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Real rotting corpse in TV doco
Sounds like Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Naughts.
CNet’s short history of vandalism of Dubya on Wikipedia.
After a flurry of posts where I talked about personalised filters and even more recently podcasting, it has been interesting to sit back and watch the blogosphere gradually come around to a lot of the ideas we seem to take for granted at Synop. This is very reassuring for the guys in our “yet to be announced product” development team.
Specifically this comment, lauded by Doc Searls on a post of his, specifically the later part, which bears a resemblance to several of my posts, particularly these ones about personalised newspapers and Internet content and content as product.
(Originally posted to Synop weblog)
I’ve been thinking a bit about what the music industry will look like in the next 10 to 20 years. Although I’ve talked about the coming revolution before, and sites like Downhill Battle do a great job talking about why things will change (see the section Crucial Readings on their site) and how to drive the change, not many people seem to be talking about what will replace the current 50 year old money making machine that is the recording industry.
Last night I saw a bunch of noise rock bands play at The Kirk, an old little church which is now used as a specifically secular art and music space. The bands were Rand and Holland from Sydney, because of ghosts from Melbourne, and Faun Fables from San Francisco in the U.S. While I was primarily there to see because of ghosts, who venture up this way far too infrequently, I ended up being more amazed by Faun Fables and their show.
To call it cabaret would be doing them an injustice, but there are certainly elements of it, especially when the show started. There is no seating at The Kirk, so people tend to sit on the floor, being more docile and appreciative than your typical rock crowd, and because there’s no bar, there’s no need for the long pauses between bands. The audience tended to forget this when they were scattered around the room and outside on the street when Dawn McCarthy walked to the front of the room, facing the stage, and sang her first song unaccompanied. She then walked to the stage, small suitcase in hand, and she and Nils acted out 4 minute existentialist scene set on a train station, before proceeding into the main part of their musical set.
For their last song, a rather subdued and unaccompanied song by Dawn, also included theatrics, sitting at what looked like a gypsy fortune telling stool, showing photos of her life to the audience as she sang. The video in this post is of that song, which was shot on my camera phone, so my apologies for the really bad visuals, although the audio is as haunting as the original.
Again, all three bands were selling merchandise, CDs, t-shirts, badges, and in the case of because of ghosts a hand etched limited edition vinyl recording of a live gig in Sydney earlier in the year. The packaging is recyclable screen printed cardboard, with hand stiching, a photo of which is also included in this post.
Artists like Faun Fables, although the main vocalist Dawn McCarthy does have a cabaret, folk and circus sideshow background, are defining new ways for artists to extend their work into other domains and mediums. Not for much longer can big recording acts simply record mass consumable music, provide a simplistic live show, and expect to make millions. With the Napster generation, the audience may not be as pedantic about sound quality, but the audience for different styles and genres of music is starting to explode.
This is co-incidentally the direction marketing and productisation has been heading over the past few years, targetting a niche, or even the individual consumer, with what they specifically would like to hear. In many ways iTunes Store provides the technology for this, being able to construct or produce your own compilations and playlists, and the artists will very soon I feel follow suit.
How about a customised feed by an artist? Instead of selling albums, new songs are drip fed to the public, and sound matching technology or better use of metadata allows consumers to pick the tracks they want to hear, or even purchase, if there’s still such a thing. Perhaps we’ll say goodbye to albums, and instead embrace the serial song list.
Anyway, I don’t have to say it again, but I will, the music industry is changing, and I think it will be a change in the extreme…
Here’s some more info on Faun Fables. The video clip is in 3gp format, so you’ll need to right click or control to save it, depending on your legacy platform, and a recent version of QuickTime to play it.
There’s nothing quite as exciting and exhilarating*, as standing on a stage in front of a live audience, without a script, and holding them completely in your control. Knowing that any body movement, facial expression, or utterance will dictate what the audience will say and do, and that even the smallest mistake will break that delicate connection. Don’t underestimate the power of silence. A mimed scene that keeps a comedy audience dead quiet, yet intensely focused, for the entire scene, feels like pure magic, only to be topped off by the roar of the crowd as the scene ends. People seem to like being controlled, so long as they are rewarded. Mind control? Pah! We’ll keep that between you and me.
