Art
: TV is rarely considered art but that's snobbish crap. TV is art and it's art that matters because people watch it; it speaks to them.
There is art that doesn't matter because it's not seen or can't speak to people or is just bull.
Take today's New York Times business section. Good for the New York Times that they sold eight pages of advertising and called it art. Bad for my fellow Deutsche Bank shareholders that we paid the bill for this murder of trees in the name of art.
Those eight pages are filled with tiny print -- at first, you think it's another kind of stock table with words, not numbers -- that turn out to be just a list of words collected from the many people and many languages of New York. "Wordsearch, a translinguistic sculpture," it's called.
This is one of those things that sounds like a good idea... but isn't. (As Nick Denton once said -- I remember it even if he doesn't -- regarding business: "I can't afford brainstorming anymore." The same could be said for the meeting that lead to this project.)
Eight big pages of tiny words.
What's the point?
You know what, don't answer that. I don't care. The point is obvious but still, I don't care.
This is self-absorbed show-off snobbish-wolves-in-populist-sheep's clothing. It's a waste of paper and ink. It makes my head explode.
I'll take popular culture any day.
Snobs
: And while I'm on my populist rant, let me complain about the lead of Caryn Jame's review of the Forstye Saga in the NY Times today:
Oh, the English and their wacky sense of humor! Mark Thompson, the chief executive of Channel 4 in Britain, recently gave a lecture about the state of television and said, "When you're looking for ambitious, complex and above all modern TV, you find yourself watching not British, but American pieces." To American viewers that idea rings with a Monty Pythonesque absurdity that could keep us howling with laughter all season. If American television represents the avant-garde, we're all in very deep trouble (even though Mr. Thompson was right in citing the anomalous "Six Feet Under" and "24" as models of innovation).
What incredible snobbery! What knee-jerk anti-American, anti-cultural-populism!
Yes, damnit, American TV
is giving us "ambitious, complex, and above all modern TV" and a TV critic at America's most-respected newspaper should know that. Start with
The Sopranos, West Wing, Six Feet Under, 24,and
Oz and keep going through the reinvention of news (FoxNews, love it or not, gives news personality) and the invention of late-night humor (Germany
clones David Letterman for a reason) and the addition of wit to the crappy reality genre Europe exported to us (they created
Big Brother; we created
The Osbornes). No, British TV is not smarter than American TV. No,
Masterpiece Theater is not the smartest thing on TV. No, American TV -- and Americans -- are not classless and dumb. Oh, how I hate this cultural treason.
I think I need to write a book about this.
What he says
: I have long contented that the so-called Golden Age of TV was just a figment of Milton Berle's ego -- it was just bad vaudeville on video -- and that TV is better than ever today. Now I know I'm right ... 'cause my fellow TV Guide veteran Lileks says so:
This is not one of those TV’s-goin’-straight-t’-hell rants; TV now is better than ever, at least what I watch. Spare me the “500 channels and nothing’s on” line - there’s always something good on.... When I turn my TV off at night I can almost hear the channels drumming their fists against the other side of the screen: come back! come back! We’ve so much more to give!
Time is relative:
TiVo puts out a fascinating press release about the time-shifting habits of its now 1-million-strong audience-base. They create their own prime time, watching recorded, not live, programming 80 percent of the time [via
LostRemote]. And the most-time-shifted series:
1. The Practice
2. Everybody Loves Raymond
3. Frasier
4. ER
5. Law & Order
6. Friends
7. NYPD Blue
8. CSI
9. West Wing
10. Will & Grace
Thought for the day: Conservatism is not an ideology. It is a personality type.
This will ruin your day
: Clay Shirky is one of the smartest guys I've gotten to know in this world called community. He thinks about it from professorial heights but, unlike most folks up there, he gets it right, he makes it real. He just published a new piece that is very right but will be very depressing to the community of bloggers:
A lot of people in the weblog world are asking "How can we make money doing this?" The answer is that most of us can't. Weblogs are not a new kind of publishing that requires a new system of financial reward. Instead, weblogs mark a radical break. They are such an efficient tool for distributing the written word that they make publishing a financially worthless activity. It's intuitively appealing to believe that by making the connection between writer and reader more direct, weblogs will improve the environment for direct payments as well, but the opposite is true. By removing the barriers to publishing, weblogs ensure that the few people who earn anything from their weblogs will make their money indirectly.
The search for direct fees is driven by the belief that, since weblogs make publishing easy, they should lower the barriers to becoming a professional writer. This assumption has it backwards, because mass professionalization is an oxymoron; a professional class implies a minority of members. The principal effect of weblogs is instead mass amateurization....
We want a world where global publishing is effortless. We want a world where you don't have to ask for help or permission to write out loud. However, when we get that world we face the paradox of oxygen and gold. Oxygen is more vital to human life than gold, but because air is abundant, oxygen is free. Weblogs make writing as abundant as air, with the same effect on price. Prior to the web, people paid for most of the words they read. Now, for a large and growing number of us, most of the words we read cost us nothing....
We knew this new medium was revolutionary -- but Shirky says it's even more revolutionary than any of us had thought, for it revalues words themselves.
