Mia Doi Todd - Mixed reviews

Gea Mia Doi Todd Release Date: February 19, 2008 Genre: Alternative ℗ 2008 City Zen

Last night while John and I were talking, he sent me this new album from Mia Doi Todd as a gift through iTunes. I clicked the link in my e-mail and redeemed the album. Although I transferred it immediately to my iPod, I didn't listen to it until this morning when I walked Beau.

Upon my first listen, I might call it contemplatively boring. Individually, the songs are pretty and pleasant, but in a way that is ignorable and that lets you focus more on the world around you. During a long walk or a weekend drive (if you can afford the gas!), this music lets the senses do what they will without interruption. The coherence of the album comes from its repetitiveness, but if you're looking for upbeat pop or rock, it's not here. Mostly the singer and her guitar, there is little harmonic invention, and an ear hoping for teases and tricks will find none.

Work out music it isn't, unless the work out is slow yoga, and then this album might be perfect. I've no familiarity with any of the rest of Ms. Todd's opera, so I make comment only on Gea. The sound isn't original because there are many other artists that fit this genre of plaintive singer/songwriter on the verge of clinical depression (Nick Drake for example), and some might do it better (Nick Drake for example, except he's dead because he went past the verge into suicidal depression). But there is a place for Ms. Todd somewhere in my music collection, and I'm glad to add her to my almost-chock-full-of-music iPod. (I'm running out of space for my favorite podcasts! Help!) She may very well accompany my next yoga routine. Sometimes icy and scalding are extremes that cannot exist if there is no lukewarm, and Ms. Todd's lukewarm folksy-pop might provide better perspective of the soundscape around her.

My own criticism aside, reading the reviews on iTunes is its own comic relief. No one has anything musical to write about the album. The 33 reviews listed at the time of this writing are nothing more than a restaurant wait list of lovers and haters and a few feeling apathy with an attempt at a favorable review. Even the NY Times review that a fan copied & pasted to iTunes wasn't especially clever or helpful. The first review was little more than a moronic "yeah, I'm first". The haters are more than likely too video-game-quick-click-attention-span to be able to listen to the entire album or perhaps to read an entire novel of more than a couple hundred pages in order to give a substantive review. The lovers are mostly in love with their own fawning text. The rest gave middle-ground ratings and could provide little detail as to why. In the end, with all the audience and performers that exist, there's a match for everyone, I'm sure.

(album artwork for Gea and color layout as distributed through iTunes)

2nd sleep musings on high school econ

At around 3 AM, I awoke with this idea bubbling in my brain. After an hour of tossing and turning, mulling and musing, I decided to get up, don my monogrammed bathrobe and power up my computer to let it out of my weary noggin.

Turn the -opoly games that are so prevalent into a market segment analysis and study project for a high school economics class. Have students form small groups to research the last 10 years of a particular market segment of their choosing, e.g., wireless communication, housing & mortgage financing, home & business personal computing, musing & recording industries, etc. As students conduct their research, they should evaluate trends, market influences, market explosions and bubble bursts, both stabilizing and destabilizing factors, IPO's, private industries, corporate giants and influential but small-share players. Once students have established a body of research, they begin creating their games. Using soft drinks as a model, they might start off with recognized corporations like Coke & Pepsi then structure the board to include recent trends like energy drinks, health drinks, flavored & enhanced waters, bottled coffees & teas, retail outlets like Starbucks, partnerships with fastfood & restaurant corporations. The list in my head goes on and on. Other market factors that seem on the surface to be unrelated will have effects on consumer spending: war, recession, market drops, trade with China, consumer confidence ratings, Super Bowl commercials, unsuccessful product deliveries (New Coke, yikes!). I've had similar scenarios partially developed in my head for wireless communication: AT&T Wireless is spun off Cingular. BellSouth Mobility buys Cingular but keeps the Cingular name, AT&T buys BellSouth and thus reacquires Cingular and puts everything under the AT&T umbrella. Once you consider branding, FCC rules, bandwidth auctions, proprietary phones and networks, phone number portability, and more, the possibilities for Community Chest and Chance cards start to get a little crazy. That's one strand anyway of a vast web weaving in my little cobb-webby mind at now 4:50 AM. There's still computer & operating system wars: Windows, Mac and the -Nix niche, not to neglect PDA's and other mobile computing options as well as Web-based computing (Google, Yahoo!). Allowing students to dig into market history and to explore current trends along with upcoming market events (iPod vs. Zune, SP1 for Vista and Leopard for OS X) and third party heavy hitters like Logitech, Symantec, Adobe, Intel, AMD. Any one segment is like a great tree with thousands of miles of tendrils, roots, shoots and branches all interwoven to create quite a complex system. I think students would quickly begin to understand better the interdependence of free-market economy. Then as they condense what they learn to the confines of a Monopoly styled board game, they can start to see just how all these factors affect consumers through choice in the market place, the meaning of "multi-billion dollar industry" and the reality of the butterfly effect on global economics.

And now that the alarm clock is about to begin is matinal buzzing, I will dam this stream of consciousness and leave it for some one else to ponder. Maybe I can take a nap today during my planning period.