[contextly_auto_sidebar id="6UAzCSm7AdyfFjCMRPoo70IpwVaaVVHl"] TODAY your humble blogger speaks to the musicians' rights advocate and gets into some new territory -- not just the way music streaming hurts artists, but the US government's complicity in the current mess, the feckless Department of Justice, and the irrational way people view the Internet in general. Here's Lowery in my Salon … [Read more...]
Archives for 2014
One Publisher Takes on Amazon
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="TUHr64z55mkmhkosqXugONtslgtzjq1a"] IT'S hard to know what an author or publisher should do when faced with Amazon's dominance of the market: It's hard to withdraw from a distributor who handles so large a portion of book (especially e-book) sales. But just as several small record labels have pulled their music from Spotify and other streaming services, the … [Read more...]
Will the Internet Ever Get Less Nasty?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="sX5mpeff0G48ZdDK8B8DiylO4zB4YCnG"] BY now, anyone who writes for a living knows the kind of nasty comments and chatter that accompanies almost any public utterance. (This seems like a cross between the hostility that's bred on places like Fox News and the larger "snark" culture, with an extra layer of nastiness unique to the Internet.) How did it happen, what are the … [Read more...]
Journalism’s Phony Golden Age
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="v0eG90rPghAVd66MQLAYaRsKRNlqKbJ4"] IT was only, I guess, a matter of time before the digital utopians started telling us -- including laid off scribes -- how great journalism has gotten. The latest is a Wired piece, "How the Smartphone Ushered in a Golden Age of Journalism. (It's venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and not the Wired writer, who calls it a "golden … [Read more...]
Endgame: Culture and Suicide
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="3jo4huPHGtmGS71JRG98EimGVUeNIngq"] HOW has Western literary culture dealt with the ending of life? How do we see it now? Today guest columnist Lawrence Christon looks at a bundle of complex and painful issues, as recent as the death of Robin Williams and as old as the work of Albert Camus and perhaps Shakespeare. This one is not for the faint of heart. "ENDGAME," … [Read more...]
German Writers Stand Up to Amazon
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="hPvvYov9l3ydhtOyPeAaXmviWmWA6lEM"] WHETHER opposition to the online octopus is growing and spreading is hard to tell, but some of the anger we've seen in the US literary community seems to be driving authors in the German-speaking world as well. A New York Times story reports that more than a thousand German-language authors have written a letter of protest. The … [Read more...]
Will Indie Film Survive?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="u8nyNEUGiw9T3t2MS4otkepc3HaoApPt"] ONE of the casualties of our current cultural situation is the erosion of the middle -- the middle class, the midlist author, the middlebrow, and the mid-budget film. Independent film, with its interest in boundary pushing and risk-taking, may not seem to belong in that company, but it's vulnerable to all the same forces. The New … [Read more...]
Allah-Las and Woods in Echo Park
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="pHxetFmD8PAhck5zTGruKBeGPrlL5XUG"] IT was 1966 again on Friday night, as two of today's best retro-rock bands, the folky Woods and the garage-psych Allah-Las played at the free Echo Park Rising Festival. Ideally I would have taken in more of the festival, but these were two really strong sets. I was there to see LA's Allah-Las, whose reverb-heavy take on folk rock … [Read more...]
The “Antifree” Movement Takes on “Free”
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="hMpJwAX7ROFisoxfaiwhWpOQbmzRcRS5"] BY now, we're all pretty familiar with the information-wants-to-be-free argument, and if you write for a living, or have had to endure numerous unpaid internships to break into a creative field, you know it all too well. A wide-ranging, perceptive, and slightly arch essay in the hip Brooklyn journal n+1 sketches out the … [Read more...]
The Importance of the Humanities
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="K0EQ32yHOf7wBeZF6STx4dV8MrY6105L"] A GREAT Nicholas Kristof column today gets at the value of the humanities, especially philosophy, in a pragmatic, hyper-digital and neoliberal age. He writes, near the top: I wouldn’t want everybody to be an art or literature major, but the world would be poorer — figuratively, anyway — if we were all coding software or running … [Read more...]