Wednesday, February 05, 2003

"There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and their intelligence, transform the yellow spot into the sun." (Pablo Picasso)   The Floating World of Ukiyo-e: Shadows, Dreams, and Substance This exhibition [from the Library of Congress] showcases the Library's spectacular holdings of Japanese prints, books, and drawings from the 17th to the 19th centuries. These works are complemented by related works from the Library's collections created by Japanese and Westerns artists into the 20th century   UKIYO-E - The Pictures of the Floating World The art of ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world"), originated in the metropolitan culture of Edo (Tokyo) during the period of Japanese history, when the political and military power was in the hands of the shoguns, and the country was virtually isolated from the rest of the world. It is an art closely connected with the pleasures of theatres, restaurants, teahouses, geisha and courtesans in the even then very large city. Many ukiyo-e prints by artists like Utamaro and Sharaku were in fact posters, advertising theatre performances and brothels, or idol portraits of popular actors and beautiful teahouse girls. But this more or less sophisticated world of urban pleasures was also animated by the traditional Japanese love of nature, and ukiyo-e artists like Hokusai and Hiroshige have had an enormous impact on landscape painting all over the world. 7:03:29 PM    comment [] You Ought To Be In Pixels (Time Magazine) Time has put togther a very nice collection of step by step desktop video production articles. They've pulled together a digicam buyers guide, an introduction to video capture, reviews of a handfull of desktop video editing suites a quick overview of editing techniques and wraps with a guide to DVD burning. (Thanks to Corante's Amateur Hour Weblog for the link) 2:10:42 PM    comment [] Confronting Empire (Arundhati Roy) "While the elite journeys to its imaginary destination somewhere near the top of the world, the dispossessed are spiraling downwards into crime and chaos. This climate of frustration and national disillusionment is the perfect breeding ground, history tells us, for fascism. . . . Corporate Globalization - or shall we call it by its name? - Imperialism - needs a press that pretends to be free. It needs courts that pretend to dispense justice. Meanwhile, the countries of the North harden their borders and stockpile weapons of mass destruction. After all they have to make sure that it's only money, goods, patents and services that are globalized. Not the free movement of people. Not a respect for human rights. Not international treaties on racial discrimination or chemical and nuclear weapons or greenhouse gas emissions or climate change, or - god forbid - justice. So this - all this - is "empire." This loyal confederation, this obscene accumulation of power, this greatly increased distance between those who make the decisions and those who have to suffer them. Our fight, our goal, our vision of Another World must be to eliminate that distance. . . . Still . many of us have dark moments of hopelessness and despair. We know that under the spreading canopy of the War Against Terrorism, the men in suits are hard at work. While bombs rain down on us, and cruise missiles skid across the skies, we know that contracts are being signed, patents are being registered, oil pipelines are being laid, natural resources are being plundered, water is being privatized, and George Bush is planning to go to war against Iraq. If we look at this conflict as a straightforward eye-ball to eye-ball confrontation between "Empire" and those of us who are resisting it, it might seem that we are losing. But there is another way of looking at it. We, all of us gathered here, have, each in our own way, laid siege to "Empire." We may not have stopped it in its tracks - yet - but we have stripped it down. We have made it drop its mask. We have forced it into the open. It now stands before us on the world's stage in all it's brutish, iniquitous nakedness. Empire may well go to war, but it's out in the open now - too ugly to behold its own reflection. Too ugly even to rally its own people. It won't be long before the majority of American people become our allies. Only a few days ago in Washington, a quarter of a million people marched against the war on Iraq. Each month, the protest is gathering momentum. . . . Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few.They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing." ("Confronting Empire", OutlookIndia.com) Wow. Read the full text of this article. It's brilliant. 1:11:13 PM    comment [] John Perry Barlow: Sleepers Awake on the Precipice (Mother Jones) MJ: TIA hopes to root out terrorists by monitoring -- among other things -- our purchasing habits and travel records. But looking at this kind of data mining in the commercial sector, it's clearly an imperfect science. I keep reading stories about how somebody's TIVO thinks he's gay because he watched one too many Sex in and the City's. Can we possibly expect better from the government? JPB: They've already done some of this inferential searching -- and the way they're going about it is enough to give you pause. MJ: Part of the Homeland Security Bill is something called the "Cyber Security Enhancement Act" under which "malicious" hackers can be sent to prison for life. JPB: It's ridiculous, dangerous, grossly unconstitutional, and it's perfectly in keeping with what this administration's been doing across the board. This is an administration that has recently reserved to itself the right to kill American citizens anywhere on the planet for the mere suspicion of membership in Al Qaeda. That's really quite and awe-inspiring breakthrough. And the astonishing thing is that the American people are nodding along in their stupor and saying "Yeah, well, whatever it takes to stop terrorism." I'm so disappointed in my countrymen. MJ: What do you think it will take to knock people out