Track of the Day [yeehaw]

I've been doing the GarageBand thing for a while now - that's the online indie music community, not the Apple DAW app of the same name. They agreed a while back to share the name, like nice folks do. Anyway, I've been posting tracks for a while, and the general consensus is, "Hey, this is kinda cool: well mixed, funky, but you know what? It's kinda boring too, dude."

Still, I've managed to get the coveted Track of the Day designation a couple of times. This is where they highlight your track in its given genre for 24 hours. My next one is on 23 April, for an experimental track called ModoKun3. (The title involves Japanese advertising, bootleg merchandise, and the iteration of the work that this mix represents. Or something.)

Now, this track only has a handful of reviews, and doesn't as yet have an aggregate score, so this is sort of strange. This has happened twice lately - another one of my tracks got TOTD, with very few reviews under its little belt. The frequency of my tracks being reviews has also slowed to a crawl. Those facts taken together lead me to believe that the GB scene is getting a little weak. Has everyone defected to MySpace, where no one will ever tell you that your hi-hats are too loud or that your ambient beatscape needs a stronger melody?

They will, however, tell you that they found this awesome website with all these free ringtones, dawg!

PowerPoint makes you stupid

I've long had a love / hate (mostly hate) relationship with that most ubiquitous of presentation tools, Microsoft PowerPoint. It has nothing to do with it being an M$ product, either - I actually like the Office suite, and when I've tried alternatives I've found them seriously wanting. However, as a former corporate drone and now as an educator, I've had to come to grips with PPT and find a way to use it that works for me, because frankly, the way other people were using it drove me f****** batshit crazy.

Consider this scene in a college lecture hall - a professor stands in the darkened room, giving a lecture that is being mirrored word for word behind her on slide after slide, punctuated by the occasional animated clip-art critter or distracting transition with sound effects (say, tires screeching as the slide whips off-screen to be replaced by another bullet-point nightmare). Titles are bouncing in and out, images are spinning like newspaper headlines in a Frank Capra movie, and you have long-since quit paying attention to any of it, because why should you? You've got the whole thing in the familiar three-slides-to-a-page handout form, complete with note-taking sections, wherein you are drawing pictures of men with donkey heads.

I've sat through HR orientations, law school lectures, and student presentations that all went just that way. As this article the Sydney [Australia] Morning Herald confirms, this is a terrible way to deliver information. Your brain wants its feed spoken or written, but not both at the same time. While I was in grad school, I read an article by Edward Tufte about the ill effects of the PowerPoint. He argues, and I completely agree, that PowerPoint "elevates format over content."

When I teach classes or give presentations, I use PPT - people expect it, and they seem kind of lost when they don't have a big screen to look at. My slides, though, contain very little text. I tend to speak extemporaneously, and I use the slides as prompts - here's the topic, here's a few main points, here's a graph or an illustration of some kind. The slides keep me on track, forming a loose framework, but I might go for several minutes on a single slide. I keep the colors neutral, I avoid sound effects, and the font is usually Helvetica, or maybe Trebuchet MS. I make handouts, but I usually create them from my notes, as there's not enough actual information on the PPT slides to make them worth printing

Alanis Morisette got Humps!

What a genius - a true North American treasure.

new Wilco album now streaming

I'm listening to the upcoming Wilco release Sky Blue Sky, which is streaming now at their site (linked above) and all I can say is that it's transcendent. This record seems to be the culmination of everything they've been working towards over the last two records and subsequent tours. Tweedy et al have crafted a perfect, seemless marriage of folk, country, rock, avant garde, and pop. It's not any of those things; it just is.

Nels Cline's playing is off tha heezy. He creates moments of true beauty here. Yesterday I was in the grocery store listening to his album New Monastery: a View into the Music of Andrew Hill (Cryptogramophone, 2006) on my iPod - he's replacing Bill Frisell as my favorite guitarist.