RPL's Current Crop of Top Tunes of 2007

Remember when Minnesota Public Radio wasn't the hippest place for the young kids of today to listen to music? No disrespect to musicians on A Prairie Home Companion, the classical music service, the Jazz Image (okay, Leigh Kammen tended to go on a bit, but he's retired now), or other fine standard-bearing MPR programs, but come on.

That all changed in a Public Radio Seismic Shift better known as the introduction of alternative-music-only station The Current.

So why are we promoting MPR on the RPL blog? Good question. Or perhaps the better question is: Got Current artists? The answer is Yes.

Many of you may already know that The Current has published their list of the top 89 albums of 2007 and we're happy to report that many of the titles on the list are owned by our library. Need to get your fix of Wilco, Spoon, the White Stripes, and more? We Got 'em.

You can search for music CDs in the library's online catalog by album title (say, Icky Thump) or performing artist (use "author")(say, White Stripes). Music CDs can be checked out for 14 days (7 days if there are reserves waiting).

If you don't see your favorite album or artist represented in our library collection and think other library users would be interested in it too, you can make a recommendation for purchase by entering your library card number and pin number at this link (you do need to have library card in good standing to make recommendations). You can recommend 12 titles per 12-month period. Any comments about your favorite CDs of 2007? Feel free to post comments below!

Notes from the Big Blue NonFiction Wall: January

It's so very, very cold again and a great time to make sure that you have some very, very good books to keep your mind engaged while we wait for the Earth to get a move on into that warm, sunny Spring-ward tilt that we love so much. Time to take a brief tour of the newest of the new non-fiction gracing the mighty Big Blue NonFiction wall on the second floor of the Rochester Public Library.

Speaking of the Earth, let's start with something a little Cosmic. America In Space: Nasa's First Fifty Years (with a forward by Neil Armstrong - the astronaut, not the biker dude who used to date Sheryl Crow) is a spectacular coffee table book that deals with everything NASA from the pre-Explorer days to the Moon to the Space Shuttle and beyond. There are some truly spectacular images of Earth, spacecraft, and the men and women who boldly went where most of us are unlikely to go. There's even a picture of Richard Nixon laughing (page 195, if you don't believe me)! Whether you remember those heady times of the Space Race with the Soviet Union or you're saying to yourself "What was this 'Soviet Union'?", this book will amaze and delight.

Switching gears from the Heavens to the not-so-funny, but sometimes-funny pages comes the book Art Spiegelman: Conversations edited by Joseph Witek. For those who may not be in the know, Mr. Spiegelman is the acclaimed artist/writer of the graphic novel Maus: A Survivors Tale which tells the story of his father's experience in the Holocaust and won a Special Pulitzer Prize in 1992. It was one of the first works that showed that the medium of comics could be used to tell serious stories and made Spiegelman one of the famous literary cartoonists in the world (admittedly, a small group). This new book is a collection of conversations with Speigelman (hence the catch & accurate title of the book) spans thirty years and serves as a primer on this history and development of comics as a serious art form. Spiegelman is a very smart, funny and candid artist and it is interesting to catch his words at so many different junctures of his career in one place.

For those of you who thought secret Presidential taping was the sole purview of one Richard Milhous Nixon, think again. LBJ was a secret taper par excellence, and some recently released transcripts of his 1964 recordings prove it. Get an insider's view through this amazing collection of phone conversation collected in The Presidential Recordings, Lyndon B. Johnson. Don't worry, once you finish the first one, there are still two other new volumes that we've recently received at the library. Editors David Schreve, Robert David Johnson put the conversations in historical context and give quite the insight into one of this country's more turbulent decades. Secret taping done right.

And finally, the book we've all been waiting to have written ever since cavemen started acting rudely at the Dawn of Time (see the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey for details) : Look, Speak, & Behave For Men by Jamie Yasko-Mangum. This book contains "expert advice on Image, Etiquette, and Effective Communication for the Professional" in a mere 212 pages. If effective, it could be Pulitzer time for Ms. Yasko-Mangum. Bringing together the four elements that make a man a man (Positive Self-Esteem, Polished Appearance, Speaking Intelligently, and Behaving With Pride), this book gives tips for the modern professional man (although not much of it seems to apply to professional wrestlers) in a concise, readable little book. A book hardly bigger than a PDA (and potentially more valuable) could be sitting there for you if you visit the Big Blue NonFiction wall in time. Also available (but probably less necessary) Look, Speak, & Behave For Women.

Until next month, remember to visit the Big Blue NonFiction wall because you'll never know what you might find.

Directory Assistance or Ancestry in the City

When a singer has an incredibly good voice, people will sometimes say that they could "sing the phone book" and it would be good. The underlying thought is that phone books are an inherently boring read and only Ol' Blue Eyes (or insert your crooner-of-choice here) could make it interesting.

Poppycock! Even if you are cursed with something less than a Golden Throat, be assured that you could still sing the words from our collection of Rochester City Directories and put a song in the heart of local historians.

Lets talk about phone books for a minute. Okay, when they're not new any more and start piling up in your garage, they aren't all that exciting. But like John Travolta, if they hang around long enough through a period of pointless direct-to-video offerings, the fickle public once again embraces their charms.

Enter Rochester City Directories. We've got them here at the library going back as far as 1911. What good are they? Well, first off, a City Directory is a little bit more than a phone book. Way back when, in addition to your phone number (and some of the earliest ones aren't particularly chock full of phone numbers as the "telephone technology" hadn't quite caught on yet), City Directories listed the people who lived in the town and also listed their occupations (even if your occupation was "high school student"). If you're interested in local history or family genealogy, your Spider Sense should be fully a-tingle. These books are treasure troves of historical information!

Want to know who lived in your house in years gone by? You can look up any property by its street address and find out who owned (and quite possibly who lived) in it. You can also see what the businesses of the day were.

You want a list of farmers in Olmsted County in 1923 (and, really, who doesn't?), check out the directory. You can see which churches, businesses, and politicians were around at that time.

Lots of this information is not available from any other source (sorry Google, you don't have EVERYTHING yet). Another reason to visit your good ol' Rochester Public Library. Because of their historical significance (and their irreplaceable nature), we do keep our City Directories archived in the Magazine Room (far back left corner of the 2nd floor as you're coming up the stairs or elevator). You can read them while you're here (and we have one of those photocopy machines if you find something good.) The upside is that they are never checked out, so they will be here when you visit.

A whole Historical Rochester awaits!