I remember when short films were the boring realm of arts students and film societies. Maybe they had a government grant and some public broadcast stations were mandated to play them. Or they were simply a tool for aspiring filmmakers to practice their craft and hopefully go on to do bigger and better things. The films themselves were not all that fun to watch, at least in light of more exciting, bigger budget, feature length competition. But then there was the perfect storm. The big media players, in a never ending quest to make more for less, cut costs to the point of being insulting. The natural result of the massive increase in “reality” shows is to put the following question in everyone’s mind: why pay for something you could do yourself? At the same time, DIY culture was becoming empowered. The lowered cost of digital tools has now put the power of film making into everyone’s hands. And while that democratization may result in a lot of poor content, it also allows great artists to realize visions that would have been cost prohibitive even ten years ago to independently create and release their works to the world. Check out this creepy short about a girl who everyone forgot by artist Katy Towell. It is reminiscent of Tim Burton’s work (one of her influences) but strikes me more as the sort of thing Dr. Seuss might have produced if he had gone over to the dark side after watching “Village of the Damned” a few too many times…
You can check out more of Katy’s work at her site: Children R Skary. Be sure to also check out the merch section with lots of cool stuff, including a book version of the above video.
This Sunday, Axl Rose finally made good on promises of Chinese Democracy. It’s been seventeen years since the last batch of original music released by Guns n’ Roses and nine years since the title started floating around. Rose’s efforts to record the most expensive album ever have at the very least secured him a legendary role in pop culture. Chinese Democracy is now even defined in Urban Dictionary as: “A promise, often made more than once over an extended period of time, which the person is either unwilling or unable to keep.” While the album could never live up to seventeen years of expectations, it is growing on me. It has a ton of faults along with the scattered (yet numerous) flashes of brilliance, but at the very least, you’ve got to respect the perseverance. The pressure must have been unreal, and to release anything at all at this point shows balls. Hopefully Axl will continue his experimentation and allow videos like this to exist:
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You might not think it’s possible to make a comedy act out of stuff you’d find in a modern art gallery, but Ursus Wehrli does just that in this video by giving his version of “tidied up” paintings. My favorite is his attempt to tidy up one of Pollock’s paintings: “Jackson Pollock, for example… yeah, that’s a really hard one… but after a while, I just decided here to go all the way and just put the paint back into the cans.”
I’m reading Lawrence Lessig’s Remix
, which makes a very passionate argument for moving away from the 20th century copyright laws that the big media companies seem to have a death grip on, even as technology pushes onward and these laws seem more and more ridiculous. I thought I’d find some more information on his work and ended up watching this presentation on his site: I find this very interesting for a number of reasons: (more…)
Decent photography, you say? Well, whatever you think about this picture, the most impressive thing about it is that the person in it isn’t real. She was rendered. The future will definitely be interesting if we manage not to blow ourselves up. If you want to check out more cool rendered portraits from the CG Society, click here! Watch out Hollywood, you may be the new manufacturing sector 
I am convinced that this post at soundmeme.com describes the future of independent music (and perhaps the future of music, period – as more and more of it transitions away from the classic record deal structure). It’s a great article that describes a very different way of thinking about releasing and making money off of music: one that my own band has been experimenting with for over a year.
Being a guitar player, I’ve been sort of reluctant to succumb to the whole Guitar Hero thing. I don’t know whether it’s the years of practice reduced to six colored buttons or the fact that it’s sometimes a lot more fun than actually playing an indie show, but something about it just makes me want to break down and cry. All those wasted years.
After all, in the game you have crowds and reliable gear and awesome stages and… did I mention crowds?
Anyway, I have recently been lured into playing a song or two (cough, cough) and I started wondering if someone had made something like this for the piano. A pianist actually plays keys as opposed to strings, so Piano Hero would be closer to the real thing than Guitar Hero by default. Turn the complexity up a bit more by having your game “controller” fitted with a full 88 keys, and voila: your very own electronic piano teacher!
Enter Synthesia:
The video above is from Sean at hdpiano.com, and it uses a FREE software app that you can get for Mac or PC at www.synthesiagame.com.
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Check out what Rush Limbaugh has to say about Barack Obama’s amazing acceptance speech on Tuesday. I suppose the guy does make his living off of being a hypocritical jackass, so it’s understandable that he couldn’t even wait a day to reflect on one of the most inspirational speeches of our lifetime before critiquing it.
This is one of my favorite parts:
OBAMA: The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you, we as a people will get there.
RUSH: Okay, I remember that bite. Where are we going? He didn’t tell the crowd where we were going, and the crowd didn’t care where they’re going.
Now, before you get too worked up about this, just imagine Mr. Limbaugh applying this same expert analysis to Martin Luther King: “You have a dream?!?!?! What dream? What kind of funny business are you trying to pull here, mister?”
It’s easy to get angry reading a transcript like this, which just reeks of stupid, but you’ve got to put it in perspective. These are the dying gasps of an old system. It’s a system based on anger and hate, and on Tuesday, the majority of Americans decided it had been around for long enough. It’s all the poor guy knows. As Obama was fond of pointing out about McCain, “He just doesn’t get it.”
