Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Monday, October 24, 2005
Some Thoughts on iTunes and the Music Industry
I was talking to a friend last week about a new feature in the new iPod that is being more or less kept secret out in the open, a feature overshadowed by its new gadget-porn video capabilities. While everyone is going gaga for the fact that music videos, porn, and television shows are available watch on the tiny, high-def screens of the new iPods (why anyone needs to watch things this much is beyond me- attention is labor, and you're signing yourself up for lots less downtime with video on your person), another feature was added that few are talking about- the new iPods can record in full stereo.
Time to throw away those portable DAT recorders, everyone. Podcasting is the new bootlegging.
With iTunes set up to suck podcasts down from the web now, with the very popular iPod highly and firmly installed in an eager consumer base, and with the digital method of music delivery taking more and more power away from the giant, vampiric middle men that are the music industry (an industry that doesn't produce music so much as it does a paid bureaucracy that, in the end, really isn't that into music) and giving it to the artists to produce, niche market, and publicize themselves, Apple may very well have set itself in the position as one of the sole entities existent in the music industry once all the majors collapse. As people and artists become more tech-savvy and realize they don't need the labels, iTunes will be there, still, with its handy podcasting capabilities and the viral nature of bootlegs spreading out across the web building artists' popularity. Not a label, but profiting as a distribution point. There won't be an absolute need to use iTunes, but the iPod will be indispensable. In one version of the future, Apple could be all that is left of the music industry.
Now: Playing
Not About Love
from the album "Extraordinary Machine" by
Fiona Apple
Time to throw away those portable DAT recorders, everyone. Podcasting is the new bootlegging.
With iTunes set up to suck podcasts down from the web now, with the very popular iPod highly and firmly installed in an eager consumer base, and with the digital method of music delivery taking more and more power away from the giant, vampiric middle men that are the music industry (an industry that doesn't produce music so much as it does a paid bureaucracy that, in the end, really isn't that into music) and giving it to the artists to produce, niche market, and publicize themselves, Apple may very well have set itself in the position as one of the sole entities existent in the music industry once all the majors collapse. As people and artists become more tech-savvy and realize they don't need the labels, iTunes will be there, still, with its handy podcasting capabilities and the viral nature of bootlegs spreading out across the web building artists' popularity. Not a label, but profiting as a distribution point. There won't be an absolute need to use iTunes, but the iPod will be indispensable. In one version of the future, Apple could be all that is left of the music industry.
Now: Playing
Not About Love
from the album "Extraordinary Machine" by
Fiona Apple
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Self-Employment of the Mind
The days pass lazy like an eye, and it is always easy to find tasks to fill them that do not require you to remember them.
It's commonly held that there is no long-term reward in working for others- the real fulfillment is only cultivated through self-employment, self-reliance, the confident highs extracted from the knowledge of one's own independence.
Of course, self-employment of the conventional variety suffers from the same deficiencies of wage slavery in that it is still a clever passing of time from cradle to grave, delivering a healthy dearth of reasons for carrying on in a culture that still, at least loosely, is based on the myth of progress. Forward motion without goals, without a proper ideology, presents dilemmas to the mind unburdened by sufficient distraction. One successful method for dealing with the outside world of varied ultimate disappointments is to become a hermetic man. Find self-employment in the mind, become a curator of your own private museum of a constant horror.
This method is not uncommon- it is the basis of delusions great and small. When the boundaries perceived do not budge, ignore the fact that you ever perceived anything beyond those frontiers and suppress the moment that you did so. The moment of perfect horror, the moment when you failed to achieve the escape velocity required to lift you from the morass of your life (perceived within the shared and first delusion, progress), that is the moment that will define the curio existence of the hermetic man, that will be the theme of the plan defining the cyclical boundary of the track his life is running on.
The gift of purpose! Even if delusion, what satisfaction one can bring to oneself closing doors and operating on an abbreviated operating system. Authority (the suppression of the knowledge of the lack of omniscience, the invitation to others to populate and cohabitate within the lonely mind), Righteousness (The security guard of the mental Mütter Museum), Ambition (the gift of the whole endeavor and the force assuring the museum stays in operation)- just some of the derivatives of this cottage curio industry's artifice.
On these small stages within these sealed humans all great social action takes place, producing a rich vein of ore for some alien observer to comment on and categorize.
I, for one, fucking love a good cup of coffee in the morning.
It's commonly held that there is no long-term reward in working for others- the real fulfillment is only cultivated through self-employment, self-reliance, the confident highs extracted from the knowledge of one's own independence.
Of course, self-employment of the conventional variety suffers from the same deficiencies of wage slavery in that it is still a clever passing of time from cradle to grave, delivering a healthy dearth of reasons for carrying on in a culture that still, at least loosely, is based on the myth of progress. Forward motion without goals, without a proper ideology, presents dilemmas to the mind unburdened by sufficient distraction. One successful method for dealing with the outside world of varied ultimate disappointments is to become a hermetic man. Find self-employment in the mind, become a curator of your own private museum of a constant horror.
This method is not uncommon- it is the basis of delusions great and small. When the boundaries perceived do not budge, ignore the fact that you ever perceived anything beyond those frontiers and suppress the moment that you did so. The moment of perfect horror, the moment when you failed to achieve the escape velocity required to lift you from the morass of your life (perceived within the shared and first delusion, progress), that is the moment that will define the curio existence of the hermetic man, that will be the theme of the plan defining the cyclical boundary of the track his life is running on.
