One major gripe I do have, however, is with the digital sequence of large albums, especially classical recordings. I've just downloaded a 1956 recording of a seminal Glyndebourne production of Figaro (easily my favourite opera) and because individual tracks are arranged alphabetically, you do not listen to it in any kind of sensible sequence. It is absolutely infuriating to have to manually scroll through arias to put them in the right order. And occasionally testing too. Half way through you suddenly come across the overture. It's not exactly astra physics to sort this out iTunes. Please.
Thursday, 6 November 2008
Album downloads from iTunes
Although I am a fan of vinyl and the 3D nature of the sound, I continue to be lured into the iTunes store all too frequently and find myself exploring dark corners of the site for little-known recordings - usually of early blues music or trashy 70s pop. I don't personally find digital music quality (assuming some decent equipment to harness your computer to) significantly worse or flatter than CDs. Occasionally maybe there is a tendency to that 'bright' tone but I think you'd have to be unusually acoustically fastidious to really notice the difference. (Listen to Blue Note vinyl recordings though and I defy anyone not to be amazed how much better they are than any of the digitally remastered CDs that followed the iconic label's heyday).
Thursday, 23 October 2008
RIP MacBookPro and hello MacBook White
I never thought I'd own the shiny white baby of the mighty Mac range: altogether too cute for me. But when yesterday my second MacBook Pro hard drive died in under 9 months, and the fact that it has had to have a new keyboard too, I decided to go simple. Yes I know I could have had another hard drive under warranty, but honestly how many chances can I give the right hand of my life? So here I am smiling inanely at the pleasing clickable keys, deep glossy screen and altogether ease of use. I was an early adopter when it comes to Macs. I've had the odd PC affair, but all my main loves have been with the apple way back to neanderthal times when wireless was something your parents listened to. I'm quite glad it's not the ubiquitous aluminium and the keys don't automatically illuminate as dusk falls. Thanks to the new dual core processors it's as fast as my 12-month old top of the range MacBookPro that cost more than twice as much as the albino baby. And it still comes with two firewire ports (unlike the all-new, improved MacBooks).
I may regret this, but so far, my latest love looks like we may go the distance.
Thursday, 16 October 2008
In praise of lunch
In my first career in book publishing, the institution of lunch was the cornerstone of my business life. Lunch took up at least a third of the day, was the focus of all business deals and the only serious activity ambitious editors had to get right. Lunch was king. But then republican bean counters and efficiency monitors deposed Lunch and we all got used to dribbling bits of sandwiches over our keyboards. Deals were done in stuffy, anodyne meeting rooms and occasionally over a skinny latte in Starbucks. Lunch, like eating, was so yesterday.
So it was something of a surprise when, trying to catch up with Karen Hanton, queen of the starry Web 2.0 company toptable (an institution in its own right), she suggested we have Lunch. Last time I went to the offices of toptable, they were housed in an incongruous part of private medicine-land west of Harley Street. Now they are comfortably settled in the heart of Clerkenwell, and we walked past another threatened institution, the gaudy, municipal high-Victorian architecture of Smithfield, to a local Italian restaurant in Cowcross Street. The restaurant, like Lunch, was reassuringly passé. At one time there were hundreds of family-run pasta joints like this one: now they are hard to find. Over my linguine and her fettuncine, Karen and I caught up. Because we were having Lunch, conversation ranged, like a revolutionary, across the borders of private and business life. There were no agendas, PowerPoint presentations or meeting notes. We were able, in the course of a modest, relaxed hour or so to talk a good deal about business, but almost without noticing.
Toptable has put immense care and effort into building a best-of-breed platform in its space. It hasn't had an easy time of it but its numbers are now not just robust, but spectacular. It leads its peers in the analysis of its customer base and their behaviours; its expertise in search engine optimisation leaves so-called seo companies standing; it is as sharp a consumer-focused, market-leading web company as you will find. And having poured talent and money and energy into its platform, it is now scaling out at a rate that is eye-watering, delivering something as old-fashioned as Lunch: bottom line, cash profits.
The first time I interviewed Karen I learned of her roots as the daughter of crofters whose daily graft sucked every ounce of colour and blood from both parents and the young family too. Those roots have built an extraordinary entrepreneur whose clear-sighted, absolutely focused vision is now delivering extraordinary results. And she can still stroll round the corner to a local Italian gaff and chat over pasta. Long live Lunch.
