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2007:07:31:08:00. Tuesday. NO!: BABY TEETH (#287, JUL 14 2007).
Despite having recently released a new record, Baby Teeth played at least this one new song, which fit well with the rest of their material. For an opening band that had probably next to no previous exposure to the audience, they played a really strong set and worked the room quite well; given they're from Chicago, I'd hope to see them back here sometime soon.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:07:30:08:00. Monday. NO!: BABY TEETH (#286, JUL 14 2007).
When I probably should've been preparing for my flight to Boston the next day and subsequent two-week stay, I instead went to the High Noon to see two opening acts at the Redwalls show. Robbers on High Street became my favorite Spoon tribute band a couple years, but the surprise of the show was how good Chicago's Baby Teeth were. I'd heard and enjoyed their new record, The Simp, but their live show -- particularly as the first act of the night, when nobody was paying much attention -- was a real powerhouse, producing a kind of Elton John-led indie rock act that mostly got the crowd off their phones and looking toward the stage.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:07:27:08:00. Friday. NO!: THE BOX SOCIAL (#285, JUL 5 2007).
Elsewhere in Madison's strata, the Box Social have been touring on their debut LP all summer -- this show happening during the week-long break between the western and eastern halves of their nationwide tour. They've also built up a really solid local fanbase, as you can see from this clip of what could be their break-out hit. Going for adds now, radio directors!
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:07:25:08:00. Wednesday. NO!: THE MOTORZ (#284, JUL 5 2007).
This is another one of the Motorz' rockers, a result of too much Wii playing. Having tired my arm out on tennis and bowling, I wanted to get two early songs recorded and then put the camera down for the rest of the set, not realizing that their sweet pop material was going to come later on. So when I see them next -- probably in mid-September -- I'll hold off until several songs in to start taping.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:07:24:08:15. Tuesday. THE FRINGE. One of things that strikes me about the scholarly approach to the Internet -- in particular when it comes to democratic theory concerns, but other things as well -- is the tendency to ignore casual, mass use in favor of focusing on uses that relate to political communication, mobilization or participation in some way but that tend to involve only a certain segment of the Internet population. This is nothing new, to be sure -- lots of early networked communication/virtual space scholarship centered on the construction on new identities unlinked to one's physical self -- changing genders most often, but changing anything else as well. This doesn't appear to be something that's really panned out now that the Internet actually exists and is well populated. Some people do it, sure, but they're few and what they do online doesn't tell us much about how people in general use the Internet. My point is that given the huge changes in the technology and demography of the Internet over the past ten years or so, we actually don't understand very well how people use the Internet, and we don't spend much time trying to find out. Rather than studying casual, mainstream users -- if only to have some idea of what the baseline is -- we talk about blogging, or mash-ups, or homemade political ads on YouTube, or social tagging, or Second Life, etc. Among younger users these things are much more common uses than they are among older users, of course, though it's hardly a straight-up correlation, but they're not exactly widespread in any age group. (It should be noted that within the group that is using these things, we often ignore what the Second Life people call "griefers," or at least naively assume there is some rationale behind their behavior other than adolescent misanthropy.) So let's assume that five million Americans are doing any given one of these activities somewhat regularly -- often enough that they're not just trying it out, but are actually using it. That's probably too high (the well-publicized "One Million Strong for Barack" Facebook group has just over 300,000 members at the moment), but for the sake of argument, let's say something has five million users. That's about 2.5% of the adult population in America, and probably 3.5% of the adult Internet user population. Let's say that across all these tools and sites that are so interesting in scholars, there are ten million people using at least one of them. That leaves over 90% of online Americans being largely unstudied, perhaps using the Internet for news, perhaps wary of "Web 2.0" tools for one reason or another, but largely unaffiliated with what so many scholars see as a revolution of social politics. While there is certainly something important in examining how people on the cutting edge are using the Internet, it's a mistake both to assume that the things they are doing will filter down to the rest of the online population eventually and to assume that the mass of vanilla users have nothing to tell us about how people interact through networks.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:07:23:08:00. Monday. NO!: THE MOTORZ (#283, JUL 5 2007).
