get hella in(s)ane up in this shit. Enjoy the intellectual carnage.

Prior intros here, here, here and here.

Prior outros here, here, here and here.

Behold the entire streaming pile here, here, here and here.

Blog Month V. Game On.®

Blog Month IV: Perfunctory Terminal Posting

Meh.

The content-rich life is not for me. I do make it look good, though.

Survey: Should This Blog Be Hosted Elsewhere?

I want the honest of opinion of anyone who happens to read this.

I have a sentimental attachment to Blogger, and I utterly loathe the thoughts of changing the URL of my blog, redirecting readers through to the new one with a postdated entry, and losing whatever perception of accomplishment comes with displaying a five-year archive of overwrought vitriol in the right sidebar, BUT...this shit is starting to drive me bonkers. Simplicity is golden, inflexibility is lethal. While I have no use for fancy embedded media players or dancing Flash-animated tubas in the background, I'm sick to death of length limitations on comments, labels, titles and even, I just discovered, the total length of posts that are displayed on the home page, which evidently I've managed to exceed for the first time this Blog Month. Starting tomorrow, this monstrosity SHOULD display the complete month of December in chronological order (i.e. backwards from blogging standard practice). Not allowed. According to what I dug up, someone hacked the chronology stuff years ago, but a recent update to Blogger caused this to stop working. And fuck jump breaks. Jump breaks are for 13 year olds who only want to read the first paragraph to see if it's something they can plagiarize for their book report.

I've never used Wordpress. It looks too fancy and I'm afraid I'll like it too much. I don't know what its limitations may or may not be, how much you get for free, or how intuitive the interface is. I suppose it would be easy enough to find out. It's not comforting to know that the people who work for Google are plenty smart enough to design something state-of-the-art but choose not to. So tell me, if you have an opinion, whether you think I should stay here or go there. I'm listening.

Who Are You and What Are You Doing In My Bookmarks?

Hmm...what other blogger-like behaviors can I feign for the next 24 hours in order to make it to the end of this project? Well, how about a little Link 'n' Run?

For reasons I seem to have forgotten, these blogs found their way into my bookmarks at some point in the past. Checking them out months (possibly years?) later, I'm impressed enough to recommend them here, which I normally don't do. Long live Blog Month...


•TeledyN

An interesting read with a range of interests and rate of activity which seem to match my own quite closely.


•Schoenberg

In particular, see this post for a fascinating story with a surprise ending. If you find this inspiring, I want to be your friend. If not, you can't be my friend anymore.


•Big Mouths

Go here for an epic and thought provoking missive "about composers and history, about how the past is ineluctably linked to the instantiation of the future, an instantiation we generally call the present." Now this is blogging!


•Alphabet Soup

Some timely reflections on the new music scene. And if for some reason you can't get enough of me from my own blog, I've spilled my guts here about an experience I had entering a competition.


It Is Not Mean If It Is True (Attack Attack Attack)
(Actually, I've been on to this one for a while, but I want to mention it anyway).

Stanley Jason Zappa "attacks" (in a good way) the only Adorno essay I thought I understood with sharp wit, contemporary perspective, and LOTS of highlighting. "Corporate Boppers and Performance Art Poseurs?" I am in all likelihood the only CalArts student who thinks that's funny (hilarious, actually).

Blogkeeping

For the first time in a while, I've done some tweaking around here:

•The toolbar has been adjusted to match the color scheme as well as possible within the absurdly limited range of possibilities provided by the template.

•The title of the blog has been shortened from "My Fickle Ears Dig It" to simply "Fickle Ears," and the information immediately below has gone from alliterative to merely authorial. Let's face it, we're all sick and tired of the standard issue blogospheric shtick, and no one more than me, a point I continue to belabor here. Even so, it is surprisingly difficult to avoid slipping back into common-practice blogging, so in a fleeting lucid moment, I've opted to up the austerity factor yet another notch. If anyone was genuinely curious about the original title, it's something I blurted out once in a band rehearsal after the first complete run-through of a difficult new tune I'd brought in. As with most such statements, we thought it much funnier at the time than it really is, and it only took me five years to realize that the shortened version is a better title for a blog.

