We’ve been listening to Okkervil River since 2007, when The Stage Names came out.
Last night at Edgefield in Troutdale, Oregon we go to see the band perform in a beautiful outdoor setting. AgesandAges opened the bill, followed by Okkervil River and The Decemberists.
Okkervil River’s founding members became friends at Kimball Union Academy, a prep school in Meriden, New Hampshire, and after parting ways for college moved to Austin, Texas to live together and start a band.
The band takes its name from a short story by Russian author Tatyana Tolstaya, which is another clue as to their intelligence and where they’re coming from.
Okkervil River’s new album, I Am Very Far, was released on May 10, 2011. This is how NPR describes the record:
It’s a bold departure from how the group has operated so far. Sheff’s vocals are creaky, but his lyrics are dazzling; his arrangements are sloppy, but his hooks are indelible. The band’s trademark has always been the union of those elements into a beautiful mess. I Am Very Far reverses that formula: The storytelling is knotty, cryptic and David Lynch-like in its ominous weirdness, while the music is so severe and precise as to be terrifying at times.
In other words, it’s not a pop album. Rather, it’s a unique work from a band that finds a way to sound unlike every other band playing today — a fact for which they must be praised.
Of course, last night’s headliner, The Decemberists, are also totally unique. Darby and I call their style, “Sea Shanty music.”
Interestingly, this strange form has caught on, making The Decemberists a mainstream act, at least where record sales, touring schedules, radio airplay and critical acclaim are concerned. In fact, there was evidence of this last light, as only two in ten fans noticeably belonged to the hipster tribe.
Bank Simple, seeks to reinvent personal banking with modern online and mobile experiences, no surprise fees, and great customer service.
In order to do that, the company is consolidating its San Francisco and New York City offices and moving staff to Portland, where they intend to hire several more people.
A proud Mayor Adams says, “This company’s willingness to pick up and move here is another sign that the City of Portland’s Economic Development Strategy is on the right path to strengthen Portland’s economy. Two years ago, we put the plan in place and made sure to identify the Software Sector as a key industry cluster.”
“With BankSimple’s move, I feel that we made a right decision to focus on software and am optimistic that more companies are soon to follow,” says the Mayor, who is not running for re-election.
The other clusters that Portland officials are focusing on include Advanced Manufacturing, Clean Tech, (Academic) Research & Commercialization and the Athletic & Outdoor Industry.
Naturally, there are also software start-ups that are not venture backed. And I can think of plenty of other industries in Oregon that are in a good place to grow. The music and film industries, the green building and alternative energy industries, sustainable agriculture, food and beverage, professional services, tourism, retail and hospitality are all sectors that I have my ad guy’s eye on.
Yes, the economy in Oregon is sobering still, but there are signs that a turnaround is in the cards.
In the wake of a week of violent protests in Great Britain–spurred, as they were, by the police killing of Mark Duggan–I’m not surprised to see authorities and mainstream media cast blame in any and all directions, including in the direction of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
I’ve long contended that citizens’ media, at its core, is deeply radical and that it’s just a matter of time before “the powers that be” pull the plug. It appears that “the time” is now.
According to The Guardian, British Prime Minister, David Cameron, said his government is looking at banning people from using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook if they are thought to be plotting criminal activity.
“Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organised via social media,” said Cameron.
“And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”
Cameron’s disdain for a media channel he has little control over, led ReadWriteWeb writer Curt Hopkins to claim, “David Cameron joins the long line of powerful men who totally miss the point of social media. What Cameron is pursuing is, in effect, a ban on free speech.”
Of course, some American authorities are walking in lock step with Cameron on this issue. Philadelphia’s mayor is trying to ban “flash mobs”. Yes, flash mobs, those innocent moments of public theater have apparently been co-opted by groups aiming to steal and cause other unlawful disruptions; therefore, they must be stopped.
Also, in Oakland last week, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) shut-off of subterranean cell phone service in its downtown San Francisco stations in order to prevent a protest.
