The Record Mystique: Mysteries of Vinyl or, the second time as farce

This NYTimes story on vinyl has been making the rounds on various music boards since it came out Sunday. Many of the old writers lament that vinyl has been “relegated” to the Style section of the newspaper. Me, I just sigh every time the old myths are trotted out.

[Vinyl] virtually collapsed in the late 1980s with the advent of the compact disc.

No, the record industry chose to kill vinyl. When consumer interest in compact discs was relatively low, distributors started refusing returns on unsold records, while allowing returns on unsold compact discs. This meant that record stores assumed a huge financial risk if they kept stocking large numbers of records. Not surprisingly, CDs started filling up record stores shortly thereafter.

“It’s a customer who wants to have vinyl in their home the same way they want books in their home,” Mr. Wishnow [the founder of Insound, an online music and merchandise company] said. For such a customer, he added, the message is, “ ‘When I can have all the music in the world in the palm of my hand, what does it say about me that I spend $15 to $20 for this format that is a pain to store and move and is easily damaged?’

Records do take up space and are heavy in bulk, but they are in some ways easier to store and index because of their size, and their packaging is considerably less fragile. I was just discussing this with Tobias, who had packed up his sizable DJ record collection: records are less likely to be damaged in a move than CD jewel cases. One of the original selling points of the CD was its portability and its indestructibility. While the CD is more portable (there’s a reason that record players in cars never took off), it is has turned out to also be somewhat fussy as well.

Warner’s “Because Sound Matters” store is something of a miracle. As record sales start inching back up, rather than dropping the price of compact discs and mp3s (as they should do), the record industry has finally found a way to get people to pay more than $20 for a single LP record.

Maybe 8-9 years ago, a joke circulated around the internet that went something like this: the recording industry had finally found a form of DRM that would solve their file sharing problems. It was appealing to consumers but made the digital copying of music difficult and impractical. The technology was described in complex technical terms, and it was given a long, six-word name. It did, however, have a handy abbreviation: “R.E.C.O.R.D.”

Summer 2008 Balance Sheet/Requiem

Summer 2008 was the closest thing I’ve had to a normal summer in a couple years. And it wasn’t all that normal. It began with my return from Europe in the middle of a TA strike, and then ICA hit, which meant that May was a very busy month. By mid June, things slowed down enough that I hit my stride with writing, and had about 5 good weeks of intense work on the book. I am the type of person who sets unrealistic goals every summer and then fails to meet them. This summer, perhaps because of the chair thing, I didn’t do that. The result is 90 new pages, a personal record in the pages to weeks ratio, and so the ms. stands at 340 pages and the end is in sight. The only problem is that I keep talking to people about it and realizing there are other things to be included. My dream is to send it out for review in January 2009. We’ll see. I can say that those 5 weeks of intense work on the book were incredibly satisfying. I also got my 2 courses ready, worked on the annual report and few other miscellaneous chair things and spent 3 weeks in Australia (blog entries forthcoming). My only “failed” goals were a finished draft of my SSHRC application (though I’m well on my way) and some spring cleaning-type stuff (going through papers let over from our move last year; I hate going through papers). What more could you ask for, except for more summer?

Perhaps that September optimism is my consolation prize.

School Starts Tuesday

on what should be a beautiful 30 degree day (that’s 87, American readers). I hope they’ve fixed the A/C in my seminar room. Apart from that little worry, I am feeling the usual beginning-of-the-year optimism. Perhaps it’s tempered a little bit by the knowledge of the administration that lies in wait for fall, but I also know what to expect as I enter my 2nd fall as chair.

While chair, I teach a half load, which I’ve concentrated in the fall. So it’s two courses in fall and none in winter.

For COMS 210: Intro to Communication Studies, I resisted the urge to do major revisions to the course, simply adding one reading (Nick Couldry’s) and dropping one (Bourdieu on symbolic power). However, there is one big change. I had even more problems with WebCT this summer, and I’d had enough after my struggles with this poorly put-together program. Rather than wasting more time with them, I took matters into my own hands, and built a second website for the course. http://coms210.net now has the announcements, schedule and course documents, while WebCT will contain a few “private” course elements: a place for students to look up their grades, discussion boards (students’ enrollment in a course is supposed to be private information in Canada), and a practice exam when the time comes. I’ve never used two sites for a course before but this should give me the best of both worlds: an easy to update and access interface for managing content and dates (basically, a WordPress blog with rss), while still offering students the few features that WebCT does well.