So it was something of a surprise when, trying to catch up with Karen Hanton, queen of the starry Web 2.0 company toptable (an institution in its own right), she suggested we have Lunch. Last time I went to the offices of toptable, they were housed in an incongruous part of private medicine-land west of Harley Street. Now they are comfortably settled in the heart of Clerkenwell, and we walked past another threatened institution, the gaudy, municipal high-Victorian architecture of Smithfield, to a local Italian restaurant in Cowcross Street. The restaurant, like Lunch, was reassuringly passé. At one time there were hundreds of family-run pasta joints like this one: now they are hard to find. Over my linguine and her fettuncine, Karen and I caught up. Because we were having Lunch, conversation ranged, like a revolutionary, across the borders of private and business life. There were no agendas, PowerPoint presentations or meeting notes. We were able, in the course of a modest, relaxed hour or so to talk a good deal about business, but almost without noticing.
Toptable has put immense care and effort into building a best-of-breed platform in its space. It hasn't had an easy time of it but its numbers are now not just robust, but spectacular. It leads its peers in the analysis of its customer base and their behaviours; its expertise in search engine optimisation leaves so-called seo companies standing; it is as sharp a consumer-focused, market-leading web company as you will find. And having poured talent and money and energy into its platform, it is now scaling out at a rate that is eye-watering, delivering something as old-fashioned as Lunch: bottom line, cash profits.
The first time I interviewed Karen I learned of her roots as the daughter of crofters whose daily graft sucked every ounce of colour and blood from both parents and the young family too. Those roots have built an extraordinary entrepreneur whose clear-sighted, absolutely focused vision is now delivering extraordinary results. And she can still stroll round the corner to a local Italian gaff and chat over pasta. Long live Lunch.
Thursday, 25 September 2008
read this e-journal
Part of day job is putting together a monthly journal for Julie Meyer's company, Ariadne Capital. If you're interested in early-stage companies in the broad media, tech and telecom space then it's not a bad read and occasionally a very good one.
Monday, 15 September 2008
Is Google making us stupid?
This was the title of Nicholas Carr’s article published in Atlantic Monthly that sparked what has become a firey debate between the guardians of old culture and the nouveau tech. It’s a debate that interests me profoundly, not just because I don’t just sit but live on the fence between the two, but also because of the more scientific research that has begun to show neurological changes in a whole generation intellectually engaged with Playstation, Facebook and MSN.
John Walsh in this Sunday’s Independent, iterated the case that there are increasing numbers of people now unable to tackle what might be called ‘difficult’ literature: Joyce, Beckett, Homer, Milton. Actually that should read difficult and long. Because the argument goes that given the way we engage with information on the web, ‘power browsing’, we are increasingly unable to apply the necessary intellectual concentration needed to sustain meaning over the long distances of big novels or other works. This inability is mirrored in structural changes to the fore-brain, or the parts of the brain that are involved with language and abstract logic.
I’ve just finished reading Susan Greenfield’s ‘The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century’ (no, not that long). Professor Greenfield is the eminent Oxford neuroscientist whose work has been popularised in various forms over the past decade. She writes, “At a microcellular level, the infinitely complex network of nerve cells that make up the constituent parts of the brain actually change in response to certain experiences and stimuli.” So the brain is plastic and malleable, like a muscle. Use it or lose it. She quotes a fascinating research study undertaken by the Harvard Medical School. Three groups of adult volunteers with no prior ability to play the piano are given a week in an identical room with an identical piano. Group 1 is given intensive piano practice for five days; group 2 has nothing to do with the piano and Group 3 is told to imagine that they were spending five days intensively practising the piano. Comparative brain scans showed Group 2 had no change; Group 1 had significant structural changes to the parts of the brain associated with fine motor control and – big surprise – Group 3 showed almost as much change to the same parts of the brain as Group1. In other words, the impact of the imagination, or higher thought process, is not just real but physical.
My late father studied Classics at Cambridge and then went on to carve out a very classical career as a mandarin civil servant. He always maintained his education had taught him how to think, had trained his mind. I, of course, poo poo-ed such Byzantine thinking until, in the immortal words of the Fonz, I realised he was right just at the point when I have a son who thinks I’m wrong. (And aged four, wants nothing more than to master Playstation).
