MLA in progress

That yearly occasion of joy, despair, and drinking known as the MLA is
in full swing and I just came from a panel more or less on blogging that
included none other than academic blogger extraordinaire <a
href="http:\\www.michaelberube.com>Michael Berube</a>. With great wit
and humor as becomes professors of literature, these panelists (or at
least two of the three, as the third didn't really talk about blogs)
pronounced blogs to be good things.

For Berube, they are primarily outreach, a continuation of his
long-standing call for literature professors to engage the general
public and present their work outside the rigorous and very limited
world of scholarly journals (and of course MLA meetings).

Good stuff all in all, but I have a panel to catch, so no more details.

I know you're all disappointed.

Talking Recording Industry, Part Two.

So...the music business. The Recording Industry has existed for around a century, becoming a dominant force in the music business sometime around World War One. It's important to note that the culture industry, of which the recording industry is part, comes to prominence around this time, with the advancement of movies and records and radio. It was indeed revolutionary for consumers to be able to purchase copies of their favorite symphonies, etc. Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" gets to the heart of the matter:

...technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.

In other words, the art becomes portable and private and can be repeatedly consumed at the purchaser's leisure. It's a tremendous advancement that also creates a need for a distribution network: from the point of production (the studio time) to the store shelf. With commercial success requiring the distribution network, the record labels by and large controlled the head of the distribution chain (without a record contract you could certainly book your own studio time, but who was going to distribute or promote your product?).

This model has collapsed. Anyone with a halfway decent computer program and/or an 8 track can create reasonable recorded music and distribute it themselves for almost no cost. Between youtube.com and myspace.com, for example, distribution is free and controlled entirely by the artist. The drawback, of course, is that you won't make any money off your downloads. However, that's the Recording Industry's fault across the board: the money will no longer be available for the recorded product.

I see a revival of local music scenes and regional sounds, but that does not mean the demise of megastars -- just the demise of the worst the pop world has to offer. Small labels will remain -- they're more labors of love than they are money-makers -- but the era of the big label is over.

Of course, I could be wrong. Capitalism has an amazing way of co-opting movements and technology to serve its needs (one need only examine the marketing techniques directed at the 1960's counterculture to see how revolution against the system quickly turned into revolution through consumption: being a revolutionary became and image not an activity).

A Sea Change: Part One

Today I happened to cruise by the soon to be closed Tower Records in downtown DC. For those of you who don't know, Tower Records, a nationwide retail giant that was last hip and/or cool sometime around 1988, went bankrupt and basically the past month or so has been one long and very complete liquidation of store inventory.

When I first visited the DC store back in the early 1990s, I realized immediately that you had to be some sort of freak to get anywhere in the hiring process. The main floor was staffed with people who thought they were Trent Reznor circa 1995, but weren't, had large numbers of piercings and tatoos before that was so gauche, and basically had an attitude problem (dude...you work in a chainstore...it's like a CVS but with records). Prices were high and Smash Records in Georgetown (yes, before Smash turned into some sort of faux-punk clothing boutique) had a far better selection of punk and indie in their little basement.

Anyway, as I was sifting through the remains of Tower, finding absolutely nothing (seriously, the only band name I recognized was The Soup Dragons, and I wasn't really in the mood), I started thinking of what the demise of one of the most visible titans of the music distribution business meant. Most independent shops have closed up, although some survive. Crooked Beat in Adams Morgan is great, but it's easy to remember that it replaced -- after a hiatus of a few years -- another record store in that location, Flying Saucer Discs. And of course, DCCD is no longer.

We've essentially hit a point where record stores (to use the archaic term) can't survive except in very select niche markets. The once ubiquitous mall record store (think National Record Mart or Wall to Wall or Listening Booth) is no longer. Sam Goody is still around, but it's been reinvented as a gaming outlet rather than a music store. Today people buy music -- when they don't steal it -- from online retailers like Amazon or iTunes and big box stores that stock music but don't really rely on it for their daily bread (Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Target). And the brick and mortar retailers have the shittiest selection of music ever. No depth and very little breadth.

