Around this time of year, a handyman shows up with a vacuum cleaner and a bin full of HVAC filters. Everything by the windows has to be moved away so that he can clean the units. Although it’s no fun really, I’ve turned it into a sort of rite of spring, a cleansing purge. When I’ve put everything back where it belongs, there’s less of it than there was. This year, it was the bedroom that needed renewal. Beneath one end of the window, there’s a small bookshelf that holds up a boxy HP printer with document feed that I’d like to put somewhere else. But there is nowhere else, not at the moment anyway, and I hold on to the thing because I just may need to send or receive a fax some day. Beneath the printers, on a shallow shelf, there was  a range of neglected, forgotten supplies — paper, envelopes, labels — and an old copy of the Yellow Pages. Most of this will get the heave-ho.

In every room in the house, you will find what we call rattan boxes. They’re made out of some woven organic material, somewhere in Asia, and they’re surprisingly stout as well as handsome. They come in a few unobtrusive colors: tan, reddish brown, black, and dark olive, and I’ve got them stacked up beneath and behind everything. I have no idea what’s in any of them. Periodically, I open them all up and, sometimes schematically, sometimes with the aid of photographs on which I paste helpful dymo labels, I make a record of what’s in what. But what happens to the record? It goes into a folder somewhere. I’ve experimented with Word documents, but that excludes the visual aspect.

But I’ve hit upon what at the moment promises to be a solution so perfect that it’s a dream I didn’t dare have. Evernote. I am not going to chatter on about Evernote. You’ll either wonder what took me so long or scroll down until something interesting catches your eye. And the fun part isn’t Evernote, either. It’s the Livescribe pen that I picked up weekend before last.

With an hour to kill between dinner and the evening Paul Taylor show, Kathleen and I, desperate for shelter from the inclement weather, resorted to the local Best Buy, where, astonishingly, Kathleen found a store map that showed a rest room, which by then I needed even more than the warmth. It was when I came out of the convenience, suffused with relief, that I saw a rack of packaged Livescribe pens and notebooks. Because I misread the price, underestimating it by fifty dollars, I thought, what the hay, I’ll give it a whirl. I brought it home and stashed it in a corner. The next day, I asked my daughter and son-in-law to recommend good project management apps. Ryan suggested Evernote right away, and Megan mentioned Toodles. I checked them out on Monday, but was not motivated to go further. It was not until this past Saturday that I opened the Livescribe pen and had a go at installing it. I soon discovered that it wanted to work with Evernote, so I downloaded the program onto both computers and was amazed to discover that the pen really did work. On Sunday,  I made a list of questions and to-dos about Evernote, and synched it to the computer. Then I downloaded the Evernote apps onto my smartphone and onto the Kindle Fire, which I want to put to use as my personal assistant. (I read Internet pages on the iPad, and most ebooks on the Kindle Paperwhite. The books that I don’t read on the Paperwhite are books that I’m not going to read for pleasure, such as Evernote for Dummies.) This allowed me to strike one item from the to-do list. I synched the updated list to Evernote and, voilà: this strike-out was visible on the Fire.

There is still much to learn. But I’ve already accommodated the pen and the application to my penchant for writing notes and lists by hand, away from the computer and its barrage of information. I can’t quite believe it!

***

I’ve just read the strangest book, Douglas Gomery’s The Coming of Sound. I’d llike to say that it is one of the most illuminating business books that I’ve ever read, but it’s also the most unedited, syntatically messy book that I’ve ever read. Because I read it to learn about the history of the movie studios — always a fascinating subject — I did not take note of every garbled passage, and most of them have proven to be difficult to retrieve. Here’s one, though: “They even knew of Warner’s plan for The Jazz Singer, but figured the first star chosen for the role, George Jessel would create not hit.” Everything seems to go downhill after the comma that ought to follow “Jessel” is omitted. I wonder not only how this survived editing (of which there is little evidence throughout the book), but how it got written down in the first place. Gomery often writes like someone who hates to write.

Providing motion pictures with synchronous sound was first undertaken in 1892, and, for the next thirty years and more, every scheme flopped, even Thomas Edison’s. By the Twenties, the major producers, such as Adolph Zukor, didn’t even want to hear about sound; they were doing fine without it. When engineers at Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT & T, finally developed a truly viable solution to the problem, the company couldn’t get anyone in Hollywood to take a meeting. Eventually, at the end of a long and complicated contredanse, a front-man for Western Electric, an investment banker from Goldman, Sachs, and Harry Warner came together on a project for making short subjects featuring vaudeville acts — and sound. One thing led to another. Sailing would have been much smoother if John Otterson had not taken over representing Western Electric. Otterson was, at least in Gomery’s telling, a complete asshole, and probably — this, Gomery doesn’t even suggest — an anti-Semite. But the deeply interesting aspect of the story is the leaching, from the technology companies to the studios, of highly collusive practices that, at the end of the day, furthered competition by eliminating an entry-level problem. By the time that Paramount and MGM were ready to sign contracts with Western Electric, the two cinema giants, along with some other studios, had researched the matter collectively, and the contracts were all but identical. The studios had followed developments at Warner Bros and at Fox Films, where Movietone newsreels were the primary sound project, and were convinced by the huge success of Al Jolson’s second Warner’s feature, The Singing Fool, that, this time, sound would not only work but pay. This was in the spring of 1928. Within two years, silent movies were no longer being made. The transition could not have been more orderly. Almost everything you know about the coming of sound (from film courses and Singin’ in the Rain) is wrong, or incomplete at best.

AT & T and RCA (the child of General Electric and Westinghouse Electric) had already partitioned the territory between them: RCA got radio transmission, and AT & T got wire services. All patents were cross-licensed. Movies with sound didn’t figure in this division of spoils, and when RCA took its superior technology to Hollywood, everyone was already committed to AT & T’s subsidiary, Electrical Research Products Inc (ERPI). So David Sarnoff, head of RCA, got together with Joseph Kennedy and some others and founded RKO (which was therefore the studio that never made silents.) Eventually, the ERPI engineers had to redesign their technology in imitation of RCA’s.

The Coming of Sound, however, is a collection of essays, and, quite apart from the shoddy editing, it is burdened with narrative backtracking and superfluous re-introductions. Although Gomery hammers home a few theses (the most singular of which is the unimportance of The Jazz Singer), he has not quite created a book out of his material. Stepping back and reorganizing the material might have inspired a series of portraits of the major characters, some of whom, like Zukor and the Warners, are better known as film moguls than as businessmen, and many of whom, such as the infamous Otterson, will not have been heard of. This is a story that richly blends conflicting personalities with developing technologies, and my sense of how things work was shaken by it — always a good thing. I have to thank Douglas Gomery for taking pains.

The Coming of Sound is a thwacking rebuttal of free-market notions. The cross-licensing and collusion practiced by AT & T and RCA, and among the Hollywood studios (which were all headquartered in New York when this was going on), served to free the individual companies from the destructive competition that doesn’t accomplish anything and for the productive competition of manufacturing ever-better products. It’s hard not to be wowed by the sound business sense of men like Zukor, who managed to bring stability to an industry fraught by its uncertainty.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, March 25th, 2013 at 4:17 pm.