of that stupor? JPB: What it's going to take is for some of these initiatives to actually start affecting people out in the 'burbs. But they're so insensate at the moment, that one wonders how much it will take to effect them. Right now, it's very easy for your standard suburban television idiot to assume that this is all about people who are not like him. And his rights are not involved. By the time he finds out that his rights have been involved, they may have been so thoroughly eroded that he may never be able to get them back. But you as the Navajo say, "It's impossible to awaken a man who is pretending to be asleep." And I think that mostly what America is doing is pretending to be asleep. MJ: Do you really think that -- that your average American is well aware what's going on? JPB: Aware in some way that's subject to massive denial. We're aware but feel ourselves to be so helpless that we can't even summon up the necessary energy to drive five blocks to vote against it. (Cognitive Dissident: John Perry Barlow Interviewed by Tim Dickinson, Mother Jones) 1:06:33 PM    comment [] America: European Perspective III (William Pfaff) "The crisis between Americans and the Germans and French over war in Iraq only superficially arises from the Bush administration's determination since 2001 to attack Saddam Hussein. The two West European governments have seen the Iraqi dictator as a minor international problem, and war against him as likely to do more harm than good. But there is also a divergence in long-term perspective." "West Europeans, generally speaking, do not share America's ambitions of vast global reform or visions of history coming to an end. They had enough of that kind of thinking, and its consequences, with Marxism and Nazism. They are interested in a slow development of civilized and tolerant international relations, compromising on problems while avoiding catastrophes along the way. They have themselves only recently recovered from the catastrophes of the first and second world wars, when tens of millions of people were destroyed. They don't want more. " "The difference between European and American views is more sensibly explained in terms of an irresponsible and ideology-fed enthusiasm of Bush administration advisers and leaders for global adventure and power, fostered by people with virtually no experience, and little seeming imaginative grasp, of what war means for its victims. " . . . "... the intellectually claptrap war rhetoric of the Bush administration seems unbearably unimportant, evidence only of how remote the political class in the United States remains today from all the rest of the world." ("Europe and America: Some know more about war", International Herald Tribune) 1:00:42 PM    comment [] DVDs Rot Over Time "DVD media is susceptible to decay, which rots the disc over time and makes it unplayable. In order to make a backup of your disc (either to VHS or DVD/CDR or DivX file), you have to break the law, because the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent the access-control systems that prevent this. It's also illegal to distribute tools that do this." (via Boing Boing) 12:59:40 PM    comment [] How to Get Inside a Student's Head (Steven Pinker) "Finally, a better understanding of the mind can lead to setting new priorities as to what is taught. The goal of education should be to provide students with new cognitive tools for grasping the world. Observers from our best scientists to Jay Leno are appalled by the scientific illiteracy of typical Americans. This obliviousness leads people to squander their health on medical flimflam and to misunderstand the strengths and weaknesses of a market economy in their political choices." ("How to Get Inside a Student's Head", New York Times) 12:59:36 PM    comment [] John Perry Barlow on TIA (Mother Jones) "If you have the Total Information Awareness project working, it might be relatively easy to find everyone who had bought more than a ton of fertilizer and 500 gallons of diesel in the last year, which would be a great way of spotting potential Tim McVeighs -- but it would also spot half the farmers and ranchers in America. But having spotted them, it couldn't toss them out until it'd exposed them to the next layer of search. And the important thing to think about there is that they're no longer just looking for terrorist activity, they're looking for any kind of criminality at all -- which includes what I consider to be cultural crimes, like say marijuana smoking." "The terrifying new reality that we're dealing with here is the fact that all data are is now open to government scrutiny. All these things that have previously been sacrosanct and private are now available. And what's more frightening is that if you are managing one of those databases and the government says that it wants access to it for a completely open-ended search you are criminally liable if you if you tell the people in your database that the government is doing so. The whole dive shop thing [in June of last year], the government requested the records of everyone in the U.S. taking diving lessons] was exposed because one solitary dive shop owner in Los Angeles had the guts to come forward and say "Hey, we're not going to give you our database. And furthermore we're going to go to the press." (Cognitive Dissident: John Perry Barlow Interviewed by Tim Dickinson, Mother Jones) 12:58:27 PM    comment [] Amateur Hour: the "me" in media "The folks at Corante have launched what looks to be an excellent new weblog -- 'Amateur Hour: the 'me' in media', by Jonathan Peterson. I like what I'm seeing so far, and it's useful to see ideas from this bottom-up perspective. As regular readers of this blog know, I'm even more interested in how we join all the aggregate 'me' into 'we' to create a piece of tomorrow's 'We Media' journalism. But I'm putting Amateur Hour into my blogroll, and onto my daily list of reading." [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] While cutting and pasting to create this post, I came across