Record Store Research Articles

A radiance cache method for highly glossy surfaces

Radiance caching methods have proven to be efficient for global illumination. Their goal is to compute precisely illumination values (incident radiance or irradiance) at a reasonable number of points lying on the scene surfaces. These points, called records, are stored in a cache used for estimating illumination at other points in the scene. Unfortunately, with records lying on glossy surfaces, the irradiance value alone is not sufficient to evaluate the reflected radiance; each record should also store the incident radiance for all incident directions. Memory storage can be reduced with projection techniques using spherical harmonics or other basis functions. These techniques provide good results for low shininess BRDFs. However, they get impractical for shininess of even moderate value, since the number of projection coefficients increases drastically. In this paper, we propose a new radiance caching method that handles highly glossy surfaces while requiring a low memory storage. Each cache record stores a coarse representation of the incident illumination thanks to a new data structure, called Equivalent Area light Sources, capable of handling fuzzy mirror surfaces. In addition, our method proposes a new simplification of the interpolation process, since it avoids the need for expressing and evaluating complex gradients.

CULTURE, CUSTOM AND COLLABORATION

In recent year~ there has also been an increasing tendency for remixed music tracks, particularly those produced by prominent and/or 'breaking' acts, to be accompanied by a different, or at least reconstructed, version of the original video. Since there are clear economic reasons behind record companies and artists going for such remixes, little comment is passed on the practice (unless it is by consumers confused as to which actual version they wish to purchase at their local record store). One particular case of remixing has however.been singled out for sustained critical address, that of the Aboriginal band Yothu Yindi and the two versions of their single Treaty (see Hayward, 1992 and Mitchell, 1992). As the following article will argue, the criticisms of this particular example highlight the extent to which Aboriginal acts are subject to a degree of scrutiny not accorded to mainstream Western musicians and, like many other black and non-Anglo-Celtic artists, plagued by accusations of their 'selling-out' their own cultures and being contaminated by the values of the market and Western culture in general.

Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording by David Grubbs (review)

Reviewed by: Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording by David Grubbs Sara Haefeli Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording. By David Grubbs. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. [End Page 170] [xxv, 220 p. ISBN 9780822355762 (hardcover), $84.95; ISBN 9780822355908 (paperback), $23.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, discography, index. David Grubbs prefaces this excellent book with a description of his own relationship to records as a late baby boomer growing up in Louisville, Kentucky—first as an avid consumer of pop music, then as a teenaged editor of punk and post-punk fanzines. This love of records was inspired by the materiality of the medium as well as the multimedia nature of the physical record. There was a joy in being able to return to a record again and again. When he moved to Chicago in 1990, he was confronted with a range of different attitudes toward records, including the claim by experimental musicians that records were antithetical to their art practice. What he valued about his encounters with experimental music and avant-garde jazz was that it was always different and unrepeatable—they were art practices based on the moment and one’s physical presence in the art space. Yet he also loved the culture of the record store and the joy of chance encounters and browsing through the bins. This introductory autobiography may seem self-indulgent, but it is not. Throughout this study we are reminded that Grubbs is not only deeply knowledgeable about these art practices and the time period in question, but that records genuinely captivate him. It is this love that seems to drive the encyclopedic knowledge demonstrated in this book. Part of the brilliance of this book is that it is a joy to read. It is virtually free of social-theory jargon, although the content demonstrates that Grubbs has all the theory firmly in grasp. He moves easily through discussions of the aesthetic theory of Nelson Goodman, Roland Barthes, and Walter Benjamin without veering off into the ether. It is engagingly written, often poetically descriptive, and well-edited. The selected discography and the links to database resources make the book a useful reference resource after a first reading. In short, this is the best kind of study that is clearly motivated by a passion for its subject, and it is executed with aplomb. Grubbs’s project is shaped by the tantalizing paradox that John Cage publicly disparaged records and yet continued to make and sell records. There are a number of famous quotes by Cage that make his disdain for records clear. He told interviewers that he did not own records, that records “destroy one’s need for real music,” and that they “make people think that they’re engaging in a musical activity when they’re actually not” (p. 10). In the collection of interviews published as For the Birds (Boston: M. Boyars, 1981), Daniel Charles said, “Records, according to you, are nothing more than postcards … ” to which Cage replied, “which ruin the landscape” (p. 1). Yet Cage is one of the most widely recorded composers of the twentieth century. Given Cage’s central position in the avant-garde arts of the 1960s, these records were significant and helped to shape how others outside of the immediate circle of the New York School understood his work. Grubbs analyzes how these records continue to shape our understanding of the avantgarde today. Unlike fans in the post-Cage 1960s, we have easy access to this repertoire, as it is increasingly available through archival releases and rereleases, and is often downloadable for free via sites like UbuWeb (http://www.ubuweb.com, accessed 20 March 2015). Another paradoxical aspect of Cage’s antipathy for recordings is that he was a pioneer in the field of electronic music and wrote some of the very first pieces using magnetic tape; he also used recorded sound as source material for live performance. Part of the irony of the title of the book—Records Ruin the Landscape—is that it reminds us of Cage’s series of early experiments in electronic music called Imaginary Landscapes composed between 1939 and 1952. Grubbs...