I finally have a unique course number for COMS 608: Sound Studies, my graduate seminar in, well, sound studies. I tinker with the course every time I teach it, and this time it’s a tighter organization than ever before (and timing is partly arranged around Montreal visits by Emily Thompson and Lisa Gitelman), with lots of content from 2006 or later. Also, for the first time ever, I also left a week intentionally blank toward the end of term. By then I’ll have a good idea of what people were working on. I had originally thought of including an additional week on one the subjects already covered (perhaps aesthetics? no, wait, the voice! no, wait, listening! you see the problem) or a week just dedicated to all the awesome work that’s out now in ethnomusicology, but instead, I’ll know by then what people are working on based on their proposals, and will offer some methodologically-oriented readings that are relevant — or we’ll just re-discuss stuff from previous weeks. I also for the second time am starting off with my own book, which is awkward, but I found it more awkward not to teach it before. I make about $20 off the proposition (give or take), which is then spent buying students drinks after class. Since it’s a morning class this term, we’ll have to meet up at the end of the day.

Sound studies is now a pretty big field. It’s amazing how much stuff has come out and how much I had to leave aside. Here are some books that I had planned to include but left out for reasons of structure or timing. It’s not even close to an exhaustive list, either.

Smith, Vocal Tracks
Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape
Feld and Keil, Music Grooves
Meintjes, Sound of Africa!
Fox, Real Country
Rath, How Early America Sounded
Doyle, Echo and Reverb
Anderson, Making Easy Listening
Blesser, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?
Flinn, Unheard Melodies
Truax, Acoustic Communication (though he gets some time in an early lecture, along with McLuhan, Ong and Heavelock)
Martin, Hello, Central?
Hilmes, Radio Voices
Douglas, Listening In or Inventing American Broadcasting
Drobnick, Auditory Cultures
Cox, Audio Culture
Connor, Dumbstruck
Schmidt, Hearing Things
Wurtzler, Electric Sounds
Gallo, Mexican Modernity
Davis, Enforcing Normalcy
Baynton, Forbidden Signs
Schmidt, Hearing Things
Erlamann, Hearing Cultures

*&!$%^!

Our fantasy football league draft was scheduled for 9pm. I have been working from home online all afternoon with no problem. At 8:45, as we’re getting ready, the modem goes down and says our Sympatico username is invalid. One hour on the phone with a script-reading tech support person and multiple resets and it finally works though it still gives the username invalid response. Her explanation of why it went down? “It’s your Macintosh, sir.” Yes, that’s why my connection randomly went down and my username and password — that Bell sets and over which I have no control– suddenly stopped working.

Draft’s over and the computer did it for us. I’m sure we’ll do fine but that’s exactly what Zizek is talking about when he says you don’t want to mess with people’s enjoyment. I would have been much happier if it had gone down earlier while I was doing course prep stuff.

Mobile Dataspace

Like about a bazillion other people, the iPhone’s worldwide breakout — and the hype around it — has caused me to consider the value of having a convergence device. I experimented once before with the HP iPaq Travel Companion, which is a lovely GPS device but Windows Mobile is incredibly kludgy, especially for things like establishing internet connections and syncing with exchange servers, which is supposedly the point of the thing. The thing did everything but phone calls (except via Skype) but not reliably enough for me to use it regularly. I like the idea of a phone/camera/internet device I can carry around and I even more like the idea of having something hand-sized and lightweight to give me internet access on long trips (for instance, to Australia or Europe) instead of hauling my laptop around the world. In effect, it’s the same thing in a smaller package: the microprocessor in an iPhone, Blackberry, Palm, Nokia, etc. is considerably more powerful than the Toshiba Satellite laptop that was my main computer from about 2000-2003 and spectacularly more powerful than the laptop I took to Washington to research my dissertation. Although there are issues with functions and interface, we’re talking about handheld devices that have the processing power of computers from 10 years ago, maybe more recently. This makes literal something that Ken Wark wrote about in 2000 — that