the Shifted Librarian's lament that the Corante family of weblogs does not publish RSS feeds. Which is a darn shame, because they would have a place of honor in my information gathering ecosystem. Jenny also pointed out Corante's COPYFIGHT: the politics of IP blog. Yum! Please give us tasty RSS feeds. And from COPYFIGHT: check out the FOXTROT comic strip on DMCA, Disney, and piracy in general. Avast ye scurvy cyber-dogs! 12:58:23 PM    comment [] MP3 is Good For Me (Janis Ian) "The Recording Industry Assn. of America recently won a court ruling that effectively will cut off the recording artists it represents from new listeners. In RIAA vs. Verizon, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that anyone suspected of downloading so-called "infringing" files on the Internet -- usually an MP3 of a song -- could be sued. No evidence is required. An accuser fills out a form for a court clerk and the machinery is set in motion. The record companies say this decision will mean more money for musicians, but they have it backward. The downloaded music they're shutting off actually creates sales by exposing artists to new fans. . . . After I first posted downloadable music, my merchandise sales went up 300%. They're still double what they were before the MP3s went online. . . . Do you like '50s-style acoustic folk? Big band music? European synth? If the decision stands, you'll have to rely on word of mouth to find it -- not the Internet. Because if you get hold of an "infringing" file, you may find yourself on the receiving end of a record company lawsuit too expensive for any individual to fight. The entertainment industry has a long history of trying to shut down new technology. Most often, it has imagined that new products and services threatened industry sales. It's been proved wrong time and time again; it fought home video tooth and nail, but videotapes and rentals now bring in more money than movie releases. Music history is littered with record industry campaigns against reel-to-reel home tape recorders, cassettes, minidiscs, music videos and MTV." ("Don't Sever a High-Tech Lifeline for Musicians", Los Angeles Times) 12:57:13 PM    comment [] Digital Music Fans Get a Break in Europe (PC World) "The European Commission has presented a draft directive that punishes copyright infringement for commercial purposes, but leaves the home music downloader untouched, infuriating the entertainment industry. " "The proposed directive is meant to harmonize intellectual property rights enforcement laws in the 15-nation European Union (EU). It aims to strike "a fair balance" between interests of right holders and the opportunities the Internet offers to consumers, according to Commission documents." "Criminal sanctions apply only when copyright infringement is carried out intentionally and for commercial purposes, the Commission said." "A consortium of industry groups, including representatives of the tech industry as well as music companies, declared the proposal "inadequate." A tip of the pith helmet to Adam Curry for the pointer. 12:53:31 PM    comment [] John Perry Barlow: To Share or Not to Share? (Mother Jones) MJ: As a former lyricist still making money on royalties, what are your thoughts about online file sharing? JPB: You'd be hard pressed to find somebody who is more passionate about the belief that sharing music is good for you as a songwriter and good for humanity as a whole. The best thing that ever happened to the Grateful Dead, from an economic standpoint, was giving away our music. MJ: In terms of bootlegging? JPB: It wasn't bootlegging. We let people tape our concerts and distribute the tapes. And that became the first example I can think of viral marketing. The record companies certainly didn't know how to market us. So we became self-marketing through our tapes. MJ: And that helped you economically? JPB: No question. And it makes sense that it would. Because economic success in an information economy depends not on scarcity, but on familiarity. You can be the greatest songwriter in the history of song and if 10 people are the only ones who ever heard your songs, it doesn't matter. MJ: But what if 100 million people can get it online and nobody pays you a cent. JPB: But it doesn't tend to work that way in practice. Despite the fact that Deadheads had better recordings of all of our songs than we were putting out commercially, just about all of our albums have gone platinum over the years. Having the noncommercial version of information does not appear to operate genuinely as an inhibition against getting the commercial version. And also there are other ways of conducting commerce other than selling material objects with information on them. Performance for example. That's where most of the money is. All of this stuff about 'piracy' is fomented entirely by the record and film industries to perpetuate business models that are completely disadvantageous to both the creator and the audience. They are the biggest pirates in the deal. But unfortunately, they have made huge amounts of campaign donations and essentially created all the government that money can buy. And they have Congress. Congress is passing laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which make it so you can't break open the bottles that they're pouring your knowledge into. They directly contravene the right to know. The right to know, I think, though it may not be explicit in the Constitution is every bit as important as the right to speak. (Cognitive Dissident: John Perry Barlow Interviewed by Tim Dickinson, Mother Jones) 12:52:27 PM    comment [] Contentology "Contentology blends disciplines such as information architecture, information design, knowledge management, communications and media theory, usability engineering, Web design, "Webitorial" writing and Internet marketing. Simply put, it's about planning, developing, organizing, humanizing and publishing content." This website looks extremely useful! 12:52:12 PM    comment []

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