Academik

If you have the chance to go see this performance of Arthur Miller’s most famous work, do it.¬† While tickets are a bit pricey at $30/piece, the acting of Keith Phillips as Willie Loman is reason enough to revisit this classic play.¬† At no point during the entire performance do you doubt Keith’s authenticity as the quintessential Willie Loman, a man blinded by superficial desires and the American dream.

The supporting cast of the Loman family (Biff, Happy, and Linda) does a good job of providing the framework for Willie’s downfall and failing mental state although I noticed a few hiccups by Linda.¬† If you’re open to the story it will make you re-think your life and what you’re really striving for.¬† If not, you’re in for some great acting and an evening’s worth of entertainment.¬† Either way – try and see it.

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Wednesday was the concert for the recently re-united Brand New Heavies at Mezzanine - apparently someone here has taken a list of my favorite bands and asked them to come perform – thanks Travis! I had heard of the Brand New Heavies back in my high school days, but I was too deep in teenage angst to realize what great music this was. So i show up on Wednesday and I happen to run into the guitarist and lead singer of Phonofly. I’m not sure if the title is official yet, but at the last show for Phonofly (Halloween at the Rock-It Room) I think they dubbed me official dancer for the band – I still have to pay the cover charge to get in though :<

Back to Brand New Heavies – a couple years back I picked up their album Trunk Funk Classics 1991-2000 and was hooked on this combination of soul/funk/pop/hip-hop. Brand New Heavies has a really unique sound that you can instantly recognize. Their big hits, “Stay This Way”, “Dream On Dreamer” and “Sometimes” are all on this CD that also features my favorite track, “Soul Flower”, a collaboration with Pharcyde. If I had to describe Brand New Heavies in terms of other bands I would say James Brown mixed with Erykah Badu, blended and dusted with pop.

Unfortunately I’d lost the CD a while back so I didn’t have a chance to catch up for the concert, but the opening act, Sutro (the lead singer’s crazy hat pictured to the left reminded me of a Seinfeld joke… the 90’s called, they want their hat back) got the party off to a decent start. Their music is a mix of live instruments and programmed tracks that pull heavily from the trip-hop and downtempo genres. Their music was good, but I never felt like it went anywhere – no breakdowns, no liftups – at least none powerful enough to remember. Decide for yourself on their MySpace page by clicking on their name above.

Brand New Heavies came out to cheers and clapping from the almost packed house. They started playing and immediately I remembered their sound – funk/pop/soul goodness – it’s the type of guitar playing and rythm that make your body want to pop & lock, your hips shake, your eyes close, and for a few minutes the world seems pretty damn good – oh and it also makes you want to get laid.

I was lucky enough to meet two friends there, Jodi and Jill, so I got a special invite to a birthday party upstairs… Happy 30th Jameson, Manager at Mezzanine!
They opened with Dream on Dreamer and then progressed through a number of songs I didn’t recognize. Then the decidedly Scottish sounding guitarist got on the mic and he introduced each of the band members – each did a wicked solo. All in all it was a good concert – perhaps not worth the $30 ticket, but good to see a great band back together. Also whoever decided that concerts on a Wednesday should go until 1am needs to take a hike. If a concert takes place during the middle of the week I say I should be able to be home by midnight. Am I the only one who feels this way?

Video of Brand New Heavies performing Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes

-one of these days I’ll get a better camera, or there will better light… I promise

Click here to listen to some original tracks by the Brand New Heavies

Whenever I see this band’s name I am reminded of the time in Paris where I was too dumb to be mugged. These kids kept repeating, I have a kuh-nife. They didn’t get any money off of us because we knew they were amateurs – the k is silent ,bitches.

So in my neverending quest to soak up good music in this city I was at Mezzanine again this past weekend for a show by The Knife, a Swedish electro group. The female singer in the group is 5 months pregnant so the show started promptly just before 10pm… We arrived to packed house and the group performing at about 10:05pm. They had erected a ________(insert theater term for screen) in front of the stage to project images onto while they were doing their set. Everything was pretty much to a “t” exactly as it sounds on their CD, but the presentation was pretty over the top.

Both members of the group were in crazy costumes that looked like they were being protected from nuclear fallout; there were blacklights and lot of crazy individual lights behind them (much as I saw with Metric). They really held the audience’s attention as the female sang and the man used what looked to be the orange directing cones that airport workers use to guide planes to play samples on a drum pad. You really got the feeling that they had put a lot of effort into making this a unique show for their fans. The video of Silent Shout is below. If you are feeling adventurous check out the following tracks: Heartbeats, Na Na Na, and the Captain. Fellow Swede (born of Argentine parents) Jose Gonzalez does a great acoustic remake of Heartbeats as well.

Silent Shout by The Knife

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As usual Mezzanine hosts some of the best music in SF… Wednesday night was no different. Justice and MSTRKRFT put on an amazing show. Two highlights of the night

1 – Everyone getting up on stage during the Justice set (middle picture above). I can’t tell you how many people put their arms around me and started singing, “We ARE, YOUR FRIENDS, YOU’ll NEVER BE ALONE AGAIN!”

2 – Russell Simmons on X. Okay, it wasn’t russell simmons, but close enough. There was a guy rolling his ass off dancing the entire night. When the house DJs were playing he got up on the main stage and nearly sent the turntables crashing into the ground. His dancing was more crashing into people than anything else. In the bathroom he stopped peeing, turned to me, and asked who I was here to see… what was my favorite song? Is it We Are your friends, you’ll never be alone agaain!! or No Excuse? This is the EXCUSE THAT WE”RE MAKING”… he proceeded to sing all of these songs to me, while I was at the urinal, and while his dick was hanging out of his trousers. Eyes forward, don’t look, if you make eye contact you’ll only encourage him – my thoughts.