Cellspace is different from cyberspace and, in a weird way, much more radical. Cellphones create a real break with the suburbia of the soul where the Internet wallows. The Internet piped all manner of gunk into the suburban home. The Net was the telephone, the TV, the newspaper and a radio station all glommed together and plunked down into a suburban space that otherwise remained unchanged apart from the second phone line. Even the cable modem fails to change this basic equation. Its just more gunk, more speed, down the same old pipeline into the same old space.

Cellphones break down space in much the same way that a digital sampler breaks down beats. In cellspace, theres no place that cant be connected to another space. If theres an image that captures this, its the great moment in the movie Three Kings, where Marky Mark finds a cellphone deep in an Iraqi bunker in the middle of the desert, and uses it to call his wife, back home in suburban America.

Wark’s point is that this cellspace phenomenon is happening more outside the United States than within it, and caused him to wonder at whether there is some kind of American exceptionalism to cellphone culture (and we could add Canada too with it’s slow uptake and bad deals for users). What’s changed from then to now is that we’ve gone from two versions of the internet — one on your computer and one on your phone, to a single internet that is accessible from either device.

I’ve been reading a pile of cellphone studies material, in part for my sound seminar, and also just because. A lot of it is on space — togetherness across great distance, separation in spaces of cohabitation. Insert cliches about “virtual” and “real” spaces here and the widening gulf between them even as they coexist. But I think the most interesting aspect of having a functioning internet device that moves through the city is that it completely banalizes the informationalization of space promised by augmented reality. Practices that seemed experimental or avant-garde, or at least practices that have been presented to me as such — electronically tagging spaces, combining maps and navigation in locative media, basically endowing the world with accessible metadata — are suddenly business as usual, or at least potentially so. At least for intellectuals (of any stripe), everything already comes with its own commentary, a truly mobile internet just makes it all the more apparent. But the experience of these devices is and will continue to be less subjective dislocation and more of, well, the same. Thanks to a constant and portable internet connection, it will now be possible to know for certain whether that oversized box of clicky-pens at Costco is really a bargain or not, or to look up a hotel on tripadvisor on a walk by. I’m sure there is somewhere a real example of cellphones atomizing public space; but just as often, the wireless world simply gives a shadowy, ephemeral materiality to affective connections that already existed among spaces.

Winning Season(!)

Thursday night, the False Consciousness, our departmental softball team, completed our first winning season. We did it by beating a team with a better record than we had (they were 4-2 coming in and we were 3-3) and knocking them out of the playoffs. Rather than composing my own narrative, I will repeat Greg “Coach” Taylor’s:

With a graceful catch from Jeremy Morris at third base, the False Consciousness first ever winning season came to an end last night with a convincing 19-6 win over a team that was actually ahead of us in the standings. We played the spoilers and eliminated them from the post-season.

Not only did we have a winning season (4-3) but we finished only one point out of the playoffs.

There is no doubt the story last night was the debut of Aysha Mawani. She took the position of catcher to artistic heights. On the very first pitch of the game she caught a foul ball for an out and proceeded to do that four more times during the game (five really, but we were nice to them). This almost never happens, much less four times in a game. The rest of us in the field were unnecessary for more than an inning.

Also notable was the welcome return of Jonathan Sterne, who may have proven that jet lag can be a performance enhancer.

Thanks for a great season everyone. As usual, we never fielded the same team twice.

Please check out the department facebook page for some photos soon.

There is a post on the virtues of softball over at Midnight Poutine, and I would certainly agree with the assessment, though I had no idea that baseball was of interest to hipsters. But it shouldn’t be lost that ours is a departmental softball team. Summer has a double meaning for those living on an academic calendar, and I like the softball as a totally social mode of togetherness during a time when departments traditionally don’t come together. That we have a common project that places us in completely different roles from our academic lives is an added bonus (okay, coach Taylor did play a role in organizing the grad student association and the softball team, but my point is made).