I love coincidences... Another journalist who doubles as a computer geek and triples as a guitar player... (He's terrific at all three, but I'm older and my fingers don't move as fast.) Reading Adrian's interview at a journalism publication tipped me off to a January 23 musical milestone this month...
"5. Is there a bright future for gypsy jazz guitar players?
Yes. Gypsy jazz has enjoyed a renaissance over the last couple of years, probably thanks to the Internet and YouTube. These days, hundreds of videos of world-class players are just a click away, for free, and there’s been an explosion in instructional material. And January 2010 is Django Reinhardt’s 100th birthday. It’s a good time to be playing this type of music."
Django:
Adrian:
Local (Radford, Va.) note: Scott Fore plays a Django style too with his Hillbilly Hotclub, but YouTube seems to know him better for another style... Even though he won't have the whole band, maybe he'll do some Django tunes at the River Company Jan. 22.
Why has this old song come at me from three directions today? Coincidentally (thanks, Bill), the Times reflects on how "All the Rules of the Music Business Have Been Remade" with some discussion of YouTube, mashups, MP3 players and more. On first reading, I don't see anything about the phenomenon I've run into lately -- musicians on the Web are competing with a century of recorded history, suddenly available to anyone who pokes into digitized collections of 78s at archive.org or scores of collector sites, or unlikely reappearances, re-reappearances, and flights to space (where the song popped into the plot of a science fiction radio series, no also online).
Is it that this 1924 song, needs no mashing, or is self-mashing? I noticed lines in the last verse, not included on some recording, that add what the scholar's might call "cultural/historical context" and might clarify some of the author's and original listeners' influences (as in "operating under...")
If there’s sunshine in Washington, what makes the moonshine dear? When it’s night time in Italy, it’s Wednesday over here.
If you lay on a mattress, you’ll find that spring is near. If you haven’t an appetite, just think of Paul Revere. By the time that they pass a bill to bring back wine and beer, It’ll be night-time in Italy and Wednesday over here.
My XO-1 was the proto-netbook, an innovative low-power mini-laptop with wifi, mesh networking, a rotating screen with a "panel" mode (but no touch screen, alas), and a daylight-viewing mode I still haven't seen matched... as well as some fascinating educational software concepts.
And that was the point: One Laptop per Child had/has a goal of getting teaching machines into the hands of children around the world.
Alas, that first XO also had a keyboard that was a royal pain -- not just built for child-size fingers, but prone to "stuck" membrane keys for "ctrl" and "alt," which rendered my XO useless, especially after "pinching" a key to unstick it caused a rip in the membrane. (Presumably school systems met with the same problem acquired bushels of replacement keyboards, along with these easy-repair instructions.)
I wasn't surprised to see the XO-2 "concept" design last year featuring only a touch panel in place of the keyboard half of the laptop, eliminating the XO-1's weakest link and creating an intriguing two-page "electronic book," with either half usable as an iPhone-style touch-panel keyboard or display.
But now OLPC has taken the conceptual evolution another step, simplifying things even more with the
That first typing-surface image made me laugh, reminding me instantly of the screen-keyboard configuration of my second computer, circa 1985, the Tandy TRS-80 Model 100. It ran on four double-A batteries, had a text editor, communication ports and a programming language, and I used mine for about seven years, including some news-reporting trips on the backroads of coastal New England.
Meanwhile, I'll keep watching the Apple tablet gossip. (There's even some speculation that the XO screen I like so much might play a part.) Whatever happens, I certainly hope they don't seriously call it the "iSlate," no matter how much the name might appeal to procrastinators.
As for the thin just-a-panel XO-3, while folks like Forbes magazine speculate about roadmaps and practicality, I have a mental image of thousands of school kids holding panels above their heads, wirelessly networking their screens together to build a composite-image reminiscent of sports-stadiumaudience card-stunt displays... but a thousand times more creative... and saying... whatever the 21st century generation wants to say to the world.
I didn't do anything wild on New Year's Eve, but, if the mountain roads stay driveable, I may try for the “Howl At The Moon” benefit concert with Windfall and others, Saturday, January 2, at 7 p.m. at the Floyd Country Store, although not on its calendar.
