Aesthetics: Arts: Richard Serra's sculptures question architected work near them, in turn calling themselves into question

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A recent article by Gloria Goodale in Christian Science Monitor, "Redefining sculpture is Richard Serra's goal" (Sep15,2k6) celebrates two new exhibitions of his work in California, one at the Orange Country Performing Arts Center, a second at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center at UCLA. Goodale and Serra chatted about the role of public art.

A Richard Serra sculpture is not always an easy experience. Most famous over the nearly half century of his career for the towering, metal shapes that have graced civic spaces from Tokyo to New York to Bilbao, Spain, he specializes in the monumental, the breathtaking, and the surprising. His deceptively unfettered, simple metal walls that cut through public walkways and plazas have confounded some while delighting others. This sheer physicality of his sculptures force passersby to approach the space with a new awareness.

But make no mistake. Like him or detest him, it's impossible to ignore Mr. Serra's work when you are in its presence. ...

"Public sculpture used to have a code," says the San Francisco native, who acquired his early metalworking experience during a stint in a steel factory. "There was a given iconography written into the way we worshiped our heroes. Public sculpture had to do with the depiction of a historical time or event."

As the artists of the 20th century began to challenge that function, Serra says, the concerns began to change. "Once the work came down from its pedestal and became organized in relation to its present time and space, it began to challenge architecture in a way that it hadn't before."

Sculpture, by Archibald

The biggest challenge for artists who work in the public arena today has to do with public expectations, says Serra. "The culture hasn't developed the kind of individual sensibilities in each of us to respond to new aesthetic questions," he says. Art, he says, has less approval than entertainment, which our culture is more comfortable experiencing in public spaces.

Now, an artist's work is not the same as his talk about his/her work, nor the same as a reporter's talk about that work. So, we're not under any more obligation to take as gospel what Serra talktalks about his sculptures, as we mite were we to experience them ourselves/oneself. Still, since most of us will never do so, having a journalist report a chat with the sculptor in this case definitely as its own merit and appeal. At the same time, reading the report is a different kind of experience, a reading experience, and we can ask questions of the text about sculptures as of any text.

In the case of Serra's views, as reported, we notice how often the terms "question" and "questions" arise. This puts us on to the specific ideology of sculpture as an art; Serra reveals himself as a purveyor of an art ideology; one that has public consequences in that the ideology yapyaps about what anyone mite (or mite not experie4nce) in the specific public space upon which each scuplture impacts. Not only is the root term imported from discursive textual writing, known as "critical thawt," but for Serra apparently the critical ideology (criticism raised to an "Ism") is the priority function of art, the art of scupture certainly. Sculpture seems remiss if it doesn't "raise new aesthetic questions."

This stance seems tremendously mentistic, even in its own way rationalistic, where work that is obstructive, challenge-oriented regarding other aesthetics, loud (unignorable), monumental, anti-decorative, redefinitional of a given space, anti-entertaining (there goes Miro into the scrap-pile!), "the walls bearing in on the viewer," has a special standing as "serious art" than can be ascribed to other kinds of sculputure lacking his ideology. Indeed, Serra needs a manual of interpretation, of talktalk, yapyap, to accompany his work in order to render it "the best it could be," rather than the damn nuisance it can as easily be.

Sports: Intercollegiate: Small colleges rush to add football to supported campus activties, helps recruits new male students

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Football has strong social impact on colleges that institute the sport in their athletics programs. Inter-collegiate atheletics where the schools compete is a major draw of new students, especially males, to college campuses, no matter how small the school is. New York Times carries an article, "Small colleges, short of men, embrace football" (Jul 10,2k6) by Bill Pennington reports:

Some small American colleges, eager to attract men to increasingly female campuses, have taken notice of how many students...can be lured to attend by adding football teams. Officials at these colleges say football can bring in more tuition-paying students than any other course or activity - and not just players themselves.

'When you recruit a halfback, you get a few of his male friends, maybe his sister and his sister's boyfriend, too,' said JoAnne Boyle, president of Seton Hill University. A 123-year-old former women's institution in Greensburg, Pa., Seton Hill added football last year.

'I could have started a spiffy new major of study, spent a lot of money on lab equipment and hired a few new high-powered professors,' Dr. Boyle said. 'I might have gotten 25 more students for that. And I couldn't have counted on that major still being popular in 15 years.

'Instead, I started a football team, brought in hundreds of paying students, added a vibrant piece to our campus life and broadened our recognition factor. And in the long history of American higher education, one thing you can count on is football's longevity. Football is here to stay.'

Sports,by Sportikos

Last year's freshman class at Seton Hill was the first with more men than women. Four years ago, when the college became fully co-ed, its undergraduate student body was 18 percent male; last fall it was 41 percent male.

At a time when the image of major college football has been sullied by academic, recruiting and sexual violence scandals - and as some prominent colleges eliminate football to cope with federal gender equity regulations for athletics - many smaller institutions have embraced the sport. Since their football players generally do not receive scholarships and are not blue-chip recruits, officials at small colleges say the players tend to exhibit less of a sense of entitlement, leading to fewer academic and discipline problems.

In the last 10 years, nearly 50 colleges and universities have instituted or re-instituted football, with more than 80 percent in the small college ranks. In the same period, about 25 institutions have dropped football, the majority being scholarship-driven teams from the National Collegiate Athletic Association's top tier, Division I.

One wonders whether a network of small colleges in the USA could join together to lawnch simultaneously teams of soccer players, newly recruited for the purpose, to participate in a new small-college intercollegiate soccer league. The idea here is that football is not so unique that some colleges could greet the rise of interest in soccer ("football" in most other countries). Indeed, these hypothetical small soccer-no-football colleges mite hypothetically compete with larger colleges that alreadey have soccer teams, but don't attract European-level young players.

Tags: Football at small colleges

• sports
• colleges
• intercollegiateAthletics
• collegeStudentRecruitment
• football
• soccer

Aesthetics: Arts: The worst movie ever made in Canada, perhaps, but richly rewarded with grants, apparently.

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A movie appeared a little bit ago. A Canada-made movie. It's got a somewhat bilingual title, Bon Cop, Bad Cop. You simply must read the review by Steve Burgess in the Entertainment section of The Tyee, an online periodical out of Vancouver, British Columbia. What we have here is a review of the mentioned movie, and a meta-review of reviews of the movie. In brief, Burgess doesn't like the flick. But in making his point memorable, he tasks not just the ploys that apparently cobbled together this "crap" (he says) along with the favourable reviews in three Toronto newspapers -- Globe & Mail, Star, and (the formerly conservative) National Post. He even names some of the reviewers.

Movies, by Anaximaximum

The wealth of witticisms in the veritable denunciad make the Burgess metareview a reading pleasure. It should get some kind of award, so refWrite announces that the author wins this year's praise as our Movie Criticism Award 2006. I don't want to give away the bite he adds to the govt-grant system for Canadian film, and how he discerns its operation in this quite suspect work of cinmatic f/art, as Burgess mite say.

Oh yeah, this year's Toronto Film Festival has just concluded with the major news coming forth focussed on Sean Penn's insistence on smoking in a public meeting of a panel discussion. The incident was on TV news for days.

And, oh yeah!, the second of the "Further Resources" below is the website of a govt film agency. Now, the text of most govt websites is impeccably grammatical. Not this one. It moves from an infinitive ("seeks to") to a list of five items ("Reaching," "Reflecting," "Investing," "Harnessing," and "Reaching" again), each beginning with a gerund in bold. This can't be the work of the govt that just came to power nine months ago ... or, it's perhaps the attack of some saboteur of English grammar who has little taste for either the language or film, but has had to become bilingual to get the text-writing job. Or ....

But click up the Burgess write-up of Bon Cop, Bad Cop, and cop a deliteful text about a phantom movie you'll never see. You'll howl!

Further Research:

Canadian film history
Canada's film and video tax credit programs

Tags: The latest worst movie ever made (in Canada)

• aesthetics
• arts
• movies
• moviesbad
• moviesbilingual
• moviesgovtgrants
• Canada

Aesthetics: Architecture: Remembering 9/11 an atrocity and the question of how to monument it

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Here's a synopsis of 1 among 11 articles on 9/11 made available for reading by Christopher Knight's online article- syndication agency, EzineArticles®. Here's his invitational paragraph:

The Aesthetics of Atrocity: Remembering 9/11

Getting the aesthetics of atrocity right by committee has taken five years with nothing to show for it. Estimated costs of completing the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero is closing in on a billion dollars.

