Dude! Joe's Jottings, Mostly Junk

it is very interesting to compare the background music for various Yosemite Valley (or Grand Canyon or Yellowstone) documentaries over the years, the type they would show or sell at the visitors center. Each generation assumed it was creating a soundtrack to last, yet each sounds pretty well dated and is more a distraction than a support to the wonderful visuals each has.

The 70s attempted to use contemporary orchestral scoring to heighten the drama, but comes across as unnecessarily dark and tense.

The 80s countered by restoring friendliness to the parks through the synth-heavy newage vibe, which didn't last and now sounds as dated as disco (some artists like Kitaro are immortal but this particular stuff is quite dead). Think the same reason many people had the rock portion of Ladyhawk (I don't mind and quite like Ladyhawk, but I understand why many don't care for it).

The 90s countered that by going back to full orchestral scores in a neo-romantic vein (trying to restore what Grofe had mastered in his Grand Canyon Suite), but that tended to continue to over-dramatize the landscape, a landscape that doesn't need any help in producing drama. Still others latched onto the Clannad/Enya led "natural" synth sound, which like the 70s scoring, tended to make things too heavy for what one saw.

The 2000s followed (or led) Ken Burns in going to all acoustic instrumentation, mostly guitars and pianos, plus a lot of native american percussion and whistles and an occasional soft keyboard wash. Today that certainly sounds the most "natural" and feels the most comfortable, but I wonder if that too will sound dated to me in 10 years.

maybe I'll remember this post when we get there...

Robert Fripp's Diary for Friday, 5th August 2011:

In the inbox, from an artist-pal, the tale of their difficulties getting paid when UMG took over the record company which released their albums.

It seems UMG do not do takeovers very well. We have had problems with BGM/UMG, Island/UMG and Sanctuary/UMG. What is the common factor here? The sharp-eyed among visiting DGM innocents may already have detected this. Even with my short-sightedness, it’s not hard to find.

“Weird Al” Yankovic | Music | Set List | The A.V. Club:

I wrote this song before 9/11 just because I felt a lot of that selfishness in our culture, and immediately after 9/11 it felt like our national attitude had changed, and everyone was pitching in and being helpful, and being supporting and loving, which lasted about a week. -- Weird Al, on 'Why Does This Always Happen To Me' (Poodle Hat, 2003)

I really, really, REALLY hate DRM. Especially when it screws honest people. - WWdN: In Exile:

This [the hassle it takes for Will to actually read his own works on the platform of his choice] is the sort of thing that drives honest people to piracy, because the pirates are providing a better end user experience for them than the legal alternatives.

Dan Bricklin, who was the coder that developed the first spreadsheet all those years ago, wrote more or less the same thing about the original Napster. "Theft" or not, it provided the interface of convenience that was more important than anything else to the user base.  What was important about Napster wasn't the music itself, but the direct ID3-based search model, something iTunes and Amazon took quite a while (re: years after Napster's legal demise) before really supporting.

Torrents are the same way - a simple search finds what they want, in a format that gives no restrictions on where it can be played, for how long, leaving the viewer in total control.  The lack of control (hell, the 2 dozen wasted DVD-ROMs I have of "Digital Copies" that have all expired, having never watched a single one) is actually a major turn-off.

Shitty journalism for the sake of sensationalism and relevance, and Channel 9 just did it in spades:

High-Profile Montgomery Cop Paid For Not Working | wusa9.com:

ROCKVILLE, Md. (WUSA) -- Bound by the terms of a collective bargaining agreement with its police union, the Montgomery County Police Department continues to pay an officer who performs no duties after being charged and acquitted of perjury for making statements in a criminal trial that proved to be untrue.

it isn't the paid leave of absence, it is the fact that the bureaucracy around actually conducting this "investigation" is taking a year and a half with no sign of actually even taking place, nevermind ending any time soon.

as for the initial acquittal, that isn't enough - the department needs to close all open items of concern because even with an acquittal there can still be a civil suit that the department will have to deal with...but that still doesn't mean the department has to keep this person on the payroll doing nothing while waiting for said civil lawsuit to finally arise. i wouldn't be surprised if they're not finding a conclusion to the investigation just as a stalling tactic because the civil case can't be filed until the investigation is considered 'done'.

but trying to pin this as being "because of collective bargaining" - that's baiting a story as being political when no politics were involved, and there was no reason to do that. VERY bad reporting, channel 9. ALL police departments have "paid leave while under investigation" policies. the fact that this particular department founded it as a result of a particular union bargain was utterly irrelevant to the situation. it was a blatantly biased fact, solely put in (and in the first paragraph) to evoke emotional reactions from those following the Wisconsin situation, and making civil service unions look bad for no reason other than sensationalism.

