Tonic, my hands-down favorite music venue in New York City, is closing. My first reaction was shock, but it subsided quickly because, well, it’s really no surprise, not like this hasn’t been happening (CBGB, Continental, etc). I found out about three hours ago, and now I’ve simply become sad. I’m really going to miss Tonic. There isn’t one other place - music venue or otherwise - that I’ve been able to rely on so consistently for inspiration like I have with Tonic.

Tonic is the only club that I could decide on a whim to walk over, pay admission, and be guaranteed to see great music. Today I’ve been thinking about why this is, what was it that made Tonic so great? It’s not just that I like the whole “avante garde” scene. It’s that the people making music in this space are all pioneers of sorts, innovators, people chasing a sound they hear, chasing a sound that doesn’t exist elsewhere. And the musicians who play at Tonic range from highly skilled to virtuoso.

The reason I have given up just walking into any other venue ‘on a whim’ is because too often the musicians playing there emanated “please buy our cd’s and if you’re a record exec, please sign me” rather than at Tonic where, overwhelmingly, the musicians are (were) just playing great stuff, and loving what they play(ed). Fuck, I hate having to use the past tense about Tonic.

Before I moved to NYC, while still living in Ithaca, our band played a show at the Baggott Inn. At that show, I met a girl, we dated a few times. Point of telling you this is not the girl, but that she lived across the street from the recently-opened Tonic (they hadn’t gotten their liquor license yet). I think Tonic kept me dating that girl longer than I otherwise would have

Not really so long ago. Tonic never made it to Legend status in the way CBGB did, but, wow what a place.

There’s a letter on the site, and I’ve been thinking about this one line:

It is, however, unfortunate that it is so difficult for small businesses to operate in this city and that a chain store that can afford a high rent is more desirable than a place like Tonic that has a different kind of value.

It’s a topic that’s been getting talked about a lot lately. Patti Smith, when asked about CBGB closing, commented that our society - and more importantly our city - is prospering too well for artists to flourish. She wasn’t really bemoaning it, kinda more just stating it. And on the whole, as I walked around today and every store is a major chain store, yes, there is something… sad… to see NYC getting chain-stored. That’s really the extent to which I’m willing to go right now. It makes me sad.

Without being overly optimistic, I’m..well, not hopeful, but expectant. Of what’s to come. Of what will replace this vacuum. New York City is filled with incredibly interesting, unique, purposeful people, artists, musicians, and the inner need to express, create and “make” does not go away just because the rent got raised. The short-term answer is Brooklyn? But if this trend continues, we’ll see Brooklyn getting converted as well, neighborhood by neighborhood.

Where will this trend lead us….? How will we respond….?

I don’t know, but I’m sad about this. I’ve really depended on Tonic. I wish they had made this known with more lead time, reached out to the community for some kind of support. This is such a short notice, seems like the decision has been made, and only two weeks until closing time.

                 

I attended the NY Chapter of the Social Media Club two nights ago, and the discussion launched off of Jay Rosen’s http://www.assignmentzero.com which is an experiment on the idea that you can cover the new as good or better by using a widely dispersed group, acting in unison, than one single professional journalist.  It’s based on the idea of “Crowd Sourcing” where many people each do a small amount, and yield powerful results.

For a lot of this topic I was simply enjoying certain ideas popping out.  I like the idea of harnessing the spare moments of many people.  Some interesting benefits to this:

• reduce the amount of inference, assumption and speculation on the part of any one individual, because that individual’s task is so restricted in scope, that there’s no reason for him/her to stretch beyond what he’s absolutely sure of
• increase the focus on single points of strength; the other side of the restriction coin is that because each person focuses only and wholly on what s/he is good at, each single point’s strength is raised, which therefore raises the strength of the whole piece
• As part of this process, the biggest hurdle, or problem to solve, is organizing the participants/contributors.  How to keep 700+ journalists working in tandem?  Another question to ask is, how to easily and quickly identify - or help participants to identify - their single most effective way to contribute.  Because in this type of organization, it’s always best for the overall if each individual were to focus on what s/he does best.
• What could this do to celebrity?  I love this idea, that in harnessing the efforts and strengths of many people’s small contributions, you naturally do away with the need - or possibility - of the “I” to shine, of the “Me” to be fed.  “I” and “Me” become sublimated to the “Us” and “We” - Can this tradeoff be carried out in a way that my own “Me” is fed directly by being part of the “We”

The conversation soon moved to asking question about credibility and trust in journalism and the media.  We started off by asking how do we, as content receivers, get our news and determine who is trustworthy, etc.  And since most of us in the room are also content producers, the discussion quickly turned to that side of the topic:  How can “I” as a content producer, make it clear that I am credible, trustworthy, believable, etc?