Curating Value in Changing Markets

In this article, I ask how firms negotiate dissonance between industry trends and day-to-day market realities. By utilizing the independent record store as a case of an intermediary firm negotiating rapid industry change, I analyze their contributions to those understandings that reinforce their relevance within the market. Through an analysis of industry and news media, I compare the symbolic work of these firms before and after drastic technological innovation and document changes in the way they discuss their field. I find surviving firms offer new interpretations of their social position that both preserve many traditional aesthetics while selectively presenting new perspectives on contemporary music culture. I introduce the concept of curating value to embrace this multidimensional effect of symbolic work and extend economic sociology research on the intersection of cultural meaning and market change. I argue that the successful market positioning of independent record stores hinges upon dynamic use of symbolic criteria that, in turn, can produce new material value within a new market composition.

Culture crash: the killing of the creative class

IJEMHHRVol. 17, No. 2 • 2015 439 Scott Tinberg is an adjunct writing professor, a blogger on West Coast culture, and an award-winning journalist. In this book, he observes that the number of Americans who earn their living by making art is decreasing, and traces its implications. After World War II, the arts were not only a means of entertainment but a road to self-development and knowledge, a road that is now in disrepair. He spends too much time on describing the plight of white middle-aged males, rather on such groups as young women of color. Nevertheless Tinberg makes the case that the demise of newspapers, of risk-taking film companies, and of bookstores, record stores, and video shops, rob its former customers of an informal but effective educational milieu. The profit motive bears responsibility for this unhappy state of affairs and has impacted the middle culturally as well as economically. Tinberg describes the creative class as those who work with their minds at complex levels, including physicians, lawyers, software engineers, publishers, critics, and book and record store clerks in addition to such obvious groups as artists, architects, musicians, filmmakers, performers, and the like. Timberg displays an in-depth knowledge of Western culture and this grounding serves him well when he discusses the vicissitudes of the 21 st century. He tells his readers how ancient cave paintings were not only done for esthetic reasons but to magically attract deer and other animals for the hunters' bows, arrows, and club. To the medieval mind, the painter was of little account except for channeling the glory of God and the saints. Musicians of the late Middle Ages were stationed outside of towns so that they could alert guards as to the approach of enemies and marauders. During the Renaissance, artists and musicians became advertisements for the nobility. The 18 th and 19 th

Siding with vinyl: Record Store Day and the branding of independent music

In response to the digitization and corporatization of the record industry, Record Store Day brands music consumption as an ethical decision, coordinating the release of exclusive vinyl records to independent, locally owned retailers and framing an engineered collectors’ market as an annual holiday. In this article, I evaluate Record Store Day as an ambivalent brand culture – a perspective highlighting the affective and relational components of brands without privileging exploitation or authenticity. At once, Record Store Day is a commercial platform for the development of media ideologies and political subject positions on independence and a capitalist operation that compartmentalizes its corporate intermediaries and offloads financial risk onto small stores. Record Store Day’s success suggests that ambivalent brand cultures provide a productive framework through which to analyse the political and cultural possibilities of media formats and independent retail.

