Album Notes for "All-Acoustic Contemplative Sound Spaces"

A new digital album of ambient/space music, for evening listening, intended to establish a relaxed, peaceful atmosphere.  

It was woven from all natural-world instruments, "organic" – with no synth or any electronic sounds.

Hear it streaming free here, on Rosswriting.com/music

Several live performances, but mostly layered recordings, introspections of bells, gongs, bowls, percussion, different strings, and serene voices of Nature.  Singing insects, frogs  and birds; rain, a brook, a waterfall, the ocean...

Soundtracks meant to help the listener slow down a little, so the wave that rises in the heart can more easily be found. For putting on in the background late in the day, to set the tone for time and space to stretch out.

There are no synthesizers or electric instruments on this album, no words sung or spoken — it's a percussionist's approach to meditative ambient space music. (But we did not hold back on the tasteful use of "studio magic,' of course, wherever that was right.)

Evocative, intriguing, hypnotic...
Mellow, exotic, harmonic...
An elves' workshop at play; extraterrestrial tambouras; 

Bells reverberating in the air; the thousand-stringed roar of the mighty Monochord.

As the river moves on here, the notes get longer and deeper, slower and wider…

Hopefully this is all about sitting back and settling into in a deep and soothing sound, breathing a little deeper, feeling a little closer to the peace inside.

These Are Soundtracks of Restful Dreams

You won't find the usual type of "music" on this album, with lots of ideas and lines and chords. Instead, these are flowing, abstract atmospheres of organized sound.

You could equally say that of course it's music, only, played, very, slo-o-ow-ly... 

There may be only as many individually sounded notes in this whole collection of pieces as in one or maybe two pop songs. (The notes-per-minute make a radical contrast.)

This is all about how the strongest, most riveting note in any piece of music is a rest, a note of Silence.

Then next to that would be Reverberation, the after-effect when a note is struck, how long it lasts hanging in the air...

Putting this together came from a longtime approach of being observant for the natural possibilities, as much as possible just present, listening and responding. Letting the sound suggest where it wants to go, and your deeper brain do all the heavy lifting.

The goal, the hope, is for when the musicians can become the instrument, the highest and deepest experience you can have of playing.

Some Notes On The Tracks

We've always been utterly fascinated by being immersed in a deep, rich, flowing tone that just hangs there and hypnotizes. As percussionists, we prize the raw, living sound of instruments made directly from the earth, transformed and refined by human hands. (All praise to the instrument makers!)

There's a lot of favorite electronic music that we listen to frequently, even big fans of some. But there's no way a synthesized sound can compare to the depth and all the dimensions of a natural object resonating. That's what we've got here.

We've long been collecting especially "slow-burning" instruments, the kind that make long, sustained tones. You'll hear all kinds of strange sounds pop up in the background, but it's the bells and gongs of all sorts that carry much of the load, and a favorite is using singing bowls as gongs, striking their outer walls with mallets for the deep BOOOM-M-M-M...

They just keep ringing, and ringing... And of course they do some singing, too.

Starring Nature

The other elements to these collages are from recordings made mostly around Woodstock, New York: the frogs in the rain, peepers, crickets, katydids, the stream and waterfall.  (There must have been a few add-in's, since the ocean turns up — that was from the southeast coast of Florida.)

Featuring Peter Blum, David Budd, and Lea Garnier

Much of this album was played by Bill borrowing and buying from the impressive singing bowl collection of Peter Blum, who keeps around 30 on hand. Peter is heard on tracks 5, 6 and 11. 

Our great thanks and appreciations to him, and to David Budd (tracks 5, 8 and 11,) and Lea Garnier (8) for contributing their wonderfully sensitive playing, too.

More thanks

Three tracks, #'s 2, 6, & 10, were begun with tracks recorded by Robert Bard in his studio, Skytop Sound, in New Paltz, NY.  These were outtakes from some recording sessions Bill did with Peter that formed the basis for his "Penumbra" album.  That's how we got the recordings of Bill playing the Monochord harp (2 & 10,) which was loaned to Peter for the sessions, and of Mr. Blum on his tamboura with his beginning intonation (6).


Photo: Sky Away From The Lights, (c)2010 by Tunc Tezel

Used with permission. (Thank you, Tunc!)
From 'The World At Night' (TWAN), twanight.org


Mastered by Tom Desisto, Desisto Music, Woodstock, NY

Our thanks, too, to Garry Kvistad of Woodstock Chimes, not only for his permission to record there during one of their annual sales, but for his saying, "But don't just record – perform!" So “I Know That Girl” is Bill playing their giant, awesome Windsinger chimes in the foreground and an enormous gong behind, accompanied by the random sounds of customers trying out all the chimes, bells, rattles, flutes and whistles in the chime sale.

Stream it here, free,  at

Rosswriting.com/music

Key Influences In Wide, Slow Music

Or, Why We Made An Album Like This.  (''All-Acoustic Contemplative Sound Spaces'')

Where did we ever get the strange ideas about spare, soothing soundmaking that were pursued on this collection?  Here are a few of the original sources.

Paul Horn Inside the Taj Mahal

Paul Horn's 1967 album recorded in the dome of India's Taj Mahal was an absolute revolution in hearing, and in feeling, too.  It's got to be one of the originating albums of the ambient space in music. 

