Both the Iron Tongue of Midnight and Barron's make a case for traditional media. For me, the media world keeps changing.
I love the combination of Roku and Netflix Instant Watch for streaming movies and as a result, I'm more unwilling than ever to buy DVDs. Similarly, lala.com streaming does a good job of satisfying some of my need to buy new music. So, the quest for ownership is gradually receding even at the risk some of these new services may disappear.
With my first generation Kindle, I've purchased maybe 10 books. While the proprietary format and digital rights management are clearly drawbacks, the idea of reducing physical clutter appeals as well as the easy availability of reasonably esoteric selections e.g. Conversations with Cage. But the fear of being stuck with a broken, expensive device kept me from buying more books.
Enter the Kindle iPhone App. It automatically syncs my previously purchased books (including the last page read). And to my surprise, I prefer to read on my iPhone rather than my Kindle whenever it is convenient, which means I am finally finishing the Thelonious Monk book I downloaded last year. From Monk's Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making by Gabriel Solis:
Although I suggested above that Monk worked within the sort of synthetic "Afro-modernism" that Baker theorized, such a synthesis would appear, at least in my analyses, to be interior to Monk and anterior to performance.That is, Monk thoroughly accomplished the synthesis of vernacular and modernist practices that Baker's "Afro-modernism" relies upon (though it seems unlikely that he would have thought of it in those terms) before the moment of performance. Moreover, this really is a synthesis and not a juxtaposition; the performance as a whole speaks to both aesthetics rather than concatenating materials that satisfy one or another aesthetic, but not both. Thus a listener with little or no knowledge of or appreciation for traditional African American aesthetic concerns can listen to Monk and appreciate him entirely as a musician working with the same issues as did modernists from the classical music world and vice versa.
prior aworks post on solis and ask me now.