Rebel Girls and Singing Boys: Performing Music and Gender in the Teen Movie

Midway through the 1986 teen movie Pretty in Pink comes a strikingly memorable scene. The film's main character, Andie (Molly Ringwald), sits nonchalantly in the local record store where she works. Adorned with posters of mid-1980s post-punk groups like New Order and The Smiths, the store represents Andie's strong alternative music identity. In this particular scene, however, Andie's boss places a recording of Otis Redding's Try a Little Tenderness on the turntable, instantly transforming the mood. From out of nowhere, Andie's best friend, the overly-dramatic Duckie (Jon Cryer), bursts into the store and for the next two minutes proceeds to lip sync, dance, and gyrate his way through the climactic second half of Redding's 1966 soul classic. It is an enraptured, exuberant performance, almost as if he is physically possessed by the music. Andie, the object of Duckie's affections, however, is clearly unimpressed. Soon after his musical display, the deflated Duckie sadly learns that Andie's romantic longings lie elsewhere. His thinly masked musical cry for affection and tenderness has been in vain. As unique and unforgettable as this scene is, the gendered dichotomy that it presents between females as musical connoisseurs and males as emotional performers is far from rare within the teen movie genre of the mid-1980s to early 2000s. From Some Kind of Wonderful (1987) to 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) and Juno (2007), again and again we see female characters positioned as social outsiders via their devotion to alternative musical tastes. Likewise, in films as varied as American Pie (1999), She's All That (1999) and Napoleon Dynamite (2004), teenage boys repeatedly assume the roles of dynamic performers. By breaking out into song, and often dance, adolescent males attempt to overcome social challenges. These recurring tropes raise important questions about the teen movie genre and its use of popular music. How and why does the teen movie divide its musical scores along gendered lines? What do these musical differences tell us about the contrast between female and male adolescence? What is the significance of the Rebel Girl within the history of the teen movie, (2) and how are we to interpret the teen boy who bursts into song onscreen? My goal in this article is to dig more deeply into these questions by viewing the teen movie's soundtrack through the lenses of gender identity, musical genre, and the cinematic conventions of popular song scoring. As a coming of age film, the teen movie deals specifically with the gendered rites of passage that mark the symbolic transition from adolescence to adulthood. Music in these films can thus help underscore a character's social transformation. Regardless of how the music guides our understanding of these characters, popular song functions differently for boys than for girls. If we commonly find boys performing their gender in spontaneous moments of public music spectacle--what I call a form of karaoke masculinity--girls are more likely to maintain a consistent outsider musical identity. A female character like the rebel girl is granted a stability through her musical connoisseurship, only to meet with various threats and tests as she navigates her way through the teenager's turbulent social world. I begin this exploration by presenting a brief historical overview of the teen movie genre's birth in the mid-1950s and its musical scoring practices. From there I describe the changes that occurred in the early 1980s which ultimately served to redefine the teen movie. Specifically, this new wave of teen movies began to portray adolescence in a way that resembles anthropologist Victor Turner's description of the liminal journey, a socially defined process marked by rites of passage towards adulthood. Director and producer John Hughes is often credited with popularizing this narrative story structure, and from his very first teen movie feature, Sixteen Candles (1984), he deployed music as a way of enhancing character development, particularly along lines of gender, age, taste, and performance. …

The Little Magazine in the World of Big Data

The Little Magazine in the World of Big Data Sven Birkerts (bio) What I want to talk about, in the narrowest sense, is the place of the literary magazine in a culture that has, in terms of information and communication, as well as many other things, completely transformed itself in the last forty years—in the span of my adult lifetime. The fact that I’ve been present and interested for the whole duration gives me a vantage to speak from. This context of decades is important, since the literary magazine today, existing on paper and online, is still completely shaped by the idealism of its origins in the pre-digital world. I can try to characterize some of that idealism—or was it my idealism?—by looking back at what these journals were like when I was first coming up as a literary wannabe. At the very end of the sixties I lived in suburban Detroit, where we were served by a good public library and two decent little bookstores. I frequented both, knew their stock inside out. But it was not until I was seventeen that I first saw a lit mag. That happened not in my suburb but in downtown Detroit, near Wayne State University, in the beatniky area that my friends and I fled to whenever we could. We would go there to find coffeehouses, record stores, what were called head shops (do I need to gloss that?)—and it was there, in the far back of one of those places, on a revolving metal rack, that I saw my very first copies of New Directions and City Lights books, and my first literary journal—the Evergreen Review. I pause here to try to get back inside the moment. For it remains completely distinct in memory. That one magazine, thin as an average trade paperback, with a photo cover that I can’t quite recall, except that it was completely existential, that being, in my small circle, code for sophisticated, radical, against the mainstream, creative. The thing was, as they say, auratic; it was completely unique to me, as itself. It also became—in the way things could more easily happen before complete informational ubiquity—a doorway into another kind of culture, another way of living and looking at the world. It’s hard to imagine a correlative for this in our day, when everything is available, and a single search cue can put you on to the most arcane materials. For one consequence of such saturation and ubiquity is the complete erosion of that idea—and feeling—of the other. Which I will maintain was, those four decades ago, one of the distinguishing features of the little magazine. It was other. At the same time, or maybe for that reason, it had [End Page 224] an air of transgression. It seemed that it might give the real inside view of things that the mainstream media had airbrushed. This is subjective reminiscence, but I’ll stay with it for a bit. I jump forward five years to the early seventies. The counterculture has by now had its impact and is already waning. I have finished college and am living in the minor literary Mecca of Ann Arbor, Michigan, working in a bookstore, more keen than ever to find my way into the writing world. With the flourishing of good bookstores (it was the era of the first Borders) came the flourishing of the magazine culture—or so it seemed in that big college town. Alongside the staple mainstream publications you could find magazines like Ramparts, Rolling Stone, Creem, a renovated Esquire. And also new (to me) a whole array of very exciting little magazines: Paris Review, of course, Antaeus, Salmagundi, the Iowa Review, Kayak, Stand, a few others. They exuded independence and intensity—they were in the most seductive and covetable way literary. Some part of what I was picking up, of course, was my own projected obsession: I so wanted to be in one of those magazines, to be part of a table of contents, to be typeset, to be broadcast far and wide on paper. What could be finer than to be listed as...