(If any of my Web production students are reading... take a look at that Floyd County Historical Society page, figure out why it's in the condition it's in, figure out who is in charge, and make them a redesign offer they can't refuse!)
I think this song would be a fine one to ring in any old new year... and the video alone is hypnotic... fine for an alcohol-free holiday (or a free-alcohol one).
(With Dec. 26 update, appropriately enough.) While I was still in a half-asleep Wednesday-morning fog, the clock radio and WVTF cut through with a short piece about the between-holidays tradition of "Breaking Up Christmas" music parties, and a pointer to http://folklifefieldnotes.org, a Virginia Folklife Program website I hadn't run into before.
I didn't see the item itself on the Morning Edition rundown or WVTF sites. It ran a bit incongruously somewhere around the story about Larry McMurtry's "Literary Life", an interview with Liz Smith recalling "when gossip columns ruled," the news that Arnold Stang has died, and Frank Deford's speculation that multi-product spokesmodel Peyton Manning learned comedic timing from football. (Not the "hardest" of news this time of year.)
Update -- WVTF played the spot again on Saturday morning's Weekend VA, with this lead-in: "When Christmas is over, the fun is just getting started for many in Southern Appalachia. Virginia State Folklorist Jon Lohman has the story behind 'Breaking up Christmas,' a little-known tradition that takes place the week between Christmas and New Year's Day."
Searching for that passage helped me find the program -- and a new resource to bookmark. The segment turned out to be distributed via PRX.org, the Public Radio Exchange, "a growing social network and community of listeners, producers, and stations collaborating to reshape public radio."
The organization has a blog, RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, and services for listeners as well as producers and stations. Cool... but back to Breaking Up Christmas...
The first time I heard the program, I suspected it might be by Paul Brown, but didn't think it was his voice on the item, although I was still half asleep. Paul's the banjo-pickin' NPR news guy who did a documentary on Breaking Up Christmas a dozen years ago (as mentioned here). I think he was the first person I heard play the tune by that name, too, when he was my banjo teacher for a week or two about 30 years ago (photo at right). I couldn't find a link to that documentary of his, but did discover that he's donated his archives to my alma mater down in Chapel Hill. Cool!
In my Googling around the subject, I also found a UNC educational resource for school teachers interested in using the Breaking Up Christmas tradition (and Paul's documentary) to get students writing about their own family or cultural traditions.
The Song of the Mountains page for its 2006 Breakin' Up Christmas party mentions Paul's project and includes this enigmatic lyric:
Hoo-ray Jake and Hoo-ray John, Breakin' Up Christmas all night long.
Way back yonder a long time ago The old folks danced the do-si-do.
Way down yonder alongside the creek I seen Santy Claus washin' his feet.
Santa Claus come, done and gone, Breakin' Up Christmas right along.
I also discovered the CD of Paul's program through a fan of his in Japan, although he or she doesn't seem to police the spam on that page much. Do Breaking Up Christmas and Viagra ads go together? Who knew?
One result of all this impromptu research: I headed up&down to Floyd to see if the CountryStore had a copy of the record. (It did; I bought a couple of copies -- one for me, one for Christmas giving.)
Video footnotes c/o YouTube: Two great versions of the tune (you'll have to wait a minute for the video on the second one... from the upper Appalachians around Ithaca)
(I first heard the Horse Flies at that same Pinewoods summer camp I met Paul! Time sure flies, and the Web pulls it together... web... flies... Horse Flies... must be a thread there.)
More update: House parties, jam sessions, folk music, public radio, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blip.tv, make an interesting cross-section of old and new media "social networking." The PRX organization I discovered in my online travels this week is another manifestation... and it has it's own online video item to explain what it's all about. Enjoy:
While this was a more general blog at first, since 2009, Boblog has been for occasional writing about music, part of trying to differentiate my web writing spaces. My other blogs are JHeroes (old-time radio's portrayal of journalists) & Other Journalism, a general-purpose writerly blog, successor to stepno.com/oldblog. When I was teaching, they all sometimes served other purposes.
I have worked for two newspapers (one full time for 11 years), several magazines, four software companies, and six colleges and universities, counting part-time, freelance and student jobs. See stepno.com.
XO-3 concept design
TRS-80 Model 100
The first time I heard the program, I suspected it might be by 
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