* Actually I lied. I would expect something like bungy jumping would probably be pretty exciting, not that I’ve had the guts to do it. But then very few people lose their eyeballs on a comedy stage, and if they do, they either put them back in again before they leave, or they’ve perfected a new and exciting microphone technique. Either way, it’s still all about control.
I’m in a cleaning up mood, which is rare for me. Done the politics, time to finish off the Lane Cove Sticker Syndicate Inc Pty Ltd.
Post-election, they’ve put up another series of signs which I referred to in Sticking it to the federal member. For readers outside of the microcosm that is the northern Sydney, here’s a photo of them.
I’ve had quite a few emails asking when I’m going to comment on the U.S. disaster elections, but to be honest I don’t think I’ve got much to add to the noise, and it probably conflicts a little with what I’ve been trying to do with this site. And anyway, I’ve already spoken about our local version of G.W. in It’s time to stay, John Howard and The search for the last Liberal voter, the Liberal Party being the Australian version of the U.S. Republican Party.
So let me instead weave in a related story, try to tie up the loose ends, and return us to our regular programming.
About a month ago, I was in the backyard attending to my beetroots, and L* comes out, looking proud of herself, and the following exchange took place:
L*: Hey, notice anything about the back room?
R: The back room? Umm… no why?
L*: Have you noticed how it looks a lot neater?
R: Uhh, what do you mean neater? You mean the back room where I keep all my collectable computer gear?
L*: Collectable? Umm… I’ve been throwing a box out each week since we moved, because you said they all had to go.
R: You what?! Yeah! They all had to go INTO STORAGE!
So it turns out that she’s now done me a favour in throwing out all my old AppleII gear. Out went all my hard drives, source code, finished products, my backup hard drives and cartridges. My AppleIIgs Tenspeed prototype, my custom built (by Zip Technology for GraphicWriterIII development) Zip GSX 14MHz, two high speed SCSI cards, two RAMFasts, a bunch of rare Australian RAM cards, an Apple Integer Card with my custom serial port debugging roms built in, two Transwarp GS cards, an original first edition Apple CD ROM drive, two industrial strength power supplies, a 110V to 240V power transformer, several other cards and AppleIIgs machines including my Woz edition which I used to develop pretty much every product I wrote for the AppleIIgs.
Lucky though, she was about to throw out the old laser printer which no longer works and the old green screen with the bad flicker. Phew, saved in the nick of time!
Pretty much all the gear mentioned on my history page is now gone, sitting in a city dump somehwere as land fill. Thousands of years from now, someone is going to dig up that stuff, think to themselves “What is this crap?” and subsequently bury it all again.
So the last few months have been a bit of a watershed for me, a turning point if you will. Well, at least after the crying and screaming subsided, and when L* was finally allowed to move back home again.
With no more AppleII gear, the home and U.S. elections looming, and several other changes to my world, things were looking up, a time for change, a fresh start… and then the world suddenly plunged into another four years of darkness. I feel ripped off.
The blogosphere learned a good lesson this week about isolation and visibility. I’ll leave you with two of my favourite perspectives on the election (and yes, I’ve read a lot of them): Gina Trapani’s personal before and after journey into politics; and Dave Pollard’s post UNDERSTANDING THE PEOPLE, PART 2, and to show what is wrong with this world, I quote:
Yesterday eight million anxious, fearful white American suburbanites, male and female, who didn’t vote in 2000, pried themselves out of their isolated, insulated, heavily-mortgaged, two-income-trap homes, and voted for the devil they knew over of the devil they didn’t. And then they went home and prayed. And as a consequence, we have four more years of George Bush.
Today is Melbourne Cup day in Australia, one day a year when the entire nation stops for several hours in the afternoon, to drink champaign and sit back and watch 24 almost grown men, whip 24 poor horses around a 3.2 kilometre track. Perhaps appropriately sponsored by Emirates, and proudly promoting gambling in Australia. Have we come nowhere in 200 years?