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FT.com / Lex – Lex: Music

Lex: Music
Published: September 5 2004 18:43 | Last updated: September 5 2004 18:52

CD’sVideo killed the radio star but everyone, it seems, is taking shots at the music industry, and nowhere more so than in Asia. In Japan, the second biggest market, CD production slumped from $5.5bn in 1998 to below $3.5bn in 2003, a 13-year low. Western music is out of fashion and old songs those stalwarts that usually produce a steady stream of cash even more so. In tech-savvy Korea, the internet is the chief culprit. Volume sales fell 30 per cent in 2002, the worst hit of the top 20 markets. In China, it is piracy that pulls the trigger. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry reckons piracy excluding illegal downloads costs the industry $850m a year in Asia, excluding Japan, although this dropped to $750m in 2003.
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Music companies are fighting back as best they can. In Japan, where the economics of music are perhaps most distorted, companies are homing in on the burgeoning ringtone market. Unfortunately, their bid to sew it up the labels co-own the biggest mobile phone music distributor has elicited the attentions of anti-trust regulators. By the year-end, the companies hope to be able to download more than 30-second snatches, thus building up what is now a slight $110m market. Labels such as SonyMusic are also overhauling their business model, to end the expensive strategy of launching a string of one-hit wonders. But with no plans to change the CD pricing structure, borrow-and-burn over 3,300 shops rent CDs for 50 cents each will remain a favourite way to build music collections.

In China, a market worth less than $100m in 2002, the line of attack is different. Rather than fight for sales, the record labels are trying to squeeze royalties out of karaoke bars. The IFPI reckons this could be worth $200m a year, based on $1,000 a year from each of the country’s 200,000 karaoke bars. China has yet to enact regulations to facilitate collection, but even when it does it will be via third parties, so costs could wipe out a large part of revenues. In Asia, the sons of the radio star still look vulnerable.

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FT.com / Special Reports / Creative Business – Heard the one about the six BBC jokers?

Special Reports / Creative Business Print article | Email article

TV & radio
Heard the one about the six BBC jokers?
By Rohan Freeman
Published: August 9 2004 17:42 | Last updated: August 9 2004 17:42

BBCThe UK

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From the MT Support forums

Just Orb: Private Entries in MT

Now for the long awaited short tutorial on creating password protected entries in Movable Type. I wanted to be sure that everything was working right and secure before I explained it, and that when anyone had questions I would be able to answer them. I am now ready! I think! Let’s call this Revision 1, and as problems arise, I’ll fix the instructions.

MacTom, Inc.: RV-Based Mobile Office

The House 1860-1925

zonageek: software: TypeMover

TypeMover can backup all data related to a weblog into a single file. And when we say ALL we do mean ALL. The backup includes comments, trackbacks, pings, weblog settings, templates, email notifications, IP bans, categories, authors and, of course, entries.

Creating a generic Site-To-RSS tool

Tomorrow’s Company – Homepage – Welcome

Sherriff Mountford Estate Agents, Valuers, Surveyors and Letting Agents

Lost Cosmonauts
A technical critique
Uncovering Soviet Disasters

In 1984 St. Martin’s Press published a book, entitled “Russian Doctor”, by the Russian emigre surgeon Dr. Vladimir Golyakhovsky. He described the death of a cosmonaut trainee in a pressure chamber fire. Half an entire chapter was devoted to the incident — and with authority — since , incredibly, Golyakhovsky (a specialized surgeon-traumatologist) had apparently been the emergency room doctor at the prestigious Botkin Hospital when the dying cosmonaut was brought in.

As Golyakhovsky remembered it, a severely burned man identified only as “Sergeyev, a 24-year-old Air Force Lieutenant,” was brought in by stretcher. “I couldn’t help shudderi ng,” Golyakhovsky recalled. “The whole of him was burnt. The body was totally denuded of skin, the head of hair; there were no eyes in the face. … It was a total burn of the severest degree. But the patient was alive….”

Golyakhovsky saw the man’s mouth moving and bent down to listen. “Too much pain — do something, please — to kill the pain” were the tortured words he could make out.

“Sergeyev” was scorched everywhere but the soles of his feet, where his f light boots had offered some protection from the flames. With great dimculty the doctors inserted intr avenous lines into his feet (they couldn’t find blood vessels anywhere else) and administered painkillers and medication. “Unfortunately, Sergeyev was doomed,” Golyakhovsky remembered realizing immediately. “And yet, all of us were eager to do something, anything, to alleviate his terrible suffering.” The man lingered for sixteen hours before dying.

