With the sheer volume of media I produce, I have to offload files on a regular basis for the purposes of backup. Between the podcasts and photos, I’ve probably already consumed several terabytes in the past year alone, far exceeding the measly 1 TB allowance of my 2009 iMac.
Today, I had to offload some large files that could only be copied onto an NTFS hard drive. So I dug an old Western Digital MyBook out of my closet and tried to move the files on. In doing so, I discovered some old photos that I’d taken, but never uploaded onto Flickr:
The above is the first photoset that I ever put together. It was my final project for my Introductory Photography class in college. These photographs were taken at a UMass-Amherst fraternity over 7 years ago. They were taken with a film camera (Canon Rebel) on Kodak Tri-X black and white film, developed and printed by yours truly, then scanned into a computer in JPG form. I remember physically printing these photos out by hand in a dark room with all those delicious chemicals. Ahh, the good ol’ days.
It’s fascinating for me to look back into the past like this. Not only do the photos represent people who have undoubtedly moved on in their lives, but they also reveal my own technical and compositional limitations at the time. I’d like to think I’ve grown as a photographer, but I still think a few of these shots are pretty awesome.
A high school student who faked her pregnancy for six months as a social experiment stunned a student assembly this week by taking off the belly bundle. Only a handful of people knew that 17-year-old Gaby Rodriguez wasn’t really pregnant, including her mother, boyfriend and the principal, according to the Yakima Herald-Republic. They helped keep the secret from some of her siblings and her boyfriend’s family and students and teachers, all as part of a senior project on stereotyping.
[Update: The creators of FilmPulse have responded to the tidal wave of criticism leveled at them]
Yesterday, I started seeing a few isolated tweets about a new online show named “FilmPulse” pop up on my Twitter feed. Most of them were incredibly derogatory in nature, so I sought out more information on Google. I couldn’t easily find anything, but this morning my colleague Devindra informed me of the details: FilmPulse is ComingSoon’s attempt at a new video film talk show “focused entirely around today’s hottest and most interesting topics.” ComingSoon is a pretty big, heavily-trafficked website, so any attempt that they made into the film commentary/media space was going to be closely watched. In this case, I think the amount of attention went far beyond their expectations.
The first episode just debuted on Tuesday, April 19th, and people had some pretty strong opinions about it. Legendary blogger Anne Thompson was no fan, and Quint from Ain’t It Cool News declared that if AICN had launched a similar show, he would have quit. Even the commenters at ComingSoon didn’t seem to enjoy it. One of them wrote, “This is the worst thing I have ever seen on the internet, and I saw a video of that American hostage being decapitated in Iraq.”
Let me preface the following by saying that I pretty much never write about other podcasts/shows unless it’s to praise them (look through the archives of this blog and you’ll hopefully see that I’ve consistently held to this). I believe that as professionals, it does us no good to tear each other down. That being said, the intense interest and hatred for this show leads me to make an exception, and to try to critically evaluate what is it about this show that inspired such a strong reaction.
I’ve watched the entire 15-minute episode, which consists of a 3-minute discussion between two unnamed hosts about film ranking service Flickchart, followed by a 12-minute interview with Morgan Spurlock with one of the hosts (Update: As Will Goss points out in the comments below, they are actually named with a quick lower-third at around 3 minutes into the show. Their names are Vic and Julian). Let’s take these segments one by one, starting with the latter:
The Spurlock Interview – This is a fairly boiler-plate interview with Spurlock, who is almost always a dynamic speaker. I found nothing particularly offensive about the interview and it seemed as though the interviewer actually took the time to do a little research into Spurlock’s career and tried to ask some probing questions. It’s not the best interview I’ve ever watched with Spurlock, but there is very little that makes this interview worse than what dozens of film/entertainment journalism outlets put out on a weekly basis (except maybe for the host’s egregious mispronunciation of the word “meta”).
The Flickchart segment – This is really what seems to be generating much of the controversy for the show. FilmPulse begins with a rambling 3-minute discussion of how films are ranked, leading to an endorsement of FlickChart. One tweeter remarked that “according to FilmPulse, pre-90s films have no cultural relevancy/artistic merit. I’d have a joke about that but it makes me too fuckin angry.” So what did they say that was so offensive? Here’s a rough transcript of how it opens:
***
Host #1: When someone recommends a movie, there’s a few things you can do to avoid wasting an hour and a half of your time. First point is, is that film privileged as a classic? Is that the context in which the recommender heard of the film? If so, they may be privileging it because it would be politically correct to do otherwise.
Host #2: I think the problem is that we were born at a time when films were getting really interesting. I think there was a lot of really interesting independent filmmaking going on in the early ’90s and we were around for that. Before that, if you actually watch some movies from the ’70s that are considered classics like Bullitt or The French Connection, they’re incredibly boring to people our age because we saw The Matrix when we were 10.
Host #1: And IMDB reflects the trends of those ’70s films particularly strongly. Those were very likely rated by people who saw it when it came out. If I saw a black-and-white film today, it would knock my socks if that’s all I had to compare it against.
Later on…
Host #2: …it’s a new generation. It’s time for the next generation of voices.
Host #1: That leaves room for a tool that actually does a better job of ranking, leaving out the cultural aspect. And that would be Flickchart…
***
There are a couple of things in this exchange that are worth noting. First of all, the hosts never actually say that they subscribe to the views of this “new generation.” But they do strongly imply it. It’s this kind of tone deafness that I think internet film writers are lashing out against. From a presentational standpoint, you only have one chance to make a good first impression. If you devote the first two minutes of your first episode to explaining why the knuckle-dragging yahoos from your generation (which you heavily hint that you are a part of) think some of the sacred cows of film history are “boring,” you are probably going to catch a lot of crap from it.