None of these observations should be new to anyone who buys music or has an interest in the music scene. Or to B-School tools who are simply interested in business models. It's fairly straightforward stuff. But it got me thinking about what the collapse of the recording industry itself will mean. That's Part Two.

Is it really one week to Christmas?

It's been busy. On Friday I successfully defended my dissertation and successfully did a little but not much drinking in the course of celebrating. Saturday and Sunday meant the final weekend of Xmas tree selling, and I am certainly glad of that. It's pretty tiring having no days off for the past three weeks.

Worst of all, of course, is that I haven't had much of a chance to plug the holes in my Christmas shopping list. I've got some catching up to do, and I'm really not interested in going out on Saturday the 23rd to do it. Might be too late for mail-order, too. I'm thinking perhaps I'll just buy a bunch of popsicle sticks and make everyone some popsicle stick houses with glue and paint and see how that goes. It works for kids.

My wife got me the Gob Iron CD for Christmas, then decided it was too depressing as a Christmas gift and gave it to me early. It's a project by Jay Farrar (Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt) and Anders Parker. The title is "Death Songs for the Living," and it's mainly some traditionals with an original thrown in. If you like the roots rock/folk tradition it's a hell of an album, but it will not cheer you up.

If you don't know me you can call me Doctor Cuff

As of sometime this Friday afternoon I officially left the ranks of ABD
and joined the ranks of PhD.

Two things: One big, one small. Not in that order.

Two Items.

First item: as a quick follow-up to yesterday's post, I'd like to say that I am now regretting signing up for the "Small Penis Support Group Newsletter," because apparently they sell their mailing list to all sorts of direct email merchants. Today, Ms. Vetrone Natalika wrote to me informing me that "It's Time to make it bigger!" Disappointment came, however, when I realized that Ms. Natalika's offer was nearly word for word the same as Ms. Tassos's offer of a day ago.

Second item: I found great irony in this statement from the late dictator and mass murderer Augusto Pinochet's grandson (who serves as a captain in the Chilean army -- or did: the Chilean army discharged him following his paean to fascism):

"He was a man who defeated at the height of the Cold War the Marxist model, which tried to impose its totalitarian model not by vote, but more directly by force of arms," the officer said.

I've heard of revisionist history, but this one takes the cake. Salvador Allende was actually elected by popular vote, and it was Pinochet's force of arms that imposed its totalitarian model over the democratically elected Allende. But the U.S. knows all about that.

Everyone has something to sell.

I got an email today from someone I didn't know informing me that "Big Guys have Big sausage." I hadn't really stopped to think about it much, but it's relatively true that most butchers I've ever come across (and I'm old enough to remember when you used to go to a butcher for meat, not a supermarket) were on the portly side.

Apparently, though, the emailer, one Camilli Tassos, wasn't talking about anyone in the butcher business or abattoir profession, even though her email assured me that "Not only a larger meat will make you feel better, it will make you look better!" I suppose I could overlook the comma splice, since email is something of an informal medium.

Ms. Tassos was very cordial, though, and opened her email, "Salute sir," which is very nice, as it's always good to be called "sir," if you're a man. She then told me, interestingly enough, that "Girls love big weenie," and more importantly, I suppose, she told me that "If you don't have one -- GET ONE!" The all-caps and exclamation point imperative got my attention, let me tell you.

I couldn't help thinking about how I might get one, either from one of those naughty stores in Dupont or maybe through a mail order catalog, but Ms. Tassos confided to me a few paragraphs later that none of that was necessary; I could in fact "get a months supply and see the difference! No Pumps! No Surgery! No Exercises!"

The no exercise bit got me pretty excited, because one thing I certainly try to avoid is exercise, and what's more, she promised me "Safe Results Or Your Money Back!" I was a little deflated to see that Ms. Tassos apparently punctuated every sentence with an exclamation point, but I suppose the excitement of bringing such a valuable product to market probably got the better of her.

I'm still not exactly clear what Ms. Tassos is talking about, but it is nice to have a money back guarantee.