Along the lines of Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition) is If Homer's Odyssey were written on Twitter. And, while we're at it, Sportscenter Anchors Tell The Story of Jesus Christ. And speaking of Jesus, how about The Passion of the Christ: Blooper Reel?
Online brokerage Zecco claims it wasn't an April Fool's Day joke, but the timing is suspicious, and most certainly inauspicious: on April 1, customers opened their accounts, looked at their balances, and found they were suddenly millionaires. In a sign of our times, some of them proceeded to purchase stocks with their newfound wealth, and in a panic, Zecco's sold off the new purchases and charged the difference to the customers.
Good times all around. I pity no one in this fiasco. But I enjoy reading the Zecco forum posts as one user after another discovered their good fortune.
Right now on Amazon, it costs more to purchase the MP3's for Neko Case's new album than it does to buy the CD and have it shipped to you. It's as if they're discounting the CD to compensate for the hassle of it's physical form factor taking up space in your home, having to be packed for your next move, etc. This is the opposite of what has been the rule to date, which is that it's cheaper to buy the digital good because they pass through the savings of foregoing shipping and handling of an actual good.
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Silicon Alley Insider reports with seeming surprise that Jeff Bezos is working in an Amazon distribution center for a week. That shouldn't surprise anyone--almost everyone at Amazon went to work in the distribution centers over the holidays for many years to help handle the spike in holiday orders (at the time, there wasn't enough temporary labor in any of the markets where the DCs were located to handle the seasonal volume surge, though in this economy it might be different). With increased distribution capacity and automation, such stints are no longer required annually, but when I left Amazon every new employee spent at least some amount of time working in customer service inquiries and the distribution centers. It was always part of being the world's most customer-centric company.
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I'm with Khoi Vinh on this one: the SXSW badges, program, and maps this year were all but unusable. Not to minimize the difficulty of producing these with a volunteer team, but one thought on how to leverage some talent is to ask for help from one of the many participating design firms or panelists in exchange for prominent credits on the materials, and maybe some free advertising inventory. One's work would certainly reach a very chatty and influential crowd there.
Yes, it's a cheat in your movie trailer to use Arcade Fire (as in the appropriation of "Wake Up" in the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are, embedded below) or "Hoppipolla" by Sigur Ros (Children of Men, Slumdog Millionaire) or "Aquarium" from Saint-Saëns The Carnival of Animals (first Benjamin Button trailer, for example) in your trailer. But trailers are all about shortcuts to the pleasure centers of your brain, and the trailer below pushes many of them.
Not to say it might not still be a dud of a movie--you can't draw any meaningful conclusions from such a short and produced montage--but count me among the intrigued, especially since YYY's Karen O is collaborating with Carter Burwell on the score/soundtrack.
Sasha Frere-Jones reads in recent concert ticket bonus offerings the completion of the transition of recorded music from standalone product to mere advertisement for concerts.
If you buy a top-price ticket to one of No Doubt’s upcoming shows (between $50 and $150, roughly), you will receive a free download of the band’s entire catalogue. This makes sense, as touring is the one verifiably healthy part of the music business. Prince will release a new three-CD bundle on March 29, available exclusively at Target for $11.98. That may seem like a rollback to bargain prices of yesteryear (even though one of the CDs is by Prince’s protégée Bria Valente), but it’s more likely that Prince is seeing into the future—again. In 2004, he gave away a copy of his “Musicology
James Surowiecki has the most pragmatic assessment of the public outrage against the AIG bonuses that I've read yet, posted over at the New Yorker.
It may be true, as Andrew Ross Sorkin has argued, that not paying the bonuses would actually end up hurting taxpayers, either because we’d be setting a precedent that contracts can be easily broken or because we need to keep the A.I.G. employees in-house lest they start trading against the company. (I don’t buy either argument, but I can see the logic behind them.) But I think it’s pretty clear that even if the “this will hurt you more than me
Voltron, Defender of the Universe! If I could go back in time to speak to my elementary school self, I might tell him, as he sat there in the living room after school, watching an episode of Voltron, that someday he'd work at a company that would bring the show to another generation through the Internet.
Also new to Hulu, Felix the Cat.
AT&T is scrambling to add cell tower capacity to downtown Austin to deal with the crush of iPhone-using SXSW attendees. The first two days here I couldn't do anything requiring the 3G network here at SXSW. Without the conference wi-fi signal I would have been completely out of touch with the outside world.
Let this be a lesson to AT&T; this is hardly the last time a whole swarm of iPhone 3G users will amass for a short time at one location. If they don't anticipate these they'll continue to take a brand beating on the twitblognets from time to time.
On a related note, I've never seen so many iPhones in one place before. In a panel today a presenter used the term "Blackberry prayer mode" to refer to the stance people take when...well, it's self-explanatory. Substitute iPhone for Blackberry and it's just as descriptive.
March Madness is underway! I'm referring, of course, to The Morning News' annual Tournament of Books.
The first big upset: Unaccustomed Earth gets sent packing in the first round by City of Refuge.
