I once asked film critic Leonard Maltin how much movie production experience he had. He answered, “You don’t need to be a Cordon Bleu chef to know the omelette needs more salt.”
Experiential
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Shelves
Michael Chabon has done an interesting project, that he calls “The Shelves of Time.”
“An imaginary reconstruction of the Fantasy & Science Fiction section at Page One Books, Columbia, MD, as aggregated and averaged by memories of regular, intense perusal during the years 1972-1980.”
It’s a kick to see many of these covers again, many of which I imagine will be familiar to y’all. It’s also a strange glimpse into Chabon’s mind.
How video streaming got fragmented, in a picture
There’s a version of this RIAA infographic going around that’s a) total revenues, and b) not adjusted for inflation. “Total revenues” includes subscription revenues, ie Spotify (or as Ulrika calls the model, ransomware).
This is sales only, and also unadjusted for inflation. But I’m calling your attention to it for two reasons:
- iTunes was a big deal. iTunes really did replace CDs, for a while. But that meant Apple got a 30% cut. It is difficult to overstate how much resentment this caused at the labels. And a few labels were owned by movie studios (Sony/Columbia, Warner Bros., MCA/Universal). Which leads to…
- When Netflix was small, the studios didn’t care. But when Netflix kept growing, and looked like it was going to become an iTunes-like gatekeeper… Well, this graph shows why they decided to setup their own streaming sites. They were damned if they were going to get snookered again (from their point of view).
Now, it looks like video streaming really does benefit from economies of scale, and fragmenting the market is probably going to lead to everyone except Netflix imploding. Had the studios just stayed out of things, let Netflix take their cut, and kept everything consolidated, vast amounts of capital expenditures using shareholder cash wouldn’t have been wasted. Everyone would have been fat cats.
But there’s that damned ego problem. Faced with a second gatekeeper, the studio execs had to give it a try, other people’s cash be damned.
Oh, well.
Not all bridges go over the same water
One of the things about music services like Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube (and if you don’t think of YouTube as a music archive, you’re missing a bet) is how you can look up songs and find covers you never knew existed. Take “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
Aretha Franklin – goes right back to her gospel roots. After a quick Aretha and choir intro, we get a two minute piano and Hammond organ duet, followed by Aretha and choir returning, with a building set of accompaniment.
Johnny Cash – this is late Cash. Spare, raspy, you can almost see the whisky and cigs nearby. Fiona Apple comes in about verse two, and does harmonies. Not displeasing — they work — but even I was surprised by the choices she made. (Ask Ulrika about that one.)
Elvis Presley – in an eerie parallel to his career, the first verse is a real surprise. Sparse, clean, clear, restrained. Then, with each succeeding verse, the accompaniment becomes more overbearing, complete with a soprano of the school of what Stan Freberg called “vapor girl.”
Roberta Flack – just a woman and her piano. A drum set comes in later.
As you listen to them all, you get to appreciate Art Garfunkel’s original clarity. Sure, his tone is an acquired taste, but everyone else has enunciation problems by comparison. You can always understand Art’s words.
EDIT: It’s spooky to hear the cast of Glee’s version, which is a note-for-note copy of Aretha’s. Instrumentation, arrangement, vocal flourishes, the lot. Oh, ok, they cut back on the piano and Hammond thing, but it’s TV — time constraints. But everything else.
“We are in the waiting business.”
When we visited Vienna/Wien in 2015, it coincided with diplomatic talks about Syria, at the Hotel Imperial. These were the first talks Iran deigned to attend, so the atmosphere was quite hopeful that progress could be made.
We were in the hotel’s Café Imperial when I overheard that line from the distinguished gentleman above, presumably in one delegation or another. If you recognize the image, it’s because yes, this is the source for one of my banners.
Lost in Translation
Pastry chef, 1928
August Sander’s 1928 photo of a pastry chef (Konditor in Deutsch, which, given the business name konditori in Swedish, makes sense). This was maybe 12 feet high in sepia at… was it Old Town Bakery? in Pasadena.
Our favorite dish was their zuccotto, orange cream with a chocolate bombe-like cake around it, sprinkled with fine cocoa.
The MAD of the ‘20s
Not only do they have nuclear mutually assured destruction, the US & China have economic MAD. Nowhere is this more obvious than Apple’s supply chain. If either govt disturbs it, Apple’s stock tanks, or Chinese manufacturing gets wiped out. (Or both.)
Primatonormative
Lexicon. Pretty simple. If the concept of heteronormative exists — and it clearly does — then the idea of placing the agenda of what great apes want also exists. Thus, primatonormative.
Here we have our cat Boots, obviously thinking our primatonormative agenda doesn’t interest him:
War and Peace
I seem to have originally written this in 2018, as a review for Goodreads. I think it holds up, and is worthwhile.
So. War and Peace. Voina i Mir (Война и мир) Got that done.
First, I prefer Dunnigan’s translation because she translates the swathes of French, as well as the Russian. Pevear & Volokhonsky don’t translate the French in line with the text, but force you to endnotes (paper) or popup footnotes (Kindle). They argue this is to illustrate how the French would seem to a middle class Russian of the 1860s, but me, I just want to read the book, and this decision gets in my way. I understand it, but it’s annoying. Dunnigan is much more fluid.
Tolstoy’s main accomplishment, to me, is he obviously knows where each and every character is at all times, and there are a lot of characters. I’m even willing to give him the usually derided history lecture in Part 2 of the Epilogue, because I see it primarily as an Apologia in the old sense — ie, how and why he wrote the book.
I am not as persuaded he keeps the voices of all those characters distinct. If you want to see someone do an amazing job with narrative voices (Tolstoy writes in 3rd person omniscient), I recommend A.S. Byatt’s Possession.
If you like chess, or go, this is the book for you. So many pieces, moving so many different ways.
But… Well, I see Natasha Rostova as the ur-template for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. Her flightiness for the sake of flightiness doesn’t always seem driven by the character herself, but because Tolstoy wanted to portray her that way. In fact, I’d say that’s my largest critique — too often you see the puppetmaster, moving the marionettes the way he needs to for mechanical reasons.
I fully appreciate the accomplishment here. Still, to adapt Auda abu Tayi’s line from Lawrence of Arabia, it is not perfect.