This type of yellow journalism was (I thought) passe 95 years ago.

(Update: and when somebody decides to defend the anti-union stance by citing Walker's "teacher's union's rules forced me to fire the teacher of the year" editorial in the Wall Street Journal, I almost am too sick to laugh at the ignorance...)

Ken Burns - Public broadcasting, a 'luxury' we can't do without:

Many say that what can't survive in the marketplace doesn't deserve to survive. Not one of my documentaries, produced solely for PBS over the past 30 years, could have been made anywhere but on public broadcasting. Each time a film of mine happens to reach a large audience, I am "invited" to join the marketplace. Each time I patiently explain to my new suitor what I have planned for my next project - an 11-and-a-half-hour history of the Civil War, perhaps, or a 17-hour investigation of the history of jazz, or a 12-hour history of the national parks - I am laughed out of their offices, sent, happily, back to PBS.

The marketplace can be wonderful. Its relentless forces do weed out many unnecessary things, but there are some things the marketplace cannot do. It won't come to your house at 3 in the morning if it's on fire, it doesn't plow the streets in a blizzard and it doesn't have boots on the ground in Afghanistan. I don't mean to suggest that PBS or the endowments have a direct role in the defense of our country; no, they help make the country worth defending.

On An Overgrown Path: Do the arts need wide or deep audiences?:

But this performance, which prompted the BBC press office to spin a typically disingenuous "Radio 3 continues strong performance" story, ignores a more important underlying trend. Over the same period, which is when many of the popularising measures were introduced at the station, the average hours per listener declined by 14.1%. The average hours per listener figure is a measure of the depth of the audience and is a significant indicator of audience engagement and loyalty.

The answer to the question does classical music need wide or deep audiences? is, of course, it needs both. What matters is the total mass of the audience which is calculated as [width x depth], or in the case of a radio audience [audience size x average hours per listener]. When this calculation is made the total mass of the Radio 3 audience has declined over a two period by 3.9%, which is an interesting definition of a "strong performance".

Blue Sky Disney: To Convert Or Not To Convert...:

In fact, it makes sense especially with the blockbusters that are using mo-cap or heavy fx, why would you want to shoot Optimus Prime or Yogi Bear twice by dual rendering? You have to shoot the left and than the right, instead you can just wait till the fx are done, hand the material over and then post convert it. Shooting a film in 3D is only right for the big boys, the studio tent poles, it costs over 30% more (sometimes up to 50%) to shoot a 3D show, where as converting is a fraction of that cost. And just because “Titans” and other hack job conversions are done, that doesn’t mean they should all be done that way. That is like judging “Batman and Robin” was a bad film, so nobody should see “The Dark Knight” because Batman sucks.

Don’t judge the conversion process by one, two or even five films, when the technology is so new and fresh. And that is the exciting thing about 3D, is we are on the cutting edge of technology. 3D gets us away from the music video Michael Bay like cinematography and makes us focus more on the classic style of film-making. 3D is a check and balances, because it makes the filmmaker focus on the frame and everything in it, makes them think before shooting –

I agree with the artistic conclusion: shooting in 3D does make one be more careful about what goes into a shot and thus it will inspire and drive a new generation of cinematographers to the fore in ways that under "MTV" style quickflash editing they were relegated out of shot.

On the other hand, I think he underestimates how clever computers can be.  Shooting real 3D with real cameras is tricky and expensive.  "Shooting" a CGI-rendered scene in 3D is trivial, once you've got the numbers right, and they've had the numbers right more or less since the 18th Century.  The animator only has to set where in 3D space the object is - the rendering system takes over and can give the left and right eye perspective with absolute consistency, and it is trivial to do.

America, Fuck Yeah! (All Together Now) - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan:

When Marco Rubio lauds the USA, we roll our eyes because we have not had our skepticism of politicians surgically removed: we understand that politicians pin on flag lapels and talk about the greatness of America because they're calculating pols, not because they think more highly of the United States than the rest of us. Our eyes tend to roll when politicians kiss babies too. That isn't because we object to the notion that babies are lovable - merely because most politicians aren't.

Lowry and Sullivan on American Chauvinism : Dispatches from the Culture Wars:

But I don't think Sullivan goes nearly far enough. The "America is the greatest nation ever" meme is not just a fatuous platitude, it's a dangerous bit of demagoguery designed to end discussion of the nation's many merits and flaws. It's a club used to beat anyone who questions the motives or actions of our leaders -- whenever the person wielding that club agrees with those motives or actions, of course; if they disagree with them, that's totally different.