While in India (with the Beatles, it turns out), he snuck into the Taj Mahal with his flute and a Nagra tape recorder to play with a space with its distinctive "decay time" of almost a minute.  He played a long full note, and it just hung there forever as he slowly added notes and simple themes, creating a beautiful weave of suspended tones harmonizing with each other, on their way to disappearing into eternity.  (At least that's how it seemed...) 

He coaxed the temple's prayer caller into joining, so Horn follows him singing a line with harmonies on the flute, for a wonderful, slow motion cross-cultural improv.

The "Environments" series

LPs with sidelong tracks of pure sounds of nature and other expanded perspectives in sound. 

These albums were among the key influences in wide, slow, atmospheric music.

“The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore,” Side A, Environments 1

"Environments 1, released a year before Songs of the Humpback Whale" (another pioneering work in this realm,) "and almost a decade before Brian Eno’s ambient manifesto Ambient 1: Music for Airports, introduced the psychoacoustic concept of sound masking as well as the medicinal uses of natural sound into popular culture."

- From the Irv Teibel Archive, the official site about the originator and man behind the entire series.  

Side A of the original, “The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore,” was a straight up 30-some minutes of very clearly recorded ocean waves at a beach.  Side B, "The Optimum Aviary," was pure bird song.

"Tinntinabulation" (A) and "Dawn At New Hope, Penn." (B)

The second album's Side One was "Tinntinabulation" – unique in the the Environments series, this side was of computer-generated giant bells in a transfixing, seemingly random looping sequence.  (Done with an IBM mainframe, this has to be one of the coolest things ever produced with that technology, along with the other space program of the time, NASA's.)

The LP was playable at any speed from 16 ​2/3 to 78  rpm.  The CD reissue opted for the slowest speed, which is what you'll find online.

The bells were complemented by a Side B of the gentle sounds of all forms of nature awakening, "Dawn at New Hope, Pennsylvania."  

Many other albums were from pure scenes in Nature, including favorites like "Wood-Masted Sailboat," of the lightly thunking, ringing, wave-slapped sounds of the boat itself, all of which were so soothing.

It was a whole new kind of record to put on, of "music" to hear, a peaceful revolution in listening.  If you've ever lived next to ocean, or some unspoiled away-from-it-all spot, this was old news.  But in a loud, irriating urban situation, they were very welcome even just as aural padding. So city-dwellers craved these recordings, enough to create a new genre.

Brian Eno's Music For Airports —

Later, in the earliest 80's, Brian Eno began making what he termed "ambient" music, defined as this subtly shifting sound that was not made for direct listening, but instead was an environment, an atmosphere designed in this case to lighten the mood of the rushing travellers.

It was slow-moving piano by Harold Budd and wordless vocal samples with the full studio treatment, turning the sound into an Impressionist painting.  But the main feature of the music was how the tones sounds were left hanging there to resonate for the longest time, from start to finish.

Classical Avant-Garde —

Then there's the rethinking of music of the early 20th century's classical Avant-Garde, who were searching the world for ways out of the highly structured box that Western classical music had become by that point.  They sought a form of music based on pure tonality, the random or chance element in nature and/or everything they could think of, experimented like mad and seemingly tried everything.

These European composers pushing the limits of that music discovered how well-suited empty space was for framing their radically new statements in sound.  And they were there as the beginnings of electronic sound gave people the starry-eyed idea that maybe someday there could be completely electronic music!

"Poeme Electronique" by Edgard Varèse, an unearthly, floating combination of percussion, electronics and vocal created for a World's Fair pavilion in the late 1950's, was defining.  Varèse began making abstract percussion music in the 1930's in France using orchestral instruments.  It wasn't any kind of mellow or tonal, but he brought a whole new perspective to listening, of hearing raw, seemingly unstructured sound as music.

Alvin Lucier's "Music On A Long Thin Wire" was another breakthrough in this world.  Among his many sonic experiments, he stretched a long metal cable across an entire room and miked it as both ends.  What he got were the waves of sound impulses as the wire reacted with its environment.  At first he would play on it, activate it in various ways, until he discovered it when he reentered the empty room that it was singing to itself, just from the air currents in the house.

Hats off, too, to John Cage, primarily for his writing and ideas.  He was the writer-theorist and composer who brought very different elements into Western music, of Zen and chance and random changes of various kinds being planned for a performance. While his own music was kind of eh, his writing was stunning, coming at a time when ideas of mindfulness, of understanding how much our own music is rooted in Nature and so on, seemed to this culture to be very, very new.

So Many More

There are countless other tributaries, of course: Tony Scott's "Music for Zen Meditation and Other Joys" from 1964 was probably The original of the genre, was a set of groundbreaking, slow-motion improvs with classical koto and shakuhachi musicians and his clarinet.  Then there was the enormous impact of Indian classical music, the opening Alap section, and just the mesmerizing sound alone of the sitar and tamboura buzzing and droning together.

And 60's rock and jazz were listening: all that feedback (our frenzied version of the tamboura's sound), the jam in the middle of The Grateful Dead's "Dark Star," Weather Report's "Adios"... this could be a very long list.

All of these were defined by fewer, much longer notes, with generous space in between.  With human-made music, it seems, Less is usually More.