When people need to assemble and protest they will do so, in free nations and unfree nations. With social media tools, or without. Politicians and their friends in the media business point fingers, deflect blame and fail to ask (much less answer) the tough questions–like why are so many people upset and willing to act out in the first place? And that’s a terrible disservice. Civil society is an agreement between people, not a managed state.
Meanwhile, I think it’s important to ask where the management teams at Facebook and Twitter are on all this. According to Financial Times, Facebook has hundreds of people around the wold tasked with enforcing its ban on co-ordination of violence. The Blog Herald, reports that Facebook has assigned even more people to remove posts that explicitly incite violence, as a reaction to the events in England.
It must be noted that Facebook is partly owned by intelligence interests and radical right investors. For background on this piece of the story, see Tom Hodgkinson’s take down in The Guardian.
Another interesting window into how media works to control the message is on display in this bit from the BBC.
It’s clear from this interview that BBC briefly lost control of the message. “Mr. Howe, we have to wait for the official inquiry,” pretty much says it all. BBC wants to be fair, but a man was murdered. Facts are facts, and the fact is no one wants to report on why these things happen. No one in mainstream media wants to say the police are racist, and the government corrupt. Because they’re school chums who live in the same neighborhoods and belong to the same clubs.
Which brings us back to citizens’ media and the power of push button publishing. Even if you take Facebook and Twitter out of the equation, the internet runs on corporate infrastructure. Sure, you can run your own servers, but the data has to travel over fiber-optic lines owned by AT&T and other telecommunications behemoths.
Communications technology is nothing more than a tool and it can be, and will be, throttled at will. Yet, oppressed people always find a coordinated way to resist. Disarm one tool and another will be instantly adopted. So, let’s stop with the diversions and focus on the problem–lack of economic opportunity is an injustice not only in England, but everywhere. And when lack of opportunity is coupled with police brutality, the powder keg will explode, time and again.
[UPDATE] This is also a topic we discussed during last night’s recording of The BeanCast.
I sometimes stumble when meeting new people. At a conference, for instance, a well meaning person will eye my badge and ask, “What’s AdPulp?”
There’s no succinct way to say AdPulp is an industry website that reaches thousands of people around the world every day…but it’s not my main deal, I also run a marketing services company that specializes in brand identity, social media activation and content development.
Sadly, a variety of gibberish falls from my mouth at these crucial first-impression occasions. I won’t try to repeat my awkwardness in writing, you have to see it to believe it.
When you have a job, of course, the awkwardness isn’t there. You say, “I’m a mechanic, or I’m a copywriter” and you’re done with it. Why is it so different when you are self-employed? And why is that difference magnified when you’re a writer?
The answer is not pleasing to me. It’s tougher to deal with because words like “writer,” “freelance” and to a lesser degree “entrepreneur” may leave the listener with a negative impression.
The reality is I ought to be happy and proud to say, “I’m the principal of a brand identity concern and editor of a widely read industry pub.”
When I was in college, I had the same issue. I would meet someone and say, “I go to F&M.” Blank stare.
All those years ago I would want to explain what F&M is to people who’d never heard of it and didn’t particularly care. Now I meet a stranger and walk away feeling like an ass if I oversell AdPulp, just like I did 25 years ago when overselling my college.
Why do I let my insecurities get the best of me? I don’t know, but I do know that sharing this truth about myself is one step out of the shadows that ego casts.
President Obama is an enigma. People on the right call him a socialist; yet, his critics on the left can’t believe how much ground he’s given on fundamental liberal issues.
One critic on the left, Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University, author and political consultant, laid out a strong argument against Obama in today’s Sunday Review section of The New York Times. His main thesis looks harshly at Obama’s Achilles’ heel, namely, his desire to be liked by all sides.
The president is fond of referring to “the arc of history,†paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.†But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time — he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation.
