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Some Internet providers in the US are considering a tiered pricing system — charging more to customers who use a lot of bandwidth. There has been a hue and cry from the public regarding this proposal. By now, everyone is used to paying a flat fee, and then assuming that they can use as much bandwidth as they can get away with for that fee. The providers have even abandoned the tiered proposal trials in some cities — they are that unpopular. We’ve all become accustomed to overlooking how much bandwidth we use — without thinking about it, we go from low bandwidth usage, like emailing, browsing websites and surfing, to fairly high bandwidth usage, like video Skyping, uploading audio and photo files, or streaming a movie from Netflix or iTunes. Internet users presume that high bandwidth usage, like Skyping or video and audio streaming, is their right. This struck home today, when someone offered our group a password to a wi-fi network he had established, but didn’t offer it to those who habitually Skype. Initially, this seemed mean, but I had noticed that as more folks hop on a network, especially Skypers, the speed of the whole network goes down — especially for the rest of us. Even simple emailing becomes sluggish or intermittent. Bandwidth hogs take 80% or more of the bandwidth, and everyone else is left with slow or sometimes non-existent connections. Here then is the hidden cost of “free” services like Skype — they’re only “free” when the resource (the information highway) is limitless and infinite — which in this case, it is not. The same thing happens in hotels — the more people log on to the hotel server, the slower the whole thing goes. Sometimes it slows to a crawl, and after you’ve paid 5 Euros for an hour’s use, that can be pretty frustrating. The information highway can have traffic jams, just like any other. We tend to think of bandwidth as a God-given right, but it’s too finite, and its limits become apparent as the highway gets more crowded. So, should access be tiered? If the tiers are partitioned in chunks, should only those with more money have access to higher bandwidth connections? This would eventually lead to an information and Internet hierarchy — streaming movies, music and TV will only be available to those who can afford it — and the rest will have to watch in low-res or be content to miss that kind of web experience, forced to settle for basic emailing and web browsing. The whole Internet mixed media experience — Flash sites, video clips, audio clips, slideshows etc. — would become less available. As it is now, I don’t think twice about watching a video clip, or listening to some streaming audio if I’m curious — but I might hesitate if I knew that a meter was running. I could envision the idea of a meter that monitors bandwidth usage and charges accordingly. It might be a fair system — leaving the choice up to the user in each instance, rather than segregating users into discrete tiers. The proposed tiered plans sound less flexible. They seem to want to establish completely separate pipelines — gated Internet communities, in a way. Likewise, I just read that for centuries, fishing was relatively unregulated. There were limits on excessive catch, but the fishing grounds were more or less a free-for-all. Chesapeake Bay and other fishing grounds were public property. Anyone with a boat — a commercial fisherman, or a kid in a rowboat — was allowed to pull up oysters or crabs. It would have been all well and good when supplies seemed unlimited and plentiful, but they’re not anymore — in some places, there are no oysters or crabs left at all. Most, of course, were not taken by kids in rowboats. One proposed solution has been to privatize the oyster beds — allotting each fishery a designated area — with the assumption being that if fishermen realize that their stock is limited, they will self-manage and regulate their own consumption and fishing. Little Johnny on his rowboat will be pretty much out of luck, as the “public” fishing zones will have been fished out, and the private areas will be off limits. As our oceans and waterways become fished out and depleted, it’s fairly easy to justify some sort of fee, management or enforced regulation system — but shouldn’t that apply to anyone who uses limited natural resources? For years, mining companies have been digging out underground resources while paying a minimal cost for access — and they often leave environmental disasters in their wake. Weren’t those resources in some sense “public”? Ditto for oil and natural gas companies — shouldn’t they pay their host nations a hefty fee for access to finite resources that are, in a way, the patrimony of humanity? Someone once asked me, rhetorically, if an overweight person should pay the same amount for a plane ticket as someone of “normal” weight. It’s a rude and uncomfortable question, but not totally unreasonable when you consider that someone twice my weight requires twice as much jet fuel to get them airborne. Their carbon footprint is higher as a result. In effect, I’m subsidizing their excess — at least if all seats except first class are priced equally. Similarly, should kids and babies fly for less? Should tall men and women pay more? What about those whose above-average weight isn’t a result of overeating or poor diet? That seems unfair. Who’s to say why someone is overweight? And if you’re tall, it’s not your fault — you were born that way, so why should you be penalized? The tiered or metered way of charging for resources — how would that work? Can bandwidth even be considered a resource? Is it like the electromagnetic spectrum — a government-managed “public” resource, with various frequencies allocated to broadcast TV, mobile phones and police transmissions? We accept that not just anyone with a transmitter can usurp part of the broadcast frequency, start a radio station or blast their TV network to everyone in town — chaos would result. We accept that even though the airwaves might be “public,” they do need to be regulated. But cable and fiber optics aren’t God-given — someone paid to lay them down. For some strange reason, we presume that our health is a crapshoot. Most public health plans don’t tax people according to a tiered plan dependent on their propensity for getting diseases — though some folks, due to lifestyle, addiction or bad parenting will require more frequent and expensive treatment than others who live healthier lives. The folks who pay higher taxes, and those who are less prone to illness, are paying for those who are reckless with their health, or (it is presumed) just plain unlucky. Every industrialized country submits to this, apart from the US, where insurance companies fulfill this function — and they aren’t quite as altruistic, though they still maintain the crapshoot model, at least in the public’s eye. Anyway, the built-in unfairness of this system — that some per chance pay more than their share — is justified by the idea that a health disaster could randomly happen to any of us. We know this isn’t quite true — besides the lifestyle and social context factors that affect our likelihood of getting ill, there are genetic factors that are becoming easier and easier to assess. It seems inevitable that as genetic profiling becomes common, many will balk at paying for those who have a much greater propensity for getting serious diseases. Insurance companies will probably begin to adjust to that information before public health plans do — the companies themselves are taking on the risk, so if they can better their odds by charging so and so more because addiction, MS or Alzheimer’s runs in their family, they will. To many people this will seem unfair, since they might be as healthy as anyone else when the insurance company determines their rate — so, they will argue, why should they pay more? Auto insurance companies already do this with drivers — those who live in high-risk areas or have had accidents pay more. We don’t mind paying — via taxes or insurance — for the other fellow if we believe our risk is more or less the same as his, but we might be reluctant to pay medical bills for a junkie. In the long run, and from a wider perspective, health care does more than just insure against sudden medical costs — that is, public health care, not insurance plans. Public health care ensures that everyone lives without the fear that the bottom of their world will suddenly drop out. In the US, people with medical emergencies suddenly can’t pay their mortgages, college tuition or for their kids. They often end up on skid row, or at least in bad shape, because their financial situation is precarious (since there is no safety net) and a medical emergency knocks the whole thing down. In those countries where these worries are not as pressing, the people’s lives are different — they're less desperate, less on the edge, and therefore everyone, even those who are paying more than their share, benefits. It’s hard to quantify that benefit, I would imagine — but anyone with eyes and ears can sense it. So, back to the Internet. Is there a parallel with health care, insurance, fishing? Should I pay more, or receive less for what I pay, because my neighbor wants to stream movies, or video Skype to his or her pals night and day? Not sure. Maybe the question is how much we are willing to give up in order to share, and be equal… and what are our rights, if any, as far as resources go?