And we can only properly conclude by acknowledging the ultimate musical  influence, our countless listening experiences at the Ocean's shore.  (Preferably with the crickets.)

---

All of these were inspirations for,

"All-Acoustic Contemplative Sound Spaces" 

Bill McNeill Ross, featuring Featuring Peter Blum, David Budd, Lea Garnier; and Nature.

https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/billmcneillross

Download or stream from the CD Baby Music Store, iTunes/Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon and all the rest.

(More on the album, and a free, full streaming player, here:)

Rosswriting.com/music/ 

We've always been utterly fascinated by being immersed in a deep, rich, flowing tone that just hangs there and hypnotizes.  Alongside that, as percussionists we prize the raw, living sound of instruments made directly from the earth, transformed and refined by human hands. (All praise to the instrument makers!)

Then there's the medium of ambient or space music, which suggests a couple things: long sustained tones in a peaceful, slow moving background, addressed more to the senses, feelings and breath than to our modern overstimulated minds. And you always assume it's done on synthesizers.

There's a lot of favorite electronic music that we listen to frequently, even big fans of some.  But there's no way a synthesized sound can compare to the depth and all the dimensions of an object in nature, resonating. That's why it was put together "all acoustic."  (The new term for this unplugged approach seems to have become "organic," but I'm sorry, that only suggests food to me.)

---

"Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, and life to everything. It is the essence of order."
- Plato (429-347 BC)

And that's what it's all about.

"All Earth's water in a bubble"

Saying, "perhaps this will give us some perspective on how truly precious a resource water really is," Treehugger posted this provocative info-graphic from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), attempting to show how much water is there on, in, and above the Earth as a series of full bubbles.

The big one represents all of the water on, in and around Earth as a bubble 860 miles in diameter.  But that's 96% saltwater.  "The smaller sphere over Kentucky represents Earth's liquid fresh water in groundwater, swamp water, rivers, and lakes," the USGS says.  The volume of this sphere would be over 2.5 million cubic miles, forming a perfect bubble (and you have to imagine, quite an imposing one) about 170 miles in diameter.

That's the fresh water we need every day, but around 30% of it is unavailably deep in the ground. Rivers, the source of most of the fresh surface water people use, only constitute about 300 cubic miles, about 1/10,000th of one percent of total water.

"How much water is there on, in, and above the Earth?"  (USGS) 

From the USGS Water Science School, which offers "information on many aspects of water, along with pictures, data, maps, and an interactive center." 

"If you put all Earth's water In one place, it'd look like this"
by Jaymi Heimbuch, Treehugger.com

Good Guys Finish First, Too: Ray Allen Hits Record 3

[Thursday night, 8-something:] Just watched Ray Allen hit his 2,561st three-pointer, breaking Reggie Miller's all-time record, and in a game against the Lakers in the Boston (TD) Garden, no less. "All-Time" here should be understood to mean, "in 32 years," since the three-point shot only dates to 1979 in the NBA.

Ray Allen is by all accounts a real stand-up guy, and Reggie Miller, on the scene as a TV announcer, spent the whole first recording-breaking half sending up Allen's hours of work perfecting his craft. He's at the top of his game at age 35, a real old-timer by NBA standards, so it's worth noting how he's gone about it.

The new record holder is interviewed and says that what inspired him, when he first came into the league 15 years back, was seeing how long before a game Reggie would be out there practicing. So Miller explains that he in turn got the idea from watching Larry Bird, hours before gametime…

Later in the broadcast, Miller explained that, "it was all about having the whole court free" so you could practice taking shots from all different spots on the floor. (Ah-ha! That little mental-vision jolt you get from an expert insight.) And it's always about that 10,000 hours.

These are guys who take around 1000 practice shots a day. Miller spent the entire night repeating variations on the phrase, "those long hours in the gym, working on your shot." Because as all these gentlemen have made obvious again, for whatever craft we can talk about, that's how it's done.

Reboot

The traditionalist part of my brain will not allow me to let seven months sans postings go by unacknowledged. Search-engine-wise, of course, it doesn't matter, because people reach you by tags, not chronological lists.

But in the narrative sense, in the words of Chico Marx, "Nah, atsa no good, too." I'd moved my blogging attention primarily to logging events in the movement to make the Hudson Valley a Green Tech center, and what seems to have happened, at least at this point, can be summed up in a word: China.

In a few more words, Vince Cozzolino of The Solar Energy Consortium in Kingston talked about a specific solar manufacturer's setback, but he could have been speaking for the sector.

He explained they were "hit by a combination of the bad economy, reduced demand for solar cells because of lower subsidies in parts of Europe, and competition from countries such as China, where solar manufacturing is heavily subsidized by the government."

(From the story by Christian Livermore in the Times Herald-Record/Recordonline, 12/22/10.)

At the same time, I've gotten busy with successive new documentation projects, two of them back in the field of professional video, one for large-scale live events and the other for broadcast studios.

As a guy who was trained to really take the time to choose the right word and proofread carefully, I can't just dash off some breathless verbiage and hit Send. It takes time. Even here in the 21st century, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right — right?