•Similarly, I'm now strictly an anonymous "follower" of the few blogs to which I've subscribed through Blogger's built-in reader. I quit Facebook in a moment of clarity and pretty soon I've started creating another social network without even noticing? What the fuck? I prefer to follow blogs through good old-fashioned browser bookmarks which I capture while reading comment threads and clicking on the profiles of contributors who seem to have something timely to add to the conversation. I'll still be keeping my Blogger subscriptions simply for old time's sake as I can't imagine a drawback to doing so anonymously, though I'm sure to think of one soon. Anyway, if you are one of those authors and just saw me disappear from your followers list, (a) get a life, and (b) I promise I'm still reading you, even though you don't have a life.

•I've just discovered (probably years late as usual) that Blogger has a built-in stats page. As the kids say, LOL!!! I can't seem to get it to stop counting my own activity towards page views and the like, even though there's an option to disable this, so who knows about some of the numbers. The most perplexing? Supposedly, 81% of my pageviews (One word? Further LOL...) are on Windows and only 14% on Mac. I find that pretty hard to believe. Spambots?...REPUBLICANS?

Poonpuff FAQ for the e-Nihilists in the room (as well as any and all past/present/future MFEDI readers whose e-worldview necessitates such overt clarifications of purpose and method be made again and again regarding this and the few other constructive, well-written weblogs about music and musicians)


WHEEEEW, okay...


ahem...



Dear Angry Reader With Better Things To Do Than Sit Around Reading Some Young White Asshole's Weblog,

Before attacking my motives for joining the Post-Nicholas Payton Foofaraw (PNPF or "Poonpuff"), for making any particular argument therein, and/or for having this blog in the first place, I would humbly ask you to consider the following clarifications of purpose and method, issued at the outset of my joining the PNPF and applicable to all subsequent statements made on this topic.


(1) You're not qualified to disagree with someone who "plays more horn" than you do. Who do you think you are, anyway?

While NP indeed plays more horn than I do, mine is bigger.

In all seriousness, I graciously defer to NP and similarly accomplished individuals (if any others exist) on matters which are directly informed by one's degree of musical skill and/or career success, such as issues of instrumental technique, music criticism, marketing/career advice, practice habits, etc. However, any generalizations (music-related or otherwise) about a group of which I am a member (e.g. "white people" or "all these kids with music degrees") are fair game for rebuttal because they require no further qualifications than (a) that I be a member of the group(s) in question, and (b) that I tell the truth about myself. Under those circumstances, no musical skill whatsoever is required to be qualified to make such a rebuttal, even to a highly skilled musician such as NP. Were I to make a blanket generalization about "black people" or "New Orleans cats," don't you think NP and all other members of those respective groups would be qualified to rebut my statement?



(2) But...you're...white. WTF is up with that shit?

Guilty. Can't change it, and unlike many white classmates growing up, I never tried. If it's relevant (and I'm not saying it is; only you can decide), I did go to an elementary school from 1st through 5th grade where blacks outnumbered whites by more than 2-to-1; I have spent hundreds of hours of my life on the basketball court (one of NP's hallowed proving grounds, which is the only reason I bring it up) outnumbered by a similar margin; I did continue to volunteer (albeit in fits and starts) on the Northside of Minneapolis long after I finished high school there; believe it or not, a good high school friend of mine declared another friend and I "blacker than some [black people]" even though we didn't talk, act or dress like him; and of course, it goes without saying that a good number of my strongest musical influences are African-Americans. These are mere facts about my life experience. They do not grant me any kind of authority to speak about racial issues that I would not otherwise be thought to have. By relating them here, I simply hope to convince anyone who is not otherwise inclined to believe so that I care and that black people are real and human to me. You don't have to believe me, but that is the truth. That's all I've got for you on that front.

Hence, if you see fit to comment on something I wrote (which I welcome), I would appreciate the common intellectual courtesy of having this articulated in terms of the content of the argument in question, not in terms of my supposed qualifications (or lack thereof) to make it based on overbroad generalizations about groups of which I am a member (e.g. "young white assholes" or "academically trained white musicians from the Upper Midwest who, surprisingly, can also hold their own on the basketball court") when these generalizations may or may not actually be reflected in my specific case, and indeed, when you clearly have no possible way of knowing if they are reflected in my case or not based solely on an argument I have put forward about music and the world immediately surrounding it. There certainly are "qualifications" I do not and cannot possess, and I promise never to speak as if I possess them; I am, however, eminently qualified to evaluate overbroad generalizations about groups of which I am a member, no matter who made them or what they are. At that point, any further psychoanalysis of my identity, while perhaps relevant to other, broader discussions, is moot to the particular argument I've made about music and the world immediately surrounding it. And that's why we're all here. Just the facts, ma'am.



