Last week I was at a dinner party when a guest to my left suggested I update my thinking about the gender gap from a glass ceiling to a window. Something on par with the views afforded by the floor-to-ceiling sashes at Jazz at Lincoln Center, perhaps?

I promised I'd think it over and have been ever since, though I admit it has me troubled like a riddle I can't quite parse. Am I to take away from this visual analogy that rather than unsuspectingly hitting my head, in 2010 I can expect only to have to bloody my fist on the forward charge? With a well-applied heel of my hand to the frame of the window, can I nudge it upwards with a little patience and minus any permanent damage to myself or the transom? All these scenarios demonstrate some interesting parallels when it comes to interpreting the state of play out there as far as gender politics goes. Look and see what's around you, note all that has changed (Gail does the research, January cracks the jokes). Maybe question if the window is really even there at all (well, if you want to get all mystical about it, at least).

Same dinner party, but this time the guest seated on my right is explaining how lost he has felt  ever since a new music director came on board at his orchestra. The new maestro was great, he acknowledged, but he was just so...so different, you know. "As in Wife Swap different?" someone inquired. And we all paused and tilted out heads and imagined what that would look like, and how close it already was to how things run in many orchestras, what with the game of musical chairs played by new hires and guest visits and the like. Drama all around. The Reality TV part, though? Well, we all laughed nervously for a second about that, and then the guest on my right disappeared to make a few phone calls. Hmm.

Aside: Though no one smokes at dinner parties anymore, you should be able to smoke at concerts, "other than, you know, the Symphony Orchestra,"--performances which are apparently not "hardcore" enough to warrant lighting up.

Of late it wasn't Jay-Z as the new Sinatra that was hard to shake, but Alicia belting it out in Times Square (guess I was a little homesick or something).

And then, though Taylor clearly didn't want to talk about it, I couldn't stop her from telling me--over and over again.

La, la, la, so yeah. And if you're worried things are getting a little light and flaky around here, go get caught up on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

Well, there's a site that will do it for you, and it will even parse the Auto-Tune trend trajectory (though admittedly the "how" does not illuminate the "why").

However, now that I am properly outfitted with a consumption method, I love finding out who is reading what and why. But it's also making me wonder: Is anyone regularly reading blogs anymore, or have they been traded in for your TweetDeck? Who ranks as the best of the bunch you are following, and how are they feeding you?

[via BoingBoing]

But the one designed by Rhett and Link of "I Love Local Commercials" for Ray's Midbell Music of Sioux City, Iowa, capitalizing on the "band rap", is awkwardly poignant as well.

Now, I hear the LA Phil has the community cultural advertising thing down, but some other towns might need a hand in the marketing department. I'm not sure if these guys are open to such a project, but just imagine the possibilities if they showed up in your neck o' the woods.

Speaking of stirring up the dust, the NEA's own Rocco throws a hypothetical punch behind agency support for artistic areas such as hip-hop and graffiti. Cool, right? Gawker explains why this may not be such a great idea.

As it turns out, that conversation merely hinted at what this artistic polymath and self-confessed philosopher has to offer his audiences. I've been having a grand time digging much more deeply into his work as I put together the materials for this month's NewMusicBox cover story on him, which we posted today. His interview is brimming with great quotes, but here's a crash course that includes as much performance footage as I could pack in:

As per usual, editing choices had to be made and I didn't get to include one of my favorite Rinde Eckert tracks in the final production. Thanks to blogging, I'll be able to correct that in this space. This is "Carlo Dreams" from Eckert's song cycle Four Songs Lost In A Wall, which appeared on his 1997 release Story In, Story Out.

And grumble though I do about eating dinner before six, the lack of public transport, and what's not playing at the local cineplex--basically, the way people live their lives in community X as opposed to where I have chosen to make my home--the truth is that I recognize that the smacks about the head these trips deal me are very valuable. I live in a bubble of assumptions about life, surrounded by people who tend to agree with me, and if that shell doesn't get punctured from time to time, I risk forgetting that there are millions of people who live their lives quite differently than I do and, more importantly, I might never learn about why that is.