Now add the increasing if still stingy amount of time on Facebook, because naturally I've discovered a couple dozen old buddies that I wind up riffing with on subjects both serious and JPF (Just Plain Fun*), and all that's how the blog went "on hold." You've got to have a sense of when you're getting spread too thin; and that's coming from a skinny guy, where it becomes especially important.

But I knew the tide would come back in, and there it is. It just took the right time and an exciting enough reason — in this case, Ray Allen's night — to take keyboard in hand again.

(* - "Just Plain Fun" - no, I'd never seen that acronym before, either.)

"Slow-Blogging" 2009

The only appropriate way for me to start posting in the new year, on the 15th day of that year, is to hearken back to something I bookmarked for this purpose a couple months ago on the concept of, what else but Slow Blogging. Clearly, I'm a grizzled veteran of this only recently-named approach.

Web-logging began as one of those breathlessly, literally up-to-the-minute Internet phenomena, where the idea was not only of posting every day, but of how many times per day you could publish. Never mind that these rapid-fire essays contained only the barest minimum of thought; the point was they were so timely.

But as we've now seen, especially in these past few months, perhaps we need to incorporate a bit more reflection into our culture's modus operandi. It turns out that, even in a world wired with communication speeds of gigabits per second, Haste Still Makes Waste. Just lots more of it now, and much quicker.

I found this approach to online writing in a November 21, 2008 article about this "small, quirky movement" in where else but the New York Times (slow blogging about Old Media -- even worse!), "Haste, Scorned: Blogging at a Snail’s Pace." I was relieved to find some brethren whole-heartedly embracing this approach.

"Slow bloggers believe that news-driven blogs like TechCrunch and Gawker are the equivalent of fast food restaurants," author Sharon Otterman writes, "great for occasional consumption, but not enough to guarantee human sustenance over the longer haul."

Not convinced, O thou wired child of our frenzied times? About the slo-mo thesis, or the relevance of quoting hopelessly out-of-date Old Media? I give you these words of none other than A-list blogger Om Malik, writing about the reporting on the Mumbai terror attacks in his native India, in a post titled "With Twitter, a Desperate Need for Context":

"Even with all the news coming at me from the local Indian channels by way of streaming on the web, no one was offering context, analysis or a comprehensive overview of what was unfolding around them. It wasn’t until The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times offered up their reports that the whole time line and sequence of events started to make sense."

Ah-ha! Take that, New Media bigots. But my point isn't either/or; the point, as ever, is balance. There's no way around the fact that we live in a hyperdrive world, and we've got to keep up or be left behind. But neither has the world fundamentally changed so much since Aesop posited that, as my grandfather was found of quoting, "Slow but steady wins the race."

Related, here:
Twittering on about Facebook

Illustration by Milo Winter in a 1919 Aesop anthology,
from Project Gutenberg via Wikipedia

"Drumming Up Teamwork"

It's not very often that I can find some reason to write about musicmaking in here, in keeping with the (rather wide-angled yet) business-y focus of this blog. But it's Spring here at our latitude, and here's one.

Over the years, I've conducted a number of drumming-based teambuilding sessions for Idea Champions (mostly for GE at their famed Crotonville, NY, training campus,) a program begun by my colleague Nathan Brenowitz. I figured we could be doing a lot more with this and suggested we expand and spiff up the offering, so we developed a new program, and gave its page on the site a makeover.

"Hands on, energizing, and fun, Drumming Up Teamwork is the perfect way to help groups and teams see and hear what it takes for real teamwork to manifest in the workplace."

It's really all about Rhythm, because, from one perspective, everything is really all about rhythm: in business, and any interaction between people. We talk about how "timing is everything," about how people working together have to be "in step," and perhaps forget how very literal these expressions are.

But with a drum or bell or shaker in your hands, it becomes quite clear that for something to work, you have to tune in to the people you're working/playing with, you have to really listen, you have to get in sync. Then, in a musical setting, enjoyable, synchronized sounds happen -- and in a business situation, you get a team whose energies are flowing both strongly and focused.

Nathan tells stories of sessions he's run where longtime adversaries have experienced working in concert for the first time, and the letters he got from their relieved and grateful managers. It can be that powerful.

But hey, people express their appreciations even just for its time-honored value of stress relief. My favorite part, I'll admit, is when we drag all the drums and percussion into the middle of the circle, and tell the people to pick the one they want. Just for a moment, everyone becomes a kid again as they race to grab the shiny instrument they had their eyes on, and the room is filled with laughter and gleeful noise. And by the end, you always get at least a couple people who've experienced the transformation that connecting with Rhythm never fails to bring.

Which reminds me...

As long as we're already this far out on the limb (of having proposed that music be taken seriously, I guess), this must be my chance to relate another project I've been hot on this past month, while I obviously haven't been blogging.

That would be putting together "the World Fusion Open," a hybrid open mic and/or relatively open jam for the many people here in New York's Hudson Valley region who play instruments from around the world, or have been influenced by those musics. The first one will be at the Arts Society of Kingston (ASK) in their double gallery in the historic Rondout riverfront neighborhood, on Thursday, May 8th, and will run monthly through the summer.

Do We Act, or just React?

To "Five Ways to Be Creative Today," posted by book publicist Nettie Hartsock on her blog (3/7/2008).

Among her five were, "Turn off your computer, TV, radio, PDA and anything electronic and revel in the silence," and, "Spend time contemplating your navel and the deeper meaning of the world and how we’re all connected to one another."