(3) Gee, that's a mouthful, Socrates. If you're a musician, why don't you go practice/study/listen/compose instead of writing a pointless blog about your white angst?

Like you, I'm darn close to being a Nihilist at this point, but not completely. The ethical issues surrounding music still matter enough to me to devote a small bit of my time to considering them publicly. This is wholly a matter of (a) self-interest (i.e. since I have to live and work in this world just like NP and everyone else who makes music, and therefore would like to see it improved wherever possible), and (b) the sense that such "improvements" are, frequently, so fucking obvious to a majority of us and thus quite easily attainable if only more of us were to give them proper consideration using adequately precise terminology and more than 140 characters where needed. As you no doubt know based on your wording of the above question, most blogs fall short of meeting this need; this is where I come in.

If I had no self-interest in seeing a better musical world, or if I thought it was a wholly untenable proposition, then no, I absolutely would not bother. There are other areas of life that I feel are lost causes in this way (see: Congress, U.S.), but music is not one of them. I believe that music is trivial in comparison to these other areas, and therefore that it is easier to fix. Only a small percentage of these musical issues do I choose to explore publicly. The rest I keep to myself and seldom write down; thus, the content here is already heavily edited and pared down to its essence. You are absolutely entitled to judge it to be a waste of your time, but not a waste of my own; the latter is for myself alone to judge. Know that I spend quite a bit of time reading blogs as well as writing them, and have thus developed a very low tolerance for vacuous garbage masquerading as musicology. My activities here are always directed towards achieving something more vital and useful. Even during my annual "Blog Month" project (which is presently in effect), during which I force myself to blog daily for a month regardless of whether I feel I have something just this important to say, I am after two things I believe to be constructive objectives: one is to throw myself a change-up, knowing that I sometimes become a different writer when forced to work constantly; and the other is to critique the vacuous garbage referred to above through the time-honored literary device of satire.

Sounds like fun, huh? None of this is a burden on my direct music-making endeavors, from which I, like virtually every other musician, need occasional respite anyway. In fact, blogging has frequently allowed me to bring fresh motivation to these endeavors at times when it has been lacking. (Knowing that more people would take your blog seriously if you "played more horn," while not necessarily right, certainly provides some motivation, doesn't it?) It isn't hard to find bloggers and trolls whose musical lives are out of balance in this way, but I do not consider myself to be one of them. If you do consider me to be one, I would like to know on what intimate knowledge of my inner thoughts you base this observation, and also what you are doing wasting your time with my senseless rants? It must be more complicated than misery loving company...

a foofaraw over a kerfuffle about a boondoggle

Longtime MFEDI readers know the drill by this time: I post misinformed rants about pop music while the real issues are discussed elsewhere by more important people on their more important blogs, are then commented on extensively by the people I malign here, and are noted by me, if at all, only weeks, months or years later after I've had a chance to catch up on the gory details, by which time comment threads have been closed, libel suits filed, and any further attempt to get a word in edgewise merely dismissed as self-important "intellectual land prospecting." Ah yes, long live the blogosphere, the first (and I hope last) vehicle of human discourse where it is neither what you said nor how you said it that matter, but rather when!

So it is, again, with the Nic Payton skirmish, and here I am late to the party as usual, still young, white, middle class and accredited, just like I was before, still with a blog and a project of my own invention whereby I intend to post on it daily for a month, and presented with yet another eminent black musician who I have great respect for saying a few things I agree with alongside many more things that make me want to quit playing music altogether and go back to working at the airport. You could argue that the worst thing I could do under these circumstances would be to get involved; indeed, there superficially seems to be nothing to gain and everything to lose by doing so. By dint of both a deeper interpretation of the possibilities and a spectacular lack of willpower, I hereby declare my intent (to be withdrawn whenever I see fit) to enter the fray. In part by choice but also by necessity on some levels, this will take place here rather than elsewhere until further notice. The next post will explain in more detail why I feel justified in doing this, and will be linked to at the top of each subsequent post on the topic in order to anticipate the usual nihilistic barbs.

