Week 4, 1/28

1/28/07

My activity lulled this week, but a few new things are worth noting.

• Mei Han CDs are coming, will spend time with those next week;
• Randy Raine-Reusch (ASZA.com) checked in, and I will also deal with his most accessible materials next week, some projects with Mei Han;
• I’ll probably contact Paul Plimley again, just to alert him to my current focus on ASZA; this site is based in Vancouver, B.C., close to home for me now, part of my current strong Pacific Rim radar;
• Leo Feigin’s rare and valuable 1989 “Document: New Music from Russia, the 1980s,” companion text to Leo Records 8-CD set of that name, just arrived from him, and will engross me as I listen to same;
• Bill Shoemaker has excerpted much of my Northern Sun, Southern Moon’s Chapter Five (“The Free World Beyond America”), on which this book in progress is being built, to run in the next Point of Departure issue. It will run with an ad that will call more attention to the NewOldMusic project site, as well as my heffleyrecords.com
• looking forward to Vijay Iyer’s response to my questions on his dynamite CDs & texts

Some thoughts on the process: I’ve been pondering the design and functional intents of the Basecamp site hosting my project...wondering if it’s the best facilitator for the kind of interactivity I want to accommodate. It isn’t as slick and easy for people to pop in and out of intuitively—like a typical blog site such as this one, for instance. But it is well wrought as a place to do research and writing (as also other typical business-world) collaborative projects, which is why I chose it.

The initial awkwardnesses of some exchanges—those that spilled out from my one-on-ones with one or two people, and some solitary operations I did—were due to my unawareness of certain options. All of those are mastered now, and I know how to ensure email exchanges and private operations don’t trigger unintended automatic notifications, and do generate intended ones. So it shouldn’t be a problem in the future.

I keep in touch with activity on the site myself by having the RSS feed in my Bookmarks Bar. New activity shows up next to its name there by a (parenthesized number) showing the number of new posts. This, after having disabled the email notification option as the default setting.

Thankfully, no one has given me any negative feedback, or asked to be left alone or removed from the list. As I work my way through my research, interviews, and occasional exchanges with colleagues, I’m expecting that most people will be as comfortable communicating there as they were responding initially. I also expect more appearances on the site when I’m focused on a given person’s work and asking particular questions (as opposed to much interest in an ongoing general discussion, like in a blog or a listserv). Even those who have yet to check in, I expect to respond more readily to direct, well-informed requests to investigate specifics of their music or writing.

Once I have substantive threads on everyone woven into the site, I’ll announce that, and invite general perusal of them all by all, and any cross-commenting anyone wants to do.

Meanwhile, the thing is there; people can pop in there and/or here for any reason at any time, with me and/or anyone else in the People section, apart from the snail-plod of my work’s slow-moving dial...and, again, if no one does, I’ll just proceed in the usual way, putting my ducks in a row for the book I want to write at my own pace and wandering rhythm...