Back to the blog!
I started experimenting with this Radio weblog software in the spring and made a few test entries in the summer (see the calendar at the right). I'm never going to have time for daily log entries like some people, but once in a while I'll add something, since I have my students making weblogs this semester. For example, today some e-mail coincidences give me and example of how the Internet can conquer time and space, and bring together things from "old media" and "new," in this case from old-time fiddling to hip-hop.
Fiddler found
The first e-mail was from a fiddler I've never met. She was part of a jam session I photographed in the 1970s at the New England Fiddle Contest in Hartford. The contest organizers used the picture as a publicity shot back then, and revived it, along with the contest, a couple of years ago at FiddleFest.org, where it headed an early days photo album. Both the New York Times and Hartford Courant also printed the shot again, 25 years after I made the shot!
The picture shows an arc of four fiddlers and a guitar player jamming with Roger Sprung, a banjo wizard, who was the reason I drifted over to that particular session with my 20mm lens. I'd heard a record of him on the radio 20 years earlier, playing a highly-unlikely combination of John Philip Sousa marching-band tunes and Spanish flamenco. So when I recognized Roger's hat , and his gold-plated banjo tuning up with those fiddlers, I pulled out my camera.
I think that makes a pretty good chain of "media forms" -- phonograph records, radio, photography, newspapers, e-mail and the World Wide Web...
Back to today's e-mail -- it was from Laurie, one of the fiddlers in the picture, now a music teacher in Massachusetts; yesterday I heard from Steve, the guitar player, now in Oregon running a music store. I've also had some mail from Paul LeMay, the contest organizer, telling me that Roger Sprung was back at the 2002 event, which I missed while preparing my syllabi for school in Boston. (Now there's a warning about the Web!)
Hip hop connection
The next e-mail in the box today alerted me to a very different musical event, part of which is right here in my hometown. It seems a member of the same alumni mailing list is editor of Redeye Magazine, which probably doesn't have many fiddles in its pages, being a non-profit, youth-run political hip hop magazine. However, it does have a festival of sorts to report: The Active Arts Youth Conference next weekend, at the Somerville Theater on Davis Square, with the likes of Davey D and Jahi, and more information than you might hear from a fiddler on a stump!
There will be an open mic and free workshops covering everything from safe sex to "a multimedia workshop on how to use media as a revolutionary tool." It could be quite the event for Digital Culture, Online Editing or Online Journalism students alike! (Unfortunately, Active Arts Youth Conference did its site with Macromedia Flash... Very cool visuals, but it means you can't cut and paste the contents into e-mail to spread the word, and you can't link to the inside parts of the site. The front page might scare people away with its $20 price tag for Friday night concert tickets before they notice that the Saturday workshops at Northeastern are free!)
Back to folk
I'll have to wait for student reports after that festival, because I already have tickets to a slightly more fiddle-and-banjo weekend event.
Speaking of weekends... It's time for me to get away from the keyboard. Logging off for now...
bob
1:13:39 PM 
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