Monday, August 18, 2008
“Tropical Storm Fay, you're no Hurricane Andrew”
It's really nothing more than a really bad storm, and it's going to miss us entirely. All we'll get is a bit of rain and wind.
Okay, maybe quite a bit of rain and wind, but it's really nothing at all compared to sixteen years ago.
Just because I found it amusing
At Costco today: the price of a gallon of milk equaled the price of a gallon of gasoline.
Hmm … perhaps this is the type of post better suited for twitter …
“I knows me some ugly!”
I think I may need to dictate entries, then transcribe them, because I missed perhaps a third of what I wanted to cover in my talent post. One aspect was a bit more depth into the “dumbing down” argument Bunny stated.
To me, it seems as if each addition of media has always been about either producing the end result faster, cheaper, or to reach a wider audience, and one example I used in a later discussion about this with Bunny was books.
Prior to Johann Gutenberg building the first printing press, books were hand written (or copied) in a long and laborious process quite prone to mistakes. That, and the fact that the majority of people were illiterate, made for a very expensive product, and an extensive library might contain perhaps two dozen books, all chained to the shelves because of their expense.
But Mr. Gutenberg comes along and makes duplication faster and cheaper than before. More books at a cheaper price lead to increasing levels of literacy (not to mention breaking the monopoly The Church had on religious interpretation and scientific inquiry) to the point where the US and UK published more than 375,000 books in 2005 (and in the 90s publishers in the US published each year over twice the number of books published between 1881–91.
Indeed, today, thanks to increasing literacy, decreasing publishing costs and a thriv ing publication industry those that have the passion to write The Great American Novel can now do so.
With, sadly, predictable results.
But it's just not restricted to books. Take any media. Television and film, for instance. Both started out with a theater tradition (with television more closely related to vaudeville and film classical theater) and again, both took years to shed the trappings of theater to find their own voices, as it were. And actually, while both have a shared vocabulary (for lack of a better term), there are subtle distinctions between the two and what works for television doesn't necessarily work for film. They are two distinct, yet closely related, media.
And now, thanks to decreasing costs and rising demands, anyone can make their own television show or even film. In fact, digital video might become distinct from analog video because of advances in digital video manipulation (and that link is both indescribably cool and scary at the same time).
And how about photography? In the early 1800s, due to a rising merchant class (or middle class if you will) with a penchant for portraits, a lot of painters were looking for ways to meet the demand and thus was born photography. It's after significant advances in photography that painters (who didn't go on to become photographers) started drifting away from realism and into impressionism, pointilism, cubism and abstractism. And it took a good number of years for photography to transcend its own starting point in portraiture to become its own distinct artistic medium.
Oh, and speaking of photography, thanks to digital technology it's now cheaper and easier to take pictures than it ever was before. Also, it's cheaper and easier to manipulate photos today than it ever was before:
REMOVING her ex-husband from more than a decade of memories may take a lifetime for Laura Horn, a police emergency dispatcher in Rochester. But removing him from a dozen years of vacation photographs took only hours, with some deft mouse work from a willing friend who was proficient in Photoshop, the popular digital-image editing program.
Like a Stalin-era technician in the Kremlin removing all traces of an out-of-favor official from state photos, the friend erased the husband from numerous cherished pictures taken on cruises and at Caribbean cottages, where he had been standing alongside Ms. Horn, now 50, and other traveling companions.
“In my own reality, I know that these things did happen,” Ms. Horn said. But “without him in them, I can display them. I can look at those pictures and think of the laughter we were sharing, the places we went to.”
“This new reality,” she added, “is a lot more pleasant.”
…
After her father died several years ago, Theresa Newman Rolley, an accountant in Williamsport, Pa., hired Wayne Palmer, a photographic retoucher, to create a composite portrait of the two of them because she had no actual one of them together.
That photograph—of a moment that never happened—now hangs in her living room. It still brings tears to her eyes, she said.
“It's the only picture of my dad and me together,” Ms. Rolley said, adding, “If the only reason I can get one is cropping it in, it still means the same to me.”
I Was There. Just Ask Photoshop
Orwellian implications aside, this is just another medium to be artistically explored (and exploited) and may take years before it comes to have an artistic vocabulary of its own.
And sadly for me, Ze Frank said it so much better than I did (video transcription).