The Tribune Company owns the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Cubs, a bunch of TV stations and some other regional newspapers. They’re just barely holding on since being acquired in a takeover a year and a half ago by Sam Zell, a real estate billionaire. After the buyout, the Tribune’s editor left, as did a lot of its journalists and columnists. They reportedly weren’t happy with some of the changes that Zell had instituted. The paper had also acquired a relatively large debt. My guess is that after Zell bought the paper, his purchase price saddled the paper with debt; or rather, the paper’s employees — since its board members, like Zell, managed to avoid any personal debt. I saw similar things happen in the music business in the early 80’s, as record companies merged and were taken over by other companies (Warner Bros. was absorbed by Time and then later, AOL). The result was that the companies suddenly ended up in debt, and, in order to show a profit every quarter, had to forget about their standards and musical instincts. Long-term thinking became a thing of the past. They had to cut back here and there, which often meant cutting out middle-level employees. Bosses weren’t likely to thin their own ranks, and from their perspective, losing middle-level employees who had accrued decent salaries would help shore up the bottom line — temporarily, at least. New middle-level people could be hired at lower pay, or lower-level employees could be bumped up. The thing is, it was the middle-level people who actually knew and essentially ran the businesses. “‘From an informed public standpoint, it’s alarming,’ said Representative Kevin Brady, a Republican from the Houston area, who has seen The Houston Chronicle’s team in Washington drop to three people, from nine, in two years. ‘They’re letting go those with the most institutional knowledge, which helps reporters hold elected officials accountable.’” [ Link to NY Times article] The Houston Chronicle is not alone. Almost every newspaper in the US, except the Times and the Wall Street Journal, has drastically cut, or in many cases entirely eliminated, their Washington contingent. “‘We used to cover the Pentagon, combing through defense contracts, and we’re covering some of that out of Dallas now, but basically we don’t do it anymore,’ said Carl Leubsdorf, chief of The Dallas Morning News bureau, which had 11 people four years ago, and now has four. ‘We had someone at the Justice Department, but no longer. We can’t free someone up for a long time to do a major project.’” [ Link] As one of the Baltimore Sun reporters, who appeared in the HBO show The Wire, mentioned, you just can’t cover with 4 people what you used to with 11 — or 30. Despite management trying to squeeze more blood out of that stone, it’s just not possible. Less gets reported. Likewise, these newspapers have dumped most of their foreign bureaus, food critics, and film critics, and are loathe to assign reporters to stories that will take months to research and write. In doing so, they are eviscerating that which makes newspapers different from online reviews, blogs and websites. When papers end up like USA Today, there will be no reason to read them. “The much greater loss, the journalists say, is the decline of Washington reporting on local matters — the foibles of a hometown congressman or a public works project in the paper’s backyard. One after another, they cited the example of the San Diego paper’s Washington bureau for exposing the corruption of Representative Randall Cunningham, who is known as Duke. In accepting a Pulitzer Prize for that work in 2006, ‘we were bold enough to hope that it would be the first of many, but it turned out to be the high point,’ said George E. Condon Jr., the last bureau chief. ‘No matter how much great journalism is done by national organizations, they’re simply not geared to monitor closely a member of Congress from, say, San Diego, who’s not a national leader.’” [ Link] Second to the NY Times, the Tribune Company owns some of the country’s most widely circulated newspapers. Though I tend to think of the LA Times as more a community paper than a national one — a paper that covers mainly the intrigues and dramas of their local industry (movies, music and TV mixed in with coverage of local politics and crime) — there’s nothing wrong with in-depth reporting of one’s own city. TV sure ain’t gonna do it. Do we really need in-depth reporting, investigative journalism and foreign news desks? Can we manage without them? I am as guilty as most in that I often (though not always) read the morning papers online, for free. I jump between different publications, as their angles, points of view and interests are varied. Yeah, sometimes it’s the wacky human-interest story that grabs my attention — the sort of thing fit for web reporting — but just as often, it’s a story that is thoroughly researched and gives background and context on the topic. How does a democracy work without (in-depth) news? It doesn’t. While most of the population will not care about access to high-quality news, there are always some who read to find out what’s really going on, and why. Dictatorships, totalitarian regimes and underdeveloped countries don’t have the luxury of investigative journalism, and the news-as-entertainment in highly capitalist regimes isn’t really informative either — it’s bread and circuses. An informed citizenry, said Jefferson, is necessary for a democracy to function. He also said: “Advertisements... contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.”
and
“I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.” [ Link] TJ may have presumed we’d get our information from other sources, or maybe, like many politicians, he simply distrusted the press. It wouldn’t be surprising if he did — imagine if the press reported heavily on his taste for Brown Sugar. Politicians are held in check by the press, for better or worse; that too is one of the ways in which the press allows a democracy to function. Without the threat of public exposure, well… you can imagine. Anyway, it will be strange if the USA becomes a large industrialized country with only one or two newspapers — the NY Times and The Wall Street Journal — practicing in-depth coverage; the latter, now owned by Murdoch, may find itself eviscerated, assuming its fate follows those of his other newspaper purchases around the world. There is no way the Times can afford all the foreign desks, local reporters and journalists that a country of this size requires. What will happen when most of the country has nothing but entertainment, gossip and sports as sources of information? It’s a country ripe for takeover, if you ask me. A place where public opinion can be easily manipulated, as long as the consumers keep buying. Blogs and Internet news sites can’t fill the gap, as they don’t have the resources to sustain a team of reporters working and digging into a story — sometimes for months before anything sees the light of day. They don’t have African or Southeast Asian bureaus either. Besides, most Internet news sites like Google News are aggregates of traditional print and wire service news gatherers. Without sources they’d be pretty much nothing. Local sites like Gothamist and national ones like The Smoking Gun are cool and up-to-the-minute, but they don’t assign staff to conduct long-term investigations into the how and why of a scandal or news item. They break stuff, it’s true, but mostly they rely on others to feed them information. I have plenty of beefs with the arts and culture coverage of many newspapers; I can easily spot the biases and lack of research. I’m of that world, so I have my own personal biases as well — which sometimes match those of the critics, and sometimes don’t. I myself have gone in and out of favor a few times, so I regard their reviews and reporting with what I feel is healthy skepticism. News, though, is another story. I imagine that cops, thugs, hedge fund dudes, politicians and bureaucrats all have their own beefs with the press, but from my point of view, I’d much prefer some seriously researched coverage in those areas — with a little bias — to nothing of any depth. I’ve been trying to imagine what this country would be like without a serious news source. Like Cuba with only Granma, the organ of the party — that and bootleg satellite TV broadcasts of American Idol. Or Russia, pre-Gorbachev, when the choice was between Pravda and some samizdat mimeographed publications. Iran under the Ayatollah or the Shah. The Philippines under martial law — when all press critical of the Marcos regime was silenced. We tend to get all holier-than-thou when we look at countries without free press. We think their lives must somehow be more pathetic or sad. Needless to say, this attitude makes us feel better. But people go on. They know, or at least suspect, that they are being denied something, but they maintain hope and optimism. They don’t go around moping. They get on with their lives, and sometimes, at least now and then, feel like maybe the censorship doesn’t matter all that much. There are still reasons to be cheerful. We might like to think of life in an oppressive regime as sheer misery, but from what I can tell, it’s rarely viewed that way. Life goes on and people make do with what they have, and they fall in love and get drunk and sing and dance. It takes a lot — a whole lot — to bring them to the flash point, like what just happened in Greece. Mostly, people adapt to the way things are — and to feel miserable about it is fruitless. And that’s what we will do when there are only two serious newspapers left in the USA.
