Just something that came into my inbox that looked like fun-- anyone in the Northern Virginia area should go check it out!
The 2nd Annual Lake Anne Ukulele Festivalwill take place on Saturday, July 9, 2011 from11:00AM-5:30PM at Lake Anne Plaza, 1609 Washington Plaza, Reston, VA 20190 (at North Shore Dr. & Village Rd.). The free music festival will feature performances by several internationally known and local ukulele musicians, music demonstrations, open to the public jam session, beer/wine garden, festival vendors, and other family friendly activities. The event will kick off during the ever popular Saturday Farmers & Arts/Craft Market. Headlining the festival on Saturday will be acoustic blues queen Del Ray. Del will also offer fingerstyle blues workshops for ukulele and guitar on Sunday (see below).
Del Rey plays concerts worldwide and also conducts concert/lectures on women musicians called Women in American Music. She has contributed to projects in honor of The Mississippi Sheiks, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Johnny Cash. Del Rey has recorded five solo albums, Blue Uke (2008), When The Levee Breaks (2006), X-Rey Guitar (2000), Hot Sauce (1995) and Boogie Mysterioso (1993). The festival will also include special guests and Grammy award winning artists Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer and other performers such as Hoa Mele Wakinekona (Hawaiian), Bruce Hutton (old-time, folk), Marcy’s Potted Plants, The Aloha Boys (Hawaiian), and local duo The Sweater Set.
Performance Schedule:
11:00AM Hoa Mele Wakinekona
11:30AM The Sweater Set
12:15PM Bruce Hutton
1:00PM Marcy’s Potted Plants
1:30PM Aloha Boys
2:15PM Fink & Marxer
3:30PM Del Rey
4:30PM Open Jam Session (public participation welcomed)
Ukulele and Guitar Workshops with Del Rey “Seattle-based queen of fingerstyle blues”
Sunday July 10, 2011 -- Lake Anne Plaza (North Shore Drive and Village Road, Reston Virginia 20190)
Introduction To Fingerpicking the Ukulele, 1:00-2:15 pm
For you strummers, here's a song that will get you started using your right hand in a different way. Papa Charlie Jackson's "Mama Don't You Think I Know," a funny old tune in C with an easy-to-hear fingerpicking pattern, will get you started picking out ragtime and blues tunes on the uke. Students should be able to play C, C7, F, F7 and G7 without hesitation.
Blue Uke, 2:30-3:45 pm
Intermediate (be comfortable with first position chords and be able to keep time)
Blues, rags and old songs for the ukulele, with a focus on fingerpicking the melody. Tunes like the Mississippi River Waltz, Tappin’ That Thing (Memphis Jug Band) and Tired Chicken (Gus Cannon)...by ear, no TAB.
Moving Bass lines for Fingerstyle Guitar, 4:00-5:15 pm
Intermediate-Advanced
Want to play like a pianist? Walking and boogie-woogie bass lines for fingerstyle guitar. Learn the positions where you can find both chords and moving bass. Standard tuning. Recorders ok.
Tomorrow marks the birthday of Fiorello La Guardia, 99th mayor of New York City.
In the opening monologue of his 1958 play Comic Strip, George Panetta turns almost immediately to one of the most powerful cultural memories of New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia:
Now, I was a kid in the days of Fiorello LaGuardia-- remember him, LaGuardia? The Little Flower? Maybe he's one of the reasons I grew up. He loved all us kids in New York City, used to read the comic strips to us on Sundays-- worried and looked after us all the time.
On June 30, 1945, New York's newspaper delivery drivers began a strike that would last 17 days, refusing to distribute any paper in the city except for the leftist (and highly pro-labor) PM... a paper that might be best remembered by comics lovers for publishing the wartime political cartoons of Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel.
For those who don't mind reading between the lines, there's an excellent contemporary account of the strike from the newspaper publishers' perspective that can be found in the Prelinger Archives collection at The Internet Archive. Obviously very biased, but an interesting account of how a city dealt with a major media shutdown.
On July 1, La Guardia was scheduled for his regular Sunday broadcast of Talk to the People, a weekly radio show he held on WNYC. At one point in the show, he encouraged his listeners to gather their children around the radio, and commenced to reading that day's "Dick Tracy" comic from the Sunday Daily News. With obvious relish, the mayor described the action in the panels, impersonated the voices of various characters, and reminded listeners of the plot that had led up to that moment. At the end of each strip, he would explicate the moral of that week's adventure to his young listeners.
