Friends of Rich

Bon Iver Review

A good way to resurrect a dead blog is with a "year in review" post. It says to your readers, "sure, I haven't posted all year but I've spent all that time thinking about which albums you should listen to. You're welcome!" Problem is, I hardly listen to anything new anymore.

Maybe I've gotten lazy, but most of my musical needs are met by a couple of old standbys: Silver Jews and Talking Heads. Of course, I finally discovered the genius of Jay Reatard this year but enough has been written about him. A lot has been written about Bon Iver too but that was on last year's reviews. I guess I don't watch enough Grey's Anatomy or House (and can one ever really get enough medical procedurals?), but I hadn't heard Justin Vernon's haunting voice until just a few days ago.

It's hard for any new voice to get heard on my iPod. Even though I regularly load it up with albums that people are talking about and put them in the shuffle rotation, it's so rare that anything makes it past my relentless skipping unless it's familiar. But Vernon's voice kept rising above the comforting to confront me with the new. Maybe it's because he just tries harder, overdubbing himself dozens, even hundreds of times. But Vernon never tries too hard, in fact, the genius of For Emma, Forever Ago is its subtlety.

On many tracks, Vernon backs himself up with an audacious chorus of clones and you can tell he has strong studio chops. But the most breathtaking moments on the record are when Vernon takes a breath. The pauses on "Creature Fear" are Pinteresque. They remind me of the intro to "Wouldn't it be Nice?" with its three beats of silence that feel like a fuse being lit. Of course, those beats aren't truly silent since the drum hit on 1 bounces around the eardrums for a while like a bottle rocket in a sewer.

For Emma feels like a folkier, broodier Pet Sounds but its impact is more like that of The Pixies' (another band I discovered after everyone else) Doolittle. Both The Pixies and Bon Iver give me something I didn't even know was missing from my musical diet: dynamics. I imagine that during the final mix, the engineer called everyone over to his desk just to look at the waveforms they had made together. They would stare at the loud quiet loud shapes like paintings on a gallery wall. Those tiny vocoder moments that last only a fraction of a beat on "The Wolves (Act I and II)" are masterstrokes. The closeness of the mic to the bass drum on "Blindsided" makes me wonder if we can see the painter's surroundings somewhere on the canvas. If we look closely enough, can we hear the paint-spattered boombox in the corner of the studio and smell the model's cigarettes?

I admit that I often relegate music to the role of background noise (at work, the gym etc). My iPod is like faucet and I find myself taking music for granted like I do with running water. I'm grateful that voices like Justin Vernon's can jolt me out of a musical rut just like Frank Black (and David Berman and David Byrne) did forever ago. And Vernon did it without having to scream.

Nothing to Post

This might be the longest outage yet on here. One of the things I like about blogs is that it's ok not to post if you have nothing to post. It's ok, right?

There are a couple of reasons I haven't had anything to post in so long. One is that Facebook and Flickr do a lot of the things I started a blog to do (i.e., keep in touch with far-flung friends). The other reason (excuse) is that I've been putting most of my creative energy into learning the drums. And playing Scrabble.

I haven't decided yet whether to mothball this thing or reinvent it or what. Maybe I'll catch the blogger fever again at Barcamp Vancouver this weekend.

One thing that's more than made up for the dearth of posting here on whypop is what Amber and her sisters have created over at painfullyhip.com. Just reading it will make you at least 10% more fashionable--guaranteed!

Pithiness and New Media

I'll get straight to the point: the biggest distinction between old media and new media is speed. Be pithy or perish.

On the web, you're competing with 100 million others for someone's attention. To hold their audiences, TV and radio still rely on soothing transitions and interstitials to create the impression of "flow." So, does new media, like a good burger, benefit from all this dressing and "secret sauce" or is it just filler?

In a recent post, Jason Kottke explores how amateur podcasters and video bloggers, in an effort to look more professional, often waste their audience's time using old media techniques, like transitions and interstitials, instead of inventing new ones.

No one accidentally tunes into a podcast, so there's little need to "set the stage" or remind the audience of something they already know for the sake of "branding." As Kottke writes, "30 seconds of music before the actual podcast begins is the audio equivalent of Flash splash pages on web sites."

I listen to a lot of NPR podcasts and I've memorized the length of each intro and transition so I can scan past them on my iPod. But if the messages are short enough, I won't skip them. Attention sponsors: "Brought to you by x" should be enough. If I wanted to know your mission statement, I'd go to your "about us" page. Attention producers: if you want me to listen to the credits, give me an incentive. Put a joke in there or at least change the music up. Ira Glass does a good job of this on This American Life.

I admit that all this stripping down can go too far. Just look at The Show with Ze Frank. The guy never blinks! Creepy.

Of course, there are many videobloggers who respect their audience's time yet aren't afraid of the occasional pause. I like how this young youtube celeb cuts together the otherwise dead air at the beginning of shots for comedic effect in Knock Knock! In Amateur, Lasse Gjertsen transforms the humblest of footage into a dazzling synthesis of music and video. It's an inspiration for someone like me who wants to play music but struggles with the multitasking.