Election Day I'm scared to look.
Paint on Canvas
In an article in the weekend Financial Times, Jackie Wullschlager writes about a show of Renaissance portraits at the National Gallery in London. She makes a series of broad statements about the contemporary implications inherent in the changes portraiture went through at that time. Jackie says, for example, “the more human individuality is threatened — by biogenetics, global capitalism, the identikit personae of YouTube — the more intensely we turn to painted portraits.” I remember hearing something similar in a YouTube video, “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube,” by anthropologist Michael Wesch and his class at Kansas State University. That piece is exactly what it says it is, and, of course, it itself is also a YouTube phenomenon that looks at other YouTube phenomena and back at itself. Anyway, one of the points he and his class make is that as certain values get eroded by phenomena or technology they simultaneously become more valued. They mentioned authenticity as being a value that is highly prized among YouTube denizens, as it is relatively easy to fake a posting. And therefore, the whole YouTube world prizes stuff that isn’t slick, or God forbid fake, but is “real.” When anything can be virtual, then “real” becomes precious. So, I can see what Jackie is getting at — that the humanistic values implied by the new (at the time) Renaissance portrait styles might have contemporary relevance. Jackie also says that previous to the Renaissance, full frontal portraiture (not full frontal nude body images) were reserved for pictures of Jesus. So, by implication, to paint real people in that way was to say that the individual is no less than the God(s). That we each have a spark, a dollop, of Godness in us, and it’s always a little different. Maybe this was the beginning of the rise of the cult of individuality, of the idea that each of us is completely unique. Each a nation unto itself. Now science is telling us that maybe we’re not as unique as we would like to think. We’ll see where that leads. Of course, portraiture was originally reserved for the rich and powerful — royalty, popes, bishops and powerful merchants. But eventually, the less wealthy merchant classes soon adopted it. Jackie quotes an Italian satirist, Pietro Aretino (1554), who laments that “even tailors and vintners are given life by painters.” God forbid. So, the rich and powerful did what they always do; they changed the rules of the game to maintain their distinction. They could afford to, so they had their new portraits done giant size. Or what was then giant size. It goes without saying that only they had the wall space for such large-scale works. When is a painting not a painting? When it is a hot line to God. In another article in that paper, Robin Blake reviews a show of Byzantine works that includes a number of icons. These paintings were, he says, not revered for their painterly qualities and certainly not for their humanistic values. They were closer to sacred relics according to Blake. Like the bloody nails, bones, and wood fragments elaborately displayed in many churches today. “Any pious person who tried hard enough, it was thought, could establish a hotline to the divine through the painting.” Not only were these paintings powerful agents in this way, but also their power could be multiplied and transferred. (Walter Benjamin, take note). A copy, maybe every copy, maybe even bad copies, of the original icon was believed to somehow partake of the power of the original. This is digital technology from 1000 years ago! Where the copy and the original are identical — at least identical where it matters. I remember going into some Orthodox churches in Greece while there on tour and seeing women kissing the images on the icons. Not tongue kissing, mind you, but there was definitely passion of another sort involved. I wondered to myself how many contemporary artists might wish their work could elicit such a powerful reaction. Needless to say, one doesn’t judge these “artworks” in the same way one judges other portraits, just as a splinter allegedly from the cross is no mere chunk of kindling. Art criticism in this case becomes useless, and aesthetics too — it all becomes irrelevant.
Model Number 7: Fan Supported Label/Distribution
Just read the second of a number of articles on Maria Schneider, the jazz composer, and the release of her new album. She’s up for a Grammy, which probably prompted these articles, as her lovely new CD — which isn’t actually a CD — is only available as a download through ArtistShare, her current “record label”. The album, Sky Blue, is a suite composed for a seventeen-piece jazz orchestra, so it must have cost something to record and mix.
ArtistShare offers yet another alternative to the traditional record label deal — another possibility to add to the ever-growing list of other possibilities. Again, it probably wouldn’t work for everyone, but it certainly seems to be working for her. ArtistShare asks the fans of an artist to contribute to the making of a future record. (Obviously, this means the artist must have some fans to begin with, so emerging artists might give this one a pass.) A donation of $9.99 gets you a download of the album when it’s done, along with some texts, notes and images and a few other extras.
But then the deal ramps up in steps. A deeper investment gets you concert tickets and other perks and the highest you can go is 18k, which wouldn’t fund a mega pop record or a project in the cash only business of hip hop, but in this case it gets you a credit as a producer. You can attend the recording sessions, obtain tickets to live shows, and can even attend the Grammy’s with Maria and her producer or label guy.
I imagine that in Maria’s case, she spends a lot of time composing (with either a computer or with pencil and paper). And then the actual recording process might be fairly straightforward — some band rehearsals in any large room before renting a large studio to record the stuff more or less live over the course of a few days. Mixing and post-production could be done in a smaller, cheaper studio. So, though I doubt that 18k for example would cover it all — she works with a large ensemble — the sum would at least take a big bite out of the recording costs.
For the most part, distribution is through digital downloads, so those costs are kept under control (though I think the larger investors get signed hard copies as well as their downloads).
How did she do? Well, pretty good I’d say, though she didn’t win a Grammy this time (she got one in 2004). She got 200k from fan/participants for her record, of which 15% went to the “label”. The rest, 170k, went directly to the artist. (I suspect the recording costs come out of that as well, which must have been at least 20-30k). AND, she didn’t have to give up any of her publishing, which traditional labels often manage to get a big piece of.
Anyway, add this one to the list of possible distribution models.
(See the original article published in Wired Magazine here)
C and I are here to take a Final Cut Pro tutorial at a place called Anderson Ranch Arts Center. Years ago Mike and Doug Starn told me they took Photoshop classes up here and recommended it for intensive learning. The ranch includes ceramics studios, a large woodshop, a metalsmithing studio, darkrooms, and a full print shop that functions quasi-independently of the ranch center.
Normally, established artists come here to get help realizing a project, or to consult with the younger aspiring artists also taking the tutorials. While we didn’t have specific projects in mind, we were excited by the possibilities offered with these new affordable video and editing tools. With Final Cut one can edit professional quality, high-res video on a laptop if need be. No extra hardware, other than an external hard drive, is needed. And with the new high-definition cameras that have just come out in the last year or so, the image quality available for a relatively low cost has taken a quantum leap.