(FYI, Payton's blog is here. Further links omitted; you're smart enough to follow the trail.)

Also, closed-circuit to Sean Roderick: where's Sean Roderick when you need him? If you're out there reading, I want your reaction (on or off the record) as this discussion unfolds.

The Blogosphere, Post-Big-Bang

It has been a full year since I conducted a proper blogospheric round-up, which consists of allocating a couple of weeks worth of my "spare" time to trudging through my bookmarks (yes, I still do it that way for the most part) until I either get sick of it or I reach the shitlist at the bottom (i.e. blogs that have gone dormant or that I've otherwise determined are not worth my time, most typically because they suckered me in with one erudite post about Stravinsky's serial music but turn out to be more often concerned with pets and progeny). Feeds are just further oppressive tools of common practice blogging, whereby the latest is by default the greatest; bookmarks, meanwhile, are sortable and anonymous, which I like. So anyway, I've not been all the way through them in quite a while, and having now gotten a good head start, I'm tempted to conclude (non-empirically so far) that the blogosphere, like the universe, appears to be contracting. I'm sure that the sheer number of extant blogs continues to grow, but the activity on them seems to be slowing down in general (including, I should admit, here as well). Is it possible we are getting closer to my wet dream of a blogosphere where no one posts unless they have something really earth-shattering and well-constructed to say? Not really. I do sense that some fat has been trimmed, but it's not a proportionate amount to the overall decline in production. (Plus, holding Blog Month even just once a year pretty much upsets this particular apple cart, doesn't it?) If the fad has passed, though, that's fine with me. It was overdue.

Most Jazz (and discourse about it) Sucks

An archetypal blogospheric kerfuffle has erupted over guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel's assertion that most jazz sucks. In the interest of sparing readers a linkfest, I'll simply tell you where I first read about it and assume that y'all are smart enough to follow the thread as far as you feel is worth your time. My comments follow below.

Does "most jazz suck?" The obvious explanations for the appearance of such a condition are no less relevant for being so obvious: there's more jazz now and more documentation of it, and we've never heard the mediocre players of the past because they've been forgotten. I will admit, though, that I've always felt jazz to be the most unforgiving kind of music I've been involved with. Anyone who sits through enough high school and college ensemble concerts comes to sense this over time. Perfunctory student performances of Holst and Grainger tend to be substantially more listenable than even relatively accomplished student renditions of any given Real Book tune. Most of the best student big bands I've heard tearing through some really hard arrangements don't have a single soloist who one could reasonably say is improvising on a level commensurate with their chops, and it usually is not close. In other words, jazz is not like sex, pizza and chocolate chip cookies, things which are said to be good even when they're bad. In fact, the opposite is true: good jazz can still be pretty bad, at least as I experience the world, which is why I agree with what Rosenwinkel said and don't see a hint of either hypocrisy or hyperbole in his doing so. I would freely grant that most of my performances and all of my records suck, that I'm in a near-constant state of personal crisis over this, and that I'm constantly seeking a way forward. I'll also say without hesitation that I frequently encounter self-important charlatans who are very comfortable with having achieved much less than I have, and I imagine that with KR being as accomplished as he is, those people are far more numerous in his life than in mine. It sounds to me like all he's asking for is humility and dedication; doesn't sound like much, but it is.

An aside on the use and value of blogging: by conventional wisdom, some of the highest-profile contributors to this brouhaha broke the cardinal rule of online conduct by writing things that they almost certainly would not have said to one another in person, or at least not verbatim. Anyone who's spent two seconds on the internet knows that it would indeed be a much kinder, gentler place if this rule was never broken, but at the same time, I can't shake the feeling that the way it emboldens people to let loose on each other is also one of its most useful features. Because of people's natural tendency to play nice in person, the potential for uproarious diatribes over issues like this really exists only online, ergo, insofar as these eruptions further the dialogue, the dehumanization of rhetorical opponents in each others' eyes could actually be seen as a valuable foil to polite set-break conversation, where little beyond mere diversion can be accomplished.

