From The Half-Red House

I’ve been using last.fm as a way to connect to new music and hear familiar music when away from home. For those of us in the US, the UK, and Germany, it was possible to listen up to three times (in a lifetime) to each full track from many albums in streaming format… until last night. Last.fm has taken away this ability.

I was never very interested in the “radio” feature that randomly played songs that loosely matched some artist’s or listener’s profile of past listening; I can find sheer randomness by listening to the radio, and I know my tastes and desires in music much better than anybody’s algorithm. This is now the one feature that last.fm seems committed to promoting. Last.fm and Pandora were once rivals in this field, but now they have merged and there is essentially no difference.

As an “artist”, I can still upload music I make (http://www.last.fm/music/Jim+Giddings) and allow it to be downloaded in mp3 form, and this is an admitted convenience, but what casual listener is going to find me and download an mp3 sound-unheard?

By “scrobbling” music when I play tracks and CDs that I own using WinAmp, I can sort of “vote for” my favorite musicians by adding to their total plays, but this becomes a hollow

I hadn’t had the time to watch the Democracy Now Columbus Day special with Buffy Sainte-Marie until now. She has always been an inspiration to me, and in this interview with Amy Goodman, she talks about aspects of her life I hadn’t heard of before: her FBI record, her computer learning project for children, her childhood… She talks about Leonard Peletier as “just the kind of cousin who comes over on the weekend to help you with your car”, who was obviously framed and deserves to get out of prison and spend time with friends and family. She talks about her artistic process. I suspect you will really want to make time to see this program, too:

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/12/democracy_now_special_an_hour_of

MySpace seems not to want to let me embed the video here, so I hope the above link works.

A young friend made this rap video at Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat center in Pennsylvania, and it includes some folks associated with my Quaker Meeting in New Hampshire. The words talk about how the Quaker emphasis on direct experience puts it outside what is traditionally thought of as Christianity, but in direct relationship to the Christ spirit. Besides that… it’s Fun!

Our Meeting (monadnockfriends.org) is having a series of events called Quaker Quest this month, which is aimed at getting the word out about Quakers. Please feel free to drop by, physically or via the Web.

Mary Travers, the Mary of Peter, Paul and Mary, a ‘sixties folk group that definitely helped mold my subconscious understandings of the world, died today at age 72. In her later years, she had been part of a revival of the trio, and I was impressed with the way she insisted on performing even when she could barely stand, as in this blurry amateur YouTube video from 2007 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGLfIoNAsso). The determination and exuberance she brought to her early performances seems to flow out through the seated form on stage, in spite of the pain she must have been enduring.

One of my favorite young performers is getting in touch with one of my favorite older (than me) performers using YouTube. Anais Mitchell made a video of her Friday Night song to invite Leonard Cohen to dinner (http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=21533191&blogId=501157233). The video, and the concept of the video, thrill me beyond reason, I don’t know why… it just feels so right. (I like the cameo appearance by her cat, too).

It got me to wondering if the old master-songmakers even know what’s going on with this amazing Millennial generation. Does Leonard Cohen already know Anais Mitchell’s work.. he should! But how would he? I wonder if Dani Fine might invite him to dinner when he’s in the Bay Area? Older musicians could eat well and network with their natural companions as if they all lived in the same hip neighborhood.

On a related note, I hope “cyberfunded creativity” takes off. Sites like Microfundo (http://www.microfundo.com/) attempt to get fans excited enough and organized enough to provide a collective grubstake (an advance, not a loan or a purchase) for their favorite musicians to tour, make CDs and practice their craft outside the traditional financial support system, which has collapsed even for big names like Leoanard Cohen. Microfundo has been helping Linda Thompson restart her career, and it’s starting to support several bands of young performers. I notice more and more MySpace musicians are putting a PayPal button on their sites to solicit funds for their current projects as “donations”; this will work better if it’s done in a more organized way and collectively.

Poets, too, are using the cyberfunded creativity model (http://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com/tag/cyberfunded+creativity). It might even work better there than in music, since poetry has always paid so poorly. (P.S. I wish somebody would fund the last few lines of “The Sky-Eyes and

Red Shoes (http://www.myspace.com/redshoes1) have just come out with a great album of
original folk music called Ring Around the Land , helped out by lots of excellent artists and musicians,
including Dave Pegg of Fairport Convention.

I just wrote a short
blog about it at

I just posted a blog entry called NEFFA, Filk and Arbutus Too which may be of interest to some people here, about the NEFFA festival that’s going on now in Mansfield, Massachusetts at
http://nhpeacenik.livejournal.com/24516.html

This year, unfortunately, this year, Denise and I weren’t able to be part of this community chorus led by our friend Mary Beth Hallinan of Full Cold Moon , but we strongly recommend getting to one of the two upcoming performances in the next two weeks.

Mary Beth is using the title of a shape-note song as the title of this season’s performance. She contacted me recently for some help in understanding the words of the song, which comes from the “Southern Harmony”

Southern Harmony by William Walker (1835)