It reminds me of when Logic and other comparable softwares made audio recording, editing, and mixing available at a more reasonable cost than with Pro Tools, which required that you use their expensive hardware. Pro Tools eventually responded to the competition’s populist approach with more reasonably priced hardware setups, but the cat was out of the bag. It was possible to record audio at home, on a laptop even, at the same quality as in a professional studio.
As others have pointed out, the required gear — mics, headphones, A to D converters, amps, speakers, etc. — is far from free. And though the costs are significantly less than they once were, much of the gear still remains out of reach for many young artists. The investment need be made only once though, whereas the cost of using a professional recording studio must be shouldered every time an artist goes in. I continue to pay for a recording studio from time to time, mostly for the skills and the fresh, creative ears of the mixer, recorder or producer.
On the way to Aspen, in Newark Airport, I used the restroom, and there was a man in the neighboring toilet talking on his cell phone. Of course, everyone could hear what he was saying — not that it made much sense, as we all just heard one side.
Blocked
There’s free Wi-Fi at the Denver airport, which is a nice, sensible touch. But to my surprise, one of my habitual surfing sites has been blocked. I’m not totally shocked that alleged nudity might be blocked (if there is nudity on the Boing Boing site it’s pretty rare and likely to be arty or ironic), but I’m perplexed by the implication that all blogs and wiki sites are suspect!
Back in NYC however, Danielle explains that not all blogs and wikis are blocked, just those filtered by Secure Computing’s web censorware product called SmartFilter. According to Boing Boing co-editor Xeni Jardin,
“[…]SmartFilter isn't very smart. Secure Computing classifies any site with any nudity — even Michaelangelo's David appearing on a single page out of thousands — as a ‘nudity’ site, which means that customers who block ‘nudity’ can't get through." (see blog post here)
Turns out, Secure Computing and other similar companies have sold their products to government-controlled monopoly Internet providers in places like Kuwait, Oman, and Sudan to name a few, effectively blocking access to filtered sites — like Boing Boing — for entire countries. Xeni wrote an op-ed in the NY Times on the issue, which you can find here.
We transfer to the small plane to Aspen. It arrives over Aspen about twenty-five minutes after takeoff, but there is low visibility, so we can’t land. The plane circles for an hour over the clouds and then we have to fly back to Denver. The airline people tell us the next available flight is twenty-four hours later, so we all scramble to look for ground transportation. A wild man with a van is outside soliciting passengers; as the busses aren’t leaving for hours, a group of us pile in and we leave as soon as the van is full.
As we ascend into the mountains the snow begins falling and the roads are increasingly covered in snow. After an hour or so it’s dark, and the road is a white path amidst a white landscape. The Vail Pass is pretty outrageous, with falling and blowing snow and pretty low visibility. Every time we hit a bump the interior light in the van blinks on and off. The kid next to me is getting restless — after about 3.5 hours, he routinely asks how much further and how much longer. It’s annoying, but he’s only articulating what the rest of us feel.
On the occasion of the opening of the new, big New York Times building on 40th St and 8th Ave, I posted a journal/blog entry recently that raised some questions about print media. The post got passed around, and after a few days I received an invitation Ariel Kaminer at the Times to visit their new home. With a little trepidation and a lot of excitement, I went yesterday afternoon and got a little tour. I wondered if embedded journalists might feel much like I did— welcomed in, but unsure how much is kosher to tell and report.
Of course they are asking themselves many of the same questions I asked in my post: for example, “how will print journalism survive financially as more and more readers migrate on line?” Part of my little tour consisted of talking to folks who are confronting that issue every day, but I also encountered journalists involved in traditional newsgathering, as well as the digerati who are pondering the online and electronic future of news media.
Needless to say, the big question remains open; we didn’t decide it yesterday, but a lot of issues and ideas were raised. The Research & Development department (!), located way up on the 28th floor with incredible views, is where possible future (and present) technologies for delivering news and other services are pondered. Or you can look out the window and see New Jersey and the rolling hills that stretch further west. On a long countertop lay a broad selection of tablets, cell phones, PDAs and other devices that might become a way that people receive their news in the future.
While reading substantial articles on a Blackberry or Palm, or even an iPhone seems unlikely on those small screens, checking stocks, sports, movie times, reviews, menus, and headlines, etc., may be a more probable scenario. The tablets and readers arrayed on the counter were more intriguing to me. One or two had color screens and were touch sensitive, allowing readers to highlight parts of articles (as I do in the print version), as well as to save and send them. These devices were about half the width of this 15” laptop I’m writing on, and some were about half as thick, approximating the size of a thin trade paperback. A few had hidden keyboards (the Fujitsu Tablet PC 1610 has a keyboard that swivels out), while others did not. These devices go online, of course, but they don’t necessarily run all the software, or perform all the functions that a laptop does, though it seems obvious to me that fairly soon they will all be able to do so.
This begs the question of whether people actually want these halfway devices, devices that do some things, some of them very well, but stop there. Will people, for example, carry a slim tablet as a way of reading the morning paper and accessing other online information and leave it at that? Will they continue to own and even carry multiple devices? A (smart) phone, a computer at the office, maybe a laptop in the briefcase and another computer at home? And a tablet reader on top of all that? (Well, in many cases the tablets will replace the laptops.)
I can see both sides. When I go out to see something or to have dinner with friends, I never take my laptop. And unless the tablets evolve to use the recently emerging folding screens (enabling a small and compact device to open up and have a larger screen), I doubt I would bother to carry one around as I would a newspaper, a magazine or a book to keep me company when I’m by myself. So, even though one can do email and documents on a smart phone now, and there are various collapsible extension keyboards for them, I don’t see people reading or writing long letters or docs on tiny devices until the advent of the foldout screens.
The R&D folks mentioned the potential advent of portable devices with tiny projectors that would effectively turn any bit of nearby white surface into a screen about the size of a laptop. Hmmm…Maybe folks would adapt to writing and interacting with little projected versions of their laptop screens? The smart phone would then serve as a link to the web, as well as a storage and processing device, its user interacting not with the apparatus itself, but with thin air, a projected virtual version of a desktop and keyboard. And then before too long, the computer interface will become a hologram or a projection that doesn’t need a wall, vanishing when you’re done work (or play) and switch it off.
There was also talk of people getting articles pushed to their phones, all of which is possible, but the question of how one reads longer pieces remains. For now, portable readers seem perfect for information updates and such. In fact a couple of these R&D guys just won first prize at a Yahoo hack contest for developing — in twenty-four hours — some hardware with corresponding software linking phones and computers easily. It is hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that someone could hack a piece of software and its attendant hardware so quickly, albeit some of the stuff looked like it was held together with hot glue. Pretty impressive.