Although parents and teachers still scold teenagers for saying "like" too much, teenage video bloggers are starting to excise the boring bits from their speech altogether. The expert use of jump cuts in some of these videos reminds me of my favourite filmmaker, Errol Morris.

So, jump cuts are one example of an old media technique that work great online. Let's try and find some more and post them in the comments.

Continue reading "Pithiness and New Media"

Murch Notes

Here are some rough notes I took during a presentation by Oscar-winning film editor Walter Murch (The Godfather, The Conversation, The English Patient etc.) at SFU on Feb. 17th, 2006. He's one of my all-time heroes so I was very excited (star-struck, even) to see him speak in person.

Whenever possible, I've tried to reinterpret and expand upon the scribblings in my notebook so they more closely approximate sentences but the result is still pretty fragmentary. To make matters worse, Murch speaks in analogies and sidebars (hyperlinks, even) so it will be pretty hard to follow, especially without a transcript of the talk. The event was filmed so I might try and hunt down the video to jog my memory. Anyway, here's my first crack at reconstructing his presentation and my response to it...

Murch is wearing black New Balance sneakers (see Behind the Seen for more on his jogging) and a dark suit. Seems confident, yet loose. Fast on his feet, he is comfortable deviating from prepared remarks. Yesterday's panel session was almost entirely from the hip.

He will focus on writing since he was invited by Praxis, the screenwriting group. I have to admit I was a bit disappointed when he said this because all I wanted to hear about was cutting. In retrospect, I got more than my money's worth.

Warning: this is a very long post.

Continue reading "Murch Notes"

Page A Day

Update: well, this "page-a-day" thing didn't really pan out for any of us. I'm gonna leave this post up though in the hopes that it will keep alive some of the fervor I had for this idea even though my experiment with it wasn't very successful.

The TV post was my first page in The 2006 Page-a-Day Writing Challenge. Even though I was adapting some stuff I had written previously, I went way over the 14 minute target. A little background: the 14 minute target and the whole philosophy behind The Challenge comes from our pal, Reinhard Engels, the creator of Everyday Systems. Some of us have already started doing shovelglove, "the slegehammer workout."

We're keeping the rules of The Challenge pretty loose, especially when it comes to what is considered a "page." Whatever amounts to 14 minutes of writing or rewriting. I don't think it even has to be writing. Drawings are ok, photos are ok--anything goes. So far, I'm the only one who has decided to blog.

Fellow pagers: Anita, Ben, Landon, Mary Jane, and Pete.
Fellow shovelglovers: Ben, Josh, and Pete.

Top 13 Oddities in the History of Television

I've noticed that top 10 lists always get a high ranking on digg, so I figured a top 13 must be even better. In a shameless ploy to drive traffic to my blog, I offer you a list of strange artefacts from the history of television. The list focuses on experiments in production technology and spectatorship.

1. The Nipkow Wheel (1884). Paul Nipkow invents a mechanical system for scanning images by passing light through a series of perforations on a spinning wheel. His invention provided the basis for early television experiments along with Karl Ferdinand Braun's cathode ray tube technology.


2. The Image Dissector (1920). Philo T. Farnsworth (age 15) sketches a design for what he eventually builds himself in 1927: the first prototype of electronic television.


3. Telechrome (1946). Just before his death, mechanical television pioneer John Logie Baird demonstrates a fully electronic system for delivering high-definition colour images in 3D. However, the system was never seriously considered for adoption by government or industry.


4. The Quiz Show Scandal (1959). Dashing "egghead" Charles Van Doren admits to cheating on several popular quiz shows forcing game shows to the margins of television where they would remain until the advent of reality tv.


5. NASA's Mark-V Field Sequential Camera (1969). NASA records colour images from the Apollo 11 moon landing using a custom-designed lightweight mechanical television camera.


6. The Gong Show (1975). A game show/variety show hybrid that thrived on chaos and interruptions, most notably from the judges who could bang the "gong" to dismiss contestants. It provided the template for pseudo-interactive shows like American Idol.


7. The Magnavox Odyssey (1977). The first home video game system and the inspiration for Pong and Atari. The first video game "boom" followed soon after.


8. The ADAM Computer (1984). A disastrous-selling upgrade to the popular Colecovision game console. Introduced at the end of the first wave of video games following Atari's meltdown. Only one year later, Nintendo was to usher in the next wave of video games.


9. The PXL 2000 (1987). Fisher Price introduces the first camcorder for kids that records grainy black and white images on audio cassettes. Sold poorly but was later adopted by groups of underground filmmakers.


10. Captain Power and The Soldiers of the Future (1987). A vehicle for Mattel's action figures, featuring interactive battle sequences whereby the toys recognize on-screen targets and register hits and misses.


11. Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (1988). A comedy series about "a guy named Joel" who is kidnapped by a mad scientist and forced to watch "cheesy movies" aboard a space station. Joel, and his homemade robot companions, are superimposed over the films and make wisecracks throughout. The show actively encouraged "tape-trading" among its fans, which contributed to its 10-year run despite being on marginal networks (it even started out on Minnesota Public Access).