I’m a Communications major, so maybe I understand the way communications work a little better than everyone else, but this principle seems to escape so many of us – close the loop by providing feedback. Below is a basic illustration of communications.

Ignore the part about click a button, it won’t work. So the basic idea here is that there is someone “sending” the mesasge, there is the way they’re sending it (the channel), there’s the message itself, and someone receiving it. There can also be “noise” which distracts the receiver from the message (think pop-up ads on a web site, noise in the street during a conversation, etc.), there can be encoding and decoding necessary for the message to be understood, and there can be feedback.

Now this model works for nearly any type of communication you can think of:

This website, for instance, is the channel for my messages to reach you, the receiver. You can give feedback via e-mail or by leaving a comment. The phone is another channel for us to transmit voice messages to one another. Our feedback there is simply talking back to the person on the other end of the line. The TV is a channel for TV stations to transmit video/audio messages to us. We don’t have the opportunity for feedback via this channel, but we can always call or write to the station.

In the business world, this is an important concept because empires rise and fall on good / bad communication. Rome, good communication (thanks to lots of roads and messengers) – AT&T customer support, bad communication (thanks to foreign accents and frustration). Sometimes we get e-mails that are simply meant to let us know something – no feedback required – others require our immediate reply. The same is true for phone calls and voicemails.

A large part of my job is coordination between multiple people and without feedback the process becomes a nightmare. So I’m begging and pleading with all of you – close the loop- provide feedback! Even with salespeople, people you don’t like, or things you’re afraid of – if you return their calls/emails/voicemails/letters to let them know that you’re not interested you are giving them no reason to call you again – and believe me sometimes the salespeople would rather check you off their list than continue to have to keep calling.

Personally, when you are writing emails or leaving messages for people – make sure to think about whether or not you need a response – and let the person know it. I have experienced this repeatedly – the people who are at the best employers in good positions, will always respond quickly to a request – even if it’s to let me know that it might be a few days before they can really get back to me. So start looking at the world through this model and ask yourself – am I a good communicator?

Begin to think about what you need from your receiver, what is your real core message and what’s the best channel to send it through. Quit leaving voicemails that simply say call me back. Let the person know what you’re calling about and when you need to hear back from them, or send them a text – it’s a lot easier than having to check your voicemail.

Check out this crazy ish!

It’s like diving…in the sky

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Leave that bulky desktop battery charger at home – flip the lid on these clever AA batteries and charge over USB using the in-built, standard USB port! A must-have for digital cameras and other devices still using AA cells.

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So you wanna be a digital worker? Here’s what you need to know:

Finding Information

Search Engines – Know your search engines and what they’re good for. Google, Yahoo, Live(MSN), Answers.com, A9, Technorati, and delicious all search in different ways and in some cases search a very specific catalogue of information. Try doing the same search on each of them and you’ll notice that the responses you get aren’t all the same. Know what their strengths and weaknesses are, how to use the advanced search like searching in a specific language, removing or requiring keywords, and searching over a period of time. A9 is meant for the text of books, Technorati for blogs, and delicious for user ranked results.

Blogs – Blogs are your your doorway into the minds of experts and amateurs alike. You should know how to find them, and have at least a few blogs a day that you read related to your sector. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a technology that allows you to be notified anytime there’s a new entry from your blogroll. Use RSS aggregators (nothing to do with alligators) to easily read all of your blogs from one place, less clicking around makes more effective use of your time. I really like NetVibes (which does a whole lot more than RSS including my podcast!) as an all in one website, or Sage as a Mozilla Firefox extension. If you’re still using Internet Explorer all the time, you consider your free time worthless and your friends are probably just not that into you anymore.

Tagging – The World Wide Web according to you. With certain tools like del.icio.us and diigo you can apply certain keywords, or tags, to pages that you visit. That way next time you want to find the page, you can search by the tags that you labeled it with. If you find several pages that would work well for a certain client, you could tag them with the client’s name. Have pages you want to share with certain friends, tag pages with their names. Both sites keep track of all your searches, and they also let you share your pages with friends. I recommend using diigo because you can highlight and comment certain parts of web pages… you’ll see later.

Prioritizing Information

Remember that there’s a lot of crap on the net in the form of pornography, rants, and people who think they are worth looking at. They’re not, and you’re probably wishing that you hadn’t clicked on that pornography link right now aren’t you. It’s easy to get distracted is my point. Like a newspaper editor, you’ve got to keep in mind several principles to make sure that you get the information that’s best suited to your audience whether that’s your boss, your client, or your spouse. Always keep these in mind when searching for info: timeliness, impact, proximity, trends, and audience.

Keeping Track of it All

So now that you have this huge wealth of information at your fingertips, how are you going to get it all together to make your point? Well if you’re using diigo, you can highlight and comment on web pages, a technique called social annotation. Even your highlights can have notes attached to them. You can also forward your annotations onto other people via e-mail. Your other option is a tool called Wizlite, but this name reminds of a rhyme about staying away from electric fences – besides wouldn’t you rather one tool to do it all? Your other other option is to copy and paste into Word. Sissy.

That’s a good primer on what tools you should have and use on a frequent basis. If you’ve got questions or want to suggest something else feel free to e-mail me at ME at ACADEMIK.ORG