New York Magazine has something called “The Approval Matrix” which is their “deliberately oversimplified guide to who falls where on out taste hierarchies.” I particularly enjoyed a snippet from this week’s Approval Matrix: “Obama has the most badass Secret Service code name ever: Renegade. What’s up now, axis of evil?”
Bear with me on this: (kottke.org) is, apparently, the most popular post on kottke. It’s not actually written by Jason Kottke. I didn’t understand it when I first read it, almost exactly 8 years ago. Today, I think it makes sense.
I’m not a bit American Idol watcher, but Mykala just pointed me towards this fantastic cover of Lennon’s “Imagine.” It’s this 17 year old David Archuleta, and he’s just spot-on perfect with every note. I think we have a winner!
Consider this: one month after only part of a song called “New Soul” by Yael Naim backed the first commercial for Apple’s Macbook Air, the song debuted at #9 on the Billboard Hot 100. Disregarding its precipitous tumble down the charts after that, it is easy to see that featuring music on TV can have a profound effect on sales. This brings me to my idea: illustrated radio.
I’m not talking music videos — not only has the culture around those been absolutely beat into the corporate cemetery by MTV/VH1, but the idea is tired. We need something simple and fresh. Here’s what you do (the details are very important):
Finally, call the show “Music.” Do not call it anything else. You are promoting music, you are sharing good music. But don’t call the show “Good Music,” because that’s an opinion. The goal here is to take all the strengths and innovations of podcasting and combine them with the strengths of network TV.
KEEP IT SIMPLE. If you do that, this show will. Be. Awesome.
Charles Apple provides great before and after comparisons between the old and new Saint Paul Pioneer Press designs. I could live with the Myriad (har) of typefaces used in the new design, if only they didn’t use the face Stainless. That one is driving be absolutely batty. Every time I look at it, I’m thinking Star-Trek type computer screen displays; it’s too sharp and computer-like.
Also, I realize they went for a USA Today style color coded section-type thing… but man did I prefer the whitespace employed before to identify a section. Graphic design is really difficult, especially on something like a newspaper — I just think that this design needed a few more revisions before going public.
They’re not fonts! explains the difference between “font” and “typeface.”
Graphic designers choose typefaces for their projects but use fonts to create the finished art.
Essentially, if you are talking about the appearance of text, you are speaking about what typeface it is set in. “Font” is like an implementation, or an instance of a typeface. Quoth wikipedia:
In typography, a font (also fount) is traditionally defined as a complete character set of a single size of a particular typeface. For example, all characters for 9 point Bulmer is a font, and the 10 point size would be another font.
I’ll have to start saying that correctly.
Know the song “Hallelujah”? The one that goes “I heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord, but you don’t really care for music, do you?” (That was from memory!) Anyhow, I first heard it but Rufus Wainwright, and loooved it. However, there’s much much more to this song. In this great piece, clapclap.org covers everything you’d need to know about the song.
Today, in contrast, one particular Leonard Cohen song is featured prominently in no less than three separate episodes of teen uberdrama The OC, and can be heard in at least twenty-four separate movies and TV episodes, almost always as the soundtrack to a montage of people being sad.
What I hope to show today is how, exactly, that happened to a song called “Hallelujah.”
What I find particularly hilarious are the comments about the original:
This is more like your uncle’s band playing in a warehouse, assuming your uncle was weird and labored under the impression that he was a crooner. It passed into the public realm almost unnoticed, and remained that way for some time; in the major Cohen biography, published in 1996, there’s no entry for the song in the index, despite the fact that the book’s name is the same as the album on which “Hallelujah” originally appears.
Read on for the rest of the fascinating story. I’m not going to quote one more piece of the story because you should see the whole thing. Yet… I can’t resist:
The usage was so pervasive that, based on the numerous OC Mix CDs that were released, it seemed to inspire musicians to create their own soundalike songs, and to boost those artists who had already been working that sound. (This was the “indie rock boom” that the OC supposedly instigated, bringing sensitive-crooner bands like Death Cab For Cutie to fame and fortune.)
The most prominent example is Imogen Heap, someone who I, at least, had not heard of since a cassingle was mailed to me in 1998. But Heap’s song “Hide and Seek” soundtracked the final moments of the OC’s second season, the slot occupied a year before by a full rendition of Buckey’s “Hallelujah.” This pairing was so successful that, for the finale of season three, the final moments were accompanied, once again, by Heap, this time covering —and, to be clear, I am not shitting you—“Hallelujah.” This is the point where the OC consumes itself whole, and it is a sickeningly gorgeous thing to watch.
Articles, coverage like this, is why blogs are winning. Any magazine editor in their right mind would say “this piece, so involved and extensive as it is, can not run in any music magazine.” But they would be wrong. Yet anything truly interesting, in depth, or innovative continues to be placed either online or in a frighteningly few publications. And so the exodus from the printed to the digital word continues. (via Deron Bauman at kottke, via Andew Simone)
It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you’ve got “it” when you’re so busy that each day slides by in a swirl of homework and exams. When there’s a clear path laid before you, with structured credits and definite milestones, you can fool yourself into living and growing by the academic metric alone. Some are intelligent enough to see beyond the schedule and grow; others, such as myself, blindly follow the rigmarole.
So, blithely, I emerged from the snow-blindness of endless textbooks and assignments, thinking I had some grasp of things. The real world, without explicit benchmarks and frighteningly lacking in guideposts and waypoints, is a much much messier place than college.
This is not to say that 9 months out of college have helped me reach some epiphany. No, I make no such grand assertions. The time has, however, allowed the veil to lift and afforded me invaluable perspective. Diving back into the structure of professional school this coming August, I must realize I do not yet have an understanding of the world but of the world’s messiness.
After all, the fabric that weaves our lives in and out of people and places is not staid or predictable but a messy, complex, intricate, ethereal, transient, gossamer thing. A beautiful thing.
This Threadless T-Shirt by QuasiProto says “HONK if you’re about to run me over.” Too bad it’s sold out.
Whilst doing a bit of research for a project, I took the time to look through Wikipedia Statistics — the results were staggering. Consider this: Wikipedia averages 40 thousand (40 000) requests per second. Thus, in 3 seconds, Wikipedia receives more requests than tumbledry has in the past 5 years.
What’s even more staggering is the traffic: Wikipedia averages 500 megabytes per second in bandwidth. For reference, that’s equivalent to about 12 music albums per second.
Totals: over 100 billion requests per month for Wikipedia articles, with over 1.3 petabytes of data. Plugging those numbers into something like Mosso’s calculator shows that hosting a website with traffic similar to Wikipedia’s would cost over $3 million per month.
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