‘College radio’: The development of a trope in US student broadcasting

Abstract In the United States, the term ‘college radio’ invokes a specific, influential subset of student radio. In the early 1980s, ‘college radio’ appeared in popular discourse to refer to non-profit student stations which championed music marginalized by mainstream, commercial radio. College radio programming enacted a critique of the music industry’s political economy, reflecting participation in the late 1970s and early 1980s Do-It-Yourself (DIY) rock underground, an association of independent labels; independent record stores; small clubs; ‘zines; and those college stations which embraced punk and its offshoots. This subcultural identification carried tensions, namely, college stations functioned within the music industry they often sought to critique. As college radio communities negotiated this terrain, they helped shape ‘alternative’ and ‘indie’ culture – loosely defined but emblematic subsets of late twentieth-century US popular culture. Here, I examine the development and deployment of the ‘college radio’ signifier in the US public sphere, review the ­ existing academic literature on the sector and suggest avenues of future research.

Empowerment or Equality?: Legacies of Free to Be … You and Me

Since to Be... You and Me marked its fortieth anniversary in 2012, I've spoken about this groundbreaking children's album, book, and television special to audiences across country. Along with historian Laura Lovett, I coedited a collection titled When We Were to Be, which documents production of to project by Mario Thomas and her creative team during 1970s. Our volume also explores reception of to among critics, parents, and children and offers personal reflections and social critiques by journalists, scholars, and artists today.From moment vinyl LPs first hit record store shelves, to became a cultural phenomenon. For first generation of to kids, this musical melange of songs and stories still stirs up a heady mix of emotions, memories, and even tears. Revisiting to prompts adults to time travel back to their elementary school days to reclaim those bygone moments when future beckoned with a boundless sense of open possibility.Free to influenced listeners' values, politics, and even core identities in two fundamental ways. First, it provided an affirming narrative to boys who did not conform to dominant, heteronormative standards of masculinity. As Mario Thomas recounts, over decades, countless gay men have told her that William's Doll and It's All Right to Cry provided the first inklings that were going to okay (Thomas 2012,13). Many straight fathers, too, recall finding in these lyrics reassuring license to grow into nurturing parents. Although to Be's creators still assumed existence of only two genders linked to biological sex, families of LGBT youth often praise album as a pioneering manual of social acceptance.Second, to schooled young children in a particular set of liberal feminist ideals. With some important exceptions (discussed below), to s feminist politics are strongly individualistic: it asserts that children should pursue their interests and talents regardless of stereotypes, and it invites them to embrace their uniqueness (and thus to accept differences among other people, too.) The story Atalanta teaches girls to relish independence, adventure, curiosity, and competition rather than value marriage as life's crowning achievement. And as expressed in song Parents Are People, to affirms importance of paid work and parental roles for both mothers and fathers within heteronormative, nuclear family life.Indeed, we might regard to as original primer of what is now sometimes called empowerment feminism: a be it all-have it ethos that tells girls and women that they can succeed in all realms of life by aiming high, working hard, staying confident, and-dare I say it-leaning in. Countless women have testified to to s emboldening influence on their identities as equal-opportunity feminists; fittingly, Mario Thomas's own niece, Dionne Gordon Kirschner, offers a representative account of this experience. Raised during 1970s by a capable single mother-and also benefiting from supportive ties with Mario's extended family-Dionne sees little distinction between independent women who raised her and to philosophy that suffused her childhood:My aunt has always been Free to Be in my eyes. I grew up feeling that I wanted to attack life in same way. I knew that whatever dreams I had would my own and not a product of what others wanted for me____ Along with my mom and my aunt as role models, to empowered me in its one of a kind, progressive, and skillful storytelling. As a young person, it left me feeling energized, transformed, and capable of taking on anything that might come my way. (Kirschner 2012,22)Reading these words, it's hard not to feel impressed that a children's album could leave such an inspiring imprint. I myself was a to kid in suburban St. Louis during this time; I, too, belted out these melodies, scarcely realizing, until many years later, how profoundly they would shape my aspirations, ambitions, and beliefs. …