My mom has a habit of clipping out newspaper articles for me, often of the "opinion" variety from the local newspaper. In the last batch she included a syndicated piece by a conservative columnist named Rod Dreher, who writes for the Dallas Morning News. Titled Polanski Affair Reveals True Hollywood, it was a look at why groups of people--American citizens, Hollywood actors, the Catholic Church, etc.--will quickly rally to defend people "like them" even when controversial (and in some cases illegal) activity is involved. I was willing to follow him through the first few graphs, but then he decided to take down "Art" and the "cult of the artist" and I had to pause:

Does the filmmaking world celebrate child molestation? Of course not. What it celebrates is Art, which is to say, aesthetic pleasure elevated to the level of moral principle. It wasn't until I left reviewing films professionally that I realized fully what immersing one's mind in the imaginative world of contemporary filmmaking can do to one's moral sense. Without realizing it, one might come to see boredom as the root of all evil, and the artist who can deliver us from dullness as a kind of priest who brings us absolution through beauty and transcendence through self-forgetting.

That's greatly oversimplifying matters, admittedly, but this is only a crude version of a concept deeply embedded in modern thought: the cult of the artist. The creative class sees the artist's role as revealing deep truths to humanity, especially verities we may not wish to hear. It's all too easy to accept that men who serve as a bridge between the sacred and the profane are somehow exempt from the moral code the rest of us live by.

Leaving aside the Polanski issue for a moment, since that was flat out illegal, assuming that the moral code "the rest of us live by" is a fixed idea dividing "artists" and "everyone else" seems beyond an oversimplification to me. These codes are fluid in so many ways, variable by so many factors--geography, economics, age, religion. More than most groups, artists seem to flow between them, ferreting out their fundamentals and illustrating how communities of people apply them to their lives. And if we're going to count on this creative class of people to do the exploring and the feeling for those who can't or won't go there for themselves but yet go buy tickets to see what those artists have discovered, is it hypocritical to then chastise those same artists for bad behavior (as long as it's of the legal kind)? Is there a line, or does the value in the exercise require that we don't draw them one?

Now that's not to pretend that the things artists want to show us aren't scary and shocking and uncomfortable sometimes. But you don't have to reflect on the travails of your local drug dealer or watch another Lars von Trier movie if you don't want to.

Hipsters everywhere should take heed. Buble's success demonstrates the enormous power of that not-yet-banished sector of entertainment consumers: uncool people. While their tastes may account for zero percent of the stories America's hipster-obsessed music press writes, they still control a vast swath of the actual music spending dollar.

The humor lies in having actually sat in the theater when the curtain went up once or twice, though, no? Would it, could it actually be a murderously good joke without that part?

I love that Leonard Slatkin (or the people behind his website at least--anyone know if he'd be the sort to pen this kind of thing himself? Leonard, are you out there?) was willing to go there. I mean, it  has impact precisely because it's a Music Director of Slatkin's reputation tossing out ideas like:

For the final work on the program, Rachmaninov's 2nd Symphony, the conductor is not only going to reinstate the cuts sanctioned by the composer, but will add some additional ones as well. All in all the total performing time will be about 12 minutes.

"The piece is so long and repetitive. Once you have heard the main tunes, well, they are so memorable that they do not have to be played again."

Slatkin went on to say, "It is my hope to perform a Bruckner cycle using this philosophy. In that way, we can get through all of them in one concert, perhaps with time for the two that have no number as well."

Shield your eyes if you find such satire shocking, but really, love or hate that the Maestro is cracking jokes, it offers all symphony patrons something vital--something to dish about over intermission cocktails. 

Reading over the list, I don't think that websites foster the same sense of obligation in the reader that public radio can suggest to those consuming its transmissions. We might be offering similarly enriching news and information, but no single site holds me captive or emotionally connects strongly enough that I wouldn't just click away. Am I wrong about this? If your favorite website carved out a week and relentlessly asked you for cash, implied that you owed them for what you'd been reading for free and enjoying all year, threatened that without you they couldn't go on, and offered you an umbrella in return for your charity, would you pony up?

