Listen: Happy Mother's Day!

Everyone keeps doing the same thing out of the fear that the slightest deviation from the norm will scare away the small remaining, yet patient audience who goes along because of a lack of alternatives (we dance either because we paid or because the drugs kicked in).

Nasdaq studio

Did that depress you? Now, here comes the good news: exactly because everyone seemingly performs to the lowest still acceptable standards, all you have to do as an artist is to unleash disproportional waves of creativity. Since nothing promises secure success anymore, all considerations to what “works in the marketplace” can be freely dumped and forgotten. The more out there you get, the better. It’s the only way to stand out in a totally dull environment. The advantage is, put cynically, that the old channels are jammed. Whoever tries to break through them following “proven” old ways (which usually means emulating other people’s career paths) is wasting time and energy.

A very thoughtful article by Stefan Goldman, well worth the read; he has a point and he sets out some decent advice: 'step outside the box' appears to work here and there, at least momentarily, perhaps enough to get to that next gig and, as one commenter puts it, "killing expenses, whatever it takes to immerse in the task full time, and maybe I am misunderstanding his gist, but ... what if that's not all there is?

What if it is not the chops that need perfecting, but the one who wields the axe? This is my own approach, although admittedly I really suck at it, but I figure, as Gene Krupa put it, if you're going to die, you might as well die doing your own thing.

To be a workable theory of art, one must rest on one's priors, so let us consider what Pablo Picasso said:

“Art is just another way of keeping a diary”

If this is so, then our way to garner audience attention is not simply to out-do the oddity of our last LOLCats post, but to be an interesting diarist, to be someone who has something to say, and interesting to a degree that we really want to know what that person is going to say next. So we the audience hang on the feed awaiting the next releases, and through that person, we discover others who are also following these ideas and in there we have a community, a network.

Whether you are a minstrel or a symphony orchestra, given a tuned-in network of like minds, all sorts of commerce-like things can happen; given a large enough network, it starts to feedback and self-inspire itself, and given a still larger network, sales people will get interested in piggy-backing on it (which is not always, if ever, a Good Thing)

This, it seems to me, is a fair description of the successes we see in the wild, of, for example, phenomena we today call Darcy James Argue and The Bad Plus: artists with a message and a mission, the mission itself transcendent of the particular temporal recordings so much so that someone else in a pub playing Transit is still interesting, but clearly not as much so. The work is only a step in the evolution, a transition point on a journey and we are invited along for the ride.

The key here is in being an interesting art diarist, in becoming, in having something to say in the next work that expands on what was said in the work before; it says nothing about the low barriers to entry or the ease of posting any doodle to iTunes. In an art, there needs be a direction, a vector out of the past and through the present into some place in tomorrow.

Beethoven didn’t just dream up nifty sounds that were “neater” than the last, he had a system, he was on a quest, he had a theory of where his music had to go; each and every composition (outside of commissions for money) was a targeted probe, a further exploration into that space, each new symphony was the logical successor to the prior, building from the learning experience, going forward with a purpose.

Mahler then picked up from Beethoven, and kept running, another interesting musical ‘diarist’; Schoenberg then did the same, and Cage ditto. Each was moving in a direction, applying themselves to exploring where this thing we call music had to go, inevitably, carrying things to their logical conclusion. This is the passion that propelled them. It wasn't about penthouse suites. It wasn’t about spandex and wigs and arriving in a cocoon.

So it behooves the artist to become interesting first, and then make their art out from that foundation, tangible proof of their point. To be 'experimental' is more than just being weird and 'unique', it is about gathering experience and confirming or challenging the working hypothesis.

To some extent the ear-candy people are doing this too, only the theory they are applying towards is finding maxima in sales and bums in seats, which, to be fair, is nonetheless a quest and a scientific endeavour that has lead them to all sorts of clever inventions in the pursuit of cash register and ticket receipts.

I would just, myself, however, hope to find me some diarists with something a tad more interesting to say, and more over hope as well to be one :)

On February 3rd 2011 about 20 people got together for a workshop at the Lift11 Conference. We all had one thing in common: love for movies. We noticed that we all struggle with the current content delivery landscape, find it difficult to legally obtain the movies you want to watch and think that it could all be much easier.

This is why we collaboratively came up with the Digital Media Delivery Manifesto that can be signed on this page.

Right after the workshop Jordi and Pierre launched this platform with the Manifesto we created together. People are now able to digitally sign the Manifesto using their Facebook or Twitter account.

And who knows, in the end, maybe content providers will understand our needs. And the fact that we are not their enemy. We are just huge fans of movies who would love to pay for their content. If only it weren't so damn difficult.

Hear here! They're there. But ... will the RIAA members listen and catch up?

“Large amounts of energy will be required to fuel economic growth, increase standards of living, and lift developing nations out of poverty.” (Brown et al., 2011; see Figure at left). 

 

A key message from Brown et al. in their must-read empirical and theoretical summary of relationships between energy and economic development.   The paper reveals a hard fact of human systems: increasing development is coupled with increasing energy use and both of these are going in the same direction- up! Though whether one causes the other will probably remain a chicken and egg discussion forever, they show that Kleiber’s 3/4 power law, a foundational discovery in understanding the evolution of higher organisms, populations,  and even ecosystems also applies to human systems (as it does to social insects; eg Hou et al., 2010).  Perhaps this is not surprising given the resemblance between the network structures needed to support urban systems (roads, etc. eg. Bettencourt et al 2007), and the veins and other distribution systems needed to support the metabolism of higher organisms that are thought to give rise to these power laws.

