From: owner-harbinger-digest@smoe.org (harbinger-digest) To: harbinger-digest@smoe.org Subject: harbinger-digest V3 #113 Reply-To: harbinger@smoe.org Sender: owner-harbinger-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-harbinger-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk harbinger-digest Thursday, April 9 1998 Volume 03 : Number 113 HARBINGER DIGEST To post, mail harbinger@smoe.org To unsubscribe, mail majordomo@smoe.org with: unsubscribe harbinger-digest To get list info file, mail majordomo@smoe.org with: info harbinger-digest Today's Subjects: ---------------- (harbinger) Live Ladder!!!/Missy/Amanda [sstewart@NTCGEN01HE.ntc.nokia.co] (harbinger) Is Anyone Listening? The Audience, Music, & Manners [Joel Sie] Re: (harbinger) mtv; too many Steves ["Steve Bornstein" Subject: (harbinger) Is Anyone Listening? The Audience, Music, & Manners Is Anyone Listening? The Audience, Music, & Manners Commentary © 1998 by Joel Siegfried All Rights Reserved I had gone to my favorite hangout, Java Joe's to hear some fine acoustic music performed by a couple from Australia called The Betts. It was their first full bill at this venue, having played here before at open mike nights. Four people at a table off to my left was talking over the music, which distracted me enough to finally overcome inertia and reluctance, and go over to say a few choice words to them about respect for the performers. It was not the first time that my musical solitude had been intruded upon by inattentive or inappropriate comments from the house, though such behavior is very rare at the local coffeehouses, especially at Java Joe's. During the past summer, a Lilith Fair California venue had been a particular minefield of crowd noise, enough for Jewel to say irately before one of her songs, "You know, this would sound much better if you stop talking." Once, at a Tori Amos concert, she had stopped playing in mid-chord, looked up toward the far reaches of the balcony, and said in her best prima donna diva persona, "You want to talk. I'll wait until you're finished." After two seconds of silence, she resumed without dropping a note. I often wondered, what, if any are the boundaries between having a good time, and concert etiquette? Are there any standards? When did all the shouting begin? I mentioned my puzzlement to a friend, who send me copies of recent newsgroup messages by Tom Neff and Richard Flohil. They had some good ideas, tracing the evolution of recording fidelity past vinyl and tape to the present digital perfection. Along the way, they mentioned Sinatra, the Beatles and Elvis, and the advent of fandom, swooners and screamers. It all got me to thinking about my own personal musical odyssey, and other threads and influences. Let me tell you about some of them. Growing up in New York in the pre-digital age was culturally enriching, especially in a household that put a premium on awareness for the arts, and expressed it in season tickets to the NY City Ballet, trips to Broadway shows, and the Sunday New York Times strewn around the apartment each week as part of the week-end ritual. Still, those were primitive times. There was no TV. AM radio took its place as the electronic hearth, for music of the big bands, but mostly for those weekly shows, the Great Gildersleeve, Jack Benny, Amos & Andy, the Green Hornet, and all the rest that we listened to transfixed, watching the characters in the theater of our minds. Music was on 78 rpm vinyl. I took blurry, black & white photos with a Kodak Brownie camera that used 110 roll film. Milestones happened. I saw my first Broadway show, "The Moon is Blue", with Barry Sullivan in the wry, comedic lead. You could laugh when everyone else did, even if you didn't understand why. Off-Broadway, the Fantasticks opened, and through the decades maybe never closed, soon followed by Three Penny Opera. "Try To Remember" merged with "Mac the Knife", forever etched in memory. You cold touch the performers if you stretched out your arms, and feel the air move when they spoke. Words were holy, like prayers. The equation was a simple one: they talked, sang, acted, emoted, we listened, entranced. Sports were the only exception. At Knicks or Rangers games at Madison Square Garden, or that temple of endless broken dreams and green forevers in Brooklyn called Ebbets Field, you could scream until you were blue