The Right Stuff? The Original Double Jay as Site for Youth Counterculture

The Right Stuff? The Original Double Jay as Site for Youth Counterculture

Digging Down in the CBMR Archives: New Music Inspired by Melba Liston’s Scores

I have to dig down and do it from there, it's all from my soul. I write soul music, more or less. --Melba Liston (1996) I first entered Melba Liston's musical world through her work with iconic pianist and composer Randy Weston. An aspiring young saxophonist working in a record store in the early 1990s, I stumbled on his Spirits of Our Ancestors (Verve 551 857-2), in which Weston and Liston weave diverse strands of their musical heritage together, blending African rhythms with modem harmony, sophisticated composition with wild flights of improvisation. Twenty years later, I had the opportunity to explore that world further through Liston's scores, archived at the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago. (1) My most recent CD at that time, African Flowers (Origin 82572), documented a series of ten interconnected pieces portraying my experiences touring eastern and central Africa. For my next recording, I hoped to explore music that had influenced African Flowers, ranging from traditional regional African music to western-influenced styles such as Congolese Rumba to jazz works inspired by Africa. In the last category, the long collaboration between Weston and Liston looms large; from Uhuru Afrika (Mosaic Select 4) to Khepera (Verve-Gitanes 557 821-2), their most compelling work is permeated with African rhythms and themes. Examining Liston's archives, I initially focused solely on the Weston scores. Through these, I hoped to gain some understanding of how the two of them dealt with the African elements in their music and, if possible, apply their methods to my integration of African musical traditions into my own work. I also intended to identify some works that could be reorchestrated for my ensemble to pay tribute to the Weston-Liston canon as part of the aforementioned recording project. Shortly after commencing my research, however, I realized that very little of the CBMR collection revealed anything directly about Liston and Weston's use of African source materials. The most significant materials are a letter from Weston (Weston 1959) to the record label Roulette, mentioning the need for a month's preparation and research for Uhuru Afrika and the notation of percussion rhythms--unusual in these scores--for Bantu. The fact that these rhythms differ slightly from those on the recording perhaps indicates some collaboration between composers and musicians or a degree of improvisational freedom in the recording session. This is hardly surprising, though, and not enough to extrapolate much about the composers' specific methods concerning the influence and integration of African music. More importantly, as I looked through the vast collection of Liston's scores for everyone from Weston to Dizzy Gillespie, Marvin Gaye to Mary Lou Williams, I came to recognize her unique voice and wide-ranging, yet rarely acknowledged, contribution to jazz, rhythm and blues, and other American musical forms in the latter half of the twentieth century. The narrative conveyed through her music inspired me to change the focus and intended outcome of my research; rather than revisiting works by her or her collaborators, I decided to compose music celebrating Melba Liston's legacy. Compositional Process The first stage of my compositional process involved construction of a logical, meaningful narrative structure for the proposed piece. Liston's career was long, and she was prolific; it would be impractical to address the entire scope of her contributions in a single work, even if that work consisted of several parts. Also, it seemed desirable to privilege some events and relationships over others. For example, Randy Weston's impact obviously had to be addressed, but perhaps her arrangements for Johnny Griffin's White Gardenia (Riverside 387), while masterful, were not as essential in tracing her artistic development. Through examination of archived scores and historical materials, I eventually settled on a six-movement form focusing on the period from Liston's birth in 1926 to her return to the United States from Jamaica in 1979. …

Applications of Automated Identification Technology in EHR/EMR

Although both the electronic health record (EHR) and the electronic medical record (EMR) store an individual’s computerized health information and the terminologies are often used interchangeably, there are some differences between them. Three primary approaches in Automated Identification Technology (AIT) are barcoding, radio frequency identification (RFID), and biometrics. In this paper, technology intelligence, progress, limitations, and challenges of EHR/EMR are introduced. The applications and challenges of barcoding, RFID, and biometrics in EHR/EMR are presented respectively. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ijphs.v2i3.3300

Steps towards the Integration of Model Guided Therapy Systems into the Healthcare Environment

Hospital Information Systems (HIS) are the primary source of information in clinical routine. In most clinics and medical centers, an electronic health record (EHR) stores relevant patient information which is passed between sub-systems using the ISO standard Health Level 7 (HL7). In Radiology, the Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) is used to store and transfer medical images and other image related patient data and reports. The paper promotes the development of dedicated patient models based on HIS information. This allows specialized and tailored models for each purpose without the need for a commonly accepted data format.

