Sunday Reading
Sometimes I worry I’m missing out on life catching up on my reading. And then I find buried gems that stimulate me. I want to tell you about two.
1. Rob Walker’s article bout "Radiolab" in Sunday’s "New York Times Magazine"
I’m a satellite guy, I rarely listen to NPR, because I’ve got over a hundred other choices and I’d rather listen to uninterrupted music or Howard. But this story was so intriguing, I’m gonna download the podcast.
But that’s just the point:
"Yes, radio drifts by or washes over you when it comes out of a box on the other side of the room – but remember, a majority of ‘Radiolab’ listeners actually take in the show via podcast, and there’s something different going on when it enters your head through earbuds at the exact moment you have chosen to hear it, while you’re commuting with nothing else to think about, or cleaning the kitchen, or lying down for the night. ‘Artistically, these are the glory days for producers, if they really have the time to put into production,’ says Julie Shapiro, artistic director of Third Coast International Audio Festival, a nonprofit that promotes independently produced audio documentary work, ‘because you can have your listeners’ attention focused so carefully on every nuance.’
In that situation, the value of a media product does not come from being fast. It comes from being timeless. Abumrad made this point, indirectly, in that first long conversation I had with him and Krulwich. It wouldn’t make sense, he said, to devote the effort to seduce, disturb and engage the listener if ‘Radiolab’ episodes were merely broadcast once and disappeared.
‘But until 10 years ago, it always disappeared,’ Krulwich pointed out. A show was something that was created, was hopefully heard by a huge number of people and then vanished."
Are you creating something timeless?
That’s what people don’t understand about modern communications, the Internet, digital technologies. You’re not creating rockets, you’re creating land mines.
A rocket blasts into the air demanding your attention and then disappears, you walk away with little memory, especially after having seen the blast off of a few.
But a land mine is something you’re always watching out for. Something that could change your life in an instant even though it was buried decades before.
They say the problem is the audience, that it needs immediate gratification. That’s wrong. It’s the artists and their purveyors, the businessmen marketing the product, who are impatient, who need immediate gratification, an instant return on their investment, fame. The public just has an incredible shit detector, with no time to waste on substandard productions.
And usually, what’s truly great took time, maybe not in the gestation of the individual song or movie, but the preparation, the investment of decades honing your craft to make what you construct irresistible, even if someone discovers it after you’re dead.
That’s the secret of the Beatles, of classic rock, that’s why it’s still successful today.
And that’s why few care to remember most of the last twenty years of popular music. It was made for the radio, MTV, to be heard and discarded. Why would you want to see these people in concert? It’s like going to a great restaurant and being served a Pop-Tart.
2. The "BusinessWeek" article on the Megabus
So I’m at Carnegie Hall, and Charles, a conductor, a high level music instructor, tells me he came down from Boston to NYC on the Megabus. And he paid ten dollars.
Charles is waxing rhapsodic. About the free electricity and wi-fi, about the character of those riding with him.
And on Sunday I read this article.
Flying is a hassle. You might get there fast once you’re in the air, but until then… Driving to the airport, checking in, security screening… Why not take the bus? Which will get you from here to there without flying to Denver or Chicago in between.
It’s a burgeoning business. Read this article.
The bus provides cheap, quality, safe transportation. Is it better than light rail?
You’ll be fascinated. This is not your father’s bus.
But the point is innovation. Can you solve new problems by going back to old solutions and giving them a twist?
What if the venue advertised free wi-fi? So you wouldn’t have bandwidth charges on your iPhone?
Maybe we can solve our problems by thought instead of investment, instead of revolution maybe we can reconstruct the parts we’ve got into a new machine that works well.
I could play this out ad infinitum, but I won’t.
But I will say that so many are poor because they don’t know how to think. Anybody can learn facts, but can you put them together in new ways to make our world a better place, never mind make you rich?
The focus in the lower grades is on rote learning.
And the focus in college is on preparation for a career.
You really want to prepare for a career? Study the liberal arts. You’ll be nimble. You might even be able to jump over a candlestick!
Life is a Rubik’s Cube. You never start off in the same place. But if you persevere, you can triumph. As long as you know how to innovate, and change course and deal with frustration and have enough knowledge to get you started but not hold you back.