Although it really is an important topic with a wealth of tips, techniques and strategies for both explicit and implicit communication of “my credibility” I believe that the desire of the content producer to be viewed as credible can be considered at odd with the desire of the content receiver to receive trustworthy, solid “content” or news.

So going back to having one news piece be covered by 700 people instead of just one, I want to make two analogies.

First is the car insurance industry.  If you are male, 21 years 3 months old, 6′, brown hair (plus a whole lot of other information) they can predict, with a certain amount of reliability, what your liklihood of getting into a car accident is.   It’s not bias.  It’s not belief.  It’s just statistics.  With mass amounts of data, no one person needs to be an individual.  He is just a liklihood.  And while it’s degrading to the individual, it’s an incredibly efficient way of assessing risk factors across millions of people, something that in no way could be accomplished by assigning a personalized, rigorous interview process for each car insurance applicant.

Second example:  On this blog, I get 25-to-45 visitors a day for the search term “Myspace Music Player” and 110-140 visitors a day for the search term “VIP Movie Tickets.”  I’m not sure which engines they come from, but I know what my logs tell me.  But look at what I just wrote.  How is that possible?  Are there 45 people in the world who, each day, type in the search “Myspace Music Player” and then click on my site?  I mean, is it the same 45 people?  Impossible.  Every day, a DIFFERENT 25-to-45 people type that search phrase into the engines and end up clicking into my site.

And this is just a small example (because both these topics are only a few months old on my site).  I have pages here and on other sites where these types of trends continue for months, and years.

It’s the same concept as with the car insurance companies.  While there’s no way to predict what any one individual in the world will type into the search engines, it IS possible to predict, after a while, how many random individuals in the world will search and find my site.

So how this relates to establishing credibility?  It means that you or I, desiring to be an informed world citizen of the world, can be better serves by DECREASING our need to find one or a few highly credible sources, and instead putting our time and efforts towards drastically increasing the sheer number of sources.  While any one of those sources may or may not be trustworthy, or may or may not be biased, by making the choice to take in a wide range of bias and human flaws, the average result will be that I have a clear view of the situation.

In reality, this means that if I’m pro-bush, I increase my informed-ness by reading both pro-bush, anti-bush, and all the variations in between.  The belief that any one group, and one person does NOT have bias is flat out false.  So if I, the reader, want as broad and true a picture of reality as possible, I can only hurt myself by preferring one bias over another.  I may at the end of the day decide to SIDE with one view.  But which side I TAKE should not influence HOW MUCH I KNOW.

Ok, that’s all for now…

                 

So, I just got in the mood to mention some of the music I’ve seen lately… First was Takenobu who I caught at the Living Room in nyc… mellow stuff, but I like his use of loop layers on his cello. I was impressed he sounds very similar live as he does on the recordings.

Next show, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, just all out insanity. I love these guys (and gal - Carla Kilstedt is something else altogether). The band who opened for them (I forget the name) was also impressive however, after about midway through the show, my attention started waning. What is it that I can be seeing a band with a very unique compositional style, high musicianship but can leave me feeling drained rather than uplifted? It might something as simple as taste or preference, but whatever it is, the contrast between the opening band and Sleepytime really highlights the difference.

Both bands employ similar approach to musicianship and odd- and unique-rhytmic time signatures, yet the first band seemed to perform the amazing musicianship, while Sleepytime’s high-skill level is just a means to an end, they twist and tweak music to create another world. Really love their stuff.

Onto The Flaming Fire! - I stumbled into their show at Tonic a few months ago, the description just made em sound weird, so that was enough for me. They frikin ROCKED. Blew me away, really one of the most fun I’ve had a show in a while. I loved the interplay between all the vocalists, they were singing together, and then intertwined, but almost always at the same time. I love that stuff. So I’ve been looking forward to seeing them again, and just caught em this past saturday night opening for barbez. And yes, I still enjoyed em, I gotta say I was disappointed. They were much less ‘out there’ than the previous time at Tonic, and also had too many solo songs. From my perspective, Patrick seems to be the driving force of that band, and this show he sat half the songs out, just chugging beers (still putting out tons of great vibes, but put that beer can down bro and get a screamin

The group’s energy can’t be knocked, and I can respect that they want to increase their accessibility, but, at the same time F*%K THAT - you guy are out there, and don’t water yourselves down like that. That first show at tonic that I caught you folks really kicked major ass. Hope to catch your weirder side again soon…

Barbez and Pamelia Kurstin - I would catch Barbez whenever I can, but something about them, just leaves me without anything to say. However, Pamelia well, it’s rare you get to see such a level of viruosity like this on an instrument you didn’t expect could be brought to this level. It really is mezmerising to watch her play that thing. She’s playing again at Tonic on April 28, see ya’ll there!