in the face, without hesitation. Spectator participation had its limits. The static of AM radio gave way to the monaural perfection of FM, from Alan Freed to WBAI, from folk to free thinking. I took tiny black & white photographs that could be peeled, still wet, from the back of a Polaroid Land Camera. School days passed slowly, but there were treasured moments. Once a girlfriend and I rode our bicycles in Central Park, and later spotted Milton Berle coming out of Lindy's deli with a group of people. We raced over, for there was no bigger or brighter star anywhere. "Uncle Miltie" was gracious. "Hey kids", he chortled, "have you ever heard of Elvis Presley?" Of course, we were hip! "Well, this is Colonel Parker, his manager. Elvis is going to be on my show next week!" We were polite, but unaware that great tides of change were about to happen in music. Records were now 45 rpm singles with big holes in the middle and titles like ShaBoom ShaBoom, Earth Angel, FM had gone stereo, there were 12-inch LPs with nearly an hour's music on them. I saw Eddie Fisher perform live at the Paramount movie theater, with young girls fainting in the aisles. My favorite artists were Peter, Paul & Mary, the Kingston Trio, Judy Collins & Joan Baez. I took Kodachrome color slides with a tiny 35mm Zeiss Contessa range finder camera. High school gave way to college. I wrote a column called Circling the Square for my school paper. An East Village gallery invited me to one of their avant-garde shows, something called "Happenings" by Alan Kaprow, in which the performers and the audience merged and were interchangeable. The Beatles arrived in New York and played on Ed Sullivan along with Topo Gigo and Senor Wencez, and two guys who could ride unicycles while keeping 50 plates spinning on sticks. New York chic affected my values, and I hung out at places like the Living Room on Second Avenue, listening to Felicia Sanders sing through the blue smoke, while the management paid her the ultimate respect, by not serving drinks while she performed; or at a west side hotel which hosted Tom Lehrer in their beer garden every Saturday, and refrains of "The postman's got the longest route in town", or "Be prepared!"; or Brother Theodore ranting and drooling at Town Hall. The audience was getting to let their hair down. I bought a Minox spy camera the size of a pack of chewing gum, and took very grainy, tiny black and white images of people buying fish. When Rock & Roll was is full swing, I fear that I must have hid under a rock. Actually I moved to Europe. The closest I got to popular music was listening to Radio Luxembourg and going to a Françoise Hardy concert at the Salle de Musique in Geneva. It is hard to outrun one's genes. Mostly I gravitated towards the palaces of high culture, La Scala in Milan, the Danish Royal Ballet in Copenhagen, the Bolshoi and Kirov, and whatever symphony orchestra happened to be in town. Once I got to see Van Cliburn in concert. The audience never breathed. I took color and black & white landscapes and portraits with a Nikon F which I personally developed and printed. Seasons passed. I moved to California and became a vegetarian, for a while. The years moved by, like blurred traffic on the freeway. I had the radio on one night, and an extraordinary thing happened, a musical epiphany of sorts. A woman was singing, like no other I had ever heard before. Maybe the song was "Silent All These Years", I'm no longer certain, but after hearing Tori Amos for the first time, there was a great hunger to hear more. Message and messenger, content and all that was resonated within me from that experience opened a channel which led to further discoveries that are still on-going today. This was for me the bridge, the missing link, the Piltdown Man, the Rosetta Stone. It's hard to believe that, to quote Tori, "A kid who could play fucking Mozart at the age of 8", could evoke so many profound experiences. It is a mystery, really. Now I follow about 200 artists, female vocalists and acoustic musicians. For some of them, I take tiny digital photographs using a Kodak CD-20 camera, which makes their wardrobes look green, under most stage lighting conditions. I post these on my web pages, and dream about buying a better camera. So what have I learned about listening to live music? Not very much. It is a special chemistry, even a gift, which