If I admitted that I shed tears while Patti Smith sang “Because the Night” a capella, would you make fun of me?
Despite the vastness of Benaroya Hall and the heaviness of her poetry and the sadness buried with Robert Mapplethorpe, a smile crept on my face each time she mumbled an apology for fumbling a line as she nervously fussed with her hair. This was intimacy intensified, so strong that it pulled me down from my nosebleed balcony seat into her lap. I felt like it was okay to reach out and touch her wild mane. Her voice scratched with the richest texture which snapped my heartstrings.
It was a beautiful night.





Apropos everything
Watch this video first.
Okay, now we are on the same page. Not to point out the obvious to anyone, but the Media (yes, capital M implying a singular entity, which I defend with giant conglomerate media companies) – it is a cesspool of suckage. It is a buy-product of an era where people had at most two venues for information (newspaper and network television), mediated by whatever network affiliates found interesting for the day. It is dying. And it is scary because it is the thing I always thought I would be involved with, career-wise. I think this video gently pokes fun at how predictable, unimaginative, and formulaic it comes across to audiences.
Now we have Twitter, RSS feeds, and even Facebook to receive what we consider pertinent information. The question that haunts me, and shapes most of my academic interest, is what classifies information as pertinent. Is it demarcated as interesting because it pops up in a news feed of Facebook, or truncated in a 140 character tweet? It’s a complicated issue to think about, considering how diverse motivations for information gathering can be. For some, news is simply something to talk to others about (social stitching?) and for others, it is to be engaged in a global environment.
This is an open-ended dialogue. What does news look like to you? Why is it useful? What types of information are compelling to you?