The Blues/Funk Futurism of Roger Troutman

The Blues/Funk Futurism of Roger Troutman Scot Brown (bio) More than a decade after his tragic death, the sonic innovations of Roger Troutman—known simply as Roger and leader of the group called Zapp—continue to influence pop music. Contemporary artists such as Kanye, Akon, and T-Pain owe a tremendous debt to Roger’s brand of electronic funk. Though reigning supreme during the 1980s, his sound built on the commingling of technology and futuristic representations in film and television decades earlier. Beyond television and movie screens, African American musical artists created accessible avenues for futuristic representation through musical art. Lyrics, concepts, costumes, and album cover art, from a range of musical styles, evoked futuristic imagery set in outer space or imaginary places to frame commentaries on love, human possibility, politics, and racial conflict. Musical illustrations of the future were often textured by new technologies of sound used in scores for postwar science fiction film and television. Tonal companions to the American Aquarian age were wrought with technological enthusiasm and anxieties—most notably expressed in numerous guitar effects (popularized by Jimi Hendrix) and the synthesizer, which, in keeping with its namesake, created analogues to traditional sounds and synthesized altogether new ones. Roger Troutman is most known for expanding the range and melodic possibilities of the talk box or voice box—a device that allows an artist to fuse vocal patterns with the sound emitted by electronic instruments and mimic speech. After more than twenty years as a regional midwestern act, Roger and his brothers’ [End Page 119] group Zapp emerged with the 1980 single “More Bounce to the Ounce,” which introduced audiences to his signature talk box style. Roger described his use of the device with imagery that associated it with science fiction film and television: “I consider the voice box . . . like an African robot. . . . It says logical things that a computer says, but instead of saying them very drab and disgusting as a robot would say . . . I can sound computerized and I can also sound real funky.”1 Though precursors to this effect date back to the 1930s, the talk box emerged in popular music during the late 1960s, overlapping with the widespread use of synthesizers. Roger Troutman was in his early twenties when inspired by Stevie Wonder, who frequently used the talk box during live performances in the 1970s. Wonder’s maturation as an adult artist was distinguished by the specialized branding of his musical genius—his blindness notwithstanding, Wonder could conduct an entire recording, playing all of the instruments and doing all of the vocals. Throughout the 1970s, the recording studio expanded its place as the terrain for individualized expressions of musical genius—a path followed by many other artists, including Patrice Rushen, Rick James, and Prince. Roger Troutman was practically groomed for this brand of virtuosity, mastering numerous instruments as a child prodigy—the guitar, piano, bass, and harmonica. Having grown up in Hamilton, Ohio, just in between Dayton and Cincinnati, he and his brothers—Lester, Larry, and Terry—formed a band initially known as Little Roger and the Vels, then later Roger and the Human Body, and then Zapp. Troutman recalled that his band Roger and the Human Body independently released the single “Freedom” on their own Troutman Bros. label, and it was a regional hit in 1975. “It was number 1 in the Ohio area,” he remarked. “We didn’t have any national distribution because we just put the record out . . . [w]e paid for it ourselves.”2 Many acts from Ohio and throughout the tristate area were able to ascend to regional stardom. The area was ripe with independent record labels and disc jockeys at stations like WDAO (Dayton) who frequently aired singles by local bands. Numerous artists who would never acquire deals with major record labels had scored local hits that were played on the radio and could be purchased at neighborhood record stores. The early, pre-synthesizer Roger sound had the steadiness of a James Brown–inspired groove with an unwavering natural electric bass line, choppy rhythm guitar licks and conga patterns. The only hint of the forthcoming electronic Roger and Zapp brand was a short guitar solo connected to...

Business process management enabled compliance-aware medical record sharing

Data sharing about electronic health records (EHRs) across healthcare organisations is still a challenging task due to compliance requirements with regulatory policies that can vary across states and countries, and organisations’ internal business requirements. Even when adopting the same regulatory policies, each organisation can interpret and implement these policies and requirements differently in its internal IT environments. This paper proposes a compliance-aware data management solution for EHR systems. It allows healthcare organisations to define their own security and regulatory compliance requirements for accessing and sharing healthcare data, and enables policy enforcement while sharing data with other organisations. The policy requirements are expressed in the form of business processes that govern the access and sharing of data between people and systems. The business process operations are mapped into low-level operations on internal and remote record stores and policy enforcement points. We have implemented a prototype system that supports the proposed approach and integrated it with OpenMRS, an open source electronic medical record system, using which we have defined and enforced some real-world regulations and organisations’ policies for data sharing.

