Nano Note: QDOS
After a few months of simply playing the Nanos that I’ve already loaded with classical music — Opera (Pink), Fave Classics (Green), Baroque (Red), and Other (Blue) — I’ve gone back to the drawing board on creating playlists.
The Fave Classics program took months to build, because I was trying to automate the iTunes playlist by assigning each work its own album name, so that lining the works up in alphabetical order would also line them up in program order. Organizing the program by means of artificial album titles also allowed me to print a playlist, which seemed important at the time.
Over time, I got to be more comfortable with iTunes playlists — and I began to get tired of my elaborately constructed programs. The Fave Classics, by its very nature, held up well. I more or less loved everything on it, and it took a week to play. But I hardly ever played the Other (Blue) Nano. It was loaded with things that I had to be in the mood for. I began to see the need for greater flexibility in creating programs.
Ideally, I thought, I’d assemble an 8G program in a few minutes, pointing and clicking. That’s where going back to the drawing board comes in.
As a device for converting the music CDs into MP3 files, iTunes works like this: it locates an identifying number on the CD and then searches remote databases for information about the disc: how many cuts (tracks), titles, names of performers, and so on. All of this is very straightforward in the world of popular music, because there isn’t all that much information to work with. Classical music, with its vastly different forms (from grand opera to piano sonatas, the sheer number of performers varies hugely), its multitude of languages, and its wide variety of packaging options, daunts the compiler of databases — a human being of greater or lesser sophistication — with a barrage of decisions.
What, for example, is the title of the album? That would seem straightforward enough, but in practice it’s not. Take Wagner’s Götterdämmerung — The Twilight of the Gods, the fourth and final opera in the Ring des Nibelungen tetralogy. The best known recording of this mammoth work, conducted by the late Sir Georg Solti, comprises four CDs. The first one — according to iTunes’s search — is entitled “Wagner: Götterdämmerung (Solti) (Disc 1). The fourth disc is almost the same, but not quite: “Wagner: Götterdämmerung,” but with no parenthetical information. The third disc is chirpily titled, “Götter 3.” And the title of the second disc is in Japanese.
That is only one example of disorder in just one data field. Allow me to insist that working with the database that iTunes creates on your computer requires a lot of rewriting. If you want to assemble a program quickly, using this information, you need a uniform code of data entry.
Which is nothing new to me. I battled with the problem as a college freshman, punching data cards in the basement of the Computer Center. (Someone needs to make a period movie about the room-sized computers of the mid Sixties.) When I was a freshman, I thought that spending a lot of time building a database was stupid. Now I believe that any amount of one-time-only tedium is worth repeated ease-of-use later on.
It took about ninety minutes, the other day, to develop my database parameters. They’re extremely idiosyncratic, drawing heavily on the way that I kept the card catalogue when I was the Music Director at KLEF in Houston. I don’t know if anyone else would think of arranging such a catalogue according to the date of composer’s birth, but I found this very helpful, because I had to please several constituencies (several!), and found it easier to do so when pulling selections with my left hand (early music) could be offset by choices made from the right, with the center serving exactly as centers are supposed to do. It didn’t take more than a second to decide to set up iTunes folders with titles such as “1756 Mozart.” The folders (technically, playlists) line up automatically, but remain easy to identify.
Composing a new program for the Blue Nano, by interpolating a number of new additions to the database into a program that I threw together yesterday, did indeed take less than a minute. It took about six clicks to load it onto the Nano.
Ah, to be a true photographer. Then I’d know how to take this picture and make it snap. But I’m not, so you had to be there. A beautiful summer afternoon, hundreds of feet overlooking the Hudson River, an already quasi-Rhenish vista without the mighty parapets that command — nothing more strategic than the entrance to the Cloisters from the Henry Hudson Parkway. Like the park from which I took the photograph, the verdant palisade on the opposite shore owes to Rockefeller largesse, guinea’d by the absence, in these parts anyway, of the Rockefeller name.Â
As Houston dries off after Ike — and tries to get the power going — I offer a slight souvenir of last week’s tempest, the remnant of Hanna that blew through New York with desultory winds but buckets of rain. It was far too inclement to go out and take real pictures!
A touch of fall in the air last week tempted me to trundle the portable room air-conditioner off into the closet, but I wasn’t so foolish. One shiver does not an autumn make. This mid-September weekend has come straight out of summer. At the market today, I noticed a lot of very cross women, complaining about the heat to their cell phones. Walking home, I took my time and stuck to the shady side of the street, but I was dripping when I got home. Sitting down in the chilled blue room, with a fan to boot, will probably undo my defenses to Kathleen’s cold, which has kept her very quiet since Thursday evening.
LXIV accompanied me to the movies on Friday morning. I almost canceled, because New Yorker Festival tickets went on sale at noon, but in the end I decided to give the Festival a pass, for the second year. I liked going for the first few years, but I overdid it in 2006, and felt rather like a groupie-in-training. I have never understood the reading part of author readings. Many writers are no good at all at reading their own work, while others — I’m thinking of Gary Shteyngart here — are so vivid and entertaining that you wonder if their books aren’t simply scripts for great performances. Discussions are find, but what I like most are Q & A sessions. I’ll ask a question if I can think of a good one, but I like watching writers speak ex tempore. And then there’s the signing at the end. That’s a feature that the New Yorker Festival events omit.
Ms NOLA called me last night with the news of David Foster Wallace’s suicide. I liked the man’s non-fiction very much, but I never even tried to read Infinite Jest. I will miss his voice, which was both very funny and very learned. Considering the state of the union today, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he was finding it difficult to be funny and learned these days. As we slip into something like a shogunate, with Republican Party pooh-bahs manipulating elected officials in the exploitation of the res publica, we have a greater need than ever for critics who are learned and funny. (I don’t know what Wallace’s politics were, but his teaching post at Claremont College in Pomona suggests that he was not a radical leftist.)
Yielding to more purely personal trends, I decided to stop writing up Friday movies in time for Saturday publication. I want the weekends for myself, and the weekend begins when the Friday morning movie lets out. “For myself” means “for reading.” Instead of writing up Burn After Reading on Friday afternoon, I read Home, Marilynne Robinson’s radiant concurrence to Gilead. When I finished the book last night, it was a good thing to have a box of Kleenex by my chair. Tears flooded my eyes the moment they weren’t required for reading.