Only Time

This live performance of The Magnetic Fields' "It's Only Time" never fails to give me chills. Simply put, Stephin Merritt's talents know no bounds.

(Temporary?) Freedom

Amanda Palmer wrote a fascinating e-mail that explains how she was able to earn $19 000 in one month using Twitter, while at the same time she has not earned a single cent by selling 30 000 CDs. I'm fascinated with the ingenious ways artists of all stripes are able to use the digital economy to their advantage, but at the same time, a part of me wonders when this party is going to be busted up by all the fun-hating corporations.

Arts and commerce have always had a tense relationship, as any intro-level art history class will teach you. The tension has only increased in the 20th and 21st centuries. This is not to say that art needs to be free of any trace of commerce--that would just be silly. Where the problem arises is when financial concerns trump artistic concerns.

Look at the contemporary music industry. Thousands of artists work their fingers to the bone to fund the "big" groups. Consequently, even an act like Amanda Palmer can sell 30 000 albums without reaping any benefit. Artists have gotten wise to this, and as such you'll notice that all of these modern business models focus on getting rid of unnecessary middle men such as the major record labels.

The problem is, the record labels weren't always the artists' enemies. Indeed, there was a time in which the labels facilitated the artists' work. If we look at the groups facilitating Amanda Palmer's latest venture--the telecoms, the ISPs, social networking applications--we see a group of business that could easily become the next middle men (Yes, technically they already are middle men, but you know what I mean).

So what happens when ISPs start charging a commission on all music downloads? Not going to happen? They already no longer offer unlimited downloads, which means that as e-commerce increases and consumers download more and more video and audio, consumers will have to pay for "premium" accounts, meaning that the ISPs' earnings will increase in response to digital sales. Will we reach a point where these behaviours are as detrimental to the arts as those of the current major labels? Here's hoping not.

Astronaut

I just can't get this song out of my head. Seriously, it's been in there for weeks.

I miss Don Newman already.

Happy retirement, Don! I don't know what we'll do without you.

Metadata

Just a short thought, but have you noticed that people seem to be taking advantage of metadata more and more often as of late when it comes to storytelling? Webcomics everywhere (notably Dinosaur Comics) take advantage of the image tooltip description field to get another one-liner in. Twitter, too has led to an interesting usage of metadata: thanks to hash tags, Twitter users have started posting ironic tweets, using the hash tags as a big wink, one that lets the audience in on the joke.

I think I may just have found myself a print culture essay topic.

A roll of quarters

"Why no officer, I don't normally carry $134 billion on me. It's just that it's laundry day, is all."

Uyghur

With the recent trouble surrounding Uyghur inmates being release from Guantanamo, as well as attempts by the Chinese government to "preserve" the Uyghur city of Kashgar by destroying it, I've decided to look into the Uyghur people and culture. While I haven't looked into it enough to report anything other than the fact that it seems to be damn fascinating (and really, what culture isn't?), it's made me think about the weird blank space a lot of us have on our internal atlases, which, in my experience, tends to stretch from somewhere east of Prague to somewhere west of Beijing.

Now, this might not be true for any of you reading this, but in my experience there really is a surprising lack of knowledge concerning these areas. In some ways, this should be surprising, as even Eastern Europe seems exotic some days, but at the same time, it's really sad, as we're missing out on a lot of cool stuff. Many of these cultures and peoples were central to the silk trade, and as such there is a compelling mixture between what many people would call "Middle Eastern" and "Far Eastern" culture. I think my friend Karen gives the best example of the cultural possibilities of this region:

There’s a Uyghur restaurant around the corner from my mom’s apartment in Shanghai: I went there once, and was totally perplexed by a cute, vaguely-Asian-but-mostly-Russian-looking guy with blue eyes speaking perfect Mandarin who made me a lamb pie spiced with cumin. I was like, “Well, this mash-up of cultures and ethnicities is delightfully unfamiliar to me.”

Moments like this make me realise that no matter how small we may feel the world is, there's way more out there than we'll ever encounter in a lifetime. That and I now totally have a craving for lamb pie.

Distort

I absolutely love this cover of The Magnetic Fields' "All My Little Words." I find the growing trend of lo-fi, video game-style art fascinating. It seems that we've finally reached enough distance from the good ol' days of video games to look at them for their inherent artistic potential. Had this song come out a couple of decades ago, I'm sure that people would have largely ignored it as juvenile; now, however, those 8-bit noises sound absolutely poignent.

Education

Forces in Afghanistan are fighting to keep girls in school, while in Alberta the government is trying its hardest to keep kids out.

Don't censor information; help your kids evaluate it within the context of your moral and religious beliefs. It's called learning. It's what kids are supposed to be doing.

Grad School Funnies

A grad student walks into the faculty lounge to see one of his fellow PhD students sitting on the couch, looking kind of perplexed.

"What's wrong?" he asks her.

"The strangest thing just happened," she replies. "The lady behind the counter didn't make me sign any forms when I handed in my thesis on Kafka."