It may be duplicitous to shoot straight online while playing nice in person, but until each one of us truly becomes the straight-talking, tell-it-like-it-is, brutally honest person we all say we are, blog comment threads might remain the only way some of the most important issues get an honest treatment. Keep it about the topic at hand, but please don't keep it civil; we can always kiss each others' asses at the gig. And as is inevitably uttered once all hell has broken loose in one of these threads, shouldn't we all just go practice instead? Yes and no. Rosenwinkel's complaint about musicians not being all in enough of the time is just as relevant to our discourse as it is to our music-making. Paradoxically, the same faceless passive aggression which enables such great wastes of online time and energy may also be the most direct route to a more incisive dialogue than that which polite musical company typically permits.

October November December is Blog Month

Due to my shipping off to gradyooate school this fall, there was to be no obviously "good" month for this year's Blog Month, so I've put it off until the last possible moment with an eye towards its second half, during which there is no school. As for the first half?

  End of Semester Madness
+ a Tough Blog Month Act to Follow
= Survival Mode

Confused?

Dig prior opening salvoes here, here and here.

Shore up on the wrap-ups here, here and here.

Eat the whole shit sandwich here, here and here.

Blogtasm AcTiVaTe!!!

(And for the record, since it doesn't say so anywhere else on the page, this is the 4th (fourth) iteration of Blog Month here at My Fickle Ears Dig It. Is that clear?)

Success, Of A Sort

Given a project rife with contradictions, it's fitting that this edition of it has both affirmed and negated the well-worn saying about third efforts. With today's posting, I have for the first time succeeded in posting at least once daily for an entire month, as well as set a new personal record for posts in a month with 32. Nonetheless, this has been by far the least satisfying of the first three iterations of Blog Month. That comments have remained scarce is, of course, always a disappointment, but there's more to it than that this time.

Last year, while I started slowly, by the end of the month, I couldn't wait to get home to write. I had almost enough to say and enough time to polish it to be able to justify posting daily under the standards I try to hold myself to the rest of the year. Whatever I was reading, playing and experiencing elsewhere during that time must have been unusually inspiring or thought-provoking. I've felt inspired this month for a variety of reasons, but I've also been awfully busy. I knew that there was to be no slow month this fall, and so I tried to pick the most conducive one, but it was bound to be less than ideal either way. I frequently made room for this most trivial of projects by tabling other more vital ones in hopes that a relapse of last year's bout of inspiration might justify doing so. For the most part, it wasn't to be, and there were several days this month where I struggled to come up with something, anything to post. Notably, though, there were no days where I simply forgot to post, which is one improvement over last year. I think that bodes well for future projects, and I plan on continuing with them. But only once a year. At the most.

Per tradition, the entire opus will remain on the front page for the next several weeks. Savor it slowly, or all at once, but don't expect more of this type of material until next fall.

Placeholder

This is one of those posts, of which there's sure to be at least one more yet this month, that I'm writing simply to keep the dream alive. This is my third crack at Blog Month, and where I failed miserably to post on a daily basis in previous years, to this point in November of 2010, I've held my own. So, as you could probably gather from that lead in, I don't really have anything to say today that's worth saying. I only allow (force?) myself to post under these circumstances but one month out of the year. Enjoy it while it lasts, or alternatively, take solace in the fact that there are only 18 days left in November.

Of course, it's only 10 o'clock, and most of the material this month has been posted later in the evening than that. Given another two hours to ruminate, I could surely get myself worked up enough about something or other music related to be able to write an entry that's at least thought provoking, if not actually a useful contribution to the discourse. I'm going to a concert tonight instead. I think some people might be surprised to read that, or maybe even inclined not to believe it, but I'm not making it up. I'm on my bike as soon as this sucker is published; proofreading can wait until I get home, or perhaps tomorrow afternoon, if it's required.

It's true, I do go to hear live music on occasion. I don't go unless I want to hear what's being performed, which means I go less than a lot of musicians do, and some of them think that makes me a spoilsport. Fine with me. I'd rather give better prepared performances, produce more immaculately crafted compositions, and publish more useful and scholarly blog entries than be able to say that "I was there." I don't seem to run into anyone I know at Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra concerts, or when bands like Arp of the Covenant or Behold...The Arctopus play Minneapolis. Maybe if I bitched about it to more people, that would change. More likely, though, is that those people would just go on their blogs and write something like what I'm writing right now about how their friend dissed them for not being at a concert they would have hated.