The tour continued in a dark room the size of a kid’s bedroom with a large plasma screen on one wall and various devices — game controllers, iPods, DVD players, etc. — plugged into it. I sat on the couch. A few of the guys came in and proceeded to demonstrate the interactive “game” called Rockband. (The newspaper does review games and electronics, but I suspect these guys were not the game reviewers.) They pulled out a microphone, a virtual guitar (I don’t think it had strings on it), and some virtual drums, and proceeded to jam — full on — to a Weezer tune! The “game” allows you to select avatars — in this case a weirdly muscular drummer, a singer with a kind of white mullet, and a woman on guitar with pink hair — and you sing and “play” your instruments to the prerecorded karaoke version of the song. Lyrics and tab like graphics scroll by to help you follow along. The audience in the game world cheers. Then you get rated on your performance. These guys did really well. Really well.
On another floor I had a talk with a VP of business affairs (not the business section), who of course thinks a lot about from where to derive ad income as readers migrate online. Already the present readership is far stronger online than in print, but income from online ads is not a great, not by a long shot. Ariel says that the ad income online may be much smaller than that on paper, but it’s growing much, much faster.
At present, it is mostly the ads in the Style section, and the glossy Sunday and T magazines that pay for a disproportionate amount of the newspaper’s running costs. Without the income from Gucci and Rolex, there probably wouldn’t be a Baghdad bureau. (That’s an exaggeration, but that’s the idea.) And to some extent those seductive and provocative luxury ads work best in print — they certainly don’t have the same impact when translated to a tiny online banner.
It was pointed out however, that no matter how seductive a print ad is, it still relies almost exclusively on the reader remembering it in some vague way. First it has to meet your eyes, and then it has to be remembered in some conscious or unconscious way. While small in size, online ads have the advantage of being able to take the curious reader right to the “store” — the “store” being either the vendor’s web page or some “place” where one can buy the item with a few clicks online. Any sales person can tell you that once you’ve got the customer into your establishment only a fool will let them get out empty handed.
I sense that there is an unspoken philosophy at the Times that guides and informs everything. It’s an old idea (Jefferson, DeToqueville) that a democracy — which I would suggest we barely have now — can only run with at least semi-informed citizens. Without information a citizen can’t make intelligent choices or vote in any kind of rational way. They’re easy to dupe, fool and deceive. Gut instincts will only get you so far. (One could say that faith-based politics would deny that being informed is necessary, with faith being the only requirement.) Anyway, this philosophy places the media, and in particular the news media, in a sort of integral role — not in the government of course, but in the mechanism that makes a country work.
As a serious newspaper, or news service, or whatever it will be called, the Times would then have a duty to write about situations around the world, around the US, and in NYC and Washington. And to do fairly in-depth reporting, including investigative pieces, they must maintain bureaus in a number of far-flung spots around the globe. Needless to say, this is hugely expensive and some of those articles may not be the most popular. The press is both a product to consume and an indispensable service — a tricky balancing act to pull off.
The Times folks seemed to have internalized an extension of this idea — that, for example, it’s OK if the ads for luxury goods or gadgets fund the newsgathering and reporting because it serves a greater public service. Or, to put it another way, it’s OK if the important newsgathering part doesn’t make a profit.
Many forms of media have held those same values, though a good number have been forced to drop them in recent years. In the record biz, the successive waves of corporate takeovers put increased emphasis on the bottom line and on quarterly profits (to keep the stock values up). Labels like Warner Bros used to fund recordings by Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, Neil Young, Frank Zappa and later Talking Heads (to name but a few), with the profits made from Black Sabbath and subsequently from Madonna. The labels accepted that the less profitable, but maybe weightier and more prestigious stuff was important to keep around.
But when the suits moved in after a series of mergers, the idea that many artists’ recordings weren’t profitable in and of themselves was no longer acceptable. Like many other media forms — TV news, magazines and movies — the unprofitable stuff was inevitably axed, and the material bringing in the bucks, well, “Let’s have more of that,” the suits would say. The Ochs-Sulzberger family directs a large percentage of the board of Times, giving them effective control.
There was a similar situation at the Wall Street Journal with the Bancroft family. But, their family’s control was more fragmented and the News Corp (i.e. Rupert Murdoch) managed to take over. The Times family holds the view that “quality” journalism makes all the rest of the business worth more. It’s not uncommon that the unprofitable parts of a company lend it weight, prestige, and ultimately its worth. So, maintaining those expensive foreign bureaus is viewed as important.
It was mentioned that some folks in the building feel that the addition of glossy supplements like the T sections, is selling out. But one could also argue that as long as the serious journalism remains intact, then why not let the ads in those sections pay for it. (Well, we’ll see what happens as readers go on line.)
Lastly, I was invited to a conference room on one of the lower level news floors to sit in on the “page one” meeting. The meeting was like something out of Front Page, one of those old-fashioned newspaper movies. It’s a long-standing tradition in which representatives of each section pitch a story that might be suitable for the front page. More than twenty people sit around a giant table, each with a printed summary of his or her proposed story. A projection screen at one end of the table allows accompanying photos to be thrown up and discussed as well. The meeting was a bit frenetic, with no seeming established order of presentation. There’s no Big Board, as in Dr. Strangelove, but there is a big white wall with room enough for one.
None of the pieces even had proposed headlines at this point. Sometimes the head editor(s) would suggest that a given story be tightened up, which might involve adding a paragraph to make a point or connection, or to provide further clearer explanation.
Yesterday there was no obvious or massive breaking story, so some larger, ongoing stories (the credit debacle, for example) continued to evolve and develop in important and significant ways — although there was really nothing spectacular to hang these developments on. At one point the metro desk suggested a story about non-operating elevators at the Bronx Family court. I thought it was a good piece, as the families and children were often denied assistance or legal help because of the damn elevators — “For the want of a nail, the battle was lost” sort of thing. But OK, in the context of everything else that day, maybe it seemed that more “weight” was desired.
Haggling over the front page might seem anachronistic; soon readers might be customizing their own front pages or an algorithm might do it for them. I would argue that, as in a lot of fields (like music), a filter is more valuable than sheer information. In fact, a filter is information, in the strict sense. And a front page — whether material or virtual — is a filter that tells us what news the paper has decided we should be aware of at a glance. Granted. a nice picture (they’re getting increasingly arty these days) will draw in browsers at a newsstand as much as a headline. But for most of us, this aggregator that is that daily conference meeting is still a pretty good system.
I saw more departments after the “page one” meeting, like the guys who make interactive graphics, for example. Their online pieces are increasingly like little movies and might, I think, draw even more eyes away from the print edition. Hmmm.
On the way out I saw the nice art piece that Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen did in the 8th Ave lobby. Though it usually displays random text excerpts trolled from the online archives, at that moment it was displaying the shapes of nations and states that might be in the news. I recognized the shapes of Afghanistan and Minnesota.
Ariel adds:
“There used to be only one way to engage with the NY Times — and that was to buy the whole thing, sit down, and read it in its entirety. (If you bought it, but left parts unread you felt “guilty” — which is a big reason some people didn't buy it in the first place.)