Let him rant and point fingers. And let’s concentrate on proving him wrong.
…or dumber. According to James Surowiecki, the jury’s still out on whether or not the Internet will improve us via collective intelligence or seduce us into conformity. Check out his fascinating talk about the wisdom of crowds on TED.
Highlights:
Each blog post, each blog commentary may not, in and of itself, be exactly what we’re looking for, but collectively, the judgment of those people posting, those people linking, more often than not, is going to give you a very interesting and enormously valuable picture of what’s going on.
The more tightly linked we become to each other, the harder it is for each of us to remain independent… One of the fundamental characteristics of a network is that once you are linked in the network, the network starts to shape your views and starts to shape your interactions with everybody else… Groups are only smart when the people in them are as independent as possible. This is sort of the paradox of the wisdom of crowds or the paradox of collective intelligence… Networks make it harder for people to do that because they drive attention to the things that the network values…
I’m pretty sure everyone’s going to be talking about Tuesday night for a while. The first African American president. Jesse Jackson and Oprah Winfrey not even trying to fight back tears. John McCain making his best speech in years. He may have bought into the tactics of George Bush and his goons when they were proven effective in robbing him of the Republican nomination the first time around, but he was at least a very gracious loser. Hats off to you tonight, Senator McCain.
For some strange reason, I’m feverishly anticipating whatever Sarah Palin is going to say in regards to her defeat. We know it will be something stupid – and we’re now free to laugh about it without that heavy feeling of doom, as she will not be anywhere near the nuclear launch codes for at least another four years. By then it will be 2012, and if you believe the Mayans or Terence McKenna‘s wonderfully comical, acid and I Ching fueled “novelty theory” predictions, the last thing we’ll be worried about is Larry Flynt’s new Alaskan muse.
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Just got a message from Stella at wejustlivehere.com and am happy to put it up:
We’d all love to vote in this election because it impacts us as much as folks who’re just born here. So we put up this site to show what would happen if the millions of US aliens who can’t vote, could.
Just taking a glance at the results, one can see why it would be in the Republicans’ best interest to make gaining your U.S. citizenship difficult. Thanks, Stella!
Oh God. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Paris Hilton (to be more specific, whoever wrote this song for her) is actually kind of witty in this video:
But you know, I bet Paris knows that the First Amendment doesn’t guarantee freedom from the press, and that would mean she’s just a little more capable than the current VP on the Republican ticket.
This article speaks for itself.
It’s short and well worth the time to read. But to whet your appetite, here’s my favorite part of the article:
I’ve learned that this election is about the heart of America. It’s about the young people who are losing hope and the old people who have been forgotten. It’s about those who have worked all their lives and never fully realized the promise of America, but see that promise for their grandchildren in Barack Obama. The poor see a chance, when they often have few. I saw hope in the eyes and faces in those doorways.
Looks like France is well on its way to becoming a pioneer in overly harsh anti-piracy legislation. Get accused of pirating three times and you lose your internet access for a year. The legislation is still pending approval from the lower house of parliament. I seem to remember Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing suggesting that when adopting any of these three strike policies, there should be a reverse policy – if you make three spurious copyright infringement accusations, your internet gets cut off. But then, maybe the big media companies could operate without internet connections. Their business models certainly suggest that they have no awareness of this new medium that can do their advertising for them, reduce the cost of production, add value to products, etc., etc. The article identifies one of the goals of the legislation being to drive citizens to legitimate online music sellers like iTunes – which is interesting because Apple seems to be doing just fine with iTunes sales without the legislation. In fact, when Steve Jobs announced Apple’s entry into the market, he rightfully brushed the piracy issue off, saying that all iTunes needed to do was offer a better product at a reasonable price.
In Obama, the Arts, and Soft Power, Raymond J. Learsy talks about the increased focus Barack Obama would will give the arts if he is when he is elected President.
I have mixed feelings about public funding for the arts. I’m certainly not a big supporter of government grants to individual artists. Perhaps this is because I’ve never attempted to apply for these grants myself. I think I share with a lot of other Canadian artists, a disinterest in trying to mold my work around some status quo definition of “Canadian identity” which is certainly something that helps a lot of the folks I see getting grants. I do see a lot more funding that doesn’t seem as focused on preserving that nebulous notion of Canadian heritage, but the same essential problem still remains. Who decides which artists get funded and which ones don’t?
In a pure market economy, it’s everyone, voting with their money. And while this doesn’t always result in good art, it is fair in the sense that artists are rewarded by how much the public wants them to produce new works. With government grants, you essentially get a small group of people dictating what will be promoted to the public. There’s always the chance of a benevolant dictatorship, but more often than not, it turns into a game of who knows who.
That said, after reading Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, I’m intrigued by the ways in which funding the arts can boost today’s rising creative economy sector, thus justifying a certain amount of public funding. Here’s Florida’s thesis in a nutshell:
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