What’s sad is this: the hosts kind of had a point! The generation of today DOES view films differently. They do expect more flash, more action, quicker edits, better special effects, and so on. But rather than delving into the root causes of this, or evaluating this from a normative perspective, the hosts focus on how to give people what they want, i.e. how to use a service (Flickchart) to circumvent conventional wisdom about classic films. That’s what people find so galling about this opening salvo.
More broadly, I believe the hate against these guys highlights a number of trends. Online film critics are constantly fighting an uphill battle in the realm of legitimacy and credibility. Can quality film criticism still survive in the internet age? Several prominent film critics have decried the democratizing power of the internet, how it gives a megaphone to anyone with an opinion, and how it financially rewards those with attention rather than those with quality. The sight of these two hosts discussing the datedness of black and white films was a direct provocation for these people. After their brutal criticisms were out in the open, the bandwagon-hopping was swift and brutal.
Beyond that, FilmPulse’s first episode, and the furor surrounding it, is instructive in terms of how difficult it is to make a good show as a general matter. From the outset, one needs to be able to answer the question: why should the audience care about what you are about to say? The most unequivocal thing I can say about this show is that the hosts failed to adequately answer that question. That being said, I speak from experience when I say that starting a show is a tricky, difficult, harrowing proposition. If you heard my first podcasts, you’d probably opt never to listen to me again. But that’s what is so great about content-creation: it’s always a process of refinement, of bettering oneself and one’s product. It’s this learning experience that makes the whole enterprise so exciting. And it’s why I can forgive even the crappiest of first episodes, so long as you learn from your mistakes and try to move on.
Will these guys get a second chance to do the same? Only time will tell. Here’s their initial episode. Judge for yourself.
Our registries desperately need to be reformed, and we could greatly benefit from better data about recidivism for different sex offense types — but that’s a much bigger task than simply screening on Match.com. On that front, maybe I am making perfect the enemy of good. Eliminating some high-risk predators from the online dating pool is better than nothing. Still, Match.com’s approach of banning all registered sex offenders — even those who are low-risk or who committed minor offenses — strikes me as unjust. In the case of Georgia, the site’s ban means restricting access to 95 percent of registered offenders who are not “clearly dangerous” and two-thirds who are low-risk. That seems an inept way to screen out men who pose a serious danger to women — especially when you consider that most assaults go unreported and most sex crimes are committed by those without a sex crime record.
MSNBC has a horror story about poker players who’ve had thousands of dollars frozen due to recent federal action against online poker companies:
The government has blocked U.S. gamblers from logging on to the offshore sites, which are accused of tricking and bribing banks into processing billions of dollars in illegal profits. Now gamblers who dreamed of enormous prizes in Las Vegas, or even used online poker to make a living, can’t access online bankrolls that in some cases reach six figures
This war against the online poker companies is stupid in every respect. First of all, there’s the blatant hypocrisy of allowing actual, legalized gambling in the U.S., yet penalizing the online component. How can that possibly be justified, except out of some severely misguided sense of morality? Furthermore, there are billions worth of untapped revenue that the U.S. government could make simply by explicitly allowing online poker to operate in this country and then taxing the services.
The always-fascinating Nate Silver also has a great analysis of this issue at his NYTimes blog.
Steven Weiss has written a brief profile of David Hobby, the man whose blog, The Strobist, has changed the face of the photography industry. With the amount of information Hobby was able to dole out to amateurs, amateurs started taking pretty darn good photos on their own. The growing number of skilled photographers has had unforeseen effects on the industry:
[P]rofessionals who are outraged at photographers like Lam or at sites like iStockphoto miss the point. Neither Lam nor iStock would have had such an impact if their photography didn’t meet the market’s demand for quality. What’s diluting the market for elite photography is the transfer of professional skill to amateurs—the work David Hobby is doing. Though his blog is entirely about how to light photographs at a professional level, his reader surveys reveal that 86 percent of his readers are amateurs.
As someone who’s just breaking into professional photography myself, these words ring true. But they’re also indicative of the transformative power that the internet has across industries. Film critics can’t make $60,000 per year writing reviews anymore, because mouth-breathing yahoos like me are willing to do it for free, while thousands turn up to hear it.
In the days ahead, I’m going to plan on focusing this blog a bit more on my photography. I’ve just gotten enough gear to the point where I feel ready to shoot/cover any event, and I have some accessories coming in that I’m actually kind of excited about. Expect more photo sets, as well as reviews of cool photo products. As always, your constructive comments are appreciated.
Don’t worry: I’m going to keep sharing the cool links and attempt the full-length blog post every now and again, just as I’ve been doing for the past 5-6 months. But for the near future, photography will be one of my main focuses, and I’ll hope we can learn about this stuff together.
It’s sad, but it’s also … great, really. Imagine if you’d seen everything good, or if you knew about everything good. Imagine if you really got to all the recordings and books and movies you’re “supposed to see.” Imagine you got through everybody’s list, until everything you hadn’t read didn’t really need reading. That would imply that all the cultural value the world has managed to produce since a glob of primordial ooze first picked up a violin is so tiny and insignificant that a single human being can gobble all of it in one lifetime. That would make us failures, I think.