Me, I still read it like that. Every morning, cover to cover. But now, there are many additional ways to engage the stuff we publish. You can Google a fact, land on a Times article, dip in, dip out, move on. Or you can visit the site to get movie tickets and showtimes (actually we just yesterday launched our new movie site: www.nytimes.com/movies) and click your way to the day's reviews — or the day's news about Kabul. Or you can debate with other readers about what off-Broadway plays to see during the stagehands' strike (and click thru to the reviews). Or when a rainstorm shuts down the subway system, and the MTA website crashes, you can go to the "City Room" blog, which was fielding real-time reports about what was running and what wasn't, reported via cell phone text by wet people on subway platforms. Or you can waltz through the archives, a vast and free library of history's first draft.
Or, you can log on every morning and read every story, cover to cover (or whatever the electronic equivalent of that is).
The numbers suggest people are finding lots and lots of different ways and reasons to use the Times — as a resource for news and more broadly speaking, information — and that's what I (not ordinarily a cheerleader) find cheering. Because obviously it no longer makes any sense to expect people to read the thing just out of some sense of civic obligation."
[A special bulletin brought to you by DB and Danielle Spencer]
[Link to savenetradio.org]
The Copyright Royalty Board is proposing a large increase in the performance royalty rates for “non-interactive streaming services”. This means web radio, cable radio and satellite radio will pay more to SoundExchange in royalties. Presumably those royalties eventually dribble down to the artists getting “played”, but it’s never that simple. It’s a little complex and difficult to understand but let me see if I can describe what is in the offing. (My own streaming web radio would be affected, and since I derive no income from it, that, among other things, makes this an issue of personal interest.)
Web radio is different than broadcast radio in that the hosting costs increase precisely as the listenership increases. With streaming web radio, information on the exact number of listeners accessing the stream at any given moment or period is available, and easy to obtain, unlike broadcast radio which is just out there and no one knows how many people are listening (so how do they determine ad rates?) The more listeners you have the more you pay in hard costs — some server’s gotta host the stream. Of course stations like mine and the network of NPR stations that have no commercial revenue eventually run into a financial wall once that audience figure reaches a certain amount.
With royalties it gets more complicated. While traditional terrestrial radio does pay songwriter/publishing royalties for the musical work itself, in the U.S. they don’t pay performance royalties for the sound recording under the rationale that airplay promotes the songs, which benefits the copyright holders. (This determination was mostly due to the radio industry lobbying congress not to collect these royalties.) Web radio, however, along with satellite and cable services, does pay performance royalties — these are the rates that are being raised now. (If this discrepancy sounds illogical, it’s because it is.) Now, broadcasters are eligible for statutory licenses for these new performance royalties. These statutory licenses set royalty rates so that each station doesn’t have to license each song individually. Until now, if a webcaster’s profit was below a certain amount, they have been eligible to pay a set yearly fee, and if they met certain criteria they have been able to pay royalties as a percentage of their profits, not as a per-song fee. Registered 501(c)(3) non-profits have been eligible for reduced rates regardless of their stream traffic.
With the proposed changes the royalties can no longer be based on a percentage of revenue, but on a fee for each listening hour — how many folks are listening and for how long — and there will be a minimum fee per radio “channel”. Also, above a certain aggregate listening hour amount, non-profits have to pay the same per-listening hour rates as commercial broadcasters. So now there will be no distinction between a large-scale non-profit station (like KCRW or WXPN) and Z100. The threshold for non-profits is proposed to be 159,140 listening hours per month. Where did this bizarre number come from?
For perspective, on my web radio I get an average of about 40,000 listener hours per month. At present I pay small mechanical royalty fees that go to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC (presumably these dribble down to the artists whose songs I stream); performance royalties that get dispersed via a company called SoundExchange, and a fee to Live 365 for hosting and doing all the paperwork. I pay about $2,000 a month, based on the above listening hours. That’s rent for an apartment for many people (at least in some cities.) I can afford it, I enjoy doing it, and people seem to like it, so it’s OK for me that I’m out of pocket. I do however realize that I am in a special position — not just anyone can afford to start a streaming web radio service if it has this many listeners. If this ruling goes through it’s likely that my costs would go up about 20%, which is not crippling, yet. But one can see where this road leads — the door will have been wedged open. It’s estimated that the per-play rates will put many webcasters out of business, all but the largest and most commercially successful.
For NPR stations it is a different story as they have wider listenership than I and would pay the same royalty rates as commercial broadcasters. KCRW estimates roughly that as this ruling is retroactive they would owe $130,000 in additional fees for 2006 and $237,000 for 2007. WXPN in Philly estimates $1,000,000. In some worlds this is not a big deal but as one can imagine many of these stations barely eek by as it is, so this could very likely shut down the webcasting side of many of them. That would be a shame, as these stations are the only source of, well, good music, alternative sounds and innovative and informative programming in the U.S. It would be a loss for, well, democracy, as democracy depends on availability of many points of view untainted by commercial concerns and pressures. A truly informed populace, in other words. It points to another victory for the oligarchs — the big 5 record companies and the media companies that own them. Count one more for the big guys. The reasoning that it’s for the benefit of the artists rings a little hollow as most artists heard this argument re: cracking down on file sharing, and most never see money from their record companies anyway — so the line about “we’re doing it for you” is pretty suspect.
Who is this agency that is proposing making this change? They are not an elected body — the Copyright Royalty Board is made up of a few people appointed by the Library of Congress Copyright Office. They used to be a group of arbitrators but since 2004 they are a group of judges. (I wonder if Gonzales, Cheney etc. have any pals in there?)
The new rates are supposed to have been based on the model of the so-called willing buyer and willing seller in the marketplace — this according to the wording of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1996. But where does this “market value” come from? Does it mean that if I play more popular music on my streaming radio I should pay more? I’m confused. (I think I’m supposed to be confused.) Who is determining this value? In this case the CRB seems to be looking towards agreements made between the major record labels and the largest commercial webcasters, but this is hardly a free market model. It also seems to ignore the fact that the “value” of a song would change depending on the context — if I’m listening to a web radio stream I can’t control what I hear, which is different from purchasing the track.
The new rates are being appealed — to join a petition (against the rate changes) or learn more about this, go to savenetradio.org.
—DB/DS
+++
Some further notes, for those who are really interested:
Commercial broadcast mediums in the U.S. mostly derive their income from advertisers. Nielsen systems — boxes attached to a random sampling of viewers’ TV sets — are supposed to determine what shows are being watched, and the more popular shows can therefore demand more money from the advertisers as they are “delivering” a larger audience to view their ads and presumably buy their products. I suspect it’s a more complicated algorithm than that, as some shows will have a wealthier viewership than others, and presumably one could market more expensive items to this crowd than to Super Bowl fans even though their numbers might be smaller. You might charge more to deliver potential buyers of jewelry and designer clothes than drinkers of Bud Lite. And with cable it might be possible to determine more accurately who is watching what.