(Yes, that's Nettie with
the great Willie Nelson.)

(In the Comments, I wrote,)

Nettie, this is very good to hear, and very practical advice. (Except maybe for the "navel" part -- ewww -- although I do understand what you're trying to get at. ; - )

I figured out at some point -- and yet I have to keep reminding myself, or be reminded, as you have here -- that if I start my day by checking my e-mail or reading news on the web, that I'm allowing other people to set the tone of the day for me. Ideally, first I need to hear the voice of my own thoughts before I start to consider everyone else's.

In other words, I need to Act instead of just React. The only way to do that is to find and start from some mental/emotional place of your own, like in the ways you've suggested here.
- BR
===

Nettie Says: (March 18th, 2008 at 5:47 pm)

"Bill,
"What a great insight in terms of starting the day with yourself instead of the email or news on the Web. I’m going to try to spend a few minutes every morning in my office just listening to music and writing before i hit the email and Web.
"I love the Act instead of just React."

Nettie

"A true story about a chair"

Lois Kelly is very big on the value of genuine conversation as a marketing tool. Her book, "Beyond Buzz," has been named as various types of "best" of 2007. (Gold prize winner in the 2008 Axiom Business Book Awards in the Ads/Marketing/PR category, and called one of the best business books of 2007 by Library Journal, one of editors’ two top picks for marketing and branding books. Just FYI, because the natural question here is what was the other one, it was "Made To Stick" by Dan and Chip Heath.)

In her blog, she posted this intriguing bit:

>> "Patrick Schaber over at The Lonely Marketer
has a beautiful post about his friend Jill, who put two chairs in the middle of a busy corporate campus and sat down to listen to anyone who had something to say.
Needless to say there was a line of people waiting to talk and be heard. This is one of the more innovative employee communications strategies I’ve heard in a long time." (3/3/08)

===
(I wrote,)
Hi, Lois,

This story about the lady and her two chairs really strikes to the heart of a great principle we all need to routinely remember to return to: looking for the Simplest approach to fulfilling a need.

The key to being able to see simple solutions? It almost invariably starts with being willing to
s l o w... d o w n...

- BR

===
Related, here:
“Serious Fun Dept.: The Playpump”
Simplicity (tag)

More from Lois Kelly in -
“Can trends be predicted, much less created?”

"The Sweat That Eureka Demands"

(Extract of a recent, very up-to-the-minute post of mine in Idea Champions' "The Heart of Innovation"... a couple weeks back:)

Serious about doing something innovative? Be prepared to spend many long, focused hours working on it (and working and working and reworking...)

Thomas Edison  (Wikipedia)

"We want to believe that creativity and innovation come in flashes of pure brilliance," Janet Rae-Dupree writes in the New York Times. But, "Innovation is a slow process of accretion, building small insight upon interesting fact upon tried-and-true process. Just as an oyster wraps layer upon layer of nacre atop an offending piece of sand, ultimately yielding a pearl, innovation percolates within hard work over time."
...
(As one of the greatest inventors in memory, Thomas Edison, knew so well:)

In an interview in Harpers magazine, February 1890, (stay tuned here at Heart Of Innovation as we present the latest, greatest breakthroughs! ; ) Edison explained his method:

"I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it was untenable. ... I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory."

(More of "The Sweat That Eureka Demands" here...)

Related, here in Rosswriting: 
inventors (tag)

Front Seat TV Found "Distracting"

A situation sorely in need of a firm grasp of the obvious:
I was astonished by a recent story in the NY Times on the problems being caused by television and other screens in cars' front seats. The caption of a photo of one such cockpit display read, "Safety experts say electronic devices can be distracting."

Well, DUUHH! Excuse me, but how could the people in positions of responsibility for launching products with such obvious critical flaws not see the problem here?

Even if you're fine with an utterly distracted state from a philosophical point of view, didn’t anyone bring up the issue of the potential liability? (Or if someone did, and you figure that's the likelihood, why didn't the decision makers get it?)

The best part of the article was a quick mention of how legislation came to be introduced in New York to ban all “display generating devices” in the driver’s view. To it's credit, the state already has a law against TV sets in the front seat.

State Senator Carl L. Marcellino, who sponsored the bill, "learned this firsthand while riding in a cab in Miami — the driver was watching a boxing match on a television mounted on the dashboard." I can testify that having lived in Miami for many years, I have no problem at all imagining this. (It can be quite a surreeaalistic place.)

"High-Tech Invitations Take Your Mind Off Road" By Bill Vlasic

Related, here:
(Tag:) Focus

(Image uploaded to Flickr by wiseacre photo)

Just Keep Swinging

In the process of backing up my machine here (since I'm taking it in for a repair before the service contract is up,) I came across one of those inspirational quotes that you save to get you through discouraging interludes.

This, from one of baseball's greatest hitters, is one that I found printed across the top of the local paper's sports page a few years back, right over the scores from the various high school teams. At the time, I really needed not just to hear this, but to keep it in the forefront of my thoughts. So I taped it at the top of my monitor, where it always fed me a little encouragement and direction every time I looked up.

"My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or just feeling badly, the only thing to do was keep swinging."

