If you love these blues: A Mike Bloomfield discography

I had the great privilege of compiling the discography at the back of the newly-published Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall of an American Guitar Hero, a totally revised and expanded edition of Ed Ward’s 1983 biography of the Chicago-born blues guitarist, from Chicago Review Press.

There have been a few nice write-ups of the book, from Rolling Stoneamong others. And a blurb on the back cover from Douglas Brinkley reads, in part: “The discography alone is worth the price of admission. Highly recommended!”

It was thanks to Ed Berger, of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, that I got the gig. Continue reading If you love these blues: A Mike Bloomfield discography

Sounds of the street

Over at Tumblr I have an ongoing project I call Audio Litter. When I see a discarded CD, cassette, pair of earbuds, or other audio carrier or listening device, I snap a photo and post it. Simple. Most of the photos I’ve taken so far have been on my walk between my apartment in the St. George neighborhood of Staten Island and the SI Ferry terminal.

I was inspired by the changing character of our audio litter — more cheap earbuds, fewer CDs — and I had been thinking along the same lines as Atlantic writer Adrienne LaFrance who last year filed a piece on deteriorating CDs:

Disc drives are disappearing from newer models of laptops and cars. Many of the places we used to buy CDs—Tower Records, Sam Goody, Borders—are gone. The memory of jogging with a Discman in hand seems absurd now, but that rain-slicker-yellow Sony Sports model was once top of the line. Even the iPod that replaced it feels like a brick compared with its slim successors.

Yes, the ubiquity of a once dominant media is again receding. Like most of the technology we leave behind, CDs are are being forgotten slowly. Eventually, even the fragments disappear. No more metallic shards of broken discs glinting from the gutter. No more old strands of tape cassette tangled in tree branches like tinsel. We stop using old formats little by little. They stop working. We stop replacing them. And, before long, they’re gone.

But once I started keeping my eyes peeled for this musical trash, I was surprised at the number of CDs and even cassettes I found on sidewalks, streets, and medians. Of course, in my neighborhood there are a lot of cars, and older cars do still have players for these things. That would explain the shattered Belkin cassette adapter I found last December. But I expect to make fewer discoveries like these in the years ahead.

Tumblr Image Bot: A friendly social media robot

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

The ARChive of Contemporary Music website features many image galleries depicting items from the collection, including great album and book covers, 45-rpm adaptors, punk flyers and more. Since the launch of the site in May 2014, web traffic to the galleries has been relatively low, about a third of the number of users that hit the homepage. The ARC’s social media posts also have relatively low reach and low engagement (e.g., average interaction per tweet = 1).

As an ARC employee and the developer of the ARC website, I thought that by repurposing interesting, fun, and quirky digital content in the context of social media, perhaps we could better engage followers, attract new users, and drive new traffic to the site, potentially attracting new donors to the non-profit archive.

This was my idea when I was dreaming up a final project for LIS 664 – Programming for Cultural Heritage. By the end of the semester, I had written some Python scripts that, in conjunction with free web services, allowed me to put this idea to the test. Continue reading Tumblr Image Bot: A friendly social media robot