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I found myself unexpectedly moved by this video essay on the virtues of Superman Returns. In fact, it moved me much more than the film itself, and forced me to re-consider my thoughts on the film (which have generally been lukewarm). Maybe we’ve gotten Superman Returns wrong this whole time?
(via Matt Zoller Seitz)
Some guy’s cell phone went off during a performance of Mahler’s 9th by the New York Philharmonic, and the media is using it as an opportunity to discuss the concept of live performances in our technology-saturated society. The Wall Street Journal has the gut-wrenching account of the event. The New York Times scored an interview with the offending patron, who apparently hasn’t been able to sleep for days:
Both [the conductor] Mr. Gilbert and Patron X found something positive in the episode. “It shows how important people still feel live performance is,” Mr. Gilbert said. “This is something people either consciously or implicitly recognize as sacred.” The patron agreed. The incident underscored “the very enduring and important bond between the audience and the performers,” he said, adding, “If it’s disturbed in any significant way, it just shows how precious this whole union is.”
John Gruber has some interesting thoughts on the design aspect of alarm rings.
We recently recorded our Top 10 of 2011 episode for the /Filmcast (you can read my top 10 here). As the episode wound down, I made some (admittedly) objectionable remarks about why I didn’t feel The Artist should deserve Best Picture this year. The Artist is a lovely, beautiful film that proves you don’t need sound effects or dialogue to make an effective film. But is it really the crowning achievement of cinema for the year 2011, as the potential Best Picture designation implies? (Incidentally, The Artist just this evening picked up the Critics Choice Award for Best Picture of the year).
After the episode, Matt Singer wrote me an e-mail in which he asked the following:
So [The Artist is] beautiful and moving by your admission, but Academy voters are only going to vote for it because it’s nostalgic and old fashioned? Dave your #1 movie of the year is WAR HORSE, one of the few recent movies as nostalgic and old-fashioned as THE ARTIST. What’s the difference?
I had a chance to attempt to answer Matt’s question in a lively AIM chat today. Here it is, slightly edited for length:
David Chen: I mean
David Chen: I actually think I have a point
***
So is there a difference between “your favorite” and “the best?” Can there be an “objective” best, by any conceivable measure? Or is it always just going to be what Academy members happen to kind of be into that year?
About a year ago, writer/director Kevin Smith premiered the film Red State at the Sundance Film Festival. While I enjoyed the film, the story behind Smith’s post-film Q&A was what dominated the headlines. Smith’s actions were tantamount to a direct insult to entertainment journalists and film distributors. In fact, Smith had been leading up to this for awhile, with a well-covered rant about press coverage of Cop Out and a refusal to screen Red State for press (or to participate in press events). Some of my film writer colleagues did not take too kindly to this, with people like Drew McWeeny promising never to write about Smith or any of his films forever.
Last night, a Twitter conversation ensued in which McWeeny and several others reaffirmed this position. You can find that conversation in its near entirety by clicking here.
I’ve thought about their position for a long time and I’m going to admit: I just don’t get it. When I think of industries such as politics or technology, most of the primary players in those industries have an antagonistic relationship with the press. There is almost always a disconnect between how someone wants their story/product to be covered, and how an observer/critic wants to cover it. But I cannot remember many instances in which press figures swore off covering someone because that person was being a dick, not to the journalist specifically, but to the press at large. In what other industry would such behavior by journalists be acceptable?
Kevin Smith is a public figure whose actions and films may or may not have significance for the fields he participates in (e.g. film, podcasting, distribution, etc.). Decide whether or not they do, and then proceed accordingly. But shirking your responsibilities because he’s acted dickishly? Because you have a distaste for covering him? Because his neurotic fans make you cringe? That just lessens all of us.
[Side note: I’ve found Exquisite Tweets to be a useful tool for preserving Twitter conversations. So many interesting things get said every day and vanish forever into the ether. This service helps put a stop to that.]
Despite the troll-y headline from this NYTimes piece, the point it makes is astute and important:
[T]echnology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse.