In between the halves of their nationwide tour, the Box Social stopped home for a week and played a show at the Annex, with local rockers the Motorz opening -- if you missed it, they'll reprise their pairing on September 13. It was an interesting match-up, I thought, providing me my first opportunity to see the Motorz. Madison has always struck me as having a stratified local rock scene -- permanent, college and high school -- with not much overlap, and there are a lot of bands in the permanent level who generally produce a kind of music I don't like. There's this straight-ahead hard rock approach that strikes me almost entirely aesthetic, married as it often is to a separate-bedrooms 60's britpop aesthetic. The Motorz recently took this to its logical extreme, by releasing two albums -- one harder and one poppier. As it happens, the pop material they played at this show was pretty good. The harmonies and crunchy melody lines didn't break much new ground, but they were nice to listen to and I'll probably pick that record up after I get home. The rock material did a lot less for me, but then so does that stuff's inspirational material.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:07:20:10:17. Friday. A MORAL QUANDRY. Friday of next week, a Boston band called The Campaign For Real-Time will be playing a show at the Middle East, which I would like to go to (I may be otherwise engaged, but for the purposes of this quandry, let's assume I'm going). A while back, I downloaded one of their songs from the Boston Phoenix website, and subsequently downloaded their whole album via BitTorrent. It was good, but not great -- enough so that I'd want to see them, but probably not enough so that I'd want to buy it, particularly in a world where I check out tons and tons of new records. However, I saw a copy of the album in a used record shop yesterday for $3 and thought about buying it. While I didn't like it enough to pay, say, $12 or whatever the retail price might be, I did like it a quarter of that much. But if I pay $3 to this used record store, the band gets nothing, which sort of defeats the moral purpose of upgrading my unauthorized download to a "legitimate" CD. So would it make more sense to go to the show and pay (probably) $10 directly to the band for a new copy of the CD, thereby fulfilling the moral aspect of supporting the band (which I care about) as well as the legal aspect of owning the CD (which I don't), even though I'm apparently paying three times what I think the album is worth to me? I suspect the better choice on the merits is buying it from the band. But. This leads me to actually feel generally supported in my usual method of downloading records and going to a lot of live shows, the reason being that if supporting the band is really the point, going to shows is a better, more direct way of doing it than buying records in most cases (with the exceptions being sometimes that buying records from merch tables gets more money into the band's hands, and that self-released albums don't involve shady record industry people). But in the case of records that are just good -- the band's worth seeing live, but the record's not worth paying $10-15 for -- there's more moral worth in paying a cover than in giving them maybe 10-15% of the cost of the CD.
2007:07:20:08:00. NO!: KID, YOU'LL MOVE MOUNTAINS (#282, JUL 8 2007).
I had about 35 minutes of blank tape when I arrived at the Summerfest grounds, and had briefly thought about recording the entire KYMM set, just to have some good daytime footage to play around with. The heat put a stop to that, though, making it an effort just to hold my camera arm up for a couple of songs at a time (I later discovered that I had what appear to be first-degree burns under my wedding ring), and of course, the announcement that they'd be playing for two hours made the whole plan moot anyway. After these two songs I had to pack the camera away for good and start thinking about hydration and shade. The second one, which can be found on their live WMSE EP, is maybe my favorite KYMM song (of the ones that I know), or at least has my favorite little keyboard move in a KYMM song. "Volts" is pretty terrific as well, and I'm quite looking forward to their album coming out.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:07:19:18:57. Thursday. TWO MILLION DRUNK BOSTONIANS SINGING AULD LANG SYNE OUT OF TUNE. One of the things I like about Boston is that it's one of the few places where the cartoonishly stereotyped accent that outsiders think the locals have is actually kind of prevalent. Yesterday morning I has leaving the dorm and these two cops were outside, apparently directing people around the construction. One was sitting in an unmarked car with the window open, eating yogurt or something. As I pass, the guy standing outside the car says to the guy inside, in the kind of thick accent that I normally use when doing one of my hilarious accent routines, "Watcha eatin' theah, cream o' sum yung guy?" And then he cracks up.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:07:18:08:00. Wednesday. NO!: KID, YOU'LL MOVE MOUNTAINS (#281, JUL 8 2007).
When you're a young band with less than two hours of material, playing a two-hour set can be kind of tough. This piece was one of the tunes that was played in both halves of the show, though it looked like a mostly different crowd was hanging out by the time it came up after the intermission. I'd guess they played for at least 40 different people during the time I was there, including the middle-aged couple I saw at the merch booth talking about how the band "really had it figured out."