So, with that in mind, here's my admonishment to everyone to chill out with the whole "support" thing. If you go to concerts for reason other than listening, you're supporting mediocrity more often than you're supporting "the music." I go to listen, not to support, get a gig, socialize or whatever. That's my holier-than-thou retort to the holier-than-thous out there. With that, I'm off to Maude to hear Enormous Quartet. Let the record show that's what I was doing tonight instead of writing something you might have found informative. See you assholes back here tomorrow.

Milestones

This is the eighth post I've written this month. Earlier this year, I wrote eight posts total between March 3 and September 27.

Blog Month III

Installment #3 of the Blog Month project commences today.
Find explanations here and here.
Previous efforts are dissected here and here.
View the complete body of work here and here.

Hear, hear.

Concise or Crippled?

Readers of this blog might be surprised to learn that there were few times in either high school or college when I struggled to get a paper under the maximum word or page requirement. More often than not, the opposite was true, and more often than not, I simply could not bring myself to take what I felt was a strong paper and muck it up by B.S-ing my way into a few hundred more words or a couple more pages. I came to take pleasure in daring a teacher to give me a bad grade for a well-written paper that was a page too short, but that's not to say that I ever purposely wrote less than I could have just to find out. At the time, it seemed to me that conciseness was my greatest strength as a writer, and since no teacher of mine ever docked my grade solely because I didn't write enough, I gradually paid less and less attention to what the required length of a paper was, or if there was one at all. This, I think, is the only way to write, at least if you care even a little bit about the product.

It's only as a blogger that I've become the most unlikely of chatterboxes. In my defense, I'd say first and foremost that this is more a consequence of the format and context than of any change in my writing style. A blog post is commonly thought to reach epic, unmanageable proportions before it has become half the length of the average chapter in most any dead-tree scholarly work, a double-standard which everyone acknowledges yet no one seems to be interested in eradicating. In addition, I'm writing here about things I care about, not about the topic du jour in some ancient history class that I'm only taking because I have to. While I have, of course, stood up for breadth in education in this space before, I do have to say that forcing students to write about things they don't care about is the main reason that length requirements are thought to be necessary in the first place, and insofar as writing itself is a discipline which ought to receive substantial emphasis, it certainly would make things easier on everyone concerned if students were given greater leeway in choosing their topics.

I raise these points not to get further mired in the metablogging and navel-gazing that I sometimes lapse into here, but to use them as a jumping off point for discussing the issue of conciseness as it relates to music composition. Much as I've turned in many papers that were a page or so too short, I've also begun quite a few musical compositions with grand expectations only to suddenly realize shortly thereafter that I'm done, often while the piece is still quite short, in terms of real time at least. I've been pondering this quite a bit lately, and it raises the possibility of two interesting discussions, one musico-technical in nature, and the other social.

First things first. By the logic of mainstream academic composition pedagogy, this habit, handicap, conundrum, or whatever it is marks me rather clearly and decisively as someone who just hasn't studied hard enough or studied the right stuff. A composer is worth his salt only if he develops his ideas to their logical conclusion; we won't say exactly what that conclusion is, but since we had better look busy when it comes time for the administration to divide up the money between the composers, the cancer researchers, and the theoretical physicists, let's just say it had better look time-consuming. I'm being just a bit facetious, and about something I'm not exactly an expert on, but this dynamic most certainly exists and is more than negligible, if only a little bit more.

I don't doubt that the ability to maintain coherence across the span of an hour or more is an unusual skill which few composers possess, nor that such work should earn the composer significant status, nor that no one came out of the womb writing music that way, but rather learned to do so by a combination of intense study and trial and error. I also don't deny that I like me an hour-long coherent piece of music from time to time, and hope to write one myself some day. Having said all that, I'm not one bit ashamed of the two minute pieces I've written simply because they are only two minutes long. I believe that while there's no substitute for works like Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony or Ornette Coleman's "Free Jazz," conciseness can be (though context is indeed everything) a virtue in music much as it is in words.