Architecture, by Archibald

It has been our contention from the beginning that the inspiration was always there right in the committee's collective faces, staring back in stark, abject horror at them and anyone who looks back at it: the still standing remnant of shattered dreams and lives in a building once known as the World Trade Center.

Click-up and read the article!

Tags: 9/11 Memorial at WTO

• aesthetics
• architecture
• architecturememorial
• atrocity
• 9/11
• 5thanniversary9/11

Technics: Info: Wikipedia refuses China censorship

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A refreshing newsbit regarding Wikipedia's refusal of China censorship. kdawson posts this quote from truthsearch on today's Slashdot:

"Jimmy Wales has defied the Chinese government by refusing to bow to censorship of politically sensitive Wikipedia entries. He challenges other internet companies, including Google, to justify their claim that they could do more good than harm by co-operating with Beijing. Wikipedia has been banned from China since last October.

Technotes, by Owlie Scowlie

Whereas Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo went into the country accepting some restrictions on their online content, Wales believes it must be all or nothing for Wikipedia. 'We occupy a position in the culture that I wish Google would take up, which is that we stand for the freedom for information.'"

For the commentary on the original truthsearch item go to refWrite refBloggers Insert.

Further Info::

In China, it's Wikipedia versus the Internet censors (Oberserve via Taipei Times
Wikipedia defies the censors (The Hindu)

Tags: Wikipedia noes China censorship

• technics
• informatics
• infoWikipedia
• consorshipGoogle
• censorshipMicrosoft
• censorshipYahoo
• Chinacensorship
• censorshipChina

Sports: Tennis: I watched the US Open Tournament on TV -- ggggggggreat tennis between Federer & Roddick!

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My TV set came in handy today, as I blogged, I kept an eye on the contest between Roger Federer (Swiss) and Andy Roddick (American). But soon I was looking away from the computer to the TV scree, had to look up from my blogging, at the larger screen to my left--because the play of the game was constantly dramatic and even beautiful. Today, this tennis match between two giants reminded me of a conclusion I had reached some time back: sports are somehow aesthetic, they are part of the aesthetics of everyday life. And they are contests, competitions, they are about winning and not winning (at such h+ts as this match today one can't use the word "losing" for Roddick who was greatly outdistanced by "the tennis superstar," because Roddick was consoled by himself walking away $600,000 richer).

The event was graced by a special spectator (can I say "fan"?).

Sports, by Sportikos

Associated Press via Globe&Mail:

There might be one athlete in the world who knows exactly how Roger Federer feels as he dominates his peers and gobbles up Grand Slams, so it was fitting that Tiger Woods was sitting in his guest box Sunday for the U.S Open final.

Federer met Woods for the first time beforehand, then apparently set out to impress the golfer, controlling every facet of play in a 6-2, 4-6, 7-5, 6-1 victory over Andy Roddick for his third major championship this year and ninth of his career.

The Swiss superstar is the first man since Ivan Lendl in 1985-87 to win three consecutive U.S. Open titles — and the only man in tennis history to win Wimbledon and the U.S. Open back-to-back three years in a row.

And he did it in such impressive fashion, out-acing the big-serving Roddick 17-7, compiling a 69-33 edge in winners, and making only 19 unforced errors. Federer won eight of the last nine games against Roddick, who won the 2003 U.S. Open but now is 1-11 against the man he once was supposed to rival for supremacy in this sport.

Some facts about Andy from his "Stats" page:

* Birthdate - 8/30/1982
* Birthplace - Omaha, Nebraska
* Current Residence - Austin, TX
* Height - 6 ft, 2 in
* Weight - 190 lbs.
* Plays - Right-handed

* Turned Pro - 2000
* Shoes - Babolat
* Raquet - Babolat Pure Drive
* Clothing - Lacoste
* Watches - Rolex
* Automobile - Lexus

--------------

Roger's factoids:

Born: ......August 08, 1981, (08:40 a.m.) in Basel, Switzerland
Residence: .Oberwil, Switzerland
Plays ......Right-handed (single-handed backhand)
H+t ........6'1'' (186 cm)
Wayt .......187lbs (85 kg)
Hair .......Dark brown
Eues .......Brown
Hobbies ....Sports (golf, soccer, skiing), friends, Playstation, music, playing cards
FormerIdols.Boris Becker, Stefan Edberg

Rank ......................1
Champions Race ............1
Grand Slam Titles .........9
Tournament Titles Singles.41
Tournament Titles Doubles..7

--------------

-- Sporitkos

Further Info

Andy's Stats page
Roger's Profile page

Tags: If Nosferatu dont voodoo you, MPAA will

• aesthetics
• sports
• tennis
• tennisUSOpenSep10
• 2k6

Movies: Free legal dwnlds: Yup, Torrentfreak has 5 movie classics in the horrorflick genre, for you!

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If you're rigged technically to receive the p2p file-sharing service of BitTorrent or similars (explained) you can now download legit freebies via that application the following horrorflicks:

* Detour

* House on a Haunted Hill

* Nosferatu (1922)

* The Last Man on Earth

* The Little Shop of Horrors

Says the Torrentfreak website, these "5 movie classics...are in the public domain. Free to download, free to share, free of DRM" -- that's Digital R+ts Management, the mainstream move-industry oligopoly's p2p-wrecking technics to counter digital distribution of cinema and other arts beyond their control and profit.

"The movies are hosted by publicdomaintorrents, the great resource for movie addicts we discussed earlier." [Here's the earlier:]

Public Domain Torrents offers an extensive collection of Classic and B-Movie torrents [794 titles altogether]. The copyright of these movies has expired so you are free to share them.

They currently have a collection of 531 movies which are available in different formats (including iPod). For example, you can download the christmas classic “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” (awfull movie by the way). Or perhaps the real classic “Nosferatu“, based on the Dracula story.

Movies/P2Ptechnics,by Anaximander & OwlieScowlie

This site is pretty much heaven for both torrent and moviefreaks. New content is added on a daily basis, take a look.

I also found this site: DownloadAnyMovie.com, the name of which I suspect is a come-on, rather than a so-called "mass-piracy" site. The site's subtitle clarifies: "Your Movie Downloading Review Source." It seems to be a kind of hub for the real "piratical" thing. You can go to other movie p2p-download sites from a link in each of DownloadAnyMovie's site reviews. However, the foregoing characterizations are my compromise with the prevailing lingo of the "legit" side (as against the "pirate" side, which binomial polarity of terms expresses the relationship exclusively in the "legit" side's lingo) -- that is to say, in the USA jurisdiction. But, despite lingo, nothing is legally settled in the USA. Europe perhaps is has settled the legalities in favour of the oligarchs.

In Canada, on the other hand, the Supreme Court has reaffirmed classical Canadian legal definitions of copiable material that permit file-sharing where there is no use of the copied movies for commercial purposes. That's the one restriction, as I understand the current situation. The owner of a digitally-recorded movie has the r+t to share it with others, as long as there's no sale or rental, again, as I understand the matter.

I used to follow the Canada-legal practice of p2p file-sharing with regard to music and spoken poetry, again quite legal in the jurisdiction where I am a Permanent Resident, while remaining a citizen of the US; for that purpose of free music downloading, I used LimeWire. However, I long ago lost interest, since most of the downloads were scratchy or ticky. These days, I can listen to free music on the net from WMFU radio music out of Newark, New Jersey (as I recall); and iTunes free radio channels over the Net.

About BitTorrent legality: Paul Gil states the US/Canada difference this way:

Copyright warning. Unless you live in Canada, you must understand that copyright laws are commonly violated by P2P sharing. If you download a song, movie, or TV show, you do risk a civil lawsuit. Canadians are protected from these lawsuits because of a Canadian Supreme Court ruling, but not residents of the USA or most parts of Europe and Asia. This lawsuit risk is a reality, and you must accept this risk if you choose to download P2P files.