Afterward Golyakhovsky reported talking with a small young officer who ha d waited by the phone in the lobby while the burned man lay dying. The doctor requested and received an account of the original accident. Details included “an altitude chamber… heavily laden with oxy gen” and “a small electric stove [with] … a rag burst[ingl into flame.” Golyakhovsky was also told that it had taken half an hour to get the pressure chamber open, with “Sergeyev” on fire until the flames consumed almost all the oxygen inside the room.

Sometime later Golyakhovsky saw a photograph of this deathwatch officer in the newspapers. He had been Yuriy Gagarin, who became the first man in space.

Oberg’s article contains much more detail about who “Sergeyev” actually was, along with other “vanished” cosmonauts.

Phantoms of Space

Salon.com Books | The Salon Interview: Neal Stephenson

One of things you like to do on the side is dabble in programming. Do you see similarities between writing code and writing fiction?

I think there are common threads between writing and programming. That’s a really easy statement for people to misunderstand and twist around so I’m a little leery of making it. All I’m saying is that the thing you’re making — the novel or the computer program — has got a very complicated and finely wrought hierarchical structure to it. The structure has to work right or the whole thing fails. But the only way you can work on it is by hitting one character at a time. You’re building this thing one character at a time while having to maintain the whole structure in your head. That description applies equally well to programming and novel writing even though they’re very different activities.

I agree that comparing the two could raise hackles in some quarters. People like to believe that one activity is entirely aesthetic and emotional and the other is entirely rational.

That’s a misconception. I justify say that by referring to the work of Antonio Damasio, who’s a friend of mine. He’s written a few books about the brain, and the one that’s most relevant to this discussion is “Descartes’ Error.” The error he’s complaining about is the idea that reason and emotion are different things. He tells a story about a patient who suffered a very specific localized kind of brain damage that was blocking a certain kind of interaction between how he thought and how he felt. In certain situations, this guy was better than other people at certain things. When driving on ice he didn’t panic and he knew all the rules, how to turn the steering wheel and keep his car under control, and he was able to drive when other people were skidding off the road. But if you asked him to schedule an appointment and gave him two dates to choose between, this guy could sit there for an hour, dithering over this simple choice. Every possible contingency or scenario that could play out would flash up in his head, and he didn’t know how to choose between them.

Damasio is arguing that one of the innate faculties of our brain is that we can envision a wide range of possible scenarios and then sort through them very quickly not by logic but through a kind of process of the emotions. Emotions associated with a particular scenario cause us to prune off whole sets of options. He claims that chess masters work that way. Part of the time it’s this very logical, rational thing, but part of the time it’s “This gives me the willies. I’m not going there.” Damasio quotes in this book scientists like Einstein who quite explicitly say that their process of shifting through ideas and deciding where to go with their research has a very strong emotional component to it. I don’t buy the idea of a split between a rational and an emotional mind. I suspect that idea is a lot more common among nonscientists. I think there’s a whole complex of factors behind scientists being pegged as emotionally remote or out of touch with their feelings.

AlterNet: GONSALVES: ‘The Tyranny of Choice’?

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Salon.com Books | Busting big fat liars

You write about the conservative cradle-to-grave jobs network that goes along with the think tanks, opinion journals, magazines, radio shows and syndicated columns, and book deals and speaking fees. It sounds pretty cushy.

It is. There’s every financial incentive in the world to stay in the conservative movement forever. That [network] allows the conservatives the freedom and the confidence to devote their attention to influencing the mainstream without actually becoming a part of it. It also means that when young people are trained they can stay — it’s not an up-or-out situation. You have very senior people editing magazines who can have families. And, again, it’s sustained support. Editors of conservative magazines aren’t out trying to raise money. The money is there; the cash reserves are in the bank.

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BBC Fantasy scripts

Pauline raised the shotgun, propped it over her shoulder.
“People round here used to show respect. It’s time to remind ‘em just ‘oo the Fowlers are.”