(In the above clip from the next week, the moral is described in no uncertain terms: "Say children, what does it all mean? It means that dirty money never brings any luck! No, dirty money always brings sorrow and sadness and misery and disgrace.")
He also promised that he would read the Sunday comics on the air every Sunday as long as the strike continued, and that someone from WNYC would read the dailies every day. The next Sunday, when he came in to broadcast, there were camera crews there to record his reading. The story took on a life nationally. And it became one of the things La Guardia was best remembered for.
Such a move by a major politician today would smack of a paternalism and pandering that would make cynical observers tear him apart. But in 1945, La Guardia reading the comics over the radio really seems to have been seen fondly by a great number of people.
Part of this was likely La Guardia's personality-- he possessed a gentleness, kindness, and an air of genuine benevolence that was a huge change from the last multiple-term mayor in New York, the slick and corrupt "Beau James" Walker. He was a genuine uniter, running in opposition to machine party politics, and seemed to many to have the commonwheal of the city in mind.
He didn't lash out against the strikers or against the newspapers-- he just expressed a concern that the children shouldn't have to go without their comics just because of "a squabble among grown-ups."
I genuinely do believe that La Guardia thought that this might just be a nice thing to do-- I don't believe it was necessarily a cynical or calculated move. But I do think that there is one part of this story that needs to be read with a skeptical eye.
I don't think he was doing this simply "for the children." I think that reading the comics was targeted at adults as well.
By all accounts, La Guardia read and enjoyed the comics himself. Born in New York in 1882, he was a member of the first generation to grow up with comics in the newspaper. (Although he was old enough to be working by the time comics started appearing in New York papers, in his early teens.)
While the reputation of comics as a medium for children had fully developed by midcentury, adults actively read and discussed the events in the daily comics page. Based on research conducted around the same time, sociologist and media theorist Leo Bogart argued that newspaper comics were important to working-class urban readers because they provided noncontroversial (but still debatable) subjects of conversation in situations of urban semi-anonymity. You might not want to talk to the guy on the bar stool next to you about religion or politics, but you could debate Dick Tracy with him.
By reading the comics, he was actually not just providing entertainment for the children of his constituents. La Guardia was finding a way to insert himself into the everyday street-corner conversations of millions of New Yorkers. I would argue that this, just as much as appealing to the children, was key to why this was such a defining moment for the memory of La Guardia's career. He had understood the social function of comics to its adult readers, and had joined in that discussion. It's the mark of a true populist-- to actually understand what's important to people, even the stuff they wouldn't normally admit to.
Interestingly, while this event has faded somewhat from the public memory, and more people know La Guardia as an airport than as a politician, the recording of La Guardia reading the comics has taken on a strange and wonderful second life: the "what does it all mean?" that can be found at approximately 1:27 in the video above has become one of the most widely-used and best-known non-musical samples in hip-hop.
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending the Smithsonian's most recent Educator's Exchange, a program primarily oriented to the Education departments of the various Smithsonian museums. The topic of the roundtable discussion was cooperation between departments, focusing primarily on education and web staff. Now, I'm in a curatorial department, a historian, but given my interest in both education and new media, I had to attend.
Coming in to the Air and Space Museum's very impressive Moving Beyond Earth Gallery, I felt a little like an interloper, but I'm new enough to museums that I feel like an interloper most of the time anyway. During the lunch and discussion section, the other attendees were more than inviting, however. And the roundtable discussion was fascinating.
While the conversation rambled along, covering more topics than I could manage to tweet, the one takeaway I really got from this session was a better appreciation for and understanding of the notion of radical trust. It's a term I've heard batted about a decent amount in recent months, but haven't always had the clearest sense of what it meant.
Radical trust is, simply put, the decision by an organization-- a library, a museum, what have you-- to trust online communities, and to be sincerely open to their input. It's trusting your visitors and your users to actually know what they want to see, to be informed engaged participants, rather than passive consumers. It's making decisions that take into account the feedback people are volunteering.