The power law relationships revealed by Brown et al. indicate that to support the world population in 2050 in the current US lifestyle would require 16 times the current global energy use.  This is a huge number- and not much better if we substitute Switzerland's per capita energy use (about half that of the USA).  It is also true that our use of carbon-based energy is already changing global climate, fossil fuel use is ultimately unsustainable, the alternatives are expensive, and that in the process of using more energy we humans will change the world even more (Smil 2005).  But who would have imagined 300 years ago that humans could fuel a developing society without using more wood and horses, or the changes in living standards and longevity associated with the move to more energy-rich societies?  While we are changing the world forever, the evolution of human systems is just beginning.

Something to ponder as we roll around again to the annual misguided ritual of Earth Hour: the problem isn't that we use the energy, but rather far far more urgently the problem is how we acquire that useable energy. Numerous other studies already both predict and discover the counter-intuitive waste that results from increased conservation -- for one thing, as the demand goes down, the price goes down, making the product far more appealing to those who would waste it.

Bereft of budgets or motivated staffs, the rock music business has been hard-pressed to support the promotion and marketing efforts necessary to build acts and buzz. Without traditional record stores, there no longer are outlets in which to hype must-have recordings. In the past, record companies used to create personalities for artists, so when you bought albums, you felt a kinship to one or more of the artists. With the decline of newspaper, magazine and book reading by the youth culture, the personalities and philosophies of rock artists have become meaningless and moot.

I used to say that I'd feel old the day I saw Sir Paul McCartney as the guest host on The Tonight Show; JazzWax may be a little tongue in cheek here riffing on the horse theme of 'Jazz is Dead' so often flogged when there's not much else to write about, but then again, the numbers don't lie, and all around it does very much seem quite plausible Rock's long since jumped the shark and the boomers may very well take their hype machine with them. The sad and tragic part, though, is Rock didn't take its own advice, to stay pretty by dying young.

Ohio Impromptu (2000)
Director: Charles Sturridge
Cast: Jeremy Irons ... Reader / Listener

http://rapidshare.com/files/319394900/Ohio_Impromptu.rar

Catastrophe (2000)
Director: David Mamet
Cast:
Harold Pinter ... The Director
Rebecca Pidgeon ... The Director's Assistant
John Gielgud ... The Protagonist

http://rapidshare.com/files/303063799/Catastrophe.rar

Breath (2000)
Director: Damian Hirst
Cast: Keith Allen (voice)

http://rapidshare.com/files/245693537/Damian_Hirst-Samuel_Beckett_s_Breath.avi

Not I (1973)
Director: Anthony Page
Cast: Billie Whitelaw ... Auditor / Mouth

http://rapidshare.com/files/230450679/not_i---73_.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/230450680/not_i---73_.part2.rar

Act Without Words I (2000)
Director: Karel Reisz
Cast: Sean Foley

http://rapidshare.com/files/313022897/Beckett_on_Film_-_Act_Without_Words_I.rar

Act Without Words II (2000)
Director: Enda Hughes
Cast: Marcello Magni, Pat Kinevane

http://rapidshare.com/files/313134105/Beckett_on_Film_-_Act_Without_Words_II.rar

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Been waiting a hundred years for this

Whenever I begin to feel positive about the future of western civilization, an election roles around and shatters my illusions. As we near the municipal elections, I seek in vain for any shred of a viable future vision; the best simply say they will 'do their best' but in the same breath they repeat the mantras of growth and development.

Dear council hopefulls, I have stood in the path and in the wake of that 'development', and seen the effects in all too many previous homelands, I have heard all the Progress slogans, and I have seen what follows; among the Amerindians of central america they say it is not wise to scream in the jungle, because the jaguars will come, and when they do, they won't be thinking of your prosperity. As a public service to all candidates, I offer the following message from another world, a world before your world, a message from your elders, the peoples who live at the heart of our world, and I only ask that you give them audience, then pause and ponder why they should say such very contrary things so earnestly. If the Kobi message tempers just one of the policies that will fall from your hand in the years ahead, I will consider that to be the first evidence of real progress.

Here's a tip: real progress happens when you learn to take care of your own with what you already have.  After that, any extra is extra.  Any salvational Satori will not come from without, it will come from within.

We were never fully biological entities. We are, and always have been, the cybernetic ape.

Darwin is one of my heroes, but I believe he was wrong in seeing human evolution as a result of the same processes that account for other evolution in the biological world - especially when it comes to the size of our cranium.

Darwin had to put large cranial size down to sexual selection, arguing that women found brainy men sexy. But biomechanical factors make this untenable. I call this the smart biped paradox: once you are an upright ape, all natural selection pressures should be in favour of retaining a small cranium. That's because walking upright means having a narrower pelvis, capping babies' head size, and a shorter digestive tract, making it harder to support big, energy-hungry brains. Clearly our big brains did evolve, but I think Darwin had the wrong mechanism. I believe it was technology. We were never fully biological entities. We are and always have been artificial apes.

They shaped their tools and thereafter their tools shaped us, quite literally says Tim Taylor. Some ancestor like australopithecines started the stone toolmaking so as to fashion power extensions of themselves from sinew, leather, woven grass and wood; add in a pressing need to relieve mama's aching back, and the rest is a tumbling cascade into history...