- Henry Aaron

Now, here's a guy who, I think we can say, probably had a lot more reason to feel downhearted at times than most. As I'm sure most people realize, when he was on his way to breaking Babe Ruth's career home run record, he was receiving death threats and hate mail on a regular basis.

After the last game of the 1973 season, having reached 713, one short of the record, Aaron stated that his only fear was that he might not live to see the next season. So when he said, I just keep swinging, that was quite a statement.

(I suppose it was stressful to be receiving threats of indictment while going after Aaron's record, but I don't think they quite compare.)

1974 baseball card uploaded to Flickr by brettbigb

Two short bits of interesting thinking, one for each side

...of your brain.

First, one for the Listen For It side:

The other day I got back in contact with an old friend (and former employer, in fact), someone I knew as a near-total gearhead, but who these days is blogging quite amusingly at the eponymous Brent Noorda's Blog (with it's concise tagline of, "Anything sufficiently vague shall always ring true"). We were talking about favorite music in our exchange of mail, and he related this:

"We were in Africa (mostly Burkina Faso) last year, and ran across a guy who was a Yes fan and had lived quite a while in remote regions, where he played much of his music collection. He said that their 'Tales from Topographic Oceans' was the favorite music of the locals, who would say something like,"

"Play that one with the sounds that go all over the place for a long time."

Its famous cover art by Roger Dean

===
Then, one for the Make It Happen side:

A widely quoted statement attributed to Charles Roberts Buxton (1823-1871), an English brewer, philanthropist, writer and Member of Parliament.

"You will never find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it."

(Like, for example, becoming a member of Parliament, creating classic albums with exquisite cover art and lengthy sounds that go all over, or putting together totally unrelated pairs of blog posts.)

Great Ideas Dept.: Build at RR Stations; Auerbach as manager

(My recent posts in The Heart of Innovation; I notice there happens to be one each from New York and Boston.)

"Building 'Living Space' around Railroad Stations" (August 21)

"Imagine that at each major stop along the Long Island Rail Road, communities of housing, dining and shopping were built above existing parking lots. Parking garages would be underneath the new buildings.

"Given the location, generally within walking distance of an existing shopping area, residents would have little need for a car. A railroad station would no longer be a stop along a route, but a destination in itself. Even better, each of these hubs would be connected along the main arteries of the line." John Patrick Winberry, in Newsday.


"How the great Celtics teams won: by Keeping It Simple" (August 10)

With the supercharged Celts in the news, we go back some for Bob Cousy's view of Red Auerbach's managerial style. "Red wasn't worried about X's and O's. He seldom is. His approach is to go to the heart of the problem and try to solve it."

Half of all media will be created by consumers?

The Boston Globe's "Business Filter" recently ran an item on the (perhaps slightly self-serving) prediction of an ambitious podcaster that soon, "50% of all media consumed will be created by other consumers."

Naaaaah! IMHO, I just don't believe that most people have enough of the time and skill necessary to create stuff that's good enough to interest anyone beyond their family and friends. It takes a Huge amount of the former and a pretty fair amount of the latter to produce something that might appeal to any meaningful chunk of the Public, doesn't it?

The Filter's Maura Welch printed another ratio a while back that sounded a lot more accurate, which, to roughly paraphrase -- meaning, if I remember correctly -- was that out of 100 websurfers, one creates content, nine comment or add to it somehow, and the other 90 watch. (Hunting around for this link, which was a good one...)

Just look at any message board, a mature technology that should be trusted to show long-term behavior, that shows the ratio of messengers to lurkers, or the number of replies to a topic vs. the number of views. This may be the bottom of the ladder content-wise, but the root is usually a good place to start looking at something. (Yes, ladders have roots, too, so there's nothing wrong with that metaphor.)

I got involved in a discussion somewhere recently that showed 5 entries to over 1000 views of that topic. And that's in a medium where it's possible to create and post a message real quick-like, not like the development time required for anything more evolved, like videos, blogs, etc.

(Of course, I'll admit I still have some trouble relating to the term "podcasting" -- to me, "pods" first reminds me of what the Body Snatchers invaded in. And this is no laughing matter: look what they did to poor Donald Sutherland!)

Even The Young 'Get' Focus, It Turns Out

Finally, reassuring proof that even the currently reigning young generation, people in their twenties, understand the value of focus. All we ever hear is how in-the-moment and up-to-the-minute and always On and utterly distracted they all are, their attention flitting from one soundbite to the next and don’t stop but shop til they drop. But there are some encouraging signs that, of course, there's more to them.

Tracy McGrady, one of the two all-stars on the Houston Rockets, is 27 and a phenomenal player. He told the TV sideline reporter that in preparation for this first game of the playoffs, he’d turned everything Off.

No e-mail, no Blackberry, no texting, no phone calls, no ticket requests. His wife handled everything. He just wanted to completely focus on the game.

(In the game, he caught fire in the second half and the Rockets won; last night he had 31 points and 10 rebounds, and they won again. The picture's from NBA.com's story.)

Then there’s that great commercial where a video game version of a famous driver suddenly barks at the two kids on a couch playing the game, “C’mon, ya think I got where I am playing video games!?”

Okay, that's just one 20-something and one commercial; but the individual in question is an icon, and the other is a commercial on television -- in other words, practically scripture. So there’s some reason to hope.

