1. “Content and Its Discontents”
“We have to develop content that metamorphoses in sync with new ways of experiencing it, disseminating it and monetizing it. This argument concedes that it’s not possible to translate or extend traditional analog content like news reports and soap operas into pixels without fundamentally changing them. So we have to invent new forms. All of the fascinating, particular, sometimes beautiful and already quaint ways of organizing words and images that evolved in the previous centuries — music reviews, fashion spreads, page-one news reports, action movies, late-night talk shows — are designed for a world that no longer exists. They fail to address existing desires, while conscientiously responding to desires people no longer have.”
2. “College Radio Maintains Its Mojo”
“In the age of blogs and MySpace, college radio might seem an anachronism, an analog remnant in a digital world. With young people listening to the radio less, student stations no longer enjoy the influence they had when they gave bands like R.E.M. and Nirvana an early boost to stardom.
“But instead of clashing with the Internet, the 700 or so college stations around North America have persevered alongside it, settling into a role as the slower but more loyal foil to the fickle blogosphere. And thanks to the continued passion of their personnel, the stations remain surprisingly successful at promotion, according to many in the music industry, playing a bigger part in breaking new acts than is usually acknowledged.”
3.”Zeroing In on Your Favorite Video Clips”
“‘We abstract every object in each frame of a video and analyze it, saving it as a visual entity like a paragraph.’”
“Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they labor to find their voice, to learn their trade, to understand nuance and pace. And then, facing a sea of rejections, they hear about something like Barbara Bush’s dog getting a book deal.”
“Schickel is unafraid to apply critical thinking to history — which is, after all, part of a critic’s job — and he has the guts to venture some heretical ideas, among them his assertion that Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo is superior to John Ford’s The Searchers. (He’s right.)”
“Holstering the zingers, the author lays open It’s a Wonderful Life with an empathetic scalpel: the picture, of course, ‘turns out all right, thanks to an apprentice angel, Clarence, thanks to Christmas and its being a movie. But you can feel the ordeal and the agony, and you know what I mean when I say it’s also a film noir itching to get out and infect the small-town assurance.’ (He’s right: Frank Capra’s Jimmy Stewart is even more desperate and sweaty than Hitchcock’s.)”
“Roth is a 34-year-old songwriter, bassist and sound engineer, as well as the somewhat-reluctant co-owner of Daptone Records, a small record label in Brooklyn. He … says he strongly dislikes almost every pop song recorded since 1974, including one or two that bear his own imprint. What appeals to him — what consumes him — are dusty soul and funk records from the 1960s and early ’70s. By studiously emulating these recordings, he has gained a reputation as a devoted, even obsessive, musical purist. In an age of MP3s and computer-generated sounds, he has distinguished himself by making vinyl records featuring actual musicians manipulating real-life instruments. He has rejected the music industry, and in doing so, he has aroused its interest.”
It is with sadness and longing that I look at the pixilated image of the plant that so resembles the plant on http://www.ParentCoachingInstitute.org where we infuse a much needed living system paradigm into family support in the modern world. I like our plant image better! Neither pixels nor pictures or screen content for that matter can satisfy desires of living things–humans being in the category of living things–at least for now.