Saved (Public Feed)

Leon Polk Smith (1906-1996) was drawn to geometric con- structivist art by the Red Indian attitude to life and nature of his forbears.

Great explanation. I intend to use this bit: By placing a compressor after the reverb and assigning the lead vocal sound as a side-chain trigger for the compressor, the reverb level will drop whenever the vocal part is performing but rise whenever a phrase finishes, providing long reverb times in gaps but apparently smaller levels when the vocal is in full flow.

A musical and social history of the effortlessly smooth, radio-bred style typified by the likes of Smokey Robinson, Luther Vandross, Anita Baker, and Sade.

The flood comes and it doesn't matter if the water is right or wrong - you get in the boat, you stack sandbags, you climb on the roof and wait for a helicopter, and sometime later the water is calm and the world looks different.

No one is innocent, but neither is anyone explicitly guilty. So much of the circular dialog here is about choosing a perceived side (pro-artist, anti-commerce) and assigning blame. I use this quote perhaps more often than I should, but, “When you make yourself out to be the victim, it is easy to feel righteous,” and that goes both ways, because you’re simultaneously vilifying someone else. If we’re going to prolong this ceaseless future-of-music debate, we must ensure it sticks to music culture, and reject the culture of victimization.

So while all these independent artists argue thievery, do you know who’s winning? Major labels. This week, of the top 100 tracks on Spotify, only 6% are on independent labels. Major labels have figured out that the game is about exposure and awareness, two things that they are actually quite good at. It’s not about royalty rates, thievery, or even quality of music.

Charitable spending in the United States has taken on the protective coloration of American business culture. At every level, charitable grants have come more and more to resemble investment projects, with a specific, measurable return on equity in mind.

Tina Fey has made huge, feminist strides for women in comedy at the same time that she has made comedy at the expense of women. Such is life when you attempt — as we all should! — to bring gender criticism out of the pure ether of sociopolitical discourse and attempt to deploy it in the real, messy world of commerce, consumption and popular culture.

So that’s the refreshing message I get from the pragmatic imagination of Idler Wheel: to reject the deus ex machina of the fairytale isn’t to give up on dreaming; to love and lose doesn’t have to mean never loving again.

Yesterday at Atlantic.com, Hans Villarica posted “Study of the Day: Why Crowded Coffee Shops Fire Up Your Creativity,” a rundown of a research study that alleges moderate noise is beneficial to creativity. While I’m intrigued by the question of noise and individual cognition in public(ish) spaces, the Atlantic post exemplifies the way that research loses its contextual trappings as soon as it enters “the cultural conversation” to become the kind of free-floating “news you can use” that inevitably gets “contradicted” in subsequent studies, undermining people’s faith in the academy. …even the most cursory skim of the actual journal article provides contextual information that undermines Villarica’s pithy, straightforward advice.

Commenting on Tom Ewing’s comment about how the word ‘troll’ has come to be applied to non-trolls. Once a word is upstreamed into popular stream of discourse, everyone with a bone to pick wants to grab it off its hook on the wall and see what it can do for them.

Working on a fishing boat in Alaska sounds so romantic.

Why the sci-fi visions of the 50s and 60s didn't come true. That pretty much answers the question of why we don’t have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes. Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something. But if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.

This is so, so awesome. Gate-triggered second and third mics on Bowie. Eno and Fripp innovating with feedback and synthesizers.

It’s scary how the Memo makes Sandler and Murphy whipping boys, simply to sustain true Hollywood vulgarity. It perpetuates the collapse of critical thinking. When Sandler-bashing (and I don’t just mean the ludicrous Razzies, ratified only by tabloid media) turns into excoriation, it is necessary to examine the media’s cowardice and prejudices. The Sandler Memo has reduced criticism to a profession of chain letters.