And let’s hope so, because nothing of value is ever produced without someone willing to buckle down and focus on what's required to get it done. Sooner or later, the smart ones in every generation figure that out.

TNT's NBA broadcast focuses on New Orleans today

Kudos to TNT to devote all their between- and after-game airtime to bring the still-broken condition of New Orleans to the forefront. This was on the occasion of the first game played in New Orleans by the itinerant "New Orleans/Oklahoma City-nee-Charlotte Hornets" since Katrina hit the criminally weak levies to remodel the city.

And a heartfelt shout-out to Ernie Johnson, the longtime host of Turner's NBA halftime show -- hang in there, Ernie! Great to see you back. I've always enjoyed your considerable wit, the smooth way you literally "moderate" the show, your always evident humanity, and now your courage.

I was one who was really annoyed when the bull, Barkley, first joined your fine china shop, since I really enjoyed you and Kenny Smith before he and his great big mouth arrived. But now the youngster's calmed down and settled in, and the three of you are a clever, relaxed, enjoyable ride on the subject of professional basketball.

What a contrast with how ESPN handles its NBA share, the much larger one, unfortunately. I like a lot of the individual on-air personalities, but they're clearly being conducted to deliver all opinions at a high pitch, with that constant, macho hurling of challenges.

Don't you hate those ESPN shoutfests? On one of their regular shows, we're invited to watch as those two guys -- I'm not going to name it or them, because we shouldn't encourage them to carry in the manner they do -- argue and yell at each other as they sprint through a tightly timed series of the day's hot topics. It's exhausting, but even better, it leaves you in a cross, contentious mood. Just what we need more of in our world today.

It's "Crossfire" on sports, and it was an advance of civilization when that CNN show went off the air, sunk, it seemed, by John Stewart's gutsy appearance on their show to beg them to stop.

-- See, now, here's a great example: Barkley says he could compete in the Eastern Conference today, Reggie Miller says if you can run up and down those stairs (the lower bowl of the arena) in 20 seconds, I'll believe you -- and the next thing you know, Charles is charging up the stairs. The camerapeople are quick and zoom back to catch it, and he arrives back in a respectable time, but clearly winded, to the merriment of all.

This kind of spontaneous fun happens so seldom on television these days; it makes you wonder why.

(Note: I wrote this last night while watching the basketball post-game show, after which it was just too late to do any more with.)

Related (satire), here:
"Dance vs. Hoops"

Another Long-Overdue Wrong To Be Righted: Leaf Blowers

In what has already been a very good news day ; - ) ,
this heartening item appeared in the Boston Herald*:

"Leaf blowers may have to take leave: Cambridge mulls ban"
By Laura Crimaldi, 11/8/06

"Cambridge city officials this week established a Leaf Blowers Advisory Committee to determine whether the noisy lawn and garden machines should be muffled for good or least regulated.

"Last year, Palo Alto, Calif., banned use of the cacophonous gas-powered deleafing devices in residential zones, joining more than a dozen of California communities that have outlawed high-octane leaf blasting or limited the hours that the turbo garden contraptions can be in use.

"The yard-clearing conundrum isn’t just about neighborhood racket, leaf blower naysayers said. It’s also about health risks and actually robbing your lawn of the nutrients needed to stay healthy.

“'Everybody has this idea that it’s important to get the leaves up,' said Karen Carmean, co-chairwoman of the Cambridge Public Planting Committee. (But,) 'it is the best thing for trees to have leaves on the ground around them because it creates leaf mulch.

"The leaf blowers also kick up dust particles that pose a health threat, Carmean said. 'Particulate matter is more dangerous than we thought it was a few years ago.'”

Okay, it isn't known as The People's Republic of Cambridge for nothing. And yes, the price of not cutting your own lawn will go up along with the extra time it'll take to rake.

But I was particularly happy to see this possibility being considered, because them dang things are a pet peeve of mine, and I hadn't even considered the issues of mulch and free-flying particles. Just the damn noise!

Such a peeve, in fact, that i was moved a few years back to vent into my keyboard on the subject; to wit:

It's a Loud, Loud World
Here's a piece of technology that has all the nerve-shredding abilities that we've outlined, but absolutely none of the usefulness, the practical value, of tools that at least accomplish something. The leaf blower just moves unwanted material from one place to the other, where it is equally unappreciated. Its slogan? "Let them clean it up."

TV commercial breaks reach The Outer Limits

Call me a starry eyed innocent, but I made an honestly shocking discovery recently. Now, I don’t generally watch a lot of TV, but it was vacation, I was tired of being glued to the computer, already took a walk, yatta yatta, so I decided to see if there was anything on. (“Yeah, yeah, alright, get on with it.”)

…Okay, I’ll admit that during basketball season, you will find me plunked down in front of the tube many evenings, for at least the second half. But it’s the off-season; this is a whole different ballgame.

Anyway, with no games on – and even the Red Sox back in the traditional wait-til-next-year mode – what sounded good that night was an early John Cusack film, “The Sure Thing,” which was showing on WE – that’s right, the chick-flick channel.