And more:

Warning: while P2P file sharing technology is completely legal, many of the files traded through P2P are copyrighted. Unless you live in Canada where citizens are shielded from P2P copyright lawsuits, downloading music, movie, and TV files will put you at risk for a civil lawsuit in any other country. These lawsuits usually take the form of class-action suits, filed against groups of users who are logged as blatantly copying and distributing copyrighted materials. Recently, the MPAA [Moving Picture Association of America] and RIAA [Recording Industry Association of America - music], along with the governments of England and Australia, took several thousand users to court, demanding that they pay thousands of dollars in copyright infringement penalties. Please keep this lawsuit risk in mind when you install and use any BitTorrent software in the USA, Europe, or Asia.

All this is to say, if you can master the technical application (BitTorrents or uTorrent, Azureus, ABC, TurboBit, BitComet), you can legally and free-of-charge indulge the history of film by downloading free and legally the silent flick Nosferatu. You'll need lots of harddisk space for these lengthy files.

Further Info:

BitTorrent application site
torrents-related Google Search results

Tags: If Nosferatu dont voodoo you, MPAA will

• aesthetics
• arts
• movies
• technics
• digitalcopies
• P2P
• bittorrents
• legalfreedwnlds
• Canada
• USA
• Europe
• Nosferatu

Aesthetics: Arts: Why architecture matters and the quality of Christian discourse in saying how it does so

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An article with many interesting thawts of criticism and norm-directive discourse that add sparkle to a long ariticle with a long introductory passage using the Bible all too biblistically on the subject of architecture, has appeared in the latest issue of Comment magazine, in both print (Sep2k6 - Volume 32,I:4) and online editions (by email notification Sep7,2k6. The Bible is indeed interesting as to what and how it touches upon architecture, but the experienced artichitect-author here, David Greusel, falters in his task regarding that particular pisteutic aspect of dwellings and buildings. He wants to critique another writer on the theme Why architecture matters. Greusel may have done better here than the other guy, but I don't find his answer of very h+ quality as to the implied question regarding what matters architecturally.

Yet here's a quote worth meditating upon:

Architecture provides a framework for meaningful community — or not. As we have seen, architecture is besieged by two opposing trends: the nihilism of the avant-garde on the one hand, and the banality of the strip mall on the other. Both these trends augur toward alienation, despair, loneliness, isolation, and antisocial behavior. Nevertheless, the two opposing trends are generalizations; they don't determine what any particular work of architexture achieves (despite its place partically in any negative trend.

Architecture, by Archibald

That these consequences are mainly temporal does not mean that they are not also spiritual. Even James Howard Kunstler, an author who is outspokenly non-religious, has commented repeatedly on the soul-killing qualities of bad architecture and suburban sprawl. If a committed secularist like Kunstler can see it, why can't we?

The "we" here is Christians of the author's kind, but that way of being among the Christian kind of persons shoulders out those who read the Bible differently and reformationally, in my judgment. Still, there's enuff good architectural stuff among the bad uses of the Bible and the zeitgeisting of trends in reductive overgeneralizations about actual buildings, a blanket dismissal of every school and feature of modernist architecture, and an anti-reformational refusal to search also to affirm the kernels of truth that a given criticized movement in the arts has contributed. As a whole, the article deifies tradition and sneers at the common-grace that is inescapably present also in modernism, postmodern, and mavericks today.

As to the Bible, you can't dwell singly on the Temples--which have always been treasuries (banks, storage locations for very expensive items before money currencies existed, and structures that were easily defended in most circumstances). It was the Temples of Israel (and its enemies at times) that God had torn down. You can't read the Bible well and yet simply by-pass the tents that figure from Genesis to Acts (and which latter book frames his Epistles). Among other things, tents leave a small footprint on the planet's ecolaic surface. To your tents, O Christians!

Futher Research:

Avoiding Biblicism: The Bible and Christian Education
Biblicism--Dooyeweerd's definition

Tags: Greusel on architecture + his bliblistic intro

• aesthetics
• arts
• architecture
• buildings
• temples
• tents
• biblicism
• modernismarchitctre
• postmodernismarchitctre
• classicalarchitctre

Satire: Kids unintentional: The Bible gets delitedlly twisted in the understanding of youngsters, but what a howl!

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GRADING PAPERS

Can you imagine yourself to be the nun who is sitting at her desk grading these papers, all the while trying to keep a straight face and maintain her composure!

You may want to pay special attention to the wording and spelling. If you know the Bible even a little, you'll find this hilarious! It comes from a Catholic elementary school test where kids were asked questions about the Old and New Testaments. The following statements were written by the children being tested. Incorrect spelling has been left in place (except caps).


1. In the first book of the Bible, Guinnessis. God got tired of creating the world so he took the Sabbath off.

2. Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. Noah's wife was Joan of Ark. Noah built the ark and the animals came on in pears.

3. Lots wife was a pillar of salt during the day, but a ball of fire during the night.

4. The Jews were a proud people and throughout history they had trouble with unsympathetic genitals.

5. Sampson was a strongman who left himself be led astray by a Jezebel like Delilah.

6. Samson slayed the Philistines with the axe of the Apostles.

7. Moses led the Jews to the Red Sea where they made unleavened bread which is bread without any ingredients.

8, The Egyptians were all drowned in the dessert. Afterwards, Moses went up to Mount Cyanide to get the Ten Commandments.

9. The first commandments was when Eve told Adam to eat the apple.

10. The Seventh Commandment is Thou shalt not admit adultery.

11. Moses died before he ever reached Canada. Then Joshua led the Hebrews in the Battle of Geritol.

12. The greatest miracle in the Bible is when Joshua told his own son to stand still and he obeyed him.

Satire Now

13. David was a Hebrew king who was skilled at playing the liar. He fought the Finkelsteins, a race of people who lived in Biblical times.

14. Solomon, one of David's sons, had 100 wives and 700 porcupines.

15. When Mary heard she was the mother of Jesus, she sang the Magna Carta.

16. When the three wise guys from the East Side arrived they found Jesus in the manager.

17. Jesus was born because Mary had an immaculate contraption.

18. St. John the Blacksmith dumped water on his head.

19. Jesus enunciated the Golden Rule, which says to do unto others before they do one to you. He also explained a man doth not live by sweat alone.

20. It was a miracle when Jesus rose from the Dead and managed to get the tombstone off the entrance.

21. The people who followed the Lord were called the 12 decibels.

22. The Epistels were the wives of the Apostles.

23. One of the opposums was St. Matthew who was also a taxman.

24. St. Paul cavorted to Christianity, he preached Holy Acrimony which is another name for marriage.

25. Christians have only one spouse. This is called monotony.

-- I got this thru former h+school classmates, Rick Spurlin via Alan Ault. I couldn't stand the all-caps format, so re-wrote the piece in that respect. That's why the capitalizations are probably correct, but otherwise I copied the text as received. Maybe it's widespread online and in email forwards.

-- Anaximaximum

Semiotics: Pop: An image may not be all it appears to be, may be much more than its appearance

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A marvellously ins+tful article by Joe Carter in his blog Evangelical Outpost analyzes under the rubric "Pop Semiotics" how advanced technics has created "A New World of Blurs" (Aug10,2k6).

Although the phrase “seeing is believing” has become a cliché, it embodies a truth about the way we interact with our surroundings. Indeed, our perception of knowledge is so closely tied to visualization that we use the metaphor “I see” as a way of saying “I understand.”

Losha.jpgBut when it comes to mechanically created imagery, what we see doesn’t always match reality. Take, for example, the [large] photo [you can see by clicking here.)]. It appears to be a picture of a lovely young woman wearing a hat. But look again. Notice anything out of the ordinary?

What is unusual about the photo is that it is not a photo at all. Rather it is a drawing, produced by the amazingly talented artist Halim Ghodbane using Adobe Illustrator. When we believed the image was a photo, we believed (albeit unconsciously) that the girl actually exists. But once we are made aware that this is just a drawing, we cannot be sure the girl exists anywhere outside of the artist’s mind.