I don’t really think the Sony Reader with its galactic memory (160 books-worth) and leviathan battery life or Google Book Search (with its millions of scanned books out there free on the web) are a threat to the world’s creative imagination. To me physical access to ideas is always good if it’s expanding: I think people will always choose to lose themselves in a good book, with paper and ink and easy pages to turn at some time. What does concern me, though, is if somehow the democracy and vastness of the internet, with its multiplicity of views and sources, turns us away from the deeply-researched, long argument posited by a single, deeply-thinking person, and worse, makes us unable to follow him or her on a deep intellectual journey.
John Walsh in this Sunday’s Independent, iterated the case that there are increasing numbers of people now unable to tackle what might be called ‘difficult’ literature: Joyce, Beckett, Homer, Milton. Actually that should read difficult and long. Because the argument goes that given the way we engage with information on the web, ‘power browsing’, we are increasingly unable to apply the necessary intellectual concentration needed to sustain meaning over the long distances of big novels or other works. This inability is mirrored in structural changes to the fore-brain, or the parts of the brain that are involved with language and abstract logic.
I’ve just finished reading Susan Greenfield’s ‘The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century’ (no, not that long). Professor Greenfield is the eminent Oxford neuroscientist whose work has been popularised in various forms over the past decade. She writes, “At a microcellular level, the infinitely complex network of nerve cells that make up the constituent parts of the brain actually change in response to certain experiences and stimuli.” So the brain is plastic and malleable, like a muscle. Use it or lose it. She quotes a fascinating research study undertaken by the Harvard Medical School. Three groups of adult volunteers with no prior ability to play the piano are given a week in an identical room with an identical piano. Group 1 is given intensive piano practice for five days; group 2 has nothing to do with the piano and Group 3 is told to imagine that they were spending five days intensively practising the piano. Comparative brain scans showed Group 2 had no change; Group 1 had significant structural changes to the parts of the brain associated with fine motor control and – big surprise – Group 3 showed almost as much change to the same parts of the brain as Group1. In other words, the impact of the imagination, or higher thought process, is not just real but physical.
My late father studied Classics at Cambridge and then went on to carve out a very classical career as a mandarin civil servant. He always maintained his education had taught him how to think, had trained his mind. I, of course, poo poo-ed such Byzantine thinking until, in the immortal words of the Fonz, I realised he was right just at the point when I have a son who thinks I’m wrong. (And aged four, wants nothing more than to master Playstation).
I don’t really think the Sony Reader with its galactic memory (160 books-worth) and leviathan battery life or Google Book Search (with its millions of scanned books out there free on the web) are a threat to the world’s creative imagination. To me physical access to ideas is always good if it’s expanding: I think people will always choose to lose themselves in a good book, with paper and ink and easy pages to turn at some time. What does concern me, though, is if somehow the democracy and vastness of the internet, with its multiplicity of views and sources, turns us away from the deeply-researched, long argument posited by a single, deeply-thinking person, and worse, makes us unable to follow him or her on a deep intellectual journey.
Wednesday, 3 September 2008
Beanz meanz Heinz...or Branstons?
OK now we know the credit crunch is real. Sales of baked beans are up 12% on last year and Branstons beans are up 22%. I'm a Heinz girl myself - and the full sugar version too. They can't do them in France where the name says it all - haricots blancs à la sauce tomate - so I wonder what hard-pressed French families are eating more of? Let them eat cake.
In a world where...
Don laFontaine has died aged 68. Until his death no-one outside his niche knew his face – even his name. But his voice sold over 5,000 of Hollywood's most blockbusting flicks from Dr Strangelove to The Terminator. He'd started as a radio engineer and then progessed to a few radio ads before finding his real talent. Overweight and unglamorous, he is probably one of Hollywood's most hired actors. In his 33 year career he single-handedly created an industry of voicing movie trailers with his signature sound of an insomniac's throaty base rolling like thick black coffee over gravel. He had a pregnant voice; a voice that held your attention and promised and suggested. How can one man's voice be so iconic? So unrepeatable? So resonant for so many people across all the world. Earlier today I was doing some early work putting together Ariadne Capital's next journal to Maria Callas belting out arias at high decibels across the Somerset countryside. It got me thinking about other voices I love: the unfashionable 50s tenor, Beniamino Gigli and the rasping bark of Sid Vicious (strangely also admired by the great interpreter of German lieder, Ian Bostridge) and Tom Waits and Dylan and Louis Armstrong. They've all got highly individual voices that are drenched in experience: unmistakable. So now we can look forward to many laFontaine immitators and how dull they'll be.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
