One of the best things you can do for yourself as a band is to start touring as early as possible. As Mike King puts it on Artist House Music’s blog, “Tour Early and Tour Often.” He also mentions that in order to do this effectively, “be sure that your live show is awesome.” And [...]
Author Archives: matthew
Innovation Driving Ideas for 2010
January 14, 2010 – 10:46 pm
The end of 2009 saw reflective lists from everyone who could get up the energy to dredge their memories and diaries. I’d like to offer a different list, a wishlist for 2010, or a to-do list for the decade if you can’t get to it this year. I contributed to a similar list focused solely [...]
Print Killed Authenticity
January 13, 2010 – 5:25 pm
The first topic we address in Society and the Information Age are the cultural and societal shifts that occurred with the coming of the book and the extinction of oral tradition. Although we are now several technological generations beyond the book as a technology, parallels remain between society containing only verbal content and our now variegated content-saturated [...]
Society in the Information Age: New(ish) Course for Spring 2010
January 13, 2010 – 1:09 am
Rice University has asked me to act as a substitute instructor for the spring 2010 semester teaching a course entitled Society in the Information Age. The course examines the effects of technology on the ways in which we live, work and think about the world around us. This course has been taught for the better part [...]
How to Cook Like an Engineer
January 5, 2010 – 1:50 pm
When I go out to eat with friends, our meals arrive at the same time, and usually all at the same temperature. In my personal kitchen, this is next to impossible. Aside from a cripplingly novice technique, the most difficult part of cooking for me is timing. I tend towards complicated multi-dish meals that require [...]
Day 17 of Christmas Sweater Advent Calendar
December 18, 2009 – 3:53 am
A stressful end to six months of hard work needed to be rewarded with a couple days off to relax. At first, traditional methods of relaxation were attempted at brief intervals; reading, playing a short video game, taking a walk, watching a movie, sleeping in an hour. These were met with complete failure and as [...]
6 Months Later – Part 1
December 17, 2009 – 11:06 pm
I have an honest admission to make: I haven’t really been online for the past six months. Sure, I pop onto Twitter to dump 140 characters of what I’m doing at the moment and continue to read the NYTimes and Pitchfork daily. But the fact is, most of my media consumption over the past six [...]
Day 3 of Christmas Sweater Advent Calendar: Movie Recommendations!
December 3, 2009 – 6:24 pm
The Christmas movie is a well explored genre. It’s rife with films exploring the symbols of Christmas: family, giving, compassion, forgiveness, redemption. These topics play themselves out using Christmas as the central theme or the holidays as the setting. One of the most wonderful thing about this genre is the way it brings families together in [...]
Day 2 of Christmas Sweater Advent Calendar: Send me your Sweaters!
December 3, 2009 – 12:37 am
Christmas sweaters have a strange effect on people. They treasure them like any other sentimental object and parade them around when given the opportunity, sometimes completely oblivious to the ridiculousness. As I was talking about the Christmas Sweaters last year at the Center for Hearing and Speech, the director mentioned her “Favorite Christmas Sweater.” Every [...]