I’m excited to announce that I have a chapter in a brand new volume entitled The Production and Consumption of Music in the Digital Age. The editors, Brian J. Hracs, Michael Seman, and Tarek E. Virani, worked tirelessly in a process that ultimately took a couple of years. This actually began as a session that Hracs organized at AAG 2013 in Los Angeles. I presented some research I’d done about a few new (at the time) record stores in Highland Park, one of my favorite areas of Los Angeles. Brian and Michael (who I met shortly afterward at a dinner in, from what I remember, was an engine room/speak easy restaurant… you know, downtown LA) both thought my chapter would make a good contribution to their book, so here we are.
You can read up on the chapter list at the book’s catalog page on Routledge. A great cast of characters contributed, including my colleague Tom Bell, continuing his collaborations with Peggy Gripshover and Ola Johansson on a geographic analysis of music venues in Pittsburgh and Nashville. I can’t wait to look through a hard copy of this. If you or your professors/students are looking for a great addition for your course in Cultural Geography, Music Industry, Musicology, or anything involving the post-internet economy, make sure to check this out. And add it to your library! Don’t forget to do that, either. And follow the project on twitter. The list goes on.
While I was scrolling through older entries trying to find that one about AAG 2013, I passed by an entry about Heavy Metal Parking Lot. A quick word of congratulations to my friend Jeff Krulik on the 30th Anniversary Exhibit at the University of Maryland’s Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library. I was actually at that library for a couple of days the week before the exhibit opened, and it BURNED that I just narrowly missed it. But, if you’re in the DC area, you don’t have to! It’s runs through next spring.
Following is an update that Kurt Butefish of the Tennessee Geographic Alliance received from the National Geographic Society. Please read the update and then contact Senator Alexander with the information contained at the end of the message.
Happy December, again. I just received exciting news from my esteemed colleague Ron Kalafsky. This past spring, I TA’d for his class on the Global Economy this last spring, and we conducted something of an experiment with our students. Ron had the idea to use the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) paradigm that business-minded folks (unlike myself) employ when analyzing whether to invest in a new market. We chose a set of regional, mid-size cities and assigned them throughout the class as a mechanism for teaching geography. The set of essays we received gave us a mountain of material with which to work, but the result of the project was published today in the Journal of Geography.
Sonic Geography 