Radio tonight. Which was fun. Even though I completely fubar'ed the segue from Cab.Volt's "L 21st" into a track off the new Daft Punk CD. Retrospectively I know what I shoulda done but I didn't and it was a trainwreck. But mercifully short at least I'm sure. Those kinda minor radio disasters only seem to last 5 hours if you're actually in the MCR perpetrating them. In the outside world listening you can barely notice.
The next big wrrld music project for XDU will be reconfiguring the sub-genres and moving some stuff into the spiffy new shelves that were just built and installed. Ah, the glorious luxury of space. The downside, of course, is that now I have to figure out how to break out the sub-genres and what all the different implications of the various choices/options are. Back in the early 90s I was working for a small library and one of the things I was doing was keywording their database. I think that was one of my first introductions to the fluidity of definitions. It was always especially tricky figuring out regional and geographic stuff. Where, for example, exactly is the South? You think you know. Until you're forced to look closer. And then maybe you're not so sure. Same thing with the XDU shelves. It'd be nice to have a consistent system but I don't think that's going to happen. Instead there'll probably be some version of the current mashup of geography (Africa, Brazil, etc) and genre (reggae, klezmer, etc). Several people have suggested to me that there just be one big World section with everything in it. That would bring it in line with other genres (Jazz, RPM, Blues, etc) but I don't think it would much improve the usability of the shelves.
Tricky, tricky genrefication! The fact that everyone is pushing boundaries around with their music these day makes it even harder. Plus, each DJ thinks about music differently, so even with a good system not everyone will know where to look in the first place.
I think if we are going to untertake such an endeavor, we should go ahead and catalog what we've got--not an easy task but with a plan, a few sessions with a laptop and a few people and we can have a dayabase. Then, with that database, we take over the world!
I think we should talk about this over Ethiopian food (or Kenyan or Salvadoran ...) and beer.
i'm checking with Jason! on the status of the old database project that he and coop worked on. i wonder just how hard it would be to get it to the point where y'all could do some cataloging with it?