Semiote Analytics, by Anaximaximum

UPDATE: Couric sheds 20 pounds in doctored publicity photo

In a similar way, recent controversies over manipulated images have lead us to question what is real and what is propaganda. The retouching of a photo by photographer Adnan Hajj initially raised questions about the integrity of Reuters. But once the public became aware of the deception, bloggers began to look closer and uncovered numerous examples of image manipulation by other agencies, including the Associated Press and New York Times.

This site lists a “taxonomy of fraud” that includes digitally manipulating images after the photographs have been taken; staging and presenting images as if they were of authentic spontaneous news events; photographers staging scenes or moving objects, and presenting photos of the set-ups as if they were naturally occurring; and giving false or misleading captions to otherwise real photos that were taken at a different time or place.

I recommend clicking up Joe's site and reading the entire blog-entry, as well as the back-and-forth mini-essays that constitute the comments section. But doing so will take you deeper into the political-ethical aspect of the phenom, as promoted by editors and jouralists of the Big Media. The advanced-technics, pop-semiotics phenom itself is much larger than what finds its way into the mass media. Named after the computer application Photoshop, pop semiotics has seen the advent of the process called photoshopping (or just plain "shopping") which is used for creating images in funny, ironic, and satirical modes. These photoshopped images can be malicious, they can be just great fun. On the latter note, see, for example, The Star Wars Photoshopping Project. On some sites devoted to exhibiting photoshopped imagery, competitions are held on themes using a specific base image, or a stated task.

Beyond photoshopping, however, there are so many technical variations of image-making already that the total can't be quantified. Flickr reports that "photo" doesn't mean what it used indicate, so the image-share bank has had to add another category for the carefully staged and crafted artworks posted to its galleries, sometimes including text, that don't meet the parameters of what Flickr, when it started, assumed a photo was. Also, you'll want to read the stunning post on ExperienceCurve [Social Media, Marketing, Customer Experience] by Karl Long, entitled "Is Flickr Trying to Screw Artists?" (Aug23,2k6)). The comments are quite informative as well. In a comment a Flickr functionary is quoted as saying:

Our Community Guidelines state that non-photographic images such as screen shots, paintings, drawings, illustrations, graphic designs, scanned images, or digital art are not allowed in public areas of the site. You may still see some, but these types of images are generally blocked from appearing in searches or the Explore pages.

An impartial person can see some wisdom in the policy from the standpoint of the "ownness" of photography, a unique art indeed that has every r+t to come into the specificity of its unique aesthetic sphere (here defined, however, by its machine technique, a camera only.

But, what about a photograph of another kind of art, other than the ones cited by the functionary? For instance, as a commenter mentions in the ExperienceCurve exchange, a photograph of a sculpture. What about photoconstructions--those half-photo, half-paste-in manual constructions that are then re-photgraphed as an ensemble?

One begins to think that perhaps Flickr's policy is more determined by the commercial interests of revenue sources like camera manufacturers than by a truly aesthetically-sensitive definition of photography in an age of exfoliating techniques, artforms, and hybridization within a given range of the arts. What about a handwritten original poem, crafted to be photographed? Such a photo is not a photo, Flickr seems to be saying.

Aesthetics: Arts/Music: His hands anticipate “shape” various chord clusters & melodic lines, "became one" with piano

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I came across an incredible snippet in Catherine Nielsen's Per caritatem that exploded into all that I had learned from Dooyeweerd, Seerveld, Langer, and Adrienne Chaplin Dengerink on ways of knowing aesthetically, including the arts. In this case, a further explcitness about how the hands do the knowing for the jazz improvizing piano-player can be enriched theoretical by reading Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge, the chapter devoted to "Lore." Each piano-player ("pianist" doesn't seem r+t here) in the improv-jazz mode has a signature way of knowing thru his hands the specific instrument he addresses.

Music > Piano & Jazz Sax

Catherine is reflecting on

David Sudnow’s work, Ways of the Hand, which is an account of a classical pianist’s struggle on the road to becoming a jazz improviser. Sudnow describes in detail how at first he felt estranged from his body, viz., his hands. That is, the connection between his hands, the rhythm and metre, and the lines he wanted to play was at best strained and often more of a dis-connect. However, over time his hands began to anticipate the “shape” of various chord clusters and melodic lines—-in short his hands "became one" with the piano, which was now in a sense an extension of his own body

[how about: his body became an extension of his hands, his brain-part of his body became an extension of his hands]

and not simply a tool to be used.

[But let's not put down tools, nor intimacy with any specific tool.]

Catherine then turns to her source on Sudnow--Jeremy Begbie, a theologian whose first book I so disliked I never got around to subsequent work of his.

As Begbie explains, “the hand would treat the keyboard as a terrain to be engaged, relating to its contours, for example, to the contours of different keys […] Knowing what the next note or next notes would sound like was more to do with hand sensations than visual inspection of the keyboard. […] From the point of view of piano improvisation, listening is as much to do with the hand as with the ear” (pp. 225).

Then along the route I'm reading in Catherine regarding Sudnow's development, I come to this gem from Begbie on Sudnow (it may be Sudnow's own statement but Catherine is so immersed in Begbie that she gives the appearance at least of assigning the thawt to the latter): “The hand ‘had ways’ with the keyboard which opened up potentialities of sound not readily discoverable in any other way” (p. 226). If Begbie had started his aesthetic theory here, instead of with all that theologistic verbiage that estranges one from a wholistic view of artful creation, even in, especially in skilled improve, he would have done better.

The hands tickle the keyboard to ticke not so much the piano-player's ears, as to ticle ours in the enrapt audience. Thanks to Cythia. Thanks to Dave Evans and Bob van der Plaats on their respective pianos. Thanks to Bill Grove, a Toronto musician, who saxed on an improv-jazz saxophone beyond all earthly pleasures (yet he was what I call "a compassionate cynic" when it came to philosophizing the world and even his own music). Now the bodily organs most instrumental on the sax are hands and fingers, lungs, cheeks and lips. That's, among all else, knowing.

-- Anaximaximum

Tags: Hand-knowing the piano

• aesthetics
• arts
• music
• musiclassical
• musicjazzimprov
• piano
• saxophone
• hands
• lungs
• cheeks
• lips

Technics: online learning: Prof guesstimates time spent teaching online vs tech activities

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Prof Ken Hermann has an anecdotal analysis of what learning technics do to the ratio of a university instructor's time spent teaching students online vs. organizing and maintaining the digital-electronic technical apparatus for that purpose. He comes up with a whopping 80% for the latter, with only 20% of his time spent on what he most wants to do: preparing his content to actually teach students. Instead his time evaporates into the technical substructure of online teaching and learning.

TechNotes, by Owlie Scowlie

Online learning is a Big Biz not just for universities who add that mode of instruction to their repertoire, but also for specialist competitive corporations like Blackboard, alto the terms "competitive" and "like" may be stretching capitalist terminology where one company now wields a "virtual monopoly" -- as Kenn say in his earlier blog-entry "Time to Call Blackboard's Bluff" (Aug6,2k6). I recommend the entirety of Kenn's entries on his category "Technology and Society."

On matters of politics, big matters like war and peace, a view very different from Kenn Hermann's has been developed analytically by refWrite (Aug1,2k5), suggesting in that blog-entry a debate between him and David Horowitz.