Why doesn't everyone ever point out that Eddie is the most successful comedian ever, by any calculation … and really, it's not even close? That he's one of the best stand-ups ever? That, before Eddie, only white actors were considered sure things at the box office? That Eddie made more money making kids' movies than anyone ever? Doesn't this seem … I don't know … relevant?

This 10,000-rpm, no-pulse artificial heart doesn't resemble an organic heart--and might be all the better for it.

The value of taking it slow with web startups.

It’s true, there’s not necessarily a business case to do this, but that is not the only thing Apple will be judged on in the decades to come. And that’s what I’m talking about here: how will future generations look back at Apple, and by extension its customers? Did we all live our lives by more than just the bottom line? Or were the late twentieth and early twenty-first century the decades in which we irrevocably decided that everything should be disposable (or even recyclable) after just two or three years?

What would happen if a working disposable camera were to travel from Massachusetts to Hawaii via first-class mail, with explicit instructions for its handlers to take photographs? You'd get a rare ...

Paul Ford: I don’t really make decisions. Instead, I pick my friends carefully. Then I go where people ask me to go; when no one needs me to go anywhere or do anything I work on longer essays that I’ll publish some day.

"Much of the power of Beach House's music lies in the way it forgoes simple, this-means-this storytelling in favor of communicating indescribable emotions," wrote Lindsay Zoladz in her Pitchfork review of their latest album, Bloom. Switch a few words around, and this perfect evocation could have emanated from DDB's pitch meeting to Volkswagen. Which is not to belittle Zoladz's criticism, nor to build up ad-speak as any more than means-to-an-end capitalist labor. Instead, this connection highlights the idea that critics and marketers often seek the same positive criteria in art.

Sandler's truth is that his onscreen persona has aged with his fans and experienced the same things at roughly the same time they've experienced it. Over the course of 20 years, Adam Sandler has gone from being a staple of sleepovers to dorm rooms to lousy apartments to the suburbs. And in that time he's remained, essentially, the same guy: He's "That asshole!," the incorrigible dickwad with a heart of gold, the loudmouth buddy who's progressively less fun to hang out with as you get older, the dude your wife forbids from crashing on the couch for "just a few days, I swear."

On the collaboration between the Norwegian writer-producers Stargate and songwriter Ester Dean, who have written tons of hits for Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Beyonce, and others.

On the height of a performer and what it’s like to attend a show as a woman.

If we are going to ask people, in the form of our products, in the form of the things we make, to spend their heartbeats—if we are going to ask them to spend their heartbeats on us, on our ideas, how can we be sure, far more sure than we are now, that they spend those heartbeats wisely?

Comparing the excellent work and perspective of seminal music writer Ellen Willis and the horribleness of ‘Record Collecting for Girls’ by Courtney E. Smith.

While I’m loathe to discuss the presidential race or the existence of God with strangers or even close friends and family members, I’ll gladly enter into conversations about whether it’s plausible that Joan did what she did with the dude from Jaguar in that recent episode of Mad Men, or why my beloved Packers will return to the Super Bowl this year. And I’ll do this even if I think the other person disagrees. If we end up jousting verbally for a few hours, it’s still fairly certain that we’ll be friends at the end of the night. I wouldn’t be as confident over a difference in party affiliation or spiritual beliefs.

Here’s an alternative hypothesis: Insanely long copyright terms are how the culture industries avoid competing with their own back catalogs. Imagine that we still had a copyright term that maxed out at 28 years, the regime the first Americans lived under. The shorter term wouldn’t in itself have much effect on output or incentives to create. But it would mean that, today, every book, song, image, and movie produced before 1984 was freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. Under those conditions, would we be anywhere near as willing to pay a premium for the latest release?

Now, tasked with little more than delivering a modest number of age-appropriate eyeballs, O’Brien seems both stunted and settled, lavishly rewarded for doing what he loves most for a company that seems to value the end product the least. It’s been well established by now that Conan O’Brien can’t stop. But it seems he’s only transcendent when someone is trying to make him.