Orality and literacy, from Idiolect

Table summarising Chapter 3: Some psychodynamics of orality

oral /literate

words as actions /words as objects
formulaic /unstructured/multiple
additive /subordinative
harmonising /analytic/dissective
redundant /sparse
narrative /facts & lists
episodic/thematic /chronological
ever-present /past and future looking
amnesic /hypermnemonic
’savage mind’ /rationality
animistic /objective
holistic /linear
conservative /progressive
unreflective /introspective
social/public /individual
empathetic & participatory /objectively distanced
situational/situated /abstract
contextual /self-contained
restricted code /elaborated code

“Is the idea of a Jaynesian software rewrite of self-consciousness subsumed within the idea of a transition from oral to literate culture? (p28)”

Zombies are Republicans

The Return of the Zombies

The Guardian on the Dawn of the Dead remake:

“Zombies were a staple of low-budget horror for decades before Romero made them over back in 1968. Most famously they featured in Val Lewton’s no-budget 1941 RKO classic I Walked With A Zombie, which, given the story’s links to Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester and the young girl soon fated to become “the madwoman in the attic”, has always been a critics’ favourite. This wasn’t the case for most other zombie flicks, which remained determinedly low-rent and cheesy. I Walked With A Zombie had class, soul and brains to burn (though sadly not to eat), but the remainder, until Romero at least, is the distilled essence of everything crappily lovable about bad B-movies.

Take, for instance, the alleged comedy Zombies On Broadway (and just how great is that title?), directed in 1945 by Gordon Douglas, who later became Frank Sinatra’s hack director of choice. Lugosi himself plays Dr Renault, who creates his zombies with injections, then lets them loose in a gangster-run nightclub as the on-stage attraction. John Drew Barrymore, father of Drew, acquired a ration of drinking-money in 1957 by starring in the Italian flick War Of The Zombies, in which he revives dead Roman legionnaires to form his army of global domination. The Zombies Of Mora Tau (1957) guarded an underwater treasure (that’s correct, sub-aquatic zombies) while 1981’s Night Of The Zombies features reanimated Nazi soldiers and stars the 1970s porn star Jamie Gillis, whose presence is entirely appropriate to the nonsensical plot and its brainless execution.

Dlugosz.net: Integrating Gallery into MovableType

Gallery is a very nice PHP-based online photo album. It runs well on its own & also easily integrates into a few weblog frameworks. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that anyone has documented how to easily integrate it into MovableType, which is what I’m using here on my site. Click on the link below to read my quick and dirty tutorial on how to integrate Gallery into MovableType.

How and Why Wonder Books

wePod is an UK equivalent of RipDigital.

New York’s Premier Alternative Newspaper. Arts, Music, Food, Movies and Opinion

The last third of the book is dedicated to Lockwood’s own efforts and eventual success in his quest to uncover the truth behind the sudden disappearance of the species. His eloquence hits its full stride as he describes the processes leading to his epiphany, itself described as more of an unfolding than a leaping flash of insight. His expeditions in the field attempting to recover specimens from melting glaciers are not in any way overblown or exaggerated. There’s an endearing humility in his tone as he recounts what amounts to a forensic Indiana Jones adventure. A quote in the bridge to this section stuck with me, as it gives the reader an excellent insight into the workings of Lockwood’s fabulous reasoning, and a disturbing (probably unintended) implication regarding our own destiny:

“In recent years, the emerging field of complexity is finding that sudden catastrophic changes may be inherent in some systems, including populations. My own work in the field of catastrophe theory suggests that modern grasshopper outbreaks may be precisely such systems. Their erratic dynamics are entirely normal, although we can exacerbate the outbreaks by mismanagement of the rangeland. We’ve even found evidence that grasshopper populations exhibit a phenomenon called self-organizing criticality, in which they naturally develop to the point where outbreaks and crashes are triggered by their own biology.”

“Self-organizing criticality” is a disturbing concept when applied to human populations. Fortunately, Lockwood doesn’t go there, but he does indulge himself in a Jeremiad at the conclusion that goes on just long enough to indicate a certain charming naivete as regards the relation of people to entropy in ecological systems. He closes on a disarmingly perverse note, suggesting that the Rocky Mountain locust may not, in fact, be truly extinct at all. The great plague of the Golden West may simply be biding its time, lying dormant in the last pristine habitat left to it: Yellowstone National Park.

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BBC – Talent – Sitcom Writer

Are you a budding comedy writer?

Full of fresh, funny and distinctive ideas with loads of series potential?

BBC Three are looking for new half-hour narrative contemporary comedies featuring unusual worlds and voices, the kind that reflect the channel’s cutting-edge style, up there with the likes of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and Nighty Night .

Eight shortlisted writers will benefit from masterclasses with top comedy writers and producers. Three finalists will each receive

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