Tags: Pando for large email attachments

• technics
• pedagogy
• onlinelearning
• companieslearning
• learningcompanies
• Blackboard
• webct
• HermannKenn

Technics: Digital file-sharing: Music industry thaws a bit to acknowledge the benefits of free downloads and P2P

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Techdirt contributor Mike hits the jackpot once again with his recent blog-entry,"Rethinking The Music Industry Business Model... Finally Going Mainstream." I've underlined his links, but not live-linked them. Click up his entry to navigate to his links, and to read the interesting comments that are already flowing in, replying to this piece. Excellent analysis, Mike! I'm interested in the whole idea of new tech-age business models he touts, convincing me at least. So, I'm looking forward to an attempt at some analysis of his thawts on that key idea. My colleague Spondent hopes to do just that over the next few days in the USE, Inc. Game series on correspondence refWrite. Heeeeeere's Techdirt Mike:

from the can't-stop-the-trend dept

For all the complaints we have about the way the RIAA conducts its business, we have always been optimistic that things would get sorted out eventually. It wasn't the music industry that was in trouble at all -- just the traditional recording labels. People often accuse us of hating the music industry, which is totally incorrect. When we discuss music industry strategies it's hoping that they recognize that these new business models have the potential to be much bigger than the old ones. This is based on a few simple ideas that really shouldn't be that hard to grasp, unless you're desperately tied to an existing business model and unwilling to change. First, treating all your customers as criminals doesn't create much loyalty or willingness to buy your product. Especially in a market where the product is based on being a fan, not filling a need. You want your fans to be happy -- not pissed off. Second, the basic economics are there. On the supply and demand curve the supply of digital goods is infinite, meaning that the trend over time will absolutely be for the price to get pushed towards zero. It's just the way the market works. That's not a bad thing if you embrace it and recognize that, rather than lost revenue, free content represents free promotion. After all, the hardest part of becoming a success in the music business is the marketing to get your product known. The third, and final, aspect of this is how new technologies have dramatically decreased the costs of every other aspect of the music business. Creation, publishing and distribution are all now much cheaper due to the onward march of technology, forcing a shift in how we think about copyright issues.

TechNotes, by Owlie Scowlie

Based on all of this, it's not hard to come up with a variety of different business models that are based on (1) using the music as a promotional good to get a lot more attention in a crowded market (2) offering customers what they want, and offering them plenty of different ways to get it and (3) building tremendous loyalty from happy customers who feel much closer to the musicians and are much more willing to spend money on secondary products (merchandise, concerts, access). Plenty of musicians have figured this out, and now it's moving further and further away from being a "fringe" idea and into the mainstream music business. Wired Magazine is running a bunch of articles about how the industry is realizing this, with two pieces that are definitely worth reading. There's an interview with Beck where he discusses continually giving fans more ways to interact with the content, and not worrying about things appearing on the internet. However, even more interesting is the article about Canadian music management and music label firm Nettwerk. You may remember that name from their announcement earlier this year that they would pay the legal fees for a teen sued for file sharing one of their own artists. The article also discusses how Nettwerk recognizes all of what we discuss above, in that it's encouraging each band on its roster to build its own label, and focus not just on how to "sell a CD," but on selling the entire experience of the music. When you look at things that way, it means you don't worry if some of the music is heard for free, because that just encourages more interest in other things the band is selling. It's also looking to try experiments similar to the recently announced Sellaband, who focuses on getting people to "invest" in a musician to help them pay for a recording, in exchange for a share of the later profits. In other words, the industry is evolving -- in many of the ways that plenty of people have been predicting all along. This is a good thing -- and one of these days the old record labels will finally recognize the mistakes they've made... or simply disappear.

Culture: Movies & TV: CSM reviews media alternatives - TV show testing, TV summer series, and 2 movies just released in DVD

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"Before TV shows air, they to survive ... The Lab," Christian Science Monitor Monitor, (Aug4,2k6) by Gloria Goodale

"Tubegazing: Three Moons over Milford," Christian Science Monitor Monitor, (Aug4,2k6) by Gloria Goodale.

Groovin' the Tube, by Anaximander

Three Moons Over Milford (ABC Family, premières Aug. 6 at 8 p.m.): Once again, cable demonstrates that summer doesn't have to be a dry spell for new shows. ABC Family's "Three Moons Over Milford" is a gently charming look at, oh, the end of the world - or not, depending on your point of view. A cosmic explosion has split the moon into three bits and nobody, including the scientists, knows what will happen next. So folks have to make their own decisions. Elizabeth McGovern stars as the mom of two teens (who are confused about whether they need to stay in school) and wife to a wealthy man who decides to chuck it all in and climb the world's seven tallest peaks while he still can. Grade: B+.

Summer Fun > TV and DVD, by Anaximander

CSM (Aug4,2k6), DVD Reviews gives two recent releases the once-over. 30 Days receives a B grade from Stephen Hamphries, while V for Vendetta gets a B- from David S. Hauck. Great pix of character Evey (Natalie Protman) by Claudio Carpi. Readers may recall the earlier meta-review I wrote up on reviews of V for Vendetta, a genre I called a 'meta-review.' You may also recall how Dr Fraud took umbrage at this way of approaching a movie, needing more as he always does to grind into his malice machine. But the meta-review is worth the re-reading.

What's interesting in CSM's focuses here are united around the theme of alternatives. Gooddale's first article above shows how the TV producers test shows for their common-denominator appeal, essentially asking what in this particular new series may turn off the widest possible audience torturing the experts dreams, or what will attract the largest audience? The latter, more positive construction of the question, has some dubious background presuppositions around theories of basic human drives like eating and sex. The industry has learned a bit that biotic-drives driven TV has problems in reaching the largest possible audience. Family-fare actually gets more viewers, tho some in each family may constitute a very different market demographic. So, more adult-themed (and I mean here action, forensic, and copware as much as eros-lacing) requires careful handling, and rules out a considerable audience. But innocuousness doesn't bring the largest possible, either. TV, including the networks, have to take more seriously production for niche-viewerships in any kind of non-documentary narrative episode TV-series. DVDs are a way of avoiding what the tube is currently offering.

Tags: Pando for large email attachments

• culture
• TV
• showtesting
• family-fare
• meta-review
• DrFraud
• DVDs
• humandrivessex&food

Culture: Movies: Gregory Baus reviews 'Superman Returns'

Gregory Baus, intrepid Calvinist blogger, reviews the other Superman movie this summer, Superman Returns. Provocative.

- Anaximaximum

Tags: Pando for large email attachments

• movies

Technics: Music file-sharing: Music overlords try to kill off LimeWire P2P music hub

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Yep, old-school greed-capitalism is still trying to dictate your choice of music and ability to share-give-to / share-get-from fellow individual music-lovers for non-commercial purposes. The pretense that the benefits of sales-only music exchange in a digital-electronic age benefits the artists has been blown sky-h+ by studies from within the music industry itself. However, it doesn't serve the private purposes of those codgers formed by the old business culture to revise, each in his/her own case, their companies' business models, and perhaps those presently in power are incapable of doings so. Perhaps only a new generation of executives at the corporations joined in the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) can catch up to the study-backed proof that P2P music sharing advances the music culture and the companies that produce for it, but most of all the artists. (Altho not the mega-stars who already are awash in multmillions, awards, and stardom - but everyone else musically creative as MySpace and other new artists' webdoms based on sharing, further prove.

As one wag on the subject, posting on Slashdot properly denominates the music-industry dominants "Recording Industrialists Against Artists."

TechNotes, by Owlie Scowlie

The companies behind the new lawsuit against Lime Group which operates the LimeWire music P2P file-sharers hub) are Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Vivendi's Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Britain's EMI Music -- companies which are so top-heavy with overpaid tiers of executives that they should all be banked out, ruptured. But, lol. They'll win and will decimate the last standing major P2P noncommercial file-sharing music hub, because they are intent upon determining how the Internet works -- so that it works only for them and their kind and their shoddy products and megalomaniacal overpaid top-stars.

Techdirt has the most analytic, incisive write-up that I've seen so far:

As has been widely expected, the RIAA has officially gone after Limewire today. Following the Supreme Court Grokster decision that didn't actually say Grokster was guilty of copyright infringement (just that they could be liable if they were found to have "induced" copyright infringement), the RIAA simply pretended that the ruling meant all file sharing apps were illegal and sent out warning letters to a bunch of them. Many shut down or tried to come up with other business models, while most users simply moved on to whatever else there was (and there were plenty of options). It looks like popular file sharing app Limewire continued to resist -- so now the RIAA is suing. What will be interesting is to see how far this case goes. If history is any indication, the RIAA will do its best to make the case as expensive as possible for Limewire, so they feel compelled to settle or just disappear completely. However, the firm does have a defense: they just need to show that they were not actively "inducing" copyright infringement -- even if that's what their software was often used for. They might want to take notes on Torrentspy's case against the MPAA. - Contributed by Mike with 35 comments to date on Techdirt

MPAA? That's the Motion Picture Association of America which is trying to prevent the sharing of digital-electronic movies via the Internet. Both industry orgs use decrepit old business models as tho they were written in stone, when in fact they are part of the recent failures of both industries, including exorbitant pricings and shoddy products from which consumers of cultural products have turned away in thousands upon thousands of droves.

