Blogger Book Club: Shelf Empowerment

Some books just insist that you take the topic beyond the page, and so this week I'm super excited to inaugurate Blogger Book Club here at Mind the Gap. First off the shelf for discussion is the sure-to-stir-debate Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig.

Once upon a time I heard the name Lawrence Lessig mentioned during a panel at a publishing conference, and a room full of adults actually hissed in response. Who was this beast? As it turned out, he was a man with big (and, to some, incendiary) ideas--most of which had reducing the legal reach of copyright at their core. When I saw him on The Colbert Report a couple months back, it was clear he was still rocking boats. 

If terms like "intellectual property protection" and "copyright reform" raise your pulse rate, come take a seat on our virtual couch. If you'd like a little background before we get started, you can give the book's contents a skim here, and there's a quick capsule summary here.

Now, I'm no Oprah, but I am thrilled to be able to say that the following awesome people overlooked that part and agreed to join the club for this freshman outing:

• Corey Dargel is a Texas-born, Brooklyn-based composer, writer, and singer. Recent projects include the album Other People's Love Songs and the music-theater piece Removable Parts. Corey blogs at 13neardeathexperiences.com about the creation of his new art-pop song cycle commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble.

• Marc Geelhoed manages the Grammy-winning in-house record label of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, CSO Resound. He was the first classical critic for Time Out Chicago, where he wrote from 2005 to 2008, and has contributed to Slate, the Financial Times, and the New Statesman.

• Composer and pianist Matthew Guerrieri's writing is always found at the blog Soho the Dog, frequently found in the Boston Globe, and occasionally spotted in NewMusicBox, Slate, and Playbill.

• Lisa Hirsch lives in Oakland, CA, where she's a technical writer by day and a music reviewer, blogger, and chorister by night. Read more of her writing at Iron Tongue of Midnight.
  

• Saxophonist Brian Sacawa is the executive director of Mobtown Modern, a new music series presented by the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. He is also the co-founder of the duo Hybrid Groove Project, author of the blog Sounds Like Now, and a fierce bicycle racer.

• Composer Alex Shapiro aligns note after note with the hope that a few of them might actually sound good next to each other. Alex's acoustic and electroacoustic works are performed and broadcast weekly across the U.S. and internationally, and can be found on almost twenty commercially released recordings. A former longtime Los Angeles denizen, she was born and raised in Manhattan and now lives on acreage closely supervised by the deer and foxes of Washington state's San Juan Island. Alex procrastinates on her next piece by updating her website and her blog.

• Steve Smith is a man out about town Night After Night. He is also the music editor for Time Out New York, a weekly lifestyle, arts and entertainment magazine in New York City, as well as a regular contributor to The New York Times.

• Marc Weidenbaum writes daily at Disquiet.com (since 1996) about ambient/electronic music and sound art. He's been published in Nature, NewMusicBox, Down Beat, and Pulse! (where he was an editor for seven years, and edited the comics for a decade), as well as in the manga magazine Shonen Jump (where he was an editor for five years), among other places. In April he'll have an audio piece in an exhibit at the Crewest Gallery in Los Angeles. He lives in San Francisco's Richmond District.