Dancing about architecture

Book: A Visit From the Goon Squad

Author: Jennifer Egan

Published: 2010 (Knopf)

Pages: 273

I’ve been staring down this book and its good reviews since it came out, resisting the urge to read it because writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Which is to say, there’s always a gap of interpretation that I’m willing to throw myself across because I love both art forms so much, and I usually end up banging my head a good one against waves of description that, fawning as they may be, don’t actually tell me anything. In my experience as a high school newspaper A&E editor, college radio station CD reviewer, Rolling Stone subscriber for far longer than it deserved, and High Fidelity fan, the better the review the more abstract the descriptions and therefore the more removed from living, breathing, sweating music stand the words.

But that’s not the case here. Actually, this collection of stories and incidents and characters on the New York music scene focuses so much on the people and the human bits of music that it’s really easy to slip into the punk clubs and the record label board rooms and undergraduate couches and start listening without noticing until everybody else turns their attention, too. The music underlines the humanity, the good and bad choices, the way time keeps pulling at everyone and their dreams.

It takes a bit of decoding to figure out everybody’s full individual chronological story arcs, but that’s not super important unless you get bored after you finish reading and want a slideshow project like the one the record label head’s former assistant’s kid makes to chart how her family is unraveling. (That was my favorite bit.)  It’s quieter than I expected, literally and metaphorically. Its last little bit of future predicting edges toward gimmick territory without ever touching down.

I don’t regret waiting to read it, or checking it out of the library instead of buying it, but I’m glad it waited for me to discover its charms. 

Predictions of the digital age

Book: Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite

Author: John Brockman

Published: 1996 (HardWired)

Pages: 335

Irony is reading a physical book all about how the world is going digital and how we should adapt or risk getting left behind.

What Brockman did was gather up all his influential friends and acquaintances from the industry, sat them down one by one, and interviewed them about where they thought the Internet and the World Wide Web were headed and what they and the world at large needed to do about it.

And then he typed it and sent it off to get bound in paper and glue and cardboard and to sell on one of the platforms most of his interviewees predicted would be dead by now (to be fair, they’re getting sort of right).

Reading fifteen-year-old predictions about the Internet feels a little like reading Nostradamus; it’s a faddish way of retroactively proving that psychics really do exist. Although the people interviewed for this book were far more actively engaged in the innovations they talked about, their projections were still vague enough to apply correctly to what the Internet has become without knowing if 2011’s Internet is exactly what they were thinking in 1996.

A good bit of why I liked reading this was so I could nod my head and mentally mark off what we’ve innovated from these Suggestions of the Future.

• Interaction and personalization will always be king in a medium that’s simultaneously broadcaster and audience.
• As long as we have such a thing as technology, we will have people worrying about whether or not we’re spending too much time on it.
• Ease of access, cheapening of speed, and building of communities are the steadiest foundations on which to build Internet interest.
• Nobody will ever care about interactive TV.

I really, really wish Brockman had hosted round table talks/arguments and just recorded those verbatim, or at least left his questions in so on the page his interviews would get some of that interaction action they all yap on about. That way he would’ve caught some great arguments that would have taken all these sentiments, which were thought-provoking but difficult to get through in big chunks that said basically the same thing.

“You sly dog! You’ve got me monolouging!”  

Anyway, this was a sort of interesting book, but it’s by no means necessary.