Where have consumers gone? To P2P. That's person-to-person or peer-to-peer file-sharing and new artists who give away their creations for the very purpose of being picked up consumers who enjoy digitally certain few of the free downloads, and then go out and buy. This gives consumers of culture a real element of choice in what products become significant culturally, outside of RIAA and MPAA dictation and marketing games.

In the past this TechNotes column (see Siderbar for new Columns Index) has carried two synopses from a major statement by Dr. Michael Geist on the case for P2P file-sharing and other pro-consumer features of the Internet that the oligopolies of the culture and communications industry have tried to repress.

By the way, Techdirt carries a Google Ads ad-link for LimeWire™: Free Music. Which observation ties into a little matter of full disclosure. I have subscribed to and downloaded music from LimeWire in the past, and still have some songs from that source I would imagine. A practice which fell into neglect since it took me too long to download sufficient numbers of copies of any given song or spoken poem, from time to time, to get that special copy that wasn't scratchy. Plus, the practice tends to build up large files of songs to which I rarely if ever listened.

In Canada, non-commercial copying and file-sharing is not illegal, as long as the receiver in the sharing doesn't make any commercial use of the song/s. Now, I have been viciously attacked by the usual, Dr Fraud (aka Fred Pluthero), who is Canadian and pretends to be informed about everything, but apparently doesn't know Canadian law and morality in regard to noncommercial file-sharing P2P. As a Christian, I have also reflected on my P2P music file-sharing practice in M.D. Stalfleu's protestant philosophical-ethical system of theoretical frameworks, and have no problem with the practice within the parameters outlined. Dr Fraud however keeps braying no matter what level of moral and ethical responsiblity I have undertaken, which only raises questions about his motives. I bore you, dear readers, no further with the fraudster who has been keeping company with Dr Moriarty of late in the vicinity of dank tombs, it's said.

Futher Resources:

Dr Michael Geist on P2P, etc - Part I
Dr Michael Geist on P2P, etc - Part II

Tags: LimeWire targetted for P2P filesharing 'inducement' by Big Music

• aesthetics
• music
• filesharing
• p2p
• noncommercialuse
• musicindustry
• musicorporations
• RIAA
• MPAA

Culture: Hollywood Movies: Family-fare films gaining new recognition from studios & distributors

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A WorldNetDaily Exclusive (Jul26,2k6), entitled "Family movies best, Hollywood realizes," tells us of what the big movie producers, studios, and distributors are now becoming aware. Besides the sheer payload of family fare, WND also says that "Films with Christian content earn much more money at box office" than, shall we hazard the implication intended, "non-Christian" movies.

Which awkward, and possibly untrue, conceptualization is all too glaring for any critical thinker to entertain regarding the place of (different kinds of) movies in the culture. Or is it?

What does "Christian content" mean here? Content that is compatible with good healthy morality? I put the question this way becaue I do not believe a Christian ethics (that is Christian reflection on morals, mores, and morality according to protestant philosophical-ethical general theory, in the sense of M D Stafleu's "Characters and Relations")--I do not believe such a Christian ethics gives us all that much a different way of being oriented to the good in a given society than much else moral practice, reflection, and guidance does. Ethics is theoretical; morals are more a constellation of attitudes and behaviours.

Movies, by Anaximaximum

Movies that evidence a "Christian content" cannot do that by conveying good moral attitudes and behaviour, but only by including some version of the Gospel story--with lots of lattitude for a Christ-rooted conveyance of a biblical motif in imagined realistic fashion, or allegorically, or exemplarily in regard to contemporary characters (or historically-reconstructed personages, or living persons). "Christian content" =/= "exemplifying or portraying good attitudes and behaviours." Neverthless, of course, let's not discourage the pursuit of positive films of good living and neighbourlihoods, where good morals set the tone or prevail thru an agonistic plot; let's not discourage an explicitly Christian communal pursuit of that goal along with those of other religions who also pursue a similar orientation to daily living.

A group of Christians organized as a film-producing company does not devalue this task by making a movie about a Hindu town where a (moral) problem is confronted and a good outcome ensues (according to God's common grace, we mite add). But this is not the same as a case where the more special pursuit of a good movie focussed to tell a partiucalr kind of story: the story of human sin, awareness thereof and need for grace, and forgiveness. The latter again is precisely the "Christian" in Christian content because it includes some version, implicit or explicit of the Gospel story.

So, when WND swings into a booster mode of dubiously designated "Christian" movies, let's not swallow the hype too uncritically.

--------------

Posted: July 22, 2006
1:00 a.m. Eastern


© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com

Ted Baehr, whose Movieguide website and MOVIEGUIDE magazine have been carrying that message to a congregation of moviemakers for 14 years, tells WorldNetDaily that his message – and the facts – appear to be sinking in.

"Movies with a strong Christian content year after year do better at the box office," he says, citing statistics compiled by the Christian Film & Television Commission, of which he's chairman.

He says over the years those movies have turned in average income of about $160 million. Movies with less significant levels of moral leadership have averaged $60 million, and those at the opposite end of the scale from Christian values have averaged $12 million.

"We've hammered away at that for the last 14 years with our economic analysis of the box office," he said.

But now the trends are shifting. He says the percentage of family-oriented films has risen from 6 percent in 1985 to 45 percent in 2002. And in 1985, 81 percent of the movies were rated R, but fewer than 45 percent of the movies released since 2001 have been R.

A major change surfaced Thursday when, as WorldNetDaily reported, Disney announced that its current cutback in staffing means the R-rating will virtually disappear from its products.

Walt Disney Pictures are released under the Pixar animation label, Disney and Touchstone. Mirimax used to be part but has since been separated to stand alone.

When Disney's move was announced, confirmation came that many of the 650 staff cuts are being made in the Touchstone division, which used to produce the more mature-themed films.

Oren Aviv, newly appointed president of Disney production, says he believes a Disney film always should be something the entire family can enjoy.

"That to us has always defined a Disney movie, and that definitely hasn't changed," he says.

The return-to-family-fare move was made just as Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean" turned in a weekend sales total of $135.6 million and the computer-animated "Cars" has been declared a hit.

The math isn't complicated, Baehr says.

"They can make more money because it's better to sell four tickets to a family than one ticket to a teen," he says.

He does credit Hollywood with good intentions, citing what he perceives as a "real desire" to move in this direction.

His associate at Movieguide, David Outten, also noted yesterday that because of advances in technology, parents have a much larger range of options for entertainment these days.

Citing iPods and video downloads as a "shock wave" for the movie industry, he says on-demand services eventually could make any movie or program available in stores and online services. Already, more than 150 major television programs can be had on iTunes, he said.

That won't mean the end of Hollywood, however, says Baehr. The top quality of audio and video that has been developed is expensive to record, and reports of the death of movies started surfacing about the time VHS tapes arrived, but it's still around, he says.

"Just because you have a kitchen in your home doesn't mean you don't want to go out to a restaurant once in awhile," he says.

The key will be to keep quality in the stories first, with other components such as character, dialogue, music and spectacle following.

He does caution that not every movie that has sound morals is good for children to see. The blockbuster "The Passion of the Christ" isn't good for anyone under 12, while "Schindler's List" has strong redemptive content but also horrific scenes, he says.

And just because it's a children's movie doesn't mean it's good for kids either. "Monster House," he says, has very heavy spiritualist influences.

------------------

Baehr is a movie critic, educator, lecturer and author of "The Media-Wise Family." He's financed a number of feature films, produced many television and radio programs and now is working on several new movies. His MovieGuide site publishes reviews of current movies and features articles and interviews with top filmmakers and stars such as Steven Spielberg and Lindsay Lohan.

Technics: Net software: Large attachments split from message by new Pando

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Technology Evangelist carries a feature by Benjamin Higginbotham, "Pando: A Better Way to Send Large Email Attachments" that pinpoints two areas where email desperately requires upgrading: "file attachments and user authentication. I can’t fix user authentication today, but a product called Pando can fix the problems with attachments."

