State of Mind of The Art

Watch how the salt takes on shapes based on the frequency. -Spotted on Google Video.
Warning: Contains super high pitches.

The Brand Played On - by Philippa Ibbotson - Spotted on The Guardian UK

The London Symphony Orchestra has been working with Baby IQ to retool their image, and apparently it’s been in the direction of making the image more valuable than the music. The LSO has openly admitted that the campaign is intended to make the LSO a brand name, rather than being about the power of classical music.

This cynical commentary is written by an insider, a member of the Classical community. The author goes on to lament the objectification of music, and especially the decline of classical music as an art form, as it is slowly consumed by all devouring beat of capitalism and money. I find it inspiring that some musicians still have the idealism to love music as an art, and not an object, and I hope you do too.

The five immutable truths about the blogging vs. journalism debate, according to Kottke:

1. Mainstream, top-down, professional journalism will continue to play a vital role in covering news events, and in shaping our interpretation of those events, as it should.

2. Bloggers will grow increasingly adept at covering certain kinds of news events, but not all. They will play an increasingly important role in the interpretation of all kinds of news.

3. The majority of bloggers won’t be concerned with traditional news at all.

4. Professional, edited journalism will have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than blogging; examples of sloppy, offensive, factually incorrect, or tedious writing will be abundant in the blogosphere. But diamonds in that rough will be abundant as well.

5. Blogs — like all modes of contemporary media — are not historically unique; they draw upon and resemble a number of past traditions and forms, depending on their focus.

spotted on boing boing
originally published on dr.xnlb.com

Check this article:  Sue Google, Not Us, Torrentspy tells Hollywood (spotted on PCWelt)
In a legal reply to the MPAA, TorrentSpy claims a person can find more torrents through Google than you can through a torrent portal.  The argunment goes on to say that since TorrentSpy doesn’t have any copyrighted work on their site, they cannot be held responsible for what people do after they leave their site.
The basis of lawsuits like this is MGM vs. Grokster.  In that case it was decided by the Supreme Court that Grokster actively provided tools and promotion for pirating.  Of course, the Supreme Court also ruled in that case that the act of file sharing, or using P2P software is *_not_* illegal.  They also ruled that unless a manufacturer actively promotes piracy, they cannot be held liable for what people do with the software.

So to review for you, TorrentSpy points you toward people who are sharing files you may want, and that’s all they do.  They don’t suggest you steal stuff, and they don;t promote any method of copyright infringement. According to the Supreme Court, that means they’re not breaking the law.  The MPAA (and the RIAA, too) don’t really care if the Supreme Court allows TorrentSpy to point you toward copyrighted material that’s shared.  They are going to sue us all until we pay what they feel they deserve.  And if that isn’t enough, they twist the meaning of copyright to protect themselves, and not the artists.
Now I am all for the protection of copyrighted works, and I don’t see a problem with the moral issue that somone’s movies or music shouldn’t be free _if there is percieved value._  But if reality is that people are sharing media, and that most people _still_ buy media, then there is a softer hand to be used to convince us to buy stuff.

As an aside for Americans, these big companies are just going to keep sidestepping the law, and continue to force our government to protect their interests, at the expense of ours.

I can get behind this:

“The old model of acting is that the rehearsal is great and then things change when you say ‘rolling’ –usually for the worse. Now there’s no film in the camera. You can shoot everything. So there’s no rehearsal. Or perhaps it’s all rehearsal. Either way, it’s far more natural.”

There is something powerful about this. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it when I was watching the War of the Worlds (Spielberg Version), but the above quote triggered it for me. It was his first forray into digital film making, and there was a certain authenticity in the faces of the actors.
And this seems to be the trend. As more and more directors adopt digital film making techniques, and become comfortable with these tools, the human condition will finally be reflected on the silver screen in a way that here-to-fore has rarely been seen.
That’s something I can really digg.
another long tail insight

originally published on dr.xnlb.com