12. The BOX (1995). The first interactive music video network with no hosts or commercials, only available to the small home satellite audience (pre-DirecTV). Viewers choose the most popular videos by phoning in to a 900 number.


13. ZeD (2002). CBC's now-defunct experiment in viewer-submitted programming, which billed itself as "open source television" and "surreality tv."

Linkography (will be inline soon): http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/FINE/juhde/baird962.htm
http://www.tvhistory.tv/NASA-Camera.htm
http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/farnsworth.html
http://www.thebox.nl/
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/6213/history.html
http://www.ce.org/publications/books_references/digital_america/history/television.asp
http://www.ce.org/publications/books_references/digital_america/history/videogames.asp
http://www.mst3kinfo.com/history/
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gong_Show
http://www.anzwers.org/free/moviewerx/pxlhist.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/quizshow/peopleevents/pande02.html
http://zed.cbc.ca/

Continue reading "Top 13 Oddities in the History of Television"

Down With This Sort of Thing

I just discovered my first auto-antonym: down. Pointing out auto-antonyms (words that have two contradictory meanings) is the kind of annoying word game that people with English degrees are supposed to play all the time but this is my first time.

Technically, down isn't a very good specimen because it doesn't work on it's own. The contradictions only happen when paired with other words like I am and with. Anyway, I just like being able to say, "Yeah, I'm down with this sort of thing" or "Down with this sort of thing!" depending on the situation.

I got my inspiration from reporter, Heather Mallick quoting Father Ted in her op-ed piece, Atheists Don't Get It.

Writing/Coding

A few months ago, I started writing code full-time after a very long hiatus. What surprised me about my new job was that maybe taking a few years off to get an English degree wasn't such a bad career move after all. I used to think I could never be much of a programmer because I had little aptitude for math or science but I've learned that to be successful in programming, like most things, demands discipline not genius.

I think that's one reason why bloggers deserve respect: because they have the discipline to write to the same rigorous deadlines as a seasoned beat reporter. But unlike reporters, whose editors are willing to supply any discipline that might be lacking, bloggers impose their own deadlines.

Of course, I still have a lot to learn about deadlines. I've been letting this blog languish for some time now and almost every paper I wrote in university was, miraculously marked "extension granted." I may not yet be a disciplined writer; however, I remain stubborn enough to call myself one. And I think any programmer can call themsevles a writer too because the code one writes is nothing without the prose that accompanies it. In his essay, Is Writing More Important than Programming?, Jeff Atwood quotes Joel Spolsky who explains in Advice for Computer Science College Students what distinguishes great programmers from "tolerable" ones:

It's whether they can communicate their ideas. By persuading other people, they get leverage. By writing clear comments and technical specs, they let other programmers understand their code, which means other programmers can use and work with their code instead of rewriting it. Absent this, their code is worthless. By writing clear technical documentation for end users, they allow people to figure out what their code is supposed to do, which is the only way those users can see the value in their code.

I am part of a new class of "user-developers" as Terry Hancock calls them. Thanks to high-level languages and being able to consult Google (or more importanly, the big-brains on my MSN buddy list), most programming problems aren't as daunting as they used to be. However, what remains as daunting as ever is entropy. It is the cause of writer's block, obfuscated code, and crappy software. Writing code, like any form of writing, demands a high tolerance for chaos and the willingness to grind it out until your readers/users can make sense of your ideas.

Not Just Sweatshops in Common

So Nike+iPod is here (actually, not yet in Canada) and it looks to me like BrainAge for your body. I have a feeling that, for whatever reason, being able to track my running data on my computer would motivate me to go running more regularly. Isn't it strange that something doesn't even seem real until we can convert it to bits?

Good news if you don't want to use Nike shoes: how-to use nike+ipod sport kit with any shoe.

Oh, and another reason to go running: no more stretching. Quirks and Quarks: scientists debunk the importance of pre-workout stretching.

You Tube and Copyright

According to this article in the Hollywood Reporter, You Tube is actually shielded from copyright infringement suits because it is defined as an "online service provider" under the US DMCA.

I think services like You Tube have an important role to play in the media ecosystem because they, at least temporarily, disrupt the rigid rules of copyright. Strangely, it seems that You Tube benefits copyright owners most when their works are uploaded without permission.

In this week's "Pulpit" column, Robert Cringely examines You Tube's notoriously sweeping Terms of Service, which basically state that by uploading a video, you agree to sign away all your rights as creator to You Tube. However, Larry Lessig points out an interesting loophole: if one of your fans upload the video they are not authorized to grant those right to You Tube. And so it is up to you whether you want to ask You Tube to remove it or leave it up to help spread word of mouth.

What if videos whose copyright couldn't be verified were automatically taken offline once a certain number of viewings was reached? Advertisers could even sponsor the more popular videos to keep them going. This would also make it possible to have a wide variety of back-catalog videos available that only seen occasionally but could potentially turn into hits thanks to the effect of "the long tail."