Because of the odd combination of temperament and circumstance that has kept me from having individual composition lessons with a credentialed academic, I've never gotten a second opinion (actually, I guess it would be a first opinion...) as to whether I'm concise or crippled. What I do have are the opinions of people I work with, which, to state the obvious, are not always candid since most of these people are, to some extent, friends as well as colleagues, but nonetheless undoubtedly have a grain of truth to them. This leads to the second, social aspect of the discussion. Bridging styles artistically means, for better or worse, that you must also bridge them socially, and I'm beginning to feel that this has become an increasingly maddening sideshow to the "real" work of writing music, booking shows, and giving performances. Of all the facets of this dance I do, the length issue is probably one of the more trivial, but it does come up quite often and has now officially joined the growing list of incompatibilities among the various scenes I claim to inhabit.

Most frustrating of all is that, as with blogging, I have by and large ceased to be known as the concise one and instead become known as the verbose one without changing anything about my work except for who's stuck playing it (or, more accurately, going from no one playing it to a few people putting up with it; I suppose a successful career as a composer, then, is when many people have to put up with it?). It seems that on top of all the stylistic and contextual/presentational issues that no two musical cliques can seem to agree upon, there's the issue of attention span, and as with all other such issues, I seem to represent both extremes at once depending on who you talk to.

I attended a concert of John Harbison's music last weekend; the composer was in attendance and stuck around afterwards for a post-concert Q and A session of the type that is all the rage these days. When asked to name the greatest challenge facing young composers today, he cited the need to digest and synthesize the diversity of musical styles that they espouse, a diversity which he implied (and I think he's probably right) either didn't exist or wasn't taken seriously when he was their age. It's hard enough to fathom accomplishing this in the purely artistic sense without layering on top of that the social minefield that must be navigated concurrently. It's something of a paradox that this social minefield exists not because most musicians aren't up to the artistic challenge, but rather because they're simply not interested in taking it in the first place. They each have their "thing" and that's what they do, end of story. Who am I to take issue with that? We all have to do what we love. If you love doing a few different things, though, you're posed with another conundrum: hold out for the chance to work with other like-minded generalists (if there even are any that match your interests that specifically), or work concurrently with different groups of specialists that probably hate each other, and, perhaps, end up hating you as well by virtue of your association with the rival clique.

If nothing else, I would say that I seldom find myself complaining that a piece of music is too short, but that I also reserve a special place in my own personal pantheon for pieces of music which achieve profundity in all the requisite ways and just happen to do so on an epic temporal scale. By virtue of my taste in music, the music I write probably should be moving toward this larger scale, but seeing that this only presents even greater potential to polarize friends, colleagues and listeners alike, I suppose it's not all bad that it hasn't happened yet.

Blog Month In Review: By The Numbers

Blog Month 2009 ends today, bringing to a close my somewhat more successful yet still slightly disappointing second effort at impersonating a real blogger (for my first effort, go here). I've not only set a new high water mark for posts in a month (23), but also for self-indulgence and capriciousness, I think. I'm also reasonably certain that I've both written and received more comments (of the thoughtful and thoughtless variety alike) this month than I normally do in a year.

It was a month suitably filled with excess, one during which I realized not only how much fun it can be to simply heap posts on top of posts, but also that I have neither the time to do so consistently nor the patience to do so thoughtfully. The flu-induced doldrums of the first couple of weeks notwithstanding, there were stretches later in the month where I simply could not write fast enough, where I found myself eager to get home from teaching or gigging or rehearsing simply to write the next entry. That happens to me occasionally, but it's quite rare and it doesn't usually last as long or cover as much ground as it did this month. It was quite exciting (yes, I'm easily amused) in a way that this project as a whole has not been since I started it, yet I'm not entirely convinced that's a bad thing. I simply cannot afford to devote this kind of time to blogging every month, but when I can, I prefer to invest in a few thoroughly argued missives on topics near and dear to me rather than simply spewing random thoughts onto my screen and rushing to post them without much revision or fact-checking. There's certainly no shortage of the latter if that's what your after, and so I don't feel the slightest bit guilty for refusing to add to it the other 11 months out of the year. I sure had fun this month, and I'm looking forward to the next one, but rest assured that Blog Month will remain only an occasional indulgence. We hope you'll stay tuned for that, as well as more of the arcane musico-philosophical pontification that has been and will remain our specialty around here.