I can testify to the user authentication problem, as refWrite's publisher has had his name exploited by a notorious character, DrFraud, who used it to make a Yahoo address and then sent a hideous poison-pen email maligning friends to a major Christian institution, and putting refWrite's publisher's name below the signoff "Yours in Christ."

But that's not what Higgie can help us with. He's focussed on the large attachments issue.

E-mail servers like to have text messages sent back and forth. As soon as a user sends a 10MB file, an image for example, it bogs down the servers on both ends, increases the size of the message storage and slows the process of getting new messages for the recipient as their system tries to download the massive attachment.

The solution is to split the message into two parts. When I compose a message that has a 10MB file attached to it and hit send, the text part goes to the e-mail server while the attachment goes to a file server. The recipient would not see a file in the message like they do today, rather they would see a link to the file just like a link to a web site. By splitting the message into two parts the E-mail server does not need to store and process a huge file and the recipient does not have to download a massive file to get the rest of their messages. This is the best case solution. It’s transparent to both the sender and recipient. No special e-mail program is used, the e-mail client knows how to split the messages and where to send each, and so it just works.

I don’t know how to get that best case scenario today, but Pando.com gets us really close. Install the Pando client on your Windows based PC or Macintosh, and using the client you can send a message with up to a 1000MB attachment (that’s 1GB). The attachment will go to their file server while the message will simply have the link to the file. This is fantastic.

TechNotes, by Owlie Scowlie

What Pando does not do today is integrate directly into my Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird or Mail.app applications from the sender side but it does look like they are working on getting direct Outlook support soon.

Ugh! Perhaps the worst of the lot!

Unfortunately this service requires the recipient to also have Pando installed. I believe the solution would be much more powerful if Pando simply embedded a link into the message without requiring any special software. A simple web browser would be a great tool to download. Pando gets us close, but not all the way to the grand attachment vision above.

The reason that Pando requires a special app on the receiving end is that the whole system uses a p2p type model. The advantage of this is that the recipient can start downloading the file before the sender is done uploading, making the time required in the whole process much smaller than it could be. The other advantage is that bandwidth can be shared between the sender and receiving party. This helps keep costs low if not free. I would like to see a system where rather than placing a .pando file in the recipients e-mail, it's a hyperlink that the recipient can click on. This link would open a page that would try and detect a Pando install. If Pando is installed the download would start right away. If Pando is not installed the file would download right in the browser. If the file was not done uploading then the user would have the option to wait for the file or to download Pando to start the x-fer ( = transfer) right away.

By using Pando today I’m able to get 1/2 way to my vision of splitting the message from the attachment. Hopefully soon they will have their Outlook plugin which will make the process almost transparent to both sides. I would really like to seea Thunderbird, Outlook Express and Mail.app plugin as well. It would also be nice if Pando sold server software that an IT department could install on a box next to their mail server. This would allow users inside the building to take advantage of the service without having to use external bandwidth and it should be a lot faster.

For now Pando is in beta but I have found that it works great. If you’re constantly sending messages with large attachments (anything over 1MB in my opinion), do your IT team or E-mail admin a favor... Download and try Pando. They will thank you for it!

About that authentication matter, Higgie trivializes the matter by using the word "spoofing" -

E-mail is an interesting creature. Originally designed for text only this beast has grown out of control with users spoofing names, attachments in excess of 10MB and just plain abuse of the system.

"Spoofing names" gives a lite-hearted quality to the matter, and there must be many occasions lite-heartedness is the name of the game of using someone else's name as an email address (best sent to the person herself / himself); but I would avoid it altogether. Why? Because there's the more usual case where malice is the intention of the serious non-spoofer. What's the correct word for a DrFraud name-abuse email address? Whatever it is, it's hate mail.

Tags: Pando for large email attachments

• technics
• software
• servers
• email
• emailauthentication
• attachmentslrge

Culture: Sport: World Cup glow is gone, but Zidane's headbutt lives

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The hero of the World Cup, its Most Valuable Player, a status which may be stripped from him but remains true enuff his nevertheless, was Zinedine Zidane. A French-born français of Algerian immigrant parentage, Zidane was captain of a team that was composed mostly of immigrant Blacks or the children of immigrants. The team in large part came from the very banlieus that proudced the riots over immigrant youth unemployment, and the structural racial disadvantage that is intrinsic to French society today.

In comparison, Italy fielded an all-white team. It won by a hair, after the l'affaire Zidane-Matrazzi took place for thw whole world to see (but could not hear). It was Matrazzi who hurled an insult at the wrong moment at the wrong footballer. Matrazzi ended up on the ground after getting a headbutt, which you can see replayed over and over at I've Made a Huge Tiny Mistake, a website devoted mostly to sports guffaws. The headbutt was not the guffaw in this case, rather the insulting mouth of Matrazzi who turned many nonhardcore football (soccer) fans sour on the Italian win.

Football / Soccer

If Zidane gets stripped of his honour, then the Italian team should be stripped of its first-place standing as well. In any case, Matrazzi needs to have his mouth washed with something harsh; he disgraced his team, he disgraced his sport, he disgraced the ideal of fair inclusive sport as an emblem of peace and peaceful competion for excellence.

The larger question of the racial composition of Europe's football teams looms large from the incident, but is so much more significant in understanding how Europe, and in this case particularly how France, creates the demand among immigrants of colour to find places in professional sports, shut out as so many of them are from other professions. Julio Godoy of Inter Press Service news agency and writing from Paris, takes a close look at the problem in his article, "World Cup Shows Different Faces of Immigration" (Jul 12,2k6). Click it up – mesdames, mesdemoiselles, et messieurs. - Owlie Scowlie

Tags: Resistance to Pluthero's bad blogging practices

• culture
• sports
• football
• soccer
• worldcup
• zidane
• matrazzi
• racism

Technics: Theory - content/semiotics distinction? 'Feedburner' by John Heileman, Business 2.0, layered semiotically as free ad

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I just came across an article, "Redefining the RSS feed––FeedBurner CEO Dick Costolo tells Business 2.0 Magazine how he plans to put his stamp on the Wild West medium of RSS," by John Heilemann, the article appearing online in Business 2.0 Magazine (June 27,2k6). I became enchanted by the content, and at the same time I thawt of the discourse intextated without inline visuals or live-links as a perfect occasion for visual-enrichment and hypertexting (more radically, I'm interested in the phenom of hyperwording). Even the more limited project of vis-enrich / hypertexting with live-links can not be done all at once (by me). The first new layer––being a visually-enriched second layer and taking the semiotic-semantic significance to a h+er, more complex level than Heilemann in Biz2.0––has already been added by my co-composer Anaximaximum and myself, Owlie Scowlie, for this blog entry. In the immediate case, we're your refWrite team for this semiotically-experimental blog-entry which has already undergone three drafts, and is now being left to dry. It includes hypertext language markup (HTML) in the form of common semiotic devices, that overlap one another in meaning (semantic-grammatical import) where the accumulation of signs can no longer be taken for granted as individual marks for emphasis––for instance, emphasis of acronyms, or individual words more largely, or phrases. In this second semiotic layer also, some URL's make visible links that connect you live whenever you click your cursor on one or another of them (these will be built up over time in this blog-entry), each of the visible live-links taking you away to yet another imaginal /rather, virtual/ universe of some other webpage, probably at some other blogsite / website.

The text below is semiotically-treated by A and OS, as a semiotics analysis / experiment that is derived from a Business 2.0 Magazine magazine article by John Heilemann as mentioned above. Here's Heilemann's plain text with some "second level" semiotic enrichment:

Mention to Dick Costolo that, for most of this generation's Web startups, getting funded has been a snap, and he emits a rueful laugh. "Not for us," recalls the CEO of the content syndication outfit FeedBurner. "Most venture capitalists we met couldn't spell RSS - let alone understand it."

That was in 2004, and Costolo and his three co-founders were toiling in obscurity in their Windy City headquarters. "I don't know how many times we heard, 'We like you guys, but you're in Chicago,'" Costolo says. "Which really meant 'We don't get it.'"

Two and a half years later, a lot more people get it - as FeedBurner's meteoric rise vividly demonstrates. Today the company manages more than 300,000 feeds that use the RSS (really simple syndication) format or a variant thereof, and its customers range from the humblest bloggers to the mightiest publishers: Gannett (Charts), Hearst, Reuters.