[Update: We have negotiated a way to get back on Stitcher. They are now streaming directly from our podcast feed and are showing no ads over our content. My original post follows.]
Stitcher is an extremely convenient mobile app that allows you to subscribe and listen to your favorite podcasts by streaming them (i.e. without having to “sync” them). Over the past few months, I’ve encountered many listeners who have appreciated consuming my shows in this way, and I’ve used the Stitcher app myself a bunch of times. Unfortunately, I can no longer support this service.
Since I learned about Stitcher, I always just assumed that the service taps into the content directly using a podcast’s RSS feed (similar to how Downcast, which is a spectacularly great app, does it). I started to suspect that this was not the case when I noticed differences in audio quality between an “official” episode of one of my podcasts and the Stitcher version of the episode. They were clearly compressing the audio of the show in some way. Compressing makes it easier to listen to the show if you’re streaming it over a mobile data connection, but I wondered what the implications were for show producers such as myself.
I recently had the chance to learn about these implications through a blog post by Nerdist podcast host Chris Hardwick. His post is long and detailed, but it comes down to this: Stitcher essentially creates a copy of each one of your episodes, compresses the audio to facilitate streaming, then serves up that copy via their servers. They also sell in-app adds on this content.
As a podcast host/producer, there are two important implications for this:
1) People are downloading episodes in a way that prevents us from keeping track of these downloads. Whenever we are lucky enough to have a sponsor, that sponsor typically pays us based on how many downloads we have. No Stitcher downloads/streams counted towards these totals.
2) Stitcher sells advertising on top of our content, essentially making money off of our “free” labor. This is a bit unjust on its face, but moreover, as Hardwick points out, this can become complicated when Stitcher’s sponsors conflict with our own.
Earlier today, I requested that both of my shows (The /Filmcast and The Tobolowsky Files) be removed from Stitcher. The representative I spoke with was incredibly accommodating and professional and as of now, both podcasts have been removed.
I know many of you listen to our show using Stitcher and I am deeply sorry for any inconvenience this change may cause your routine. That being said, if you listened to our show via Stitcher, it means we didn’t get to track your downloads and any revenue generated from your downloads went straight to Stitcher (Stitcher has an ad partnership program but why would I enlist in that when I can just sell advertising on my own?). While being de-listed from Stitcher nominally takes away from our exposure, it will maximize our ability to monetize our podcast and thus, will hopefully increase our overall longevity.
In my interactions with the Stitcher representative today, I learned that Stitcher apparently now has a way to tap into original podcast feeds, thus allowing us to keep track of downloads. Obviously this method comes with a number of disadvantages for the listener; most importantly, audio with large file sizes is difficult to stream and can end up costing a ton of data. Nonetheless, we may want to take them up on this option one day.
I’m not ready to do that right now. The problem is that for many months, Stitcher scraped our content, streamed it from their own servers, and sold ads on top of it. I find it objectionable and baffling that any company would think this is acceptable behavior, especially a company that purports to support a community of DIY bootstrappers that is the podcasting community. As a result, even if Stitcher has improved their ways, they’ve already destroyed a lot of trust in my mind. It may be possible for them to rebuild it, but that will take a long, long time.
This past year cemented Twitter as a service that has definitely changed the way we think about communication. I enjoyed the following retrospectives about the best (and worst) tweets of 2011:
Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon has a nice overall list of the best and worst tweets of the year.
Time magazine also has their own best and worst tweets list, most of them with a political slant.
The Wall Street Journal has a list of the best celebrity tweets of 2011.
Warming Glow has compiled some pretty amazing tidbits from the world of television.
Mashable has a list of 2011’s shocking social media disasters.
[And these are not really tweets, but New York magazine has some of the best quotes of the year]
Some valuable perspective from Dear Coke Talk (via Rosa):
Annihilating your ego is the quickest way to happiness. Embracing your insignificance will make your anxiety suddenly seem ridiculous. You’ll recognize petty emotions like schadenfreude and envy for the childish tantrums that they are. You’ll stop comparing your talents to others, and you’ll be able to enjoy being good at something without the need to be great.