Episode 32: You can get anything you want…
Listen here.
1. answering machine message – MVB
2. “Preparando el Marck5” – Meteoro (from Latinamericarpet: Exploring the Vinyl Warp of Latin American Psychedelia, v. 1 compilation)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “This Time Tomorrow” – The Kinks (from Lola vs. Powerman and the Money-Go-Round, part 1)
5. “Ra 2” – Sun Ra Arkestra (from 2007/11/01 Iridium, NYC)
6. “Happy Coffee Song” – Trey Anastasio (from One Man’s Trash)
7. “Vajdaszentivány” – A Hawk and a Hacksaw (from A Hawk and a Hacksaw & the Hun Hangár Ensemble EP)
8. “Mr. Tambourine Man” – Bob Dylan (from 1999/07/30 Jones Beach, NY)
9. “Worry ’til Spring” – Sprengjuhöllin (from Verum í sambandi/Worry ’til Spring)
10. “For Some Time” – RANA (from Here in the USA)
11. “Alice’s Restaurant” – Arlo Guthrie (from Alice’s Restaurant)
12. “Harvest Moon” – Of Montreal (from Sony Connect EP)
On books:
It’s the oldest and the first mass medium. And it’s the one that requires the most training to access. Novels, particularly, require serious cultural training. But it’s still the same thing — I make black marks on a white surface and someone else in another location looks at them and interprets them and sees a spaceship or whatever. It’s magic. It’s a magical thing. It’s very old magic, but it’s very thorough. The book is very well worked out, somewhat in the way that the wheel is very well worked out.
via the Washington Post
I swallowed Google’s utopian kool-aid at CES a few years ago, and — on a primal level — have a real hard time understanding any argument suggesting that Google’s mass digitization of books is anything but a profoundly good thing. But Jean-Noël Jeanneney’s Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge genuinely opens up the discussion.
Where publishers’ frustrations seemed profit driven, Jeanneney’s analysis of how Google’s economic approach manifests itself in search results is totally essential.
There is a danger that cultural populism will organize channels of access in favor of the most elementary, the least disturbing, and most commonplace products.
Elsewhere:
Despite the false appearance of gratuitousness, the private sector reaps the profits by indirectly selling the use of these books through the advertising exposure that occurs with each hit, and also by global exposure. The company expects this increasingly lucrative business, thanks to Google Book Search, to have an impact on its entire commercial offering. Naturally, what remains of such profits, after distribution to shareholders, will further accentuate the imbalance in favor of the private sector and reduce the influence of those institutions serving the common interest.
In other words, down with libraries! Having run the Bibliotheèque nationale de France for five years, I can see why Jeanneney might fret. His arguments get curmudgeonly on occasion, such as his criticism of Google’s massive book intake, saying that it is the job of a library to carefully pick what they preserve — and totally ignoring the fact that Google is digitizing collections already vetted by librarians. (Though his fear of an American dominance seems totally warranted.)
Jeanneney yearns for some sort of governmental involvement in these projects. And, really, if what he proposes ever occurs, it would be an amazing and useful advance for humanity. While it is true that the internet is a free market (which left it vulnerable to domination by a utopian company like Google), it also has the power to be something else entirely, the same unformed ether it always was. (Maybe this is a particularly American way of approaching the basic metaphor of the ‘net: the old, unsettled west.) People can preserve information with profit behind them, like Google, or because they want to, like Brewster Kahle’s archive.org.
In the case of the latter, it is little different than any national library, at least in the sense that it is an institution that earns its power in recognition. After Jeanneney’s book, I might not trust Google the way I once did, but I do trust the internet. When given the choice of freedom, the result isn’t always a market. Sometime it’s just being free.
Download torrent. (File expires November 20th.)
– There is a suspension of disbelief in watching Eric Zala, Chris Strompolos, and Jayson Lamb’s shot-for-shot adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which (beginning when they were 12) took them seven years to complete. Obviously, the cast isn’t digging in the desert near Cairo. There are just too many trees. There is little believability to the firefight in the Nepal bar. But, so what? There’s a suspension of disbelief in watching the original Raiders, too. It’s just something one deals with when watching movies.
– In Raiders, though, the disbelief is smoothed over by big budget special effects and Harrison Ford’s charisma. In the Adaptation, it is the opposite, coming via the sheer low fidelity of the project: the analog video blur that coats the actors’ mid-scene age changes, or the distortion that occasionally permeates the soundtrack, a tape warble transforming a melodramatic string swell into something like a theremin moan. It intensifies the disbelief until the movie becomes about something else entirely.
– With a plane replaced by a boat, a monkey by a puppy, dramatically speaking, the big tension isn’t what’s going to happen, but how it’s going to be executed. How are they going to shoot lightning ghosts from the Ark? Or make that dude’s face melt?
– What is the “correct” order in which to screen the films in a double feature? Does one show the Adaptation first, to let the audience members’ memories guide their viewing, and then show the original, to see how it matches up? On one hand, that’s probably more satisfying from a traditionally dramatic point of view, but why should Spielberg have primacy over the marquee?
Today marked the first Sunday where the Times had no baseball stories. Caught up on some old bookmarks I’d never read and found a few more.
o A great Violet Blue story about the ownership of sex.com.
o Seth Stevenson’s travel journal from Dubai. I imagine it’s fairly impossible to file a boring story from there.
o A back door in the iTunes store to listen to Japanese pop and other delights.
o Mark Dery’s “Rememberance of tacos post” begins with the immortal lede “I’m having a señor moment,” and presents a brief history of Mexican food in the United States, which seems (to me) just another manifestation of the aesthetic/technological idea/ideal of realism.
o “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace,” a paper by Danah Boyd.
The concept of Raiders of the Lost Ark – The Adaptation got me thinking: Just as George Lucas remade the original Star Wars movies to look as of he’d had all the money he’d wanted to make them, wouldn’t it be cool if he redid the second trilogy as if he’d had none of the money he wanted?
Episode 31: Attack of the Harvest Moonies!
Listen here.
1. “Car Commercial” – Al Kooper (from The Landlord OST)
2. “Terrapin” – Syd Barrett (from Radio One Sessions)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “Now I’m Freeking Out” – Ween
5. “Creator” – Santogold
6. “Nat Pwe” – Bobadin (from Folk and Pop Music of Mynamar (Burma), v. 3 compilation)
7. “Paper Shoes” – Yoko Ono (from Plastic Ono Band)
8. “Marigold” – Nirvana (from Heart-Shaped Box single)
9. “Blue Nile” – Alice Coltrane (from Ptah the El Daoud)
10. “Jade Like Wine” – Six Organs of Admittance (from Shelter From the Ash)
11. “Parchman Farm Blues” – Bukka White (from Anthology of American Folk Music, v. 4A compilation)
12. “Goin’ To California” – Irene Kral (from Gilles Peterson Digs America, v. 2 compilation)
13. “Braver Newer World” – Jimmie Dale Gilmore (from Braver Newer World)
14. “Harvest Moon” – Neil Young (from Harvest Moon)
