The Age of Video

If you stop and think about it, it's pretty amazing that I can pull up nearly any video I want. And, that it can be very easy for me to watch something that someone tells me I should. I'm listening to Radiohead's House of Cards after being told by another blogger, Corbin at I'm Spatial, which has me really digging this band for the first time. I've never been much of a fan, but this song is kind of catchy.

The way they captured these images is interesting, given that it's all made up of data as near as I can tell. We'll come back to that at one point, but this video seems pretty important to me because of the way it is introducing the concept of visual representation by pure data to a wide audience.



And now I'm listening to an interview with a young Jimmy Page, thanks to this blog, playing some skiffle. The blogger might not know it, but skiffle is the name given to what was played in Liverpool, this style of taking the blues by way of the early rock and roll that was going on at the moment. Maybe some day I could interview my dad for a podcast about this, given that he's in the same cohort as the Beatles, who started off as a skiffle band.



If I were an academic or if I had a slightly more organized mind, perhaps I'd write more about skiffle. I could take research projects to England, to visit Liverpool. I've not been in over ten years now. I had hoped to go this year, given that they're the European City of Culture.

But, back to the James Page thing. Yes, I would love to do some sort of musical study of this music, given that Led Zeppelin ended up being some of the best evolution of the blues Robert Johnson could have asked for. I recently snagged a lot of original Led Zeppelin on vinyl, and I've been revisiting all of that. I know why it's important, but I lack the vocabulary and the discipline to write about it in such a way that might be interesting to people. In the past, I would have thought a radio piece might work, but I'm not sure about that anymore. I don't really know how to tell stories anymore. Have I lost my chops?

Anyway, James Page became Jimmy Page, and to prove the ridiculous claim I made above about Zeppelin and the Blues, I present this:



Do what I do - just listen. Surf elsewhere while YouTube is on. It's kind of fun that way for so much of this stuff.