Perhaps upset is too strong a word. After all, I haven't read City of Refuge. But Unaccustomed Earth was one of my favorite books of 2008, so count me intrigued.
Perusing the list of contenders, I realize I've read about as many of them as I've seen NCAA men's basketball teams play. The only other book on the list I've read, in part, is 2666, which I'm about a third of the way through and which I'd assume is the presumptive #1 seed based on the critical praise it's garnered to date (it also has the sentimental vote a la Heath Ledger at the Oscars as author Roberto Bolano is no longer with us).
My attention span for reading new fiction novels seems to shrink just a little bit more each year.
UPDATE: Oops, I'm just fractionally more well-read than I thought. I have read The Dart League King, and I recommend that for your reading list also.
Last night I attended a sold-out concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall uniting M83 with the LA Philharmonic. Being a subscriber this season paid off as I ended up sitting dead center in the third row, Anthony Gonzalez's U-shaped bank of Macbook Pros and synthesizers directly in front of me. The program looked promising...
...but though I love M83 and the LA Phil and the music of Pärt and La Mer, and though I think the acoustics at that venue are near perfect, as with your favorite foods it's not clear that the whole will equal, let alone surpass, the mix of the parts.
A valid concern, it seems, as the collaborative piece that concluded the concert was the least appealing of the program. Sean O'Laughlin, who arranged similar collaborations between the LA Phil and rock acts like Belle and Sebastian and The Decemberists, opted for a sort of earnest and straightforward melodrama that lacked the type of unique slow build of peculiar sonic landscapes that makes M83's music so appealing to us introverts. The collaborative arrangement featured a choir of women garbed in white, like nurses, a drum set, and overwhelming strings that left me unclear what Gonzalez was doing with his gear, so drowned out was his input.
As an event, though, it was an overwhelming success. I haven't seen the hall so full all year, the usual crowd of aged patrons replaced by a sea of what looked like hipsters dressed for prom. In this recession, an event that can bring in a younger audience and expose them to some classical pieces that are musical neighbors to a rock act they know is an event worth learning from. Having to read body language, always a dangerous task, I'd say half the orchestra bought into it and half had to strain to keep their eyes from rolling, but I find events like this more appealing than so-called crossover discs, with classical musicians playing with, say, Bobby McFerrin.
M83's solo set made good use of the acoustics of the space (aided by some aggressive lighting design), and I'm partial to Fratres and La Mer. It was a well-designed program. M83's work has always occupied prime real estate on my iPod, perhaps because it feels like an anthem of an introvert. Letting someone know you listen to M83 is like saying, "I may be quiet, but I contain multitudes."
One advantage of Kindle is that it provides a new tool for mental accounting. Call me irrational but formerly I could not read more than seven or eight books at a time without abandoning some of them midway. Kindle (like Netflix, I might add) gives me a new queue and allows me to have more "hanging," partially unread books at any point in time, yet without disrupting my mental equilibrium.
I have just one book on my Kindle so far, so I have not yet been able to gauge whether Cowen's assessment fits my experience. But it sounds like a reasonable hypothesis, especially considering I have to hurdle a metropolis of partially-read books on the scale of the trash-built apocolypse in Wall-E just to climb into bed.
Great essay in Design Observer trying to advance the discussion about suburbs versus cities.
Whether in art or architecture, the suburbs seem to lack cultural authorship and a “back story
Follow some simple directions and get a free copy of DEVONThink for your Mac (not to mention hand utilities Hyperspaces and Overflow).
Steven Berlin Johnson has written in the past about how DEVONThink has helped him in researching and writing his novels, so I'm looking forward to giving it a whirl.
Titled Turn Off the Dark, with music and lyrics by Bono and The Edge and direction from Julie Taymor (Lion King), the Spider-Man musical will preview on Broadway beginning Jan. 16, 2010 and open officially on Feb. 18, 2010.
I can't help but picture a three melody ensemble piece: Neil Patrick Harris as Peter Parker, singing in his Spiderman suit, perched on the precipice of a tall building in NYC, Mary Jane (no thoughts who'd play her), many miles away, singing from a fashion catwalk where she stands as various assistants attend to her hair and makeup, and finally, Ewan McGregor as Eddie Brock, harmonizing from a NY city alley, as as Venom's inky black creeps across his skin and possesses him.
Bizarre.
Obama is speaking to Congress today. I was hoping real-life slumdog millionaire (well, sort of) Bobby Jindal would be there for the talk, so that he could walk out partway through Obama's speech and Obama could say, "You can walk out on me, Governor Jindal, but you can't walk out on the American people..." or whatever it is that Jeff Bridges says in The Contender. (IMDb memorable quotes you're letting me down on this one).
In advance, I want to address those who will complain that this live stream is from Fox News: we should have a CNBC version for watching after the fact. It's the internet, speculation is cheap, but we honestly have no political agenda we're trying to push, we just shoot to obtain the best live stream possible from all available sources, and whatever network broadcasts the actual address, it's all the same during the speech anyhow.