for some, when it happens, can reveal new wonders. Sure, I appreciate being among like-minded audiences, and from talking with performers, I know that is what most artists want as well -- that bond and that connection with the people they are performing for. Boundaries between sports and entertainment have been blurred. Television has become the pacifier and night light for the latch-key generation. People talk over it, so why not do the same at live performances? There's always lots of distractions and there are new gadgets and technologies which appear all the time. Attitudes about concert etiquette come from behavior and past conditioning, but people can change. At least, I hope so. Click. -=End=- - -- _______________________________________________________________ Joel Siegfried San Diego, California Email: mailto:ecto@home.com Voice Mail: (619)222-9236 Female Vocalists: http://members.home.net/ecto/index.html _______________________________________________________________ - ------------------------------ To unsubscribe, mail majordomo@smoe.org with: unsubscribe harbinger Please note the new majordomo address To buy Paula merchandise from Paula(!) try: http://pw2.netcom.com/~ilml/pcmerch.html Digest, further unsub and problems FAQ at: http://www.netaxs.com/~jgreshes/lists/harbinger.html For This Fire kinda-lyrics write Riphug@aol.com ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 08 Apr 1998 20:52:42 PDT From: "Steve Bornstein" Subject: Re: (harbinger) mtv; too many Steves >From owner-harbinger@smoe.org Tue Apr 7 14:28:02 1998 >Received: from smoe.org [204.167.97.154] (root) > by siren.shore.net with esmtp (Exim) > id 0yMdbB-0001H5-00; Tue, 7 Apr 1998 14:59:58 -0400 >Received: from localhost (daemon@localhost) > by smoe.org (8.8.7/8.8.7/listq-jane) with SMTP id OAA22313; > Tue, 7 Apr 1998 14:52:25 -0400 (EDT) >Received: by smoe.org (bulk_mailer v1.5); Tue, 7 Apr 1998 14:52:21 - -0400 >Received: (from majordom@localhost) > by smoe.org (8.8.7/8.8.7/listq-jane) id OAA22262 > for harbinger-outgoing; Tue, 7 Apr 1998 14:44:16 -0400 (EDT) >Received: from aw.ivm.net (root@mail.ivm.net [195.78.161.2]) > by smoe.org (8.8.7/8.8.7/daemon-mode-relay2) with ESMTP id OAA22258 > for ; Tue, 7 Apr 1998 14:44:07 -0400 (EDT) >From: sus@home.ivm.de >Received: from home.ivm.de (Port105.aw.ivm.de [195.247.225.105]) > by aw.ivm.net (8.8.8/8.8.8-ivm) with ESMTP id UAA30306 > for ; Tue, 7 Apr 1998 20:41:38 +0200 >Message-ID: <352A73B3.F7AB705C@home.ivm.de> >Date: Tue, 07 Apr 1998 20:43:00 +0200 >X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.03 [de] (Win95; I) >MIME-Version: 1.0 >To: harbinger@smoe.org >Subject: Re: (harbinger) mtv; too many Steves >References: <098d00431140748UPIMSSMTPUSR01@email.msn.com> >Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii >Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit >Sender: owner-harbinger@smoe.org >Reply-To: harbinger@smoe.org >Precedence: bulk > > > >kristine boeke schrieb: > >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Steve Bornstein >> To: harbinger@smoe.org >> Date: Monday, April 06, 1998 8:51 PM >> Subject: Re: (harbinger) mtv; too many Steves >> >> >Kristine and/or Holly >> >> My name's not really Holly, but I just wanted to feel like I fit in. >> > >*lol* Susanne > Me too. That just cracked me up. They do say brevity is the soul of wit, and that is a genuine one-liner. Thanks - I needed a good laugh to help get past an inordinate amount of bull-scheisse (sp?) in my recent life. Of course, my problem is trying to find a way to *not* fit in too much and still somehow . . . Peace Steve (name under construction) coming soon to a site near you ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com - ------------------------------ To unsubscribe, mail majordomo@smoe.org with: unsubscribe harbinger Please note the new majordomo address To buy Paula merchandise from Paula(!) try: http://pw2.netcom.com/~ilml/pcmerch.html Digest, further unsub and problems FAQ at: http://www.netaxs.com/~jgreshes/lists/harbinger.html For This Fire kinda-lyrics write Riphug@aol.com ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 08 Apr 1998 21:08:20 PDT From: "Steve Bornstein" Subject: Re: (harbinger) Paula Cole & Missy Elliot together -Reply >From owner-harbinger@smoe.org Tue Apr 7 20:20:41 1998 >Received: from smoe.org [204.167.97.154] (root) > by siren.shore.net