(And if so, do you need my mailing address? I've got these lovely tote bags I can send as a thank you, and for the next hour your donation will be matched dollar-for-dollar by my Aunt Sallie.)

First, in last week's issue we got a few words on program notes:

"The Dialogue Between the Wind and the Sea" pits roiling strings against strident brass, belligerent woodwinds, and unhinged timpani bent on physical reprisal. Again, the composer ingeniously juxtaposes regular and triple figures, a development that for many years was hailed as a breakthrough in modern composition, although it is now generally acknowledged to have been a printer's error. Still, the layered rhythms create a spectacular lurching effect that vividly evokes the roll of waves, as well as a tremendous desire to urinate.

And now this week we get a few tips on marketing when the only person left on staff is the intern:

If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they're better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent. You may have gotten the blast e-mail from Jason Zepp, your acquiring editor, saying that people who do this sort of thing will go to Hell, but just ignore it.

And if everything your tech department has ever said to you sounds something like that, it only gets better from there...

No, of course I don't. But staring out at a sea of panel attendees taking pictures and video with their iPhones last week suggested to me that it was perhaps wise that I board this bandwagon already if I was going to continue working in internet media. (Also, a bit later when starvation was eminent and Sidney asked his iPhone where we should eat lunch, it literally drew us a map.) And so, with my reservations finally tamped down, Brian and I welcomed twin iPhones into our lives this past weekend--his wearing the black case, mine in steely mauve.

I have to admit that it is a pretty cool device and I am enjoying getting to know my new little gadget. Still, suddenly having five more ways to organize my copious to-do lists did not exactly lower my stress level.

"You need a game!" I thought to myself, while browsing through all those actually productivity increasing apps. But the whizz and bang of the games on offer didn't really seem like my thing. The zen garden, however, was a bit too much of a cat nap. And then, across a crowded iTunes store, I saw it. Bloom. For the remainder of the weekend, every time Brian looked up from his own iPhone to ask what I was doing, I was not exploring new ways to organize my travel reservations or plan dinner menus. I was actually making music again. Well, sorta-kinda.

(Video is by mrk087, not yours truly. Sorry for any confusion there, folks.) 

Anyway, it was an eye-opening, career-examining, industry-evaluating set of events, and though being a "music" "journalist" sort of feels like standing on the decks of two sinking ships in this economic environment, I ended up really jazzed about the field because of how passionately people create, consume, and connect over music these days. Sure, making a living wage and having health care are not small concerns, but if those first pieces aren't in place, we are surely lost on the rest of it, so I was encouraged.

Now, on to the things I learned about, or learned more about, that you might find useful in your own life and work:

1. Need money? Try Kickstarter

What does that do, you ask? Kickstarter is "is a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers..." I personally know at least one composer who successfully used this platform to raise the funding he needed to make a record.

Think this can't possibly work? Seriously, none of these videos make you at least consider opening your wallet? Not even Allison's?:

2. Need dynamic multimedia? Meet Sophie

Love all the crazy multimedia content out there but feeling technically under-skilled to put it all to use in the digital realm? There's an app for that! Well, actually not an app, it's a whole set of software tools and it's really for educational institutions to use, but I see a wider application of this kind of product coming down the pike, don't you? Go ahead and dance about architecture!

3. Need new music? Get ready for Spotify

Not yet available in the US (licensing deals still to be done), it's the streaming music service Europe is abuzz over that's completely legal and completely free (ad supported). Subscribe for extra bells and whistles and to avoid the ads. I tried not to get sucked in as Spotify's founder and CEO Daniel Ek spoke to the crowd, but he was just so,...so rational in all his answers about why Spotify was successful, what it would offer users directly and what it would partner with others to do. I couldn't help myself, I was completely mesmerized.

Also:

1. Al Franken is still bringing the smart and funny, even though he is now a serious Senator dealing with lots of heavy issues.

2. Music journalists: You are only worth the audience you bring.

3. Facts and figures courtesy Ariel Hyatt via Greg Kot: "U.S. album sales in 2008: More than 115,000 albums were released, but only 110 sold more than 250,000 copies, a mere 1,500 topped 10,000 sales, and fewer than 6,000 cracked the 1,000 barrier."