The San Francisco Chronicle informs me this morning that thirteen million people created blogs in 2005 (“The Way We Live,” by Patricia Yollin, 12/15/06). It’s not clear whether they are all Americans, though this information comes from the Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2007. The article quotes Gerald Celente, founder of the Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y., saying, “People are more electronically connected and less humanly connected....We’re trying to make technology replace what we’ve lost humanly.” Well, I did read that article on the information superhighway. I do have a blog. I find links for the blog on Wikipedia (and edited the Malvina entry). I keep in touch with far-flung friends by email. But I learn a lot on the information footpath too. Last Saturday I was at the downtown Berkeley Farmers’ Market and ran into Country Joe MacDonald. He said he was working up his Woody Guthrie show again and had gotten out the correspondence between my mother and Woody that he uses in it. I remembered those letters, but hadn’t found them myself. He had copied them from the Little Sandy Review, and promised to send me a copy, which he did. They were written when Woody was in the hospital. In one letter my mother promised to send home-made cookies to Woody when she got over a cold. But she was a while getting around to it and Woody’s next letter had, scrawled at the bottom, “Cookies talks louder than words!” which became a byword in our family. Yesterday I had breakfast with my cybrarian friend Carole (I just learned that word) and she told me the format of my blog came up all funny on Firefox. I’d only seen it on Safari, which is what dot-Mac is intended for, and it looked fine. I’ll try it on Explorer, I said, but Carole said that since I had Explorer for Mac it should be OK. It’s Explorer for PCs that might have glitches. I just tried it, and Explorer for Mac isn’t getting it right either. The page isn’t centered on the background, which is OK, but the links in the text all come out saying “shapeimage” instead of “a book on storytelling” or whatever. They work, but you don’t know where you’re going before you click. Rats. I do have an old version of Explorer. Is anybody out there having trouble? I’d like to know. I did learn “cybrarian” online. It was a Word-a-Day word meaning a librarian who specializes in internet knowledge sources, and I wrote a limerick for it: I am an old-fashioned librarian And though some folks might think me contrarian I’ll hoist a Cointreau To this portmanteau Because my best friend’s a cybrarian. While I was uploading the Steve Goodman piece at Jimmy Bean’s, I overheard the people at the next table working on a website for an animal rescue organization. I interrupted (I had met one of the women at the library) to say that my partner had been chair of the Berkeley Humane Commission, so while I wasn’t actively eavesdropping, I kept hearing familiar terms. The upshot of the conversation is that they will use my spay-neuter song, “Fix My Dog” on their website. http://www.secondchancerescue.com/ I considered dropping my subscription to the Sunday New York Times to make more space for book writing, but just read an article on the new paths music takes from creator to listener using the web to bypass the big music corporations, and realized I need to have this information. A while ago I was noticing that my partner, Claudia, read the business section while I read the arts and entertainment section, and I was thinking what an airhead I am, then I thought, wait a minute, arts and entertainment...that’s my business! Same reason my mother finally bought a television set after I left for college—she wanted to see what was going on in her business (plus my dad—not a big sports fan—wanted to root for Jackie Robinson when he made it to the majors). I didn’t see my first TV set (in a store window) till I was in the fifth grade, and didn’t live with one until my husband’s grandmother moved into a nursing home and gave us hers, when I was about thirty. Anyway, this article (“2006, Brought To You By You,” by Jon Pareles, NYT 12/10/06) that hooked me back into the Times, talks about YouTube and GarageBand giving us “homemade art independently distributed and inventively promoted.” According to Pareles, the big music companies still have the advantage, but the independents are gaining. After her first three albums, my mother started her own record label, Cassandra. I went directly to my own label, Sisters’ Choice. Most singer-songwriters have their own label. The difference now is that instead of just selling albums at our own concerts, we can sell over the internet. The next step is skipping the investment in pressing CDs and putting a song directly on line on iTunes or as an MP3. This is great for topical songs, which can go out of date before an album gets put together. Also for the situation I was in where I was asked to write some songs for a book for preschool teachers called That's Not Fair: A Teacher's Guide to Activism with Young Children by Ann Pelo and Fran Davidson. The book offers teachers strategies to encourage children to act for fairness and to become change-makers. The publisher, Red Leaf Press, didn’t want to put out a CD to go with the book, but since some teachers would not be able to learn the songs from written music, I arranged to put the songs on my website. Most of what Parales said I knew, but he makes a point that I haven’t heard. He says that in a way this is bringing us back to a folk culture, where anybody can create, parody, or change a song. Only instead of being divided by villages and tribes, we are divided by genres, by belief systems. The music isn’t any better (or worse) than the stuff the music industry hypes, but we have gotten around that constricting funnel and can go hunting on our own. Of course we create our own constricting funnels, but at least we are erasing the division between performer and listener, and that’s got to be healthy.  No Hole in My Head, © 1963 by Malvina Reynolds, renewed 1993 So here I am, blogging about blogging. However, I am carrying my blog address on slips of paper in my wallet, to advertise it to the people I meet on the information footpath. In other news, I saw in the same NY Times entertainment section an ad for Mel Gibson’s new movie phrased this way: “Apocalypto: no one can outrun their destiny.” This is not, I presume, a movie aimed at feminists. Gender-neutral language has truly settled into the mainstream. © 2006 by Nancy Schimmelhttp://www.countryjoe.com/mailto:partners-in-rhyme@att.net?subject=subscribehttp://www.secondchancerescue.comhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandrahttp://www.redleafpress.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=262http://www.sisterschoice.com/thatsnotfair.html
Malvina and Country Joe, photographed for an interview she did of Joe for BAM (Bay Area Music Magazine). She went into the hospital that evening and died two days later, March 17, 1978.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
THE INFORMATION FOOTPATH