From an audience perspective we are used to receiving radio and TV more or less for free. We see it as a God-given right, and our perception is that the stuff is simply “in the air” and there for the taking. Of course the fact that we “pay” by being forced to listen or watch lots of ads is somewhat ignored. Subscription services that reduce ads like Tivo, cable, and commercial-free satellite radio are increasingly popular, but I would argue that ads are not consciously viewed by the public as a cost. To some extent free programming is simply an elaborate means of getting us to sit still and tune in to the ads. With cable we pay a blanket fee, which helps fund the channels — and we still feel we can and should have complete access to the cornucopia of programs, some with ads and some without. NPR and PBS stations are funded by viewers like you, as we are often reminded, and by miniscule government grants. They don’t solicit ads. Though they pay a fee for their license and pay royalties for playing music, these amounts are not too high. And being non-profits they get a tax break. (I do not.) Broadcast radio has been traditionally viewed as a kind of free promotion of the artists and record labels’ products, and therefore the idea that the stations should be paying performance royalties was waived. The same “promotional” logic was applied to MTV in the past; the videos, for a certain period, were provided free and seen as publicity vehicles for CDs. After a while the big record companies extracted fees from MTV — which they didn’t share with the artists — and now there are hardly any videos shown at all. (Since, in the past, TV had no “product” to sell, this “promotional” reasoning was not possible in that medium. For example, Seinfeld or American Idol are not broadcast without ads under an assumption that folks will rush out an buy a video or DVD…it’s also true that, unlike music, TV shows are not quite as endlessly repeatable.) With web radio that logic seems to be partially being left behind.
—DB
The “promotional” rationale for not collecting performance royalties from terrestrial radio is more of a reflection of the radio industry’s powerful lobby in the 1940s than an ideological decision. The RIAA calls it “an historical accident”, and the U.S. copyright office has acknowledged the asymmetry of collecting publishing royalties but not mechanical royalties. We are one of the few industrialized countries that doesn’t collect these royalties. The EU nations do collect performance royalties for terrestrial radio, but because we don’t collect them here, they don’t distribute those revenues to U.S. artists.
There are of course many examples of broadcast mediums that are essentially promotional as far as the copyright holder is concerned and don’t earn direct royalty revenues. However, the songwriter/publisher royalty income from terrestrial radio is more than token. As for web radio, the “promotional” logic was never applied, dating back to the initial decision to charge performance royalties in 1995 with the DPRA (Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act). The performance royalty rates have always been significant for webcasters (12% of profit for commercial broadcasters above a modest profit threshold) even before these proposed rate increases, despite the fact that the revenues don’t amount to much for the artists.
—DS
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4.17.07
Here are some links/articles on the web radio issue that was decided yesterday:
The Death of Web Radio? [Business Week Online]
Net Radio Operators Lose Appeal Over Fees [c|net news.com]
Interesting that SoundExchange initiated the whole thing…and that they are a non-profit created by the big record labels. Hmmm. One could say conflict of interest but cleverly held at arm's length by the creation of this mouthpiece?
A new music download site has made deals with two of the largest music catalogues in the world — potentially, then, they could become a challenge to iTunes. But the model is way different.
From The Guardian UK: The deal follows SpiralFrog's agreement with Universal Music Group announced last week and means the site can offer users free legal downloads from artists such as James Blunt, Kelly Clarkson and this week's Mercury Prize winners, Arctic Monkeys.
While iTunes charges for music — 79p a track in Britain — on SpiralFrog users will have to watch a short advert before they can download a song free.
As far as artists are concerned, it is understood they will get royalties based on how many times songs are downloaded, with the money coming from SpiralFrog's advertising revenue.
All well and good if you want stuff these major labels have signed and approved of — to me it implies that if you’re not an artist with one of these majors then you might have trouble getting your track available on these sites in the first place, and even then, if your stuff isn’t hot, the advertiser who is paying you will eventually balk at funding fringe stuff that doesn’t draw (the right) consumers to their products. The advertiser holds the purse strings, and will naturally pull the other strings too, despite what they may claim, so this model puts the control of what music is available back in the hands of the majors and their corporate cronies.
Not that iTunes is fair and balanced, either. I don’t know the details, but I have heard that they are like record stores of yore — doling out position (visibility) to a very very limited number of artists. No surprise there — there is limited space. I’ve also heard that true indie artists get inferior treatment — lower royalty rates (or higher entry costs), less attention, and sometimes they are refused entry outright. Who’s manning the velvet rope here? What happened to that Long Tail where everything is available?
Now, a lot of this inequity might be due simply to pragmatic realities — there are only a finite number of tracks that can be processed and added at once — large, but finite.
Soon enough a site will open that is like a Google search for music downloads — downloads that are not copy-protected but you still pay for. eMusic tracks have no copy protection, for example, but their catalogue is limited. Eventually a meta search will turn up the tracks you want, wherever they live, on whomever’s site. Consumers don’t care who they buy them from if the interface is easy and intuitive. Soon enough iTunes consumers will find they have reached the 5th authorized player on their tracks and the frustration will set in when they can’t listen to the music they paid for. They’ll start to look elsewhere.
No mention whether or not SpiralFrog’s tracks have similar copy protection or similar malicious malware attached; maybe they won’t. But I can bet that the big advertisers won’t leap to sponsor the last 3 CDs I bought — Anja Garbarek, The Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Thelonious Monk. Niche advertisers might sponsor these kinds of records — they could sponsor them on their own sites via their own servers. Putamayo CDs are in effect sponsored by the health food stores and eco-boutiques that give them display space. A Mormon-owned Home Depot like chain, like the one featured in Big Love, might sponsor the choir’s CDs, and bars and coffee shops might sponsor the Monk CDs. The abovementioned search engine interface would find the tunes wherever they lived and the money would flow accordingly. They don’t have to be given free, as in the SpiralFrog model, but there are some obvious synergistic and mutually beneficial models that would naturally evolve to make this kind of sponsorship lucrative. For some.
Still, it still puts access in the hands of advertisers — a third party, so to speak. You’re not getting your groceries from the farm, you’re getting the ones that the store decides to stock. The mutually beneficial aspects of having a third party will rub off most when there are large numbers. Beco at The Red Hot Organization pointed out to me that a Lenny Kravitts tune was sponsored by a vodka company — you could get it free from their site and nowhere else. They took out ads, billboards, etc. Apparently it worked, and his visibility and CD shot up as a result. But what big vodka company would do that for some of the stuff I buy? A niche brand that might be a perfect match but they probably couldn’t afford that kind of marketing for fringe stuff. Often, though, the fringe stuff wouldn’t be right for that mass audience anyway — so no harm done. That stuff is better marketed via MySpace, websites and word of mouth. Or via specialized stores. But the point is, in this model it will never get the chance at a wider audience. The playing field had at least the illusion of becoming level — but maybe not for long.
Melanie from Wired arranged for Danielle and me to visit Apple and have a chat/lunch with Jonathan Ive.
From Wikipedia: Ive's team designed the original iMac and its successors, the original iBook and its successors, the Power Mac starting with the Blue and White Power Mac G3, the Power Mac G4 Cube, the PowerBook starting with the Titanium PowerBook G4 (or possibly earlier), the eMac, the Mac mini, the Xserve and Xserve RAID, the iPod family, the AirPort base station family, and the Apple Cinema Display and some later Studio Displays.