Art
: TV is rarely considered art but that's snobbish crap. TV is art and it's art that matters because people watch it; it speaks to them.
There is art that doesn't matter because it's not seen or can't speak to people or is just bull.
Take today's New York Times business section. Good for the New York Times that they sold eight pages of advertising and called it art. Bad for my fellow Deutsche Bank shareholders that we paid the bill for this murder of trees in the name of art.
Those eight pages are filled with tiny print -- at first, you think it's another kind of stock table with words, not numbers -- that turn out to be just a list of words collected from the many people and many languages of New York. "Wordsearch, a translinguistic sculpture," it's called.
This is one of those things that sounds like a good idea... but isn't. (As Nick Denton once said -- I remember it even if he doesn't -- regarding business: "I can't afford brainstorming anymore." The same could be said for the meeting that lead to this project.)
Eight big pages of tiny words.
What's the point?
You know what, don't answer that. I don't care. The point is obvious but still, I don't care.
This is self-absorbed show-off snobbish-wolves-in-populist-sheep's clothing. It's a waste of paper and ink. It makes my head explode.
I'll take popular culture any day.
Snobs
: And while I'm on my populist rant, let me complain about the lead of Caryn Jame's review of the Forstye Saga in the NY Times today:
Oh, the English and their wacky sense of humor! Mark Thompson, the chief executive of Channel 4 in Britain, recently gave a lecture about the state of television and said, "When you're looking for ambitious, complex and above all modern TV, you find yourself watching not British, but American pieces." To American viewers that idea rings with a Monty Pythonesque absurdity that could keep us howling with laughter all season. If American television represents the avant-garde, we're all in very deep trouble (even though Mr. Thompson was right in citing the anomalous "Six Feet Under" and "24" as models of innovation).
What incredible snobbery! What knee-jerk anti-American, anti-cultural-populism!
Yes, damnit, American TV
is giving us "ambitious, complex, and above all modern TV" and a TV critic at America's most-respected newspaper should know that. Start with
The Sopranos, West Wing, Six Feet Under, 24,and
Oz and keep going through the reinvention of news (FoxNews, love it or not, gives news personality) and the invention of late-night humor (Germany
clones David Letterman for a reason) and the addition of wit to the crappy reality genre Europe exported to us (they created
Big Brother; we created
The Osbornes). No, British TV is not smarter than American TV. No,
Masterpiece Theater is not the smartest thing on TV. No, American TV -- and Americans -- are not classless and dumb. Oh, how I hate this cultural treason.
I think I need to write a book about this.
What he says
: I have long contented that the so-called Golden Age of TV was just a figment of Milton Berle's ego -- it was just bad vaudeville on video -- and that TV is better than ever today. Now I know I'm right ... 'cause my fellow TV Guide veteran Lileks says so:
This is not one of those TV’s-goin’-straight-t’-hell rants; TV now is better than ever, at least what I watch. Spare me the “500 channels and nothing’s on” line - there’s always something good on.... When I turn my TV off at night I can almost hear the channels drumming their fists against the other side of the screen: come back! come back! We’ve so much more to give!
Time is relative:
TiVo puts out a fascinating press release about the time-shifting habits of its now 1-million-strong audience-base. They create their own prime time, watching recorded, not live, programming 80 percent of the time [via
LostRemote]. And the most-time-shifted series:
1. The Practice
2. Everybody Loves Raymond
3. Frasier
4. ER
5. Law & Order
6. Friends
7. NYPD Blue
8. CSI
9. West Wing
10. Will & Grace
Thought for the day: Conservatism is not an ideology. It is a personality type.
This will ruin your day
: Clay Shirky is one of the smartest guys I've gotten to know in this world called community. He thinks about it from professorial heights but, unlike most folks up there, he gets it right, he makes it real. He just published a new piece that is very right but will be very depressing to the community of bloggers:
A lot of people in the weblog world are asking "How can we make money doing this?" The answer is that most of us can't. Weblogs are not a new kind of publishing that requires a new system of financial reward. Instead, weblogs mark a radical break. They are such an efficient tool for distributing the written word that they make publishing a financially worthless activity. It's intuitively appealing to believe that by making the connection between writer and reader more direct, weblogs will improve the environment for direct payments as well, but the opposite is true. By removing the barriers to publishing, weblogs ensure that the few people who earn anything from their weblogs will make their money indirectly.
The search for direct fees is driven by the belief that, since weblogs make publishing easy, they should lower the barriers to becoming a professional writer. This assumption has it backwards, because mass professionalization is an oxymoron; a professional class implies a minority of members. The principal effect of weblogs is instead mass amateurization....
We want a world where global publishing is effortless. We want a world where you don't have to ask for help or permission to write out loud. However, when we get that world we face the paradox of oxygen and gold. Oxygen is more vital to human life than gold, but because air is abundant, oxygen is free. Weblogs make writing as abundant as air, with the same effect on price. Prior to the web, people paid for most of the words they read. Now, for a large and growing number of us, most of the words we read cost us nothing....
We knew this new medium was revolutionary -- but Shirky says it's even more revolutionary than any of us had thought, for it revalues words themselves.
...
