Last weekend, I lead a session at MinneBar entitled “The Internet and the Future of Art,” in which I talked about my experiences producing In the Hands, my sense of the past relationships between art and society, and my wishes for the future. The audience joined in, and it was a very interesting 40 minutes of discussion.

Tim Wilson has very kindly made an audio recording of the session available on They Savvy Technologist. He did a good job of capturing a very interactive session with only a single mic in a noisy room. Well done!

If any of you want to follow along with the session, here are slightly cleaned up versions of the two “idea map” diagrams you’ll hear me producing on my Powerbook during the session:

• 20th century (PDF, 82k)
• 21st century (PDF, 80k)

Note that these are rough, still in process, and entirely up for discussion. I’m still figuring all of this out, along with the rest of the world!

It was a pleasure doing the session, and a pleasure attending the conference. I’m grateful to all who planned and sponsored it! If there’s a BarCamp in your area, I highly recommend checking it out.

After a cold (which left my voice in bad shape for podcasting) and MinneBar (which was a great pleasure), it’s back to In the Hands! I’m continuing from last time the series of recordings I made recently with soprano Kim Sueoka of songs by Todd Harper.

For several years, Todd has been writing songs full of the sort of jazz changes that are his roots, but as much in the tradition of lieder as anything. He always makes them short, sweet, and very focused — haiku-like — and when he’s setting a text longer than a few lines, he’ll often break it into a chain of very short songs, each only a few words long. I don’t know of anybody who does anything quite like it.

The four songs of this short cycle are almost a sort of “found haiku” — the text is from actual police reports in an unnamed northern Minnesota town. Yes, they are real. No, Todd will not tell you which town it is.

They’re absolutely hilarious — Kim does a perfect deadpan delivery of their painfully earnest description of the mundane and mildly ridiculous things the police in a small town have to deal with. Audiences have different reactions to the humor: when we did them at an ACF Tuesday Salon, the very polite “high art crowd” audience murmured appreciatively at the humor, but seemed to be waiting for permission to laugh; when we did them shortly afterwards at Patrick’s Cabaret, the audience let out such an incredible stream of roars and guffaws, we were barely able to stay together!

There’s something in them beyond the humor, however: a sweetness, a tender love for the world of a small towns. Our sense of scale is relative in all things — space, time, what’s important — and in a little town, a disheveled stranger, a fence knocked down … these things matter. Todd lets the humor in, but it’s not mocking — it’s tender. He’s laughing about what he loves, I think.

Todd Harper, music
Northwoods Police Report
Kim Sueoka, soprano
Paul Cantrell, piano

Download (3:57 / 4.8 M)