Saturday, November 8, 2003

I'm still walking on a cloud after a great, if short, set by the Dave Holland Quintet at the Painted Bride. Every piece was very good, but some of the new, still unnamed ones were truly mesmeric. Chris Potter was outstanding on alto sax. Steve Nelson on vibes and marimba put out an unstoppable flow of invention and surprise. Holland, Robin Eubanks and drummer Nate Smith maintained the Holland complex sound and hard-charging drive. More intense than even excellent recordings like Points of View. My only regret was not to have bought a ticket for the later show too. 10:07:21 PM

Completed my reservations for NIPS this afternoon. Besides the great program, and the workshop where we are giving a talk, there might be a bit of skiing. I'm staying an extra two days in Whistler hoping for a repeat of last year, when an unpromising warm spell gave way to major storms, cold and outstanding powder turns at the season opening of Harmony bowl. If I am really lucky, I might be able to get my first Whistler backcountry tour this time. Last year it had been too warm and the new snow was too unstable. 9:51:44 PM

Excellent NY Times article about Web sites with information about ski trips. [Scripting News] I don't know about excellent. It's not bad, but the sites mentioned are for the most part pretty thin. I do like Orbitz for last-minute travel. But for detailed lodging, guiding, equipment, and conditions info, search is essential as most hub sites are so shallow. An exceptional hub site is snow-forecast.com, which gives much more detailed weather info than is available from the main weather sites (although some more specialized sites are also very useful for local conditions; even if you don't go into the backcountry, their information is more specific and accurate than that put out by resorts and local boosters). 10:35:14 AM

I really want a music store that transcends the experiences I had in the 70s. I want to learn and I want clueful guides. It isn't easy (a few of us have tried to move down that path and have the scars to prove it), but it needs to be done. Some genres of music depend on it being done correctly if they want to survive. There is so much that can be done ... There are only a few great radio stations at this point - marketing has turned many of them into vanilla mush. A few wonderful programs exist, but following through and probing at a deeper level can be difficult. This is the sort of thing the connectivity of the Internet can fix. [tingilinde] The standard explanation for this dismal state of affairs is the increasing greed and concentration of producers and distributors (labels, radio, retail outlets). However, since I started working at a university that is also a major health-care provider, and I've also paid college tuition, I have become very curious about the so-called education-and-health cost crisis: education and health-care costs rising much faster than overall inflation. One explanation for this that has been making the rounds is the Baumol effect. I haven't read the original paper yet, but the second-hand account is that the growing cost difference between those activities and, say, consumer durables, can be explained simply by the fact that health care and education delivery centrally involve people interacting with people, and we aren't getting smarter, quicker, of less needy nearly as rapidly as manufacturing's increasing efficiency. I'm sure that there are reasonable counter-arguments, but I certainly see this in teaching and research. I wonder if the same process may help explain what happened to music. As the relatively cost of all the mechanical aspects of music production and reproduction has gone steadily down, people costs start dominating. The experience Steve misses was based on the ability of narrow appeal artists and experts in radio and record stores to make a living from interactions with a relatively small group of fans. But the cost of supporting those narrowcast interactions keep increasing relative to that of depersonalized mass culture. The obvious question is whether I should be worried about academia wilting like classical music. Demagogues in Congress have started blaming universities. To be blunt, what saves us and medicine from an immediate fate similar to classical music is that the public believes more in the advantages of Ivy League education and medical care more than it believes in the benefits of classical music. But that could change (see the growth in alternative medicine, self-help literature, and self-medication). 10:10:47 AM