Though its success so far has yielded little revenue (and not a dime of profit), the company is now backed by several of the media-savviest [Venture Capitalists] VCs in the business.

What the moneymen believe is that FeedBurner is in the vanguard of the creation of a brand-new medium. And while, God knows, talk like that is cheap, I think they may be right.

The return of "push technology"

Before explaining why that's so, it might be helpful (at least for the uninitiated) to start with the ABCs of feeds. RSS is what used to be called a "push" technology: It lets publishers stream Web content instantly to users who've subscribed to their feeds, and lets users keep up with a large number of sites without having to check them manually.

When new content is posted on a site, subscribers are notified and sent either full versions or summaries of the fresh material (along with links back to the site), which they can read inside what's known as an aggregator, such as NewsGator's FeedDemon [for Windows - Owlie Scowlie]. (Both Firefox and Apple's Safari browser have built-in feed readers.)

Semiote Analytics & Experiment, by Anaximaxium:

[But, sad to say, the last mentioned feature of Safari doesn't make up for that browser's lacks and snags. You're better advised to switch to Firefox 1.5 and a wee h+ier (1.5.0.4), with some really fine "plug-in" extensions (or "add-ons") available - Blogger Web Comments, Linkification, and the jetsetting Greasemonkey for trying JavaScripts for yet other Firefox browser add-ons. – Owlie Scowlie].

RSS began to take off roughly three years ago - and that's when Costolo, then 39 and the founder of two previous startups with the same three partners, saw an opening.

"We thought, if this gets big, it's going to be impossible for content producers to manage," he remembers. "We'll say to publishers, 'Hand us your content to syndicate - we'll run your feeds and provide you a detailed picture of how many subscribers you have, what's being read, where the feeds are going. Then we'll help you monetize them by stapling ads to them.'"

When FeedBurner launched in February 2004, it was instantly popular with bloggers. But commercial publishers were wary, if not outright dismissive.

Technotes, by Owlie Scowlie

"They'd say, 'I only care about feeds in that they drive traffic back to my site,'" Costolo reports. So he reminded the publishers of what happened when the Web boom began. "They tried to use their sites to drive subscriptions to their print products," Costolo says. "I said, 'How'd that work out for you? The new medium never drives dollars to the old; it drives dollars to the new thing.'"

Like the Web 10 years ago, he argued, feeds had reached a tipping point. "You can't stop this train," he told them. "Content is going to be syndicated and consumed all over the place. Your job is to figure out how to turn that into an opportunity."

Incorporating advertising

Crucial to convincing the publishers was that Costolo offered to run their feeds and provide them with subscriber data for free. What they saw when they looked at the data was that "hits to their feeds were going up, up, up, while traffic back to their sites wasn't going up as significantly," Costolo says. "That caused a lot of them to say, 'Shit, there's a lot of money that I'm not making out there on the edges.'"

All along, Costolo thought advertising was the way for publishers to begin to rake in that dough. Initially the company had planned to splice ads from various ad networks into the feeds it manages, taking a cut of the revenue, typically 35 percent.

But Costolo's team soon decided that it made more sense to build [RSS']s own ad network - and one that places ads not just in feeds but also on the publishers' websites. (Such ads, Costolo says, will be "feed-driven." Unlike, say, ads placed through Google's AdSense network, which are typically in a column far away from the post containing the targeted keyword, FeedBurner's will be tightly linked to specific items and positioned in the middle of the page, right under the relevant post.)

With its burgeoning ad network, FeedBurner may be hurling itself into the lion's mouth. As a manager of feeds, the company has no equal.

But as an ad network, it will be in competition with Google (Charts), as well as Yahoo (Charts – music and stocks), AOL, Blogads, ValueClick, and others. Costolo recalls that when he was seeking VC cash, the specter of Google was often raised.

He dismissed it then, but no longer. "I've come around to the view that Google will eventually start managing feeds and monetizing feeds as another way to promote AdSense," he concedes.

Staring down Google

Yet Costolo views the prospect of tangling with Google with striking equanimity. "We have to leverage our critical mass of publishers to create network effects," he says. As an example, Costolo cites plans to allow publishers in the network to form "affinity groups" by blending their feeds together.

[Inserted enumeration below: A.), B.), C.) with bracketed stuff of mine - Owlie Scowlie: ]

He mentions the possibility that

A.) Daily Kos,

[An extreme leftwing blog, main rallying point of extreme left in Democratic Party where the ever-leftier prez-election-loser John Kerry and nomination-as-candidate loser Howard Deane, now National Democratic Party's Chairman are both lionized, or is it eagle-ized? legalized? - Owlie Scowlie]

B.) Talking Points Memo,

[An extreme leftwing blog, main rallying point of extreme left in Democratic Party where the ever-leftier prez-election-loser John Kerry and nomination-as-candidate loser Howard Deane, now National Democratic Party's Chairman are both lionized, or is it eagle-ized? legalized? - Owlie Scowlie]

and C.) a handful of other popular liberal political blogs

[here's a handful of said liberal political blogs, tho I don't know how "popular" they are - OS]

• 1.) The Plank

• 2.) The Arkansas Blog

• 3.) The Online Beat [blog via The Nation]

• 4.) The Notion [blog via The Nation]

• 5.) Editor's Cut [blog via The Nation</a>


might offer a joint feed - leading lefty readers to subscribe to that feed rather than to each individually.

"Then the incentive for all of them would be high to stay in FeedBurner," Costolo says, "because as part of the liberal politics feed, they'd be reaching more people than they would on their own."

Costolo's confidence about fending off Google and other potential rivals also owes to FeedBurner's head start in a market that's racing forward at lightning speed. "For RSS, 2004 was all about blogs, 2005 was all about text publishers, and 2006 is shaping up as the year of audio and video," he says.

Already Apple (Charts -- The Human Body Project and AAPL financial chart [Yahoo! Finance]) has harnessed RSS to potent effect in its iTunes Music Store, which offers thousands of audio and video podcasts for download, each of them powered by a feed.

And although Costolo won't name the companies, he says two entertainment giants are about to start using FeedBurner to drive consumers to social media venues such as MySpace. "Hollywood sees how feeds can contribute to the ecosystem of exposure," Costolo observes.

And FeedBurner intends to make that ecosystem even more complex. For some time the company has been developing a feed-splicing tool to let users create what Costolo calls a "personal content network" - a "feed of me."

"You put your tags in Del.icio.us, your photos in , your friends in ; you have a blog , a podcast [not yet! - OS], etc.," he says. "And we splice it all together into a single feed."

There are, of course, plenty of folks with personal websites. But with a "feed of me," subscribers would be able to track changes in your data at the atomic level - being notified instantly when you add a new photo set or playlist, not just when you update your site.

More important, developers could build new applications to display and manipulate all that data, leading to vast new possibilities for advertising and marketing.

All of which is why I like Costolo's chances in any future battle over this virgin turf - even, dare I say it, with Google. What the guys at FeedBurner understand is that RSS is a brand-new medium, as distinct from the Web as the Web is from newspapers, radio, and TV.

It will be consumed differently and will operate by rules that are foreign not just to traditional publishers but to the titans of the Web. Costolo and his crew don't have all the answers about where this revolution is headed.

But they're asking questions that no one else has even thought of, and that's no small advantage.

- John Heilemann wrote "Pride Before the Fall." His next book is "The Valley." He lives in Brooklyn.



How FeedBurner Works

1 Publishing software is used to create a standard RSS feed.

2 FeedBurner takes the feed and repackages it, making it easier ...

3 ... for advertisers to insert ads wherever the feed appears.

... for consumers to subscribe to it by email, on the Web, or infeed-reading software.

... for the publisher to track the size of his feed audience.

The foregoing alteration, not so much of the textual content but of the semiotic interpretive overlay, at first confined just to what we're calling Level 2 (bolds, underlines, and live-links together) give an accumulated result that alters the graphic experience of the page, hence also of the text.

- Anaximaximum and Owlie Scowlie

Further Resources:

Really Simple Syndication
What is RSS?, by Mark Pilgrim