At the outset, I promised to post at least one picture this month. Seeing that I've basically struck out to this point, I offer instead the following chart comparing my level of productivity this month to that of last year's maiden voyage:



Last year's rate appears in goldenrod and this year's in navy. The ideal rate of posting (daily) is also given, in maroon, for the sake of comparison. From the 14th of this month on, I nearly kept pace, but the flu had already set me back much too far to be able to catch up. In neither case did I keep up with the ideal rate for more than the first few days, although I'd forgotten that at one point last year, a flurry of activity on the 11th of the month actually put me ahead of the pace. In any case, I'm on a trajectory now, and so while I'm content to crawl back under my rock for a few months, I do look forward to next fall, when the pressure will be on, the anticipation will be palpable, and the stakes higher than ever.

As December rolls in and the dust settles, the current project will occupy the front page in its entirety, standing as a monument to self-indulgence, verbosity, and of course, fickleness. If you're a first time reader, please amuse yourself with the content below, but be careful not to form any unreasonable expectations. We reserve the right to break your heart in the unfortunate event that should occur.

...and what a pantheon it is

Someone named Clara at a place called Wikio has contacted me twice within the past couple of weeks to inform me that this blog has attained a ranking of 43rd in the classical music category. I can't figure out if the site offers any way to compare blogs in different categories, but I have to think that 43rd in classical music must be the equivalent of about 10,000th in "Entertainment" or "Politics." If they ever add a "Pan-Stylistic Musico-Philosophical Ramblings" category, I'm sure I'll jump right to the top of that, but I'm not holding my breath.

Though I continue to cling to it as if out of total ignorance, I'm fully aware that my quest to establish an egoless and altruistic blog persona is an overly idealistic proposition if there ever was one. Even so, I could not in good conscience accept the invitation to add a Wikio badge to the sidebar proclaiming my status. I'd much prefer that the reputation of this document be made or unmade by its content. I also think those things are just plain tacky, a tad bit too smug for my taste, and in the case of this particular category and ranking, not necessarily guaranteed to work to your advantage, kind of like advertising the fact that you're the 205,957th coolest person in the Twin Cities.

I suppose this means I'm no longer allowed to lament my small readership, complain about the paucity of comments, or wonder aloud how blogs which seem to me to have no clear identity or focus could be more popular than mine. I could do more to shove this blog in people's faces, but I just don't believe in doing that (and not in music, either). I certainly don't believe in leaving comments on other people's blogs simply to promote my own. That's not only self-serving but downright destructive. Obviously, it's not like I want to hide the blog from people, and I do wonder what the chances are of the random person who goes looking for something just like this actually finding it. You have to have more free time and patience than most anyone has in order to successfully navigate the blogosphere without a compass. In that way, I wonder if the rankings, the blogrolls, and the perfuctory back patting aren't worth something, if not just a little tiny bit. I still don't want the badge, though, and as best I can tell, I won't lose my ranking by turning it down.

It also occurred to me during this time that in a moment of vulnerability, I once tacked a "followers" list onto the sidebar. I'm thankful for the 8 of them, but using them for marketing purposes runs contrary to the M.O. around here, so away it goes. It's not entirely for the same reason that I'm seriously considering abandoning the Postroll as well. I still dig the concept, but I have not invested enough in it for it to work. As such, most of the posts listed were written or originally linked to by the same few bloggers. I envisioned it being a more diverse collection of posts from a wider variety of sources. Those sources, I'm sad to say, have largely failed to materialize, and while I still find time to investigate a few new blogs from time to time, I haven't stumbled on a new "favorite" music blogger for quite some time. If only I could simply hide it without straight up deleting it. I can't seem to figure out if there's a way to do that, which means there probably isn't. That way I could keep open the option of returning to it in the future without merely starting over.

That brings us to one more thing I could do if I really wanted to be a real blogger, and that would be to move to a real platform. The estimable Kris Tiner recently did just that (read his explanation here), with seriously bad ass results. Once again, though, I find myself espousing some lofty conceit of purity, thinking to myself instead that imposing generic templates renders templates moot and allows the document to succeed or fail based on its content rather than its slick packaging. That would work if everyone operated under those restrictions. More likely, though, I'm just shooting myself in the foot.