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon

Gerbrand Bakker Ten White Geese David Colmer, tr. Penguin In this quietly haunting and poignant story, a wife takes the name Emilie and flees from Amsterdam to rural Wales seeking solace and a new identity. The husband’s search for his wife is complicated by the appearance of an enigmatic young man and his dog. A finely crafted character study, Ten White Geese captures the experience of inner turmoil and conflicting emotions. An Anthology of Modern Ukrainian Drama Larissa M. L. Zaleska Onyshkevych, ed. Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press The nine plays in this anthology cover each decade of the twentieth century and range in style from neoromanticism through postmodernism. An in-depth biography and list of selected works for each playwright, along with an explanatory essay, accompany each play. Nota Bene Michael Chabon. Telegraph Avenue. New York. Harper. 2012. isbn 9780061493348 Michael Chabon’s novel Telegraph Avenue, on a basic level, is about work life and home life in Oakland, California . Longtime friends Archy and Nat own Brokeland Records, a hole-inthe -wall record store that specializes in jazz. They are trying to keep their business alive as a “Dogpile megastore ” readies to open near them. Archy and Nat are devotees to a dying product from a bygone age. Similarly, Gwen and Aviva—Archy and Nat’s spouses, respectively—are devotees to the dying field of midwifery. As a birth goes wrong, they must battle to keep their privileges with a hospital, at which a racist doctor derides their profession as “voodoo.” On the domestic side of things, there are marital spats, absent fathers, a homosexual son, and, not surprisingly, childbirth, all of this underpinned by questions of race— Archy and Gwen are black; Aviva and Nat are white—and sex that add a weight that Chabon, for the most part, handles aptly. Particularly excelling when writing about family, Chabon can mold beautiful descriptions , crafting images in a way that is simultaneously unique yet familiar, and his ability to use these descriptions to cause the reader to reflect on some of the most intimate parts of life is among the best of today’s fiction writers. Unfortunately, at some point in his life it seems Chabon was told that he is a good describer, and he took the compliment too much to heart. At times he describes to the point of annoyance. This happens in particular on the business side of things, because in order to give what he perceives as an accurate feel of working at a record store, he has to name every jazz musician that ever played; or in order to get to the heart of actors in kung-fu films—one of the many divergences in a complicated but well-thoughtout plot—he has to mention every kung-fu fighter that ever threw a roundhouse kick. Quickly, this cataloging becomes tedious. Yet for all his overdescription, Chabon remains one of the truly brave living writers, willing and preferring to inhabit characters that are on the surface nothing like him. He is a writer with a sharp imagination, and fills Telegraph Avenue with a breathtaking diversity that, because it is so representative of twentyfirst -century America, deserves our attention. In a funny, self-referential moment, he has Gwen thinking about Candygirl Clark. Candygirl Clark is a character from the kung-fu films, and her catchphrase in these films was “Do what you got to do, and stay fly.” Gwen wonders if “the phrase was something cooked up by the screenwriter, some Jewish dude trying to think like an asskicking soul sister.” Of course, in this moment, Chabon is “some Jewish dude trying to think like an asskicking soul sister,” which he obviously recognizes. But his courage to never shy away from possibly contentious situations like these makes him well worth the time spent wading through pop culture references and excessive descriptions. Kevin Pickard University of Oklahoma may – june 2013 • 59 ...

Music Industry in India: Economic and Legal Issues and Challenges

The current disagreements between the recording industry and media distribution companies like Napster also raise questions about how much current copyright law has strayed from its original constitutional intent. On the one hand, Napster is illegal. It violates artists’ and copyright holders’ rights to be paid for their works, and does not give artists a choice over how their music is reproduced and distributed. On the other hand, it is also important to remember the reasons for which the incentive system exists. The Constitution established copyright law for the benefit of the public, to “promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts.” The purpose of copyright is to encourage creativity and development by establishing exclusive rights for those who did the creating, but only to the extent that the works would be disseminated to the public. Online digital distribution of music has the potential to offer various benefits to artists, the recording industry, and consumers. For artists, the Internet provides a method with which a broad audience may be reached at very little cost. For record companies, container less music offers vast savings from the elimination of both manufacturing costs associated with CDs and losses from overproduction. For consumers, online digital music distribution allows them to choose the music they want to hear, when they want to hear it, without the hassles of going to the record store or ordering an album online. Purchasing could become much more efficient, and consumers would have access to an unprecedented catalogue of music only a few clicks away. If music continues to be distributed illegally at no cost over the Internet, musicians may be deprived of compensation for their work, ultimately destroying the incentive system carefully crafted by copyright law. At its heart, copyright law attempts to provide creators with enough economic incentives to encourage the creation and dissemination of creative works, to the benefit of the public.