with esmtp (Exim) > id 0yMlPP-0006ky-00; Tue, 7 Apr 1998 23:20:20 -0400 >Received: from localhost (daemon@localhost) > by smoe.org (8.8.7/8.8.7/listq-jane) with SMTP id XAA00931; > Tue, 7 Apr 1998 23:12:30 -0400 (EDT) >Received: by smoe.org (bulk_mailer v1.5); Tue, 7 Apr 1998 23:12:19 - -0400 >Received: (from majordom@localhost) > by smoe.org (8.8.7/8.8.7/listq-jane) id XAA00904 > for harbinger-outgoing; Tue, 7 Apr 1998 23:09:55 -0400 (EDT) >Received: from imo15.mx.aol.com (imo15.mx.aol.com [198.81.17.37]) > by smoe.org (8.8.7/8.8.7/daemon-mode-relay2) with ESMTP id XAA00900 > for ; Tue, 7 Apr 1998 23:09:48 -0400 (EDT) >Received: from DWspinTHIS@aol.com > by imo15.mx.aol.com (IMOv13.ems) id FXOJa22227 > for ; Tue, 7 Apr 1998 23:06:26 -0500 (EDT) >From: DWspinTHIS >Message-ID: <1c6e2794.352ae9b6@aol.com> >Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1998 23:06:26 EDT >To: harbinger@smoe.org >Mime-Version: 1.0 >Subject: Re: (harbinger) Paula Cole & Missy Elliot together -Reply >Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII >Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit >X-Mailer: AOL 4.0 for Windows 95 sub 170 >Sender: owner-harbinger@smoe.org >Reply-To: harbinger@smoe.org >Precedence: bulk > >missy elliot...isn't that the rapper that looks like a balloon and moves like >she's having convulsions? > >*chandler bing post-sarcasm eye roll* >hol > > Don't know about that, but I do know she is the only artist whose album appeared on three of the NY Times critc's Best of 1997 lists - people with very different tastes, too - which certainly implies she is worthy of respect. Peace Steve ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com - ------------------------------ To unsubscribe, mail majordomo@smoe.org with: unsubscribe harbinger Please note the new majordomo address To buy Paula merchandise from Paula(!) try: http://pw2.netcom.com/~ilml/pcmerch.html Digest, further unsub and problems FAQ at: http://www.netaxs.com/~jgreshes/lists/harbinger.html For This Fire kinda-lyrics write Riphug@aol.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1998 01:27:38 -0400 From: "Chris Povie" Subject: (harbinger) No Paula Content, but Relevant... Hello. You know how every once in a while you come across a computer program that really knox yer sox off? Well, the other day it happened to me. Please read on, go to the site and download this beauty. DiscPlay 4.04 is an amazing CD player for Windows that puts the standard Win95-supplied player to shame. Ya know how when listening to CDs on your computer, you put in the disc, and the list of trax shows, "Track 01, Track 02, etc. etc." ? Well, here's where awesome Discplay takes the cake: After putting in a cd for the first time, DiscPlay reads the digital info on the disc, and looks it up in a free-of-charge database. Instantly, all track names are listed in their entirety. Some even have lyrics! Lo and behold, there is even a button on the interface for "links"-- I put in Paula Cole's "This Fire", push the 'links' button, and my browser opens up to PollStar's website, listing all Paula 's current tour dates! All of this happens within seconds. The program keeps track of how many times you listen to each track, and ranks your tracks by #'s of listens. All data is saved in your 'collection' file, for easy viewing, searching (by artist or keyword), or printing out. MY ENTIRE 350+ CD COLLECTION IS CURRENTLY IN A DATABASE, COMPLETE WITH ALL TRACK NAMES AND DATES, AND I NEVER TOUCHED MY KEYBOARD!!!! Please, go to www.obvion.com/discplay and download your free trial copy. It's good for 30 days. When you decide, like I did, that you can't live without this program, write me at pove@writeme.com for instructions on how to use it longer ;-) . Please try this, and let me know via pove@writeme.com how you love it. Again, www.obvion.com/discplay . Thanks for reading. -Chris p.s. The prog's about 1.5 MB . - ------------------------------ To unsubscribe, mail majordomo@smoe.org with: unsubscribe harbinger Please note the new majordomo address To buy Paula merchandise from Paula(!) try: http://pw2.netcom.com/~ilml/pcmerch.html Digest, further unsub and problems FAQ at: http://www.netaxs.com/~jgreshes/lists/harbinger.html For This Fire kinda-lyrics write Riphug@aol.com ------------------------------ End of harbinger-digest V3 #113 *******************************