Music Archives, Google Doc stuff, Capturing media and The Wang Gang.
Trawling through online music archives is one of life's great pleasures.....dealing with Google and wrangling media consumption, less so.
Music Archives
There is no better way to waste your time than wandering around the myriad of music archives that inhabit the interwebz.
That grumpy old chap, Neil Young has an outstanding archive and hours can be spent ambling around in its hallways, peeking into various albums on the timeline and digging into the history of Neil’s recordings.
If blues, folk and world music is your jam, the Alan Lomax Archive is a beast and has the wonderful moniker of The Archive of Cultural Equity.
In there words:
“From 1978 to 1983, Alan Lomax and a video-crew travelled through the American South and Southwest, documenting its traditional music — brass bands, second-liners, and Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans; miners, moonshiners, and Primitive Baptists in Kentucky; flat-footers, string bands, and Piedmont blues in North Carolina; Cajun cowboys, fiddlers, and zydeco stompers in French-speaking Louisiana; and fife-and-drum ensembles, gospel quartets, former railroad track-liners, levee-camp muleskinners, and players on the pre-war blues circuit in Mississippi; and vernacular music and material culture among Mexican American communities and the Tohono O'odham, Yacqui, and Mountain Apache in Arizona. This footage ultimately totaled some 350 hours and was edited into Lomax's "American Patchwork" series, which aired on American public television in 1991.”
Have a poke around the archive and see if anything tickles your fancy.
The Alan Lomax Archive
And don‘t forget the Alan Lomax YouTube Channel which is just wonderful.
And last but certainly not least the Mighty John Peel.
Arguably the most influential radio show ever, he was the longest-serving of the original BBC Radio 1 DJs, broadcasting regularly from 1967 until his death in 2004 with an amazing selection of artists over the years, the John Peel Sessions are some of the most memorable recordings you’ll come across.
Have a float round his website to find some gems but here are some of my favourite Peel Session on Spotify Below:
David Bowie - Recorded BBC1 - May 1972
PJ Harvey - Recorded BBC1 - 1991- 2004
Echo & the Bunnymen - Recorded BBC1 - 1979-1983
And some further sessions over at THIS YOUTUBE CHANNEL
Including a scorching recording of Thin Lizzy from 1974, the Pixies in 1988 (the first year I saw them live at Orange Street in Vancouver) and The Buzzcocks, XTC in 1979, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac in 1969, T-Rex in 1970, the Go Betweens in 1983, Ride in 1990, the Triffids in 1986, New Order in 1981, Joy Division in 1979, the Jam in 1977 and Nirvana in 1990…. there are just too many bangers.
Google Doc-Fu
For better or for worse, I’m wedded to the Google Suite for work despite its dystopian privacy and data policies….. although I do use ProtonMail/Drive/Calendar for end-to-end encryption and its ‘no-log’ policy + it has a generous amount of cloud storage (500gb).
But I came across these Google Doc hints during the week that some might find useful.
Type doc.new in your browser’s address bar to open a new document. You can also type sheet.new, slide.new, form.new, site.new, drawing.new, or cal.new to create instant Google spreadsheets, slides, forms, sites, drawings or calendar events.
Share your doc in another language. Your original is preserved — GDocs creates a translated copy. It’s rough enough to get the message across. Tools > Translate document.
Show a persistent count at the bottom left of your editing window.
Go to Tools > Word count— or Command-Shift-C — and check the box for “Display word count while typing.”A new feature lets you more quickly add checklists, numbered lists, and bulleted lists. Or insert images, tables, and charts.
Type @ for a keyboard shortcut to insert whatever you need, rather than hunting through menus with your mouse.GDocs now lets you insert “building blocks.” These include mini-templates for meeting notes and tracking content. One block lets you create an email draft. You can collaborate on it in a doc, then send in Gmail.
Type @ and choose the block you want.And dictation - Tools > Voice typing ….. mind you I’m currently enamored with an iPhone app called Otter which allows me to record thoughts, conversations and meetings and transcribes it beautifully into a document for export. It even recognises the different voices in a conversation and separates them into ‘Speaker 1”, “Speaker 2” etc…. you can then go in post-recording and edit the names to your liking. It’s a bloody ripper. - Otter.ai
Capturing Media
There were some studies done around 10 years ago that show that we consume some 72Gb of content per day… around the equivalent of 176 newspapers worth of content whipping around our noggins per day. Information overload and one can only presume that number has increased over the last decade,
We obviously consume media for different purposes. Be it catching up on current affairs or escaping by reading a novel but sometimes we want to actually remember the stuff we read and try to apply it in some part of our life.
I’m a big fan of reading. I got through four books last month and I do the vast majority of my reading these days on a Kindle which makes highlighting passages of text a breeze.
I also use Instapaper to capture articles on the web to read at a later time and use the Airr app to save snippets of podcasts I listen to that I find particularly interesting or potentially useful.
One app I find indispensable for wrangling content and taking meaningful notes that I can use at a later date is Readwise.
Readwise allows me to view all my Kindle highlights, podcast snippets, Instapaper articles and even saved Twitter threads in one spot.
I can also use the Readwise app to capture highlights from physical books via the camera on my phone, which it magically converts into text and it sends me a daily email with a specified number of quotes that I’ve highlighted from content that I have consumed in the past.
Readwise also syncs with PKM systems like Notion or Obsidian and you can further segment highlighted quotes into various categories that make sense to you such as business, history, productivity, etc and create relationships between notes and highlights that have a common or complementary theme.
It’s an app that has really made a huge difference in how I consume content and learn from material I read and while the paid tier offers all the syncing bells and whistles, even the free version is worth its weight in gold for the collation of notes and highlights and the emails reminding you of important quotes.
It’s a great app.
The Wang Gang
I saw this dude cooking on an Uncle Roger episode and have become mildly obsessed with his cooking videos.
Get on the Wang Gang.
And Finally
RIP Your Majesty
Andy Warhol - 1985
That’s it for this week amigos… I wish you the finest week imaginable…. if you’re enjoying The Sunday Bento, please feel free to share it around, throw down some comments and suggestions and I’ll see you next week.
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