I can’t help but think what a difference Hillary would have made. I wasn’t for her at the time, nor was I for Obama, but in hindsight it’s easy to see how the hope Obama offered could only be realized through bulldog politics of old. The Clintons know how to work within those confines, while Obama does not.
So, where does the country go from here? Will there be a Democratic primary challenger? Will a third party candidate emerge to speak for the millions of disenfranchised Americans who have no national voice? That would be great, but said leftist will need close to a billion dollars in campaign funds to have even an outside chance of winning. All of which means the Republican contender will once again have a very good chance of being elected.
Westen rightly points to earlier times in our nation’s history when strong Presidents did rise to meet immense challenges.
In similar circumstances, Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right. Beginning in his first inaugural address, and in the fireside chats that followed, he explained how the crash had happened, and he minced no words about those who had caused it. He promised to do something no president had done before: to use the resources of the United States to put Americans directly to work, building the infrastructure we still rely on today. He swore to keep the people who had caused the crisis out of the halls of power, and he made good on that promise. In a 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden, he thundered, “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.â€
Like his younger cousin Franklin, Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, busted up monopolies and forwarded a Progressive agenda. It’s important to note that the Roosevelt family is as blue blood as American blood gets. So, why would members of the American aristocracy advocate for the people? Maybe because it was the right thing to do, more likely because it was the right thing to do for the monied class.
Right now, the wealth of the richest 400 Americans is equal to the holdings of the poorest 150 million Americans. No private Army, nor public Army for that matter, can hold back that kind of mob, should the disenfranchised turn on the rich. To keep the peace in a civil society–especially in a society with lofty ideas about itself–income disparity of this nature can not be tolerated.
People on the right tend to get upset when their opponents skillfully expose the long standing class war in this country. They say things like, “What class war?” Which is an insult to anyone with a working knowledge of American history. Class divisions and income inequality are as American as apple pie. As is resistance to these unprincipled ways.
Strangely enough, the rise of the Tea Party on the extreme right is a populist, anti-elite movement. So, the Tea Partiers have half the equation right, even while hopelessly misunderstanding the rest. The nation’s problem, as Westen points out, “isn’t tax-and-spend liberalism or the deficit — a deficit that didn’t exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars.” The problem is the game is fixed, and until “we the people” intervene in a massive bi-partisan rejection of the status quo, the change Obama promised won’t be realized during his term, or beyond.
I’ve been playing with free streaming music service, Spotify, for a few weeks now (ever since the Stockholm-based service launched in the U.S). I now wonder if there’s a reason to buy music ever again.
Spotify does not have every track one might desire in its library of 15 million tracks, but I’ve been able to locate 90% of what I’m looking for — mostly albums I don’t own from artists that I know I like. When I find the albums I want, I merely drag them over to the left-hand sidebar to create a new playlist. Then the album is always there for me when I open Spotify, without paying a thing for it.
See you later, iTunes.
Cupertino’s got to be hating this. Spotify’s user interface (UI) even looks like iTunes’.
According to Los Angeles Times, Warner Music chief executive, Edgar Bronfman Jr., is one music exec not hating Spotify (note: Warner, three other major record labels and an independent label own a little over 17% of Spotify).
He predicted that Spotify, which is currently paying more money for music royalties than it makes in subscriptions and advertising, would be profitable if it can continue to induce its free users to spring for the premium service.
“The kinds of levels that Spotify is currently achieving in Europe is also extremely encouraging,” Bronfman said. “If that keeps up, they will be a very profitable business themselves.”
Presently, 1.6 million mostly European users pay for Spotify’s premium service, which lets them use the service on mobile devices and home audio systems such as Sonos. The free stream is ad supported.
Subscriptions run $9.99-a-month in the U.S., or about $120 a year. I used to spend $120 in a month with the iTunes store, but all that ended when I changed my iTunes store ID in the fall of 2008, an unfortunate step that rendered all the songs I purchased from Apple unplayable on all my Apple devices. No, I’m not joking.