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:07:18:07:52. MICROTARGETS. Yesterday we had a talk from Sunshine Hillygus about political microtargeting via direct mail, and its relationship to cross-party vote-chasing. It seemed kind of out of place, since the general references she made to the Internet in the introduction weren't followed up with anything in the specific talk -- "information technology" was in the title, but the technology in question was data-mining and market analysis. Also, it seemed like there was a lot to be said about intra-party vote-shoring-up that she didn't cover, for whatever reason. This morning I'm introducing Dan Gillmor, whom I'm sad to say is the only OII speaker that I'd heard of before the schedule and syllabus went out. Gillmor is something of a citizen-journalism/net-media evangelist and preach-practicer, so I'm eager to hear what he has to say about the state of the American press and its relationship to the rise of its new competitors.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:07:17:07:15. Tuesday. GENERATIVITY. We had a talk yesterday from Jonathan Zittrain (of the Oxford Internet Institute and Harvard Law) on the procession of "generative" technologies over time, and in particular the generative successes of the PC and the Internet. The idea of technological generativity is that a system provides the independent ability to create within it -- e.g., the structure of the Internet which allows people wholly unrelated to its creation and operation to produce things like Flickr, or Movable Type, or del.icio.us, etc. The generativity of both the Internet and the PC (in that case, in terms of application development) can be modeled as an hourglass, where production is funneled through IP (the Internet Protocol) or the operating system to use on the other side. One of the interesting things about his talk -- apart from the mode of the presentation itself, which was occasionally very meta but in a compelling way -- was his interest in the normative concern of maintaining high levels of generativity in new systems, such as the iPhone. But the thing that especially caught my ear was one of the last things he said before the end of the session, which was that geeks can extract generativity from most any system (witness, e.g., iPod Linux, which fully modifies a nominally closed system), but that the more pressing concern is that typical users can get some generativity out of digital communication systems. I agree with this basic concern, that new media lose a lot of their appeal if regular people can't use them to express themselves in a wide range of ways, but it seems like overreaching to claim that those regular people have such generative abilities as it is. People can and do produce all kinds of things thanks to the combination of, say, iMovie* and YouTube, which respectively take advantage of the generativity of the PC and the Internet. But more importantly, regular users rely on the ability of geeks to exploit the generativity of the PC and the Internet in order to produce iMovie and YouTube in the first place. Given this reliance of user generativity on geek generativity to exist in the first place, are we simply worrying about a sliding scale of difficulty or usability? What's the difference between iPod Linux, XBox modding, BitTorrent and Napster? They all require different levels of skill to implement and use, and they all required geek generativity to be created. Unless and until the tools are generated, they can't be used to generate content and experience. * iMovie is probably not the best example, since it is produced by the same organization as the OS on which it runs, but I couldn't think of a consumer-level video program not produced by Apple or Microsoft.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:07:16:08:28. Monday. PRELUDE TO DESPAIR. Travel troubles to start the two weeks of OII. First, we had to sit on the tarmac in Madison for an hour, just moments from taking off, because of "wind shear" in Chicago grounding all planes in and out. Luckily, I didn't miss my connection to Boston because some other weather had delayed that plane by 35 minutes. Ridiculously, I managed to do exactly what I did last time I visited Boston -- take an immediate wrong turn and get lost for an hour, helped along by the fact that there are multiple streets with the same name. Am I going the right way on Mass Ave? Sure, there's Cambridge St! No AC or fans in the room, and it's humid as all hell, but I brought enough clothes that I can shower several times a day if I feel like it.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:07:16:08:00. NO!: KID, YOU'LL MOVE MOUNTAINS (#280, JUL 8 2007).
I haven't been to Summerfest in quite a while, because the value has plummeted in the last few years. At $15/ticket, it's roughly a $70 event for us to come over from Madison, and since Liz Phair and OK Go played together in 2004 there haven't been any nights with more than one act we wanted to see. Totally free is a much better value, however. On the last day of this year's edition, admission was free from noon to 4:00, and I was already in town for Art vs. Craft. Luckily, one of my favorite Milwaukee/Chicago bands was playing then -- Kid, You'll Move Mountains won a competition put on by Shepherd Express to play the 12:30 slot, and since nobody ever got scheduled for the following slot, they played for two hours in 95 degree heat. It was kind of intense.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:07:15:12:44. Sunday. OII, MYSELF AND I. I'm leaving town later this afternoon to attend the Oxford Internet Institute's summer doctoral program, this year hosted at Harvard. I'll be blogging about some of it, however esoteric it might turn out to be.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:07:13:08:00. Friday. NO!: LOCKSLEY (#279, JUL 6 2007).
With recent gigs at Summerfest and on the Terrace, Locksley have been exposed to a lot of people who probably weren't interested in them before, if they'd even heard of the band. This track is one of my favorites from their new record, and the packed summer crowd seemed to be paying a decent amount of attention to it, which is more than you can say for most hot summer night shows at the Terrace. [Late edit: I'm dumb; this is "The Past & the Present."]
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:07:11:08:00. Wednesday. NO!: LOCKSLEY (#278, JUL 6 2007).
If you notice a bunch of little white dots and lines around the stage in these clips, it's because the heat and humidity of the evening brought out an armada of flying insects. The band seemed to be bothered by them a bit -- or at least they clearly noticed the invasion -- but if they were it didn't affect their raucous set, which combined their pristine power-pop with stage energy that was more OK Go than the Beatles.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:07:09:08:00. Monday. NO!: LOCKSLEY (#277, JUL 6 2007).
Finally! After an extremely light June, I've got a bunch of early July shows to post, starting with this Locksley set from the Terrace. Locksley left Madison for Brooklyn several years ago, but they've played here several times already this year in support of their terrific sophomore full-length, which is a collection of tunes that owe a lot to the Beatles, but also to the Kinks, Cheap Trick, Elvis Costello and various other power-pop touchstones. Playing in front of maybe the biggest non-Michael Moore crowd I've ever seen on the Terrace, they dove in with this rousing short burst of a song, which set the tone for their whole show.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:07:07:18:37. Saturday. MII, MYSELF AND I. So we got a Wii last week, and ever since Emily has been referring to herself as "my Mii." Welcome to the future!
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra |
