Chronicles from Cotolo{November 2008}

Frank Cotolo
The little I know is enough for me

I know so little about any one thing that sometimes I feel I know all there is to know. Sure, it’s wonderful to be specialized and know all there is to know about one subject, but you would be surprised how useless that can be at social gatherings, where a menu of professions and interests weave their way through crowded rooms.

I enjoy going to these events because of the variety of people attending. And my knowing a little about any one thing surely helps me talk with more people than those who know a lot about one thing.

My neighbor, Dr. Stoven, for instance, knows everything there is to know about facial muscles. He makes a damned good living because of all he knows about facial muscles. He is the only person ever to explain to me how I smile. Not that I ever actually cared to know the anatomical reason but at least it added one thing for me to know about facial muscles that I did not know and that, I was sure, would help me more than it would help Dr. Stoven in the long run.

This could be the reason why some people say I am the life of the party and why I am invited to at least twenty parties every weekend. Some are far away from my home but still, the invites from Rio, Vancouver, Paris, Hong Kong and Chicago, pour in by telephone, email and cell-phone texts. It is getting so that I may soon have to purchase a tie.

People find me fascinating and I find that fascinating because most of the people who find me fascinating are fascinated by what I know. That’s fascinating, all right, considering how little I know. What does that say about those who know a lot? It says a lot about those who know a lot. Exactly how much it says about them is unknown to me because I only know much about that particular subject.

Much of this goes to show you –or anyone—that what they told me in school was hooey. One of my teachers, for instance, a Science teacher named McConner or Conners or Conmack or MacConnie or something, told me: “Cotolo, you had better come up with one subject you wish to study or else you are not going to make it out there in the real world.” I told him that was fine because I could make out there in the fake world, which is what I have done and continue to do. And rather successfully, too.

So, as I go through life even now in my late 50s, I try not to accumulate any knowledge about any one thing so I can continue to enter in conversations with people who know so much about so little. It’s the most I can do for society, aside from bringing a stray cat a cup of milk or something.

MIC AWARDS

The MIC awards

The Mic awards are handed out once per month and will be given out for the following categorizes.

+All the following terms come from The Wikipedia

*Broadcaster:

A radio personality (also known as a radio host or a radio presenter) is a person with an on-air position in radio broadcasting. A radio personality can be someone who introduces and discusses various genres of music, hosts a talk show that may take calls from listeners, or someone whose primary responsibility is to give news, weather, sports or traffic information. Professional radio personalities don't usually stay at one station for their entire career; instead, they move up and on to stations within their broadcast area or those out of town. For talk radio hosts, and many other kinds of radio personality, the highest achievement in radio is national syndication.

Oddly, according to most experienced broadcasters, radio personalities become better known in a community than personalities of other media outlets. It's surmised that the intimacy created between the radio personality and the driver and passengers of a car impacts the listener in an unusual way, although no scientific studies are know to have been made on this subject. More radio personalities are sought to make personal appearances at local functions and commercial venues than those from other media, according to Ad Age Magazine.

Sometimes frequent callers to Talk radio programs become radio personalities by default due to multiple exposure to a specific audience. Some of those callers known in the industry as "chronics", such as Lionel, are so good that station management offers them their own show.

In the 1990s, with the rise of talk-oriented radio personalities like Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh, successful radio stations began to focus less on the musical expertise of their hosts and more on the individual hosts' personalities. Since the term disk jockey has also become commonly used to refer to a club DJ, the term "radio personality" has become more appropriate for hosts of radio shows.

*Musical artist:

A musician is a person who plays or writes music. Musicians can be classified by their roles in creating or performing music:

• An instrumentalist plays a musical instrument.
• A singer (or vocalist) uses his/her voice as her instrument. For example Tuffhouse Tae, a Hip/Hop artiist who makes his own beats and records over them. Myspace.com/tuffhouset.
• Composers, arrangers and songwriters memorize and orally teach, or record their compositions in the form of traditional notation or audio recording.
• A conductor leads a musical ensemble. A conductor can simultaneously act as an instrumentalist in the ensemble.

A musician can be self-taught, or learned by formal education in a conservatory or by a private instructor or a guru.

Musicians can be amateur or professional. The meaning of these terms is, however, somewhat diffuse. Musicians have varying levels of activity and ambition in music, which often makes music both a hobby and a profession. Many professional musicians define the core of their musicianship as a state of "being married" to music, which suggests an active and progressive relationship even and especially after finishing formal education.

A professional musician is, however, usually defined as one who is paid to perform, compose or act in any other productive manner related to music, and whose main source of income is this activity. Professional musicians may work freelance, enter into a contract with a studio or record label, be employed by a professional ensemble such as a symphony orchestra or big band, or by an institution such as a church or business (such as a jazz club or a bar). A musician who earns money by selling sound recordings is called a recording artist.

The concept and the status of the musician in society varies widely, depending on sociological, cultural, and economic factors.

• Arranger
• Composer
• Conductor
• Improviser
• Instrumentalist
  • Bassist or Double bassist
  • Bassoonist
  • Bandurist (Bandura player)
  • Bouzouki player
  • Cellist
  • Clarinetist
  • Drummer
  • Euphoniumist
  • Electronic musician
  • Flautist
  • Guitarist (Electric, Acoustic)
  • Harpist
  • Hornist (Horn player)
  • Keyboardist (Keyboard player)
  • Oboist
  • Orchestrator
  • Organist
  • Pianist
  • Percussionist
  • Recorder player
  • Saxophonist
  • Sawyer (musical saw player)
  • Sitarist
  • Poet
  • Trombonist
  • Trumpeter (also Trumpet player)
  • Tubist (Tuba player)
  • Turntablist (DJ)
  • Uillean piper
  • Violinist
  • Violist (Viola player)
• Vocalist
  • Singer
  • Rapper

*Station/Podcast site:

A podcast is a series of audio or video digital-media files which is distributed over the Internet by syndicated download, through Web feeds, to portable media players and personal computers. Though the same content may also be made available by direct download or streaming, a podcast is distinguished from other digital-media formats by its ability to be syndicated, subscribed to, and downloaded automatically when new content is added.

Like the term broadcast, podcast can refer either to the series of content itself or to the method by which it is syndicated; the latter is also called podcasting. The host or author of a podcast is often called a podcaster. One of the first broadcasts was sent out by a small radio station in Surrey by radio DJ Kelly Coulter.

The term is a portmanteau of the words "iPod" and "broadcast",^[1] the Apple iPod being the brand of portable media player for which the first podcasting scripts were developed (see history of podcasting). Such scripts allow podcasts to be automatically transferred from a personal computer to a mobile device after they are downloaded.^[2] As more devices other than iPods became able to synchronize with podcast feeds, the term was redefined by some parties as a backronym for "Personal On Demand broadCASTING".^[3][4][5]

-MIC AWARDS PAST SECTION-

November 2008 Issue

Contact The MIC

Contact The MIC online magazine online

E-mail

If you have any questions or comments for the columnists....

1.E-mail the columnists off their columns
2. Send us e-mail and we will FWD it.