But back to Spotify, I have to say it’s a great music discovery engine, as well. I’m currently listening to YACHT, for instance — something I might not do if I had to pay for the privilege. Should YACHT or the other bands I’m discovering on Spotify become new favorites, I’ll eventually pay to seem them live, and I’ll no doubt end up writing about them and/or telling friends about them.
By the way, this is the service MySpace could have launched but didn’t. It’s also much more intuitive than Last.fm, Blip.fm, HypeMachine and a host of other start-ups that have tried to advance in this space. If I want a random playlist based on past preferences, there’s Pandora. Other than that, I’m looking for music on Spotify.
The New York Times just introduced me to Jstor, a not–for–profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive of over one thousand academic journals and other scholarly content.
Jstor is in the news because Aaron Swartz, a 24-year-old agitator for free access to information on the Internet managed to illegally download more than four million articles and reviews from Jstor, which provides content from the most prestigious — and expensive — scientific and literary journals in the world. Swartz’ act of defiance led to his arrest. He now faces 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines for felony counts of wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer.
Mr. Swartz is not a run-of-the-mill hacker, says the Times. He has been known for his computer work since he was 14, when he was involved in developing the software behind RSS feeds, which distribute content over the Internet. At the time the investigation began, he was a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, though he was later placed on leave. His friends and supporters are now rallying around him–45,000 have signed a petition on his behalf.
The case against Swartz is a big story, and it’s a blow to the free culture movement. But my interest spiked when I learned that institutions pay tens of thousands of dollars for subscriptions to Jstor, which stands for Journal Storage.
Founded in 1995, Jstor started with 10 journals available to a few American universities and has since expanded to include about 325,000 journal issues available at more than 7,000 institutions. In other words, Jstor is a shining example of a thriving paid content model operating online.
Stewart Brand said, “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”
With Jstor in one corner (and Swartz in legal trouble), paid content is looking like a pretty tough competitor.
For newspapers, the following graphic from Pew Research Center pretty much says it all.
As if declining revenues aren’t enough, Pew also concludes that media businesses are not innovative enough to drive change, nor are they even in the driver’s seat.
In the 20th century, the news media thrived by being the intermediary others needed to reach customers. In the 21st, increasingly there is a new intermediary: Software programmers, content aggregators and device makers control access to the public. The news industry, late to adapt and culturally more tied to content creation than engineering, finds itself more a follower than a leader in shaping its business.
NYU Professor, Clay Shirky, frames the conversation another way. “Outside a relative handful of financial publications, there is no such thing as the news business. There is only the advertising business.”
Shirky also neatly deconstructs what it means to be a newspaper:
Writing about the Dallas Cowboys in order to take money from Ford and give it to the guy on the City Desk never made much sense, but at least it worked. Online, though, the economic and technological rationale for bundling weakens—no monopoly over local advertising, no daily allotment of space to fill, no one-size-fits-all delivery system. Newspapers, as a sheaf of unrelated content glued together with ads, aren’t just being threatened with unprofitability, but incoherence.
The great unbundling is now a matter of record. However, it’s not newspapers that readers crave, but news. And news, when it is not a commodity, is worth paying for. When is it not a commodity in the ever-abundant digital arena? When no one else is covering a particular beat. Or when the beat is shared, but the quality of reporting in one vehicle is noticeably better than the competition.
Shirky claims that “news has to be free, because it has to spread. The few people who care about the news need to be able to share it with one another and, in times of crisis, to sound the alarm for the rest of us.” I think we need to clarify terms. The “news” Shirky describes is currency in a civil society, and even more valuable in an uncivil one. But what do we call the product of reporting and aggregation that isn’t mission critical, but still essential to a niche audience? Do sports writers and business reporters create “information” rather than news?
In my opinion, there’s an audience for all of the above. People will pay their legacy journalism organization for local news because while alternatives do exist, ultimately readers want to know what The Oregonian or Omaha World Herald have to say on a given topic. The same holds for local sports, business and the rest. But like cable TV, subscriber packages need to be unbundled. If you want to subscribe to just the business section of the newspaper, great, you should be able to get it for a fraction of what it otherwise would cost to subscribe the whole paper.