The gift of purpose! Even if delusion, what satisfaction one can bring to oneself closing doors and operating on an abbreviated operating system. Authority (the suppression of the knowledge of the lack of omniscience, the invitation to others to populate and cohabitate within the lonely mind), Righteousness (The security guard of the mental Mütter Museum), Ambition (the gift of the whole endeavor and the force assuring the museum stays in operation)- just some of the derivatives of this cottage curio industry's artifice.
On these small stages within these sealed humans all great social action takes place, producing a rich vein of ore for some alien observer to comment on and categorize.
I, for one, fucking love a good cup of coffee in the morning.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
Friday, October 14, 2005
Homelessness
Further reading today, the essay Shelter for the Homeless by Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) ur-visual culture critic and mass culture critic of Weimar Germany.
The shelter he writes of is that provided to those spiritually homeless denizens of the middle class, those living the lifestyle of the salaried employee. He writes they "are living at present without a doctrine to look up at or a goal to ascertain. (88)" The closest thing they can associate with something "higher" is instead glamour. This shallow version of what there is to attain in life is attained "not through concentration, but in distraction."
The lower middle class escape from their workaday lives, from their horrid existences into the "homeless shelters" of taverns, clubs, department stores, and other houses of social intoxication. They cannot bear their own lives, and so prefer endless distractions, expensive hobbies and entertainment that lets them rub elbows with their image of the lives of leisure of the leisure classes while remaining more or less content enough with their lot to not attempt to actually achieve or usurp the leisure class from its denizens. Kracauer describes this flight into leisure and images of the Weimar middle class as depoliticizing. "The flight into images is a flight from revolution and from death."
The shelter he writes of is that provided to those spiritually homeless denizens of the middle class, those living the lifestyle of the salaried employee. He writes they "are living at present without a doctrine to look up at or a goal to ascertain. (88)" The closest thing they can associate with something "higher" is instead glamour. This shallow version of what there is to attain in life is attained "not through concentration, but in distraction."
The lower middle class escape from their workaday lives, from their horrid existences into the "homeless shelters" of taverns, clubs, department stores, and other houses of social intoxication. They cannot bear their own lives, and so prefer endless distractions, expensive hobbies and entertainment that lets them rub elbows with their image of the lives of leisure of the leisure classes while remaining more or less content enough with their lot to not attempt to actually achieve or usurp the leisure class from its denizens. Kracauer describes this flight into leisure and images of the Weimar middle class as depoliticizing. "The flight into images is a flight from revolution and from death."
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Travels in hyper reality
Doing some research for Manny's monster due in the next couple of weeks on the end of the world, I just finished reading Eco's essay "Travels in Hyper Reality."
He brings up the philosophy of the Last Beach. Some quotes:
On the compulsive hodge-podge collection habits of those with archival or museum-curator leanings, the constant miscegenation of historical reproductions of art forms alongside other forms not of the same era in a desperate urge to create a fetishized and somehow more-real-than-the-original conception of the past:
"The condition for the amalgamation of the fake and authentic is that there must have been a historic catastrophe, of the sort that has made the divine Acropolis of Athens as venerable as Pompeii, city of brothels and bakeries. And this brings us to the theme of the Last Beach, the apocalyptic philosophy that more or less explicitly rules these reconstructions: Europe is declining into barbarism and something has to be saved."
p. 36
"It is the ideology of preservation, in the New World, of the treasures that the folly and negligence of hte Old World are causing to disappear into the void. Naturally this ideology conceals something- the desire for profit, in the case of the cemetery; and in the case of the Getty, the fact that it is the entrepreneurial colonization by the New World... that makes the Old World's condition critical. Just like the crocodile tears of the Roman patrician who reproduced the grandeurs of the very Greece that his country had humiliated and reduced to a colony. And so the Last Beach ideology develops its thirst for preservation of art from an imperialistic efficiency, but at the same time it is the bad conscience of this imperialistic efficiency..."
p. 39
He brings up the philosophy of the Last Beach. Some quotes:
On the compulsive hodge-podge collection habits of those with archival or museum-curator leanings, the constant miscegenation of historical reproductions of art forms alongside other forms not of the same era in a desperate urge to create a fetishized and somehow more-real-than-the-original conception of the past:
"The condition for the amalgamation of the fake and authentic is that there must have been a historic catastrophe, of the sort that has made the divine Acropolis of Athens as venerable as Pompeii, city of brothels and bakeries. And this brings us to the theme of the Last Beach, the apocalyptic philosophy that more or less explicitly rules these reconstructions: Europe is declining into barbarism and something has to be saved."
p. 36
"It is the ideology of preservation, in the New World, of the treasures that the folly and negligence of hte Old World are causing to disappear into the void. Naturally this ideology conceals something- the desire for profit, in the case of the cemetery; and in the case of the Getty, the fact that it is the entrepreneurial colonization by the New World... that makes the Old World's condition critical. Just like the crocodile tears of the Roman patrician who reproduced the grandeurs of the very Greece that his country had humiliated and reduced to a colony. And so the Last Beach ideology develops its thirst for preservation of art from an imperialistic efficiency, but at the same time it is the bad conscience of this imperialistic efficiency..."
p. 39
Technorati Tags: apocalypse, Eco
Sunday, October 09, 2005
Now tangled in you
Friday, October 07, 2005
The Most Accidental of Tremendous Boobies
I so enjoy this city and the uncounted opportunities it gives for, among so many other desirable things, turning your head innocently at any moment, caught in a world of one's own, on one's way to work, to suddenly plunge the richness of your whole vision into some ample and perfect bosom. Areolas and hosanas, brethren, to the innocent bystander.
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