One irony of the phrase is that "radical trust" isn't particularly radical. It's how many of us engage with others on the web every day. You get your friends' opinions about a coat you want to buy via Facebook, for example, and then actually consider their opinions when making the purchase. You don't simply put up your Facebook page to appear to be engaged. You actually interact. "Radical trust" is really the radical notion that organizations need to treat the people they serve like people.
What makes it so radical is that organizations, while made up of individuals, are not people, and do not act like people. Institutions have different instincts from (healthy) individuals. They're highly compartmentalized. High barriers can exist between one department and the next, even when their actual missions overlap.
If you were to do a survey of the most vocal opponents of blog comments, tagging, wikis, crowdsourcing and the like on museum websites, I'd wager some of the loudest would be in curation. Curators are perhaps the most vested in the museum's air of authority, in the implicit trust people give respected museums. This is natural, as their job is to be the arbiters of information, and to guard that trust. The job of the curator is to make sure that what is presented is accurate, interesting, valuable, and legit.
But when one of the panelists asked for a show of hands to a couple questions about interdepartmental cooperation, something became abundantly clear-- curators are also being locked out of the process. In many museums, it seemed, the curators themselves were not being given access to the back-end of online projects. Is it any wonder that they would be trepidatious about allowing something they can't even access themselves to be opened up to the whole wide world?
Radical trust can't begin with opening up your project to the entire world. It has to start with opening up your project to the guy in the next office. If people in your organization are resisting the kind of openness that you think museums need to embrace, you have to ask yourself: how open are we being within the museum? Do curatorial, collections, education, and the like all have access to the back end of your websites? Are they being given enough administrative rights to actually do something on the back end, to contribute, and to add their own specialized knowledge? Are other departments brought in to meetings to strategize about what new technologies you should adopt?
If only the museum web team is participating in the creation of content for social media and engaging with the public, you already have a problem. Bring the whole family to the table, and make sure everyone has a seat, before you invite company in for a meal.
In a meeting recently at work, we were talking about the use of social media, how to get people to come to the museum, and one person said something to the effect of, "Well, we all can agree that we want to have more followers."
We all nodded in agreement. No matter the strategy, we all want to have more people "Like" (formerly "become a fan of") our institutional Facebook page. The more people who do that, the more people see what's going on, come to the museum, participate in building community, etc. Right? I mean, that's the metric.
Then it hit me-- No. It makes absolutely no difference how many people "Like" your Facebook page.
I'm overstating it slightly, but that's what I thought at the time. My realization was-- and this may be obvious to others-- the number of people who "Like" your FB page is an essentially misleading, and almost meaningless metric.
But whether you're a nonprofit museum, an activist organizer, a brand manager, or a guy with the most amazing Spin Doctors cover band you've ever seen, it's the only metric you get.
The thing is, most of the time, nobody but first-time users visits your FB page. Most of the actual page traffic is going to be people just encountering what you have to offer on Facebook for the first time, exploring. After that, what really matters is not how many people Like your page, it's how many people's News Feeds you show up on.
The News Feed is the primary vehicle with which we explore the FB universe. It's your firehose of information. But it's not a firehose. At least it isn't for many users. You see, Facebook defaults to "Top News," not "Most Recent." So for many users, the News Feed is curated for them by Facebook's algorithms. And from what I can tell from some looking around, nobody seems to know much about those algorithms. Well, the engineer who designed News Feed just explains it by saying it's a robot, but that just makes me feel talked down to.
Facebook has created the new Google Juice. Let's call it FACEJUICE.
The beauty of FaceJuice is that it eliminates Search Engine Optimization, at least for the immediate future. You can game a search engine, at least somewhat, no matter how complex, as long as it behaves the same for every user. And while Google personalizes for those who log in, only a portion of their business is from users with accounts.
Basically everyone who uses Facebook, on the other hand, is tracked. They're a member with an account. If you use it at home or at an internet cafe halfway across the globe, you're going to log in before you get a really useful experience.
And because of that, the FaceJuice flows freely, the "robot" assigns value to every object a little differently, and Search Engine Optimization just can't factor for every person. This is good for the individual user-- it means that your news feed tends to be the most interesting, controversial, amusing, etc. posts from the people you interact with the most. It's The Best Of Your Friends. And that's nice. For the most part, nobody's trying to game the system to sell you something.