Electronic Health Records (EHR)

Electronic Health Records are electronic versions of patients’ healthcare records. An electronic health record gathers, creates, and stores the health record electronically. The electronic health record has been slow to be adopted by healthcare providers. The federal government has recently passed legislation requiring the use of electronic records or face monetary penalties. The electronic health record will improve clinical documentation, quality, healthcare utilization tracking, billing and coding, and make health records portable. The core components of an electronic health record include administrative functions, computerized physician order entry, lab systems, radiology systems, pharmacy systems, and clinical documentation. HL7 is the standard communication protocol technology that an electronic health record utilizes. Implementation of software, hardware, and IT networks are important for a successful electronic health record project. The benefits of an electronic health record include a gain in healthcare efficiencies, large gains in quality and safety, and lower healthcare costs for consumers. Electronic health record challenges include costly software packages, system security, patient confidentiality, and unknown future government regulations. Future technologies for electronic health records include bar coding, radio-frequency identification, and speech recognition.

For the Records: How African American Consumers and Music Retailers Created Commercial Public Space in the 1960s and 1970s South

For the RecordsHow African American Consumers and Music Retailers Created Commercial Public Space in the 1960s and 1970s South Joshua Clark Davis (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution In the postwar United States, record stores like Curt’s (here) in Greensboro, North Carolina, were perhaps the place where consumers most commonly interacted with people who made their living from popular culture. Conservative estimates suggest that at least 400 to 500 black-owned record stores—and probably closer to one thousand—were in operation throughout the region during this period. Photograph courtesy of Curt Moore (here), owner of Curt’s. [End Page 71] Records is a market that can be used to brighten the future of lots of black people with jobs and higher prestige all over the country,” Jimmy Liggins announced in 1976 to the readers of the Carolina Times, Durham, North Carolina’s most prominent African American newspaper. Liggins, a minor rhythm and blues star of the 1950s, was publicizing his Duplex National Black Gold Record Pool, headquartered in Durham, which sought to “help and assist black people to own and sell the music and talent blacks produce.” With the aid of this “self helping program,” aspiring hit-makers could record and release music that Black Gold sold through mail order and at Liggins’s shop, Snoopy’s Records, in downtown Durham.1 Kenny Mann vividly recalls his frequent trips to Snoopy’s as a teenager in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Liggins “was like a god” to Mann and other young customers who patronized the store. “Everybody knew” Liggins and his two business partners, Henry Bates and Paul Truitt. “These guys, I was listening to them talk about bringing Tyrone Davis and Johnny Taylor and Al Green to town . . . It was fun to go [to their store] because it felt like the place to be; there were girls in there, and I was twelve, thirteen years old.” Not only that, but Mann “never felt the pressure to buy something” like he did in stores in his hometown of Chapel Hill, where white shopkeepers frequently followed young African American shoppers around their businesses, suspecting they might shoplift. “They had a double standard,” Mann remembers. Chapel Hill “really was set up as if they didn’t want to do business with us black people.” In sharp contrast, Liggins envisioned Snoopy’s as “our mall”—a “hang out” where black consumers could buy black music in a record store owned and operated by African Americans. Black-owned record stores like Snoopy’s represented a crucial nexus where African American enterprise, consumer culture, community, and of course, music all met. And by the early 1970s, Liggins was booking and promoting shows for Mann’s band, which eventually became Liquid Pleasure, the popular Chapel Hill-based funk and soul outfit still active today. In the postwar United States, record stores were perhaps the place where consumers most commonly interacted with individuals who made their living from popular culture. Yet, while music writers and scholars have devoted much attention to black-oriented radio stations and record labels, we still know very little about the retail businesses from which African Americans purchased music, especially in the South. Conservative estimates would suggest that at least 400 to 500 black-owned record stores—and probably closer to one thousand—were in operation throughout the region during this period. An examination of the black-owned record stores in one southern state, North Carolina, not only reveals valuable insights about the southern marketplace for African American music, but also much about the broader role consumer culture played in southern black communities during these transitional decades. While desegregation measures were beginning to significantly alter the racial make-up of some areas of southern society, such as public schools, many [End Page 72] African American record retailers and consumers hesitated to assimilate into white-dominated pop-music marketplaces. Black merchandisers envisioned the record trade as an arena in which African Americans could pursue a broader strategy of bolstering economic self-sufficiency and sustaining black public life. And by seeking out music from black-owned record stores, African American consumers partook in a vibrant form of commercial public...