[UPDATE] The Economist believes, “The digital future of news has much in common with its chaotic, ink-stained past.” As the market for media moves from mass to niche, media elites wear no clothes. It’s anyone’s game today, as it was in the days of pamphleteers.
As a person with five active blogs, multiple Twitter accounts and Facebook pages, Flickr, Vimeo, and so on, I truly appreciate the following performance.
I think it’s important to ask yourself if maybe you’re over sharing. When I look at Twitter, in particular, I feel that many people are over sharing, which is annoying. People also have axes to grind, and Twitter again seems to be the preferred online place for that. But do I, or you, really care that so and so had a bad experience at Sheraton Four Points? Do I, or you, really care that so and so doesn’t like social media pundits, or people who show up late for meetings?
Just because you can share, doesn’t mean you should.
We moved from NE Portland to West Linn at the end of May and ever since we have been busy learning the area. I like to call it the South Shore, although I may be alone in that. Anyway, one of the things that stands out is the fact that West Linn and Oregon City, just across the river, both benefit from historic roots. In fact, it’s what keeps these towns from being suburbs, in the classic “municipalities made possible by Eisenhower-era freeways” sense.
Oregon City, of course, is the oldest city in Oregon. It’s where the Oregon Trail reached its end, and the place where white settlers filed their land claims in the new American territory. Today, more than 60 buildings in downtown Oregon City are eligible for the National Historic Register. But it’s clear that Oregon City needs help, as in economic development and urban renewal. It’s times like these that it would pay to be a multimillionaire, because the opportunities to usher in a new era of responsible growth and revitalization are immense.
There’s also significant pressure to make Oregon City a town of malls and planned communities, a move which strips some of the grit and character from the place. In my quest to understand the players and the details of the South Shore drama, I’ve been reading up on the Mayor, the City Commissioners, and plans for two massive projects–Clackamas Cove, a mixed use development on 109 acres, and The Rivers, a proposed 650,000-square-foot mall that would be built on a former landfill.
Oregon City Mayor, Doug Neely, is for the developments, but Commissioner James Nicita isn’t so sure. Nicita, a lawyer with an urban planning degree, wants to let taxpayers decide, and the developers aren’t happy about possible citizen roadblocks.
Steve Mayes of The Oregonian has been following the story. In June, Mayes reported that CenterCal, the company developing The Rivers, broke off negotiations with the city, citing a “deep division” among city commissioners, in particular two newly elected commissioners, James Nicita and Rocky Smith Jr., who both campaigned against the project.
According to Mayes, the project has been dogged by political clashes between those who see a mall as a way to turn an eyesore into a destination retail center and those who question the need for a $17.6 million subsidy. Now, negotiations between the land owner, Park Place Development, and CenterCal are at a standstill. City Manager David Frasher said, “You don’t have a project if the developer doesn’t have the land.”
Personally, I don’t think the Portland area needs another mall. You can find one a short drive in any direction from Oregon City.
Plus, a modern cookie-cutter mall is far from the only solution that will grow jobs and the tax base. What would be truly exciting is to see the organic growth of historic revitalization projects in the core of Oregon City’s downtown. That way, Oregon City remains a unique and vital place to work, live and visit. Naturally, this is the more complicated solution, one that depends on the actions of hundreds of individual investors, versus the swift moves of one or two adept developers.
I have my own ideas about what might work in Oregon City, and what I’d love to see happen there. After visiting Walla Walla last April, I can see how the urban tasting rooms model that makes Walla Walla such a desirable and walkable wine destination, might also work in Oregon City.
Why would the state’s wine industry make that kind of commitment to Oregon City, which isn’t known for producing wine? Access to the large wine-drinking population of Portland and its visitors, and cheap rents for historic properties, are two reasons why.