(Directed by Rob Reiner, it’s a cute one when or if you’re in the mood for a witty romantic comedy. I was coming in around the last half of the movie, and quickly remembered that I’d seen it before with my lady because of one scene. It’s when the female lead’s painfully-perfect Ivy League boyfriend offers her a cup of tea, and smugly starts to tick through his long list of choices. “…English Breakfast -- but that’s more of a ‘studying’ tea, isn’t it?” Funny the things you remember.)

But what I noticed this time was that the commercials just seemed to go on and on, and on… Every time my attention rose in expectation of the film resuming, yet another commercial started. Even with the sacred Mute button armed – don’t watch without it! – it was exhausting and frustrating. So, after spending the next break in the kitchen, I started timing the breaks. I was dumbfounded to discover that the commercial break was eight minutes long. Eight minutes!

But Wait, There’s More: in between these stupifyingly long series of ads, they generously screened 12 minutes of the film.

One gropes for a word that would begin to do justice to this: impossible? Absurd? Grotesque? I would not have believed it if I hadn’t seen and measured it myself.

Equally as astonishing as the length of these assaults was a mind-numbing phenomenon which we are all sadly accustomed to: at each break, they show you all the same commercials! On this channel, the same ones they hurled at you just twelve minutes before. It's relentlessly mind-numbing, insulting, and makes me angry at the companies pushing them at me. Put that in your focus group and smoke it.

Do you mean to tell me that anybody is sitting there and watching all, or most, or any significant percentage of those commmercials? Hel-lo, TV advertisers – they couldn’t possibly be. Nobody could even take in all that so-called information: if those were 15-second spots, that’s 32 commercials in a row. You’re letting that station make fools of you if you think anyone’s even capable of recognizing your message in the middle of all that, no matter how many times it’s shot at them, I don’t care what kind of stats they’re claiming.

You are wasting your money.

Being a longtime believer in Proactive Television Watching (TM), I did hit my friend and ally the Mute button (as usual), and literally pulled out a book and read during the next couple commercial breaks, because I didn’t remember how the movie ended. So yes, I kept watching the film, but decisively tuned out the ads – and that’ll be the last time I watch that channel.

O how we long for the return of the original “Outer Limits” show – because at the end they used to say, “We now return control of your television set to you…”

(Postscript)
I did have a similar experience a couple years back – although it wasn’t this bad – when I tried to watch the film “Rudy” on ESPN Classic. I was literally exhausted by the end of it, and that’s the last time I watched a film on that station, either.
To be fair, I just saw “9 to 5”, with Tomlin, Fonda and Parton, on AMC last night, and they’ve kept their heads at that channel; they ran the old fashioned two-minutes’ worth of ads, which seems reasonable.
We're not anti-advertising types, by any means -- we have a pantheon of favorite ads, too. Just be clever about it, and we'll watch and even tell friends about them. But if you can't attain the heights of Cleverness, jeez, at least be intelligent about it.

Another "Giant Leap For Humankind": TV-B-Gone!

All it does is turn television sets off (and now, optionally, on).

Techies like to talk about designing simplified software or devices that only do one thing, really well, despite the fact that consumers evidently prefer to buy clumsy, uneven products that promise to do everything you’ll ever need (SUVs, the “cell phone/music player/camera/web browser/micro-movie theater/GPS tracker,” MS Office...) But here’s the device that fairly defines simplicity, and in an added Thoreavian kick, offers to return a little peace and quiet to your harried life:

“Your TV-B-Gone® universal remote control resembles other TV remote controls, but is different in two important ways. First, it only has a power button that allows you to switch a TV on or off.”

“You can use TV-B-Gone® to control access to television for philosophical or practical reasons, or simply to have fun!“

—Mitch Altman, Inventor of TV-B-Gone®

Ever turned off a television that no one around was watching, and noticed that nobody noticed? But you actually did those people a favor. Subtly but definitely you helped reduce the amount of noise in their environment, with its attendant stress and drain on their biophysical components.

You see, unlike even the most insistent conversationalists you know – the ones who never seem to stop – the television does not even have to pause for a quick breath; in fact, they even edit the breaths out of the announcers' spiels. A TV never needs to sleep, either; it requires only that lifeline of electrical connection to literally continue to yell at you, vocally and visually, 24/7/365.25 (accounting for leap years).

Stress, the professional health and medical fields agree, is the number one cause of physical malfunction in "advanced" societies. Television run wild is not merely a proven source of stress, it’s practically the poster child of stress-sources! So, by putting the TV-B-Gone to prudent use -- "Click Responsibly" – you may actually be doing a significant service towards promoting the general public health.

(And we’re only half kidding.)

~~~

Trying to figure out what to get me for Christmas this year? (This question is addressed to a very small of group of people, some of which I share a last name with.) This is it. A TV-B-Gone would let me feel like Robin Hood; it'd be my bow and arrow.

And I'll really find it handy for some of the restaurants I otherwise like.

Note on the title:
(We’ve tweaked an historic quote there, but are sure that if Neil Armstrong had first set foot up yonder in recent times, he’d have put it that way. Kudos and appreciations to Mr. Armstrong, btw, for realizing that was a hugely historical moment, and rising to the occasion. He could have just said, "Roger, Houston, that's a big 10-4, we have touch-down," or something equally dull and functional.)

Related, on Rosswriting.com:
"It's a Loud, Loud World"