Found out at the last minute that I’ll be performing live on today’s WNYC Soundcheck with John Schaefer. You can listen at 2:00 PM on 93.9 FM in the NYC area, or listen online here. Preceding me is an up-and-coming young composer by the name of Steve Reich.
1. Top 4 composers under 1000
2. Top 1000 composers under 4
3. Top 80 keys on the piano
4. Top 0.4 21st-century composers (spoiler: Andrew Norman’s head and neck)
5. Top 1 musical chair under my butt
I couldn’t make it to the LCD Soundsystem Lebewohl show at Madison Square Garden last night, neither could I watch the webcast. Right now, in fact, I’m sitting in the Southwest terminal at Houston Hobby, waiting for the early flight back to LGA because some of us just can’t keep our roofs on.
Twitter is great in these indeterminate waiting periods that occupy a great deal of one’s life. Except nobody I know is tweeting at this hour, except for Erik Spiekermann. Somehow I stumbled on the #LCDMSG tag, which people have cleverly used to mark their tweets relating to the aforementioned LCD Soundsystem concert. This as-it-happens crowdsourcing is one of the things Twitter is supposed to be used for, and about which much self-congratulatory nonsense has been spouted (along the lines of, “Who needs a $450/year NYT subscription when we can watch events unfold on Twitter?”)
In reality, Twitter falls laughably short. I tapped on #LCDMSG and found about three things, tweeted and re-tweeted in a never-ending feedback loop: “OMG #LCDMSG was soooo awesome” (wow, you should be a music critic), something about a person called Patrick Ewing about which I do not care and which may or may not be a joke, and finally, messages from spam-bots which had nothing whatever to do with LCD or MSG but noticed that it was a popular tag and wanted (if spam-bots are capable of want) to sell Viagra to people.
I know for certain of one friend who was in attendance, and I’ll be interested to talk about the show when I next see him (he wasn’t considerate enough to tweet; how rude). That’s the conundrum; I’m not too interested in the subjective experiences of strangers, even if the experiences themselves are ones I’m interested in. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the entire “hashtag” feature is pretty useless; most of my friends subvert the tags into a self-conscious form of parody, using them to editorialize their own thoughts in ways that, though often clever and funny, would be preposterous to search for.
Of course, humor is the saving grace of Twitter, that perfectly flippant medium.
I’m at 35,000 feet now, roof is holding strong. Looking good, Southwest!