Whew, no wonder he has been winning lots of design awards. Jonathan showed us the inside of an aluminum PowerBook — he seemed as proud of the intricate foldings and stampings of the invisible stuff as most would be of the outside. The point was that the design goes clear through — it’s not an appliqué merely stuck on the outside to make it all seem groovy, but extends to stuff most of us will never ever see.
I mentioned that I was in the midst of a collaboration with Fatboy Slim and Jonathan said he was having dinner that night with his friend John Digweed, one of the world’s top electronic DJs and a pal of Norman’s.
Maybe that gives as much insight into where he’s coming from as anything.
John Digweed:
Here to meet with the McSweeney’s folks about our long-discussed plan to do a book of the “tree” drawings. As often happens, in two separate meetings we got sorted what had been languishing for at least a year, with various e-mails going back and forth. It’s going to be called Arboretum, appropriately, and will be simple looking, though making things look simple and straightforward is never as easy as it seems.
826 Valencia was buzzing — there were writing classes in progress, people milling about the pirate supply store up front and the tiny back office that amazingly manages Believer, McSweeney’s and now Wholphin (the DVD magazine) was filled with activity and the desks were overflowing.
This bunch has good ideas — their comments and suggestions are spot on — we plan on the book hitting stores and other outlets Aug–Sept this year.
It was raining, but the next day the weather cleared up and this city sparkled with that crystalline Northern California light that makes everything pop out with hard edges. The folding bikes came in handy, though due to the X-mas plane traffic Continental charged for overweight coming here and a surprise “bike charge” ($80!) returning. This has never ever happened to me before. I think the X-mas spirit vaccine didn’t take on the airline check-in folks — they’re probably totally overworked this season. (The “bike charge” must have been meant for people who don’t have folding bikes; the airlines sometimes add a charge for wrapping a whole bike in cardboard, understandably. But these were in suitcases, so the rule was inappropriately applied. Ahem.)
There’s lot to see between meetings — Robert Adams’ sad but chaotic and beautiful photos of clear-cutting and Kiki Smith’s retrospective at SF MoMA and two lovely pieces by British artist Cornelia Parker at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. One piece was made of the remains of a church struck by lighting, the other of a church burned by arson.
Here’s a picture:
And a short interview: BF: Obviously with Cold Dark Matter: The Exploded View, you actually blew up a building which was probably scarier for everybody but you. What was the motivation for that?
CP: I had done the piece with the steamroller-Thirty Pieces of Silver-and the piece with the train running over coins — Matter and What it Means. I was thinking of different ways of killing something off. I think the explosion was another clichéd cartoon death. At the time I was living in a house that was due to be knocked down for a motorway in a few months time, but it kept getting postponed for another six months and so on for almost ten years. I think because of living for such a long time with this constant threat of demolition that is where the steamroller and explosion ideas came from. But it wasn't a home I blew up; it was just a garden shed, a surrogate. It's another British institution, the garden shed.
BF: It feels more like J.G. Ballard than T.S. Eliot somehow, doesn't it? It has more of that kind of wit.
CP: I think it came from all kinds of places. It's a modern condition: the threat of bomb scares, and the fear it symbolizes. From seeing explosions on the news and all the time in films you sort of think you know what they are, but really your firsthand knowledge of it is very limited. I realized I'd never walked through the detritus of a bombed-out building.
BF: It's almost like you believe things are animated. Or that they're potentially animated. That they're sitting there still but if you do something to them then they're going to be animated.
CP: I like the life/death resurrection bit, which is very Catholic, something dies, but it's resurrected in another form.
Then there are the restaurants. Admittedly a foodie thing to do — but this seems to be the place that has become a center for food tourism — the produce is so fresh and it’s served in mostly casual unpretentious settings and mixed in imaginative combinations — it’s a gut-busting, wallet-thinning kind of place for a visitor. The Slanted Door, Delphina, Foreign Cinema, Luna Park, Blue Plate, San Juan Taqueria, El Farolito Taqueria, Blowfish Sushi, Greens, Zuni and Liberty Café. Most of these are in or near the Mission district, which was convenient to the hotel and to 826 Valencia, but there are many many more. Every one a winner. Not always cheap — for being in a sometimes-funky neighborhood some of these mission joints have uptown gourmet prices, but the food quality and relaxed vibes are better than many fussy uptown hoity-toity places.
Saturday is a day off so we take a bike ride with Dave Eggers in the Marin headlands. Load the bikes onto a MetroMuni bus, all of which have bike racks up front, and head across the bridge. After a little rain it turns into one of those gorgeous days that are such clichés to describe, so I won’t. There are bike trails all over the headlands and around western Marin, much of which has been left as National Forest, so there are hawks and vultures and mountain lions and seals.
With the brisk air and the mist it reminded me of the bleak but beautiful Scottish highlands, though the rain drizzles less often here.
Dream: Jerusalem Mobile
…a dream at night of a woman with very short salt and pepper hair whom I meet and we chat briefly in a field as we walk together…then we part…but I obsessively must see her again…I end up in Jerusalem, where I need to be according to some itinerary, and where I hope to find her…but at the border where I am detained a fire breaks out in one of the buildings where we’re being questioned…along with the crowd of Hasidic and other men (noticeably more relaxed and friendly than their NY counterparts) I rush out of the burning room, down some outdoor stairs, we’re all jostled and smooshed, and ominously I hear a crunch. I am wearing a yarmulke. I rush out, in the lead, through the immigration gate, followed by the others. Smoke and flames billow behind, I am clutching my (unstamped) passport…the guard waves me and rest quickly through…we pour into the streets.
I reach for my mobile to call this woman, only to find it has been crushed, and as I try to hold its pieces together to find her number it slowly crumbles and nasty chemicals leak onto my hands, Chinese characters appear briefly on the screen…all I want is the last number I dialed, which was hers, but the phone is disintegrating in my hands. I imagine I will lose the love of my life. A feeling of desperation.
I save the SIM chip and some other parts and determine that maybe if I buy a new phone and insert my memory chip then I will be able to call her, as I have her number in there — and she lives here.
…
Had dinner with another ex-Talking Head, Jerry Harrison and his wife Carol, who are just back from the massive Consumer Electronics show in Vegas. Jerry won a whole bunch of awards for his and ET’s surround sound mixes of the Talking Heads re-releases, so he’s suddenly a tech expert in that area as well as being a successful record producer. He therefore gets invited to these kinds of confabs and we discussed the news reports about the IT companies jostling for positions in the upcoming convergence of TV with the Internet.
Some reports imply the creation of a two-tiered internet — one fast enough for TV streaming and the other like what we have. Naturally the high speed one would be proprietary — you’d have to pay to get on in — so the Internet would only be partly free, and just as Apple used to offer free viewing of music videos but now charges, little by little the corporations will find ways to lock up and charge for the world wide web.
Jerry says there are lots of fiber optic cables laid down that are unused, or not used to anywhere near their capacity. And that the dot com crash hurt the backers of this infrastructure more than it did anyone else, as they never even got their stuff truly up and running. Now might be the second chance.
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