And it works well for Facebook, because the only way to beat the system, to overcome the unpredictable rapids of FaceJuice, is to game the system by simply paying Facebook. Become an advertiser. Then, your FaceJuice doesn't matter. You get guaranteed views, if not click throughs. And as an advertiser, you get more detailed metrics, analytic data, etc. So you can track if you're actually connecting with the people you're trying to sell to.
The one place where FaceJuice is not really an added value, but actually a major problem, is in group community building, organizing, and outreach for people who aren't in it for the money, and don't have the ad budget.
If you're trying to organize a rally at city hall or promote your town's local history museum, FaceJuice actively works against you, at least if you're trying to use Facebook to get people interested and involved. You have no way of knowing how many of the people who "Like" your page actually get a given post. Or any of your posts. Probability would indicate that the more Fans you have, the more people's News Feeds you'll creep up onto, but there's no way of knowing which posts are having the desired effect, getting the word out.
Did the last thing you posted on Facebook get zero responses because it wasn't compelling to your followers, or because it was buried in FaceJuice? You have no way of knowing.
Since I've already brought up the Google comparison, let's look at another part of the Googleverse-- Youtube. Youtube has a nonprofit partnership program that adds value for nonprofits who want to use their platform to promote their causes, build their community, etc. Facebook seems to offer no such program. Although I'm sure they're free to advertise.
All of this is all the more reason for nonprofits, organizers, and educators to not play in their garden. Right now Facebook is basically the only game in town-- although that may not be true soon with the unveiling of Google Me and Diaspora. But even so, try to point as much of your content outside, so you can actually have analytics, and at least judge somewhat what the value of your participation on Facebook really is.
And stop counting Facebook fans. That number means nothing.
For those of you who might not know, I've been working, for the last three months or so, on a photo-a-day challenge that I set for myself. Every day, I try to take a photo on my Motorola Droid. Then I edit the photo using photo-editing apps available for the phone. My goals are relatively simple: I just want to take some pretty pictures on a smartphone whose camera has been much-maligned, to improve my eye for composition and color, and to force myself into the discipline of doing a daily project like that.
My results thusfar can be seen in the below Flickr slideshow:
It's been a fun project, and it's gotten me thinking about the weird, science-fiction quality of our lives in the days of mobile computing... I have a phone that includes a better camera than my first digital camera, and has better photo-editing software than the first photo-editing program I used. On a two hundred dollar device with about ten dollars worth of software on it.
And it's been a lesson in perseverance. I know some of my pictures are much better than others, but that's less important than the fact that I'm getting one every day. Some days I cheat a bit, if I can't get a good one or I'm too busy or whatever, but I've been generally pretty good at sticking to the schedule. Regular production yields more results than trying for perfection every time. And that's been something I've learned a lot from, by itself. This is how you acquire craft. This is how you get books written, how you learn an instrument, how you really get anything out of life: you try, every day. Some days will be breakthroughs and some days will be crap. But you try.
And then two weeks ago happened. I was having a busy week, between work, family, and social commitments. And I got a couple days behind. And then a couple more. Eventually, it got to the point where I was a full week behind. This may not seem like much, but it was enough to make me have a minor crisis. What should I do? Abandon the project? Try to catch up?
I decided to just start back up as if nothing happened. And I think it was the right decision. Getting one decent picture a day is hard enough. Two a day, even for a week, would be next to impossible, and would probably discourage me from re-engaging in the project. I'm changing my previous expectation that I post them to the web daily, mostly because of the bugginess of the best Android Flickr upload app.
Quitting or trying to catch up would be overlooking that value I'm discovering in daily work and gradual improvement.
And plus, it just feels so good to get back on the horse. Why ruin it?
ETA
After yet another abortative attempt, I've realized that envisioning this as a 365-day, one a day project was just unrealistic, given full-time employment, half-time grad-student-hood, and my two-hour daily commute. All I was having time to take was pictures of people and things on the subway. It was getting repetitive.
I'm not ending the project, just re-envisioning it as a periodic, ongoing project. I'm changing the Flickr set description accordingly and readjusting my expectations. Because while it was a rewarding project, it was less rewarding than working, paying bills, getting my PhD, and trying to have a social life.