Robert Switzer

Second shift is over. My wife finished her evening assignment on Friday of last week and is now back on her normal schedule, as am I. So I’m bleary and jet-lagged this morning. We got up this morning around 6, after two weeks of staying up late and laying in.

After blowing about a thousand bucks, everyone in the family now has an iPod. Gail bought daughter Jen a 4 gig Nano, and then I bought a new 60 gig model last week and gave the 30 gig Gail got me for my birthday back to her. The iPod itself is a great product, though my enthusiasm doesn’t extend to the iTunes software, or the iTunes Store. More on that later.

Speaking of Jen, right now she’s somewhere in the Mekong Delta taking photos. Her school set up a 3 week tour of Vietnam and Cambodia for art students, and she signed up. I’m jealous — I’ve been to Europe and South America, but I’ve never done this kind of hard-core travel — a slightly risky trip to a truly foreign destination.

As a part of my introduction to blogging and the current state-of-the art, I’ve been checking out the offerings of others, and subscribing if they are feed-enabled. It seems like the focus of most of the feed-enabled blogs I’ve stumbled across is ‘Web 2.0′, whatever that is.

One dude in particular is especially interesting, though I’m not going to mention him by name or track back to him just yet. For now I’ll just call him ‘Clifford Stoll 2.0′.

For anyone who doesn’t remember, in 1996, Clifford Stoll wrote a book called ‘Silicon Snake Oil’ that was thoughtfully critical of the giddy boosterism surrounding the internet boom of the late ’90’s.

Stoll made the point that an enhanced virtual life can’t and won’t fix many of the problems of real life, which is true as far as it goes. And as he said, you can’t snake out a drain by pointing and clicking. What he failed to acknowledge is that if you’ve never snaked a drain before, you can learn how by pointing and clicking.

Stoll 2.0, on the other hand, is concerned that the open, accessible world of internet self-publishing, the many-to-many media paradigm that currently threatens traditional top-down broadcast media, is a grievous threat to what he calls ‘elite culture’.

His position is a variation on ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, a parable created by William Forster Lloyd, that demonstrates how unrestricted access to a resource ultimately dooms the resource because of over-exploitation.

The Commons that Stoll 2.0 is talking about is attention. In his view, the ever-increasing volume of stuff out there, especially stuff generated by amateurs or avocational creators, will overwhelm what he calls ‘elite culture’.

And it seems to me that what he’s calling ‘elite culture’ is the stuff generated by the traditional media outlets — big media, he calls it.

I’m in complete agreement with him on the importance of elite culture, though I don’t think that elite culture is always a product of the existing elites.

Amateur or avocational creators are no threat to elite culture and may in fact contribute to and expand the boundaries of it.

Elite culture isn’t the result of discovery and marketing by a large media company but rather the result of extraordinary talent or even genius.

Extraordinary talent and genius are self-evident, even to people on MySpace.

I always liked Austin City Limits, and the formula of putting a band or two in a live context, and then capturing the performance appealed to me.

I hadn’t seen the show for a long time. And I was interested in seeing what the media powers-that-be were currently flogging. So a week or two ago, I set up the TiVo with a season pass for Austin City Limits.

Last night after we finished with ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘Big Love’ there was still an hour or so left before bedtime, and there was a recent Austin City Limits on the TiVo ‘Now Playing’ list.

The show had aired in the last couple of weeks and featured two bands, The Killers and Spoon.

I had no idea who either were, though I was more than a little curious about The Killers because I’m a big fan of their namesake, Jerry Lee Lewis.

Spoon were billed as an Austin band, and I had an immediate flash of earnest, very un-Texas looking young men in earth-tones doing wordy songs for sensitive, introverted boys and girls to puzzle over in their well-appointed suburban bedrooms.

As it turns out, I wasn’t far wrong but first, The Killers.

All of a sudden, it’s 1983 again and I’m in a dingy, hot, crowded strip-mall night-club at the height of the new-wave suburban dispersion.

Back then thousands of bands like The Killers were knockin’ it out and makin’ ‘em sweat in towns small, medium, and large all across the USA. And none of those bands were much good, either.

Two seconds into The Killer’s set, I had them pegged, right on the Joy Division/New Order border but blander instrumentally, with a big dash of early U2, and, dare I say it, Freddy Mercury thrown in.

Perfectly OK stuff for rockin’ the secretaries and shoe salesmen down at the strip mall, but despite being one of the latest things being flogged by some big media company or another, totally unremarkable and undeniable proof that the wave of post-punk resurgence is cresting.

Spoon were just what I thought they’d be, a group of earnest, over-funded young men attuned to the coffee shop/bookstore side of town singing wordy songs and playing some of the coolest vintage guitars ever.

While The Killers would probably *be* shoe salesmen if they weren’t making music, more than one of Spoon are going to go to law school eventually.

The Killers definitely had the feel of a band — a group effort — despite the flashy frontman, though the group effort was weak in the songwriting department. But the rhythm section rocked hard.

Spoon, on the other hand, were definitely about the singer/songwriter. The rest of the band were probably some non-threatening buddies — OK musicians with no tunes of their own. The drummer had some of the weirdest body-mechanics I’ve ever seen in a percussionist and the bassist was so introverted that he might have imploded at any moment.

Spoon were probably the better band by a nose, but that isn’t saying much. Neither were anything special. And both were definitely big-media productions. Elite culture? Probably not.

You can find bands this good and even better on MySpace.

But hey, if you smoosh the two together taking the rhythmic drive, sweaty energy and feral sexuality of The Killers, getting rid of the brick-dumb songwriting, and pouring in Spoon’s smarty-pants lyrics while leaving out the goin’ to law school vibe and keeping the cool guitars, bingo! You’ve got it — The Spoon Killers.

Meanwhile, if a real band in the neo post-punk mode interests you, I recommend !!! and especially The Rapture.

Playing right now: 99 Problems, DJ Danger Mouse from The Grey Album.

On Vinyl of late: White Album, The Beatles; Blow By Blow and Wired, Jeff Beck; ‘Dance To The Music of Irving Berlin’, uncredited, on SpinORama Records.