2010/3/5 photo
I’ve been meaning to share this since I saw it about a week ago. I didn’t watch much of the Olympics this year because we don’t have cable TV in the house, but what little I did see I watched at the gym while on the treadmill or elliptical machine. Those personal TV’s are a handy motivation if the Olympic Games or a violent UFC fight is on. People would be fitter if the televisions only played inspiring sports. You can tell when you walk into the exercise room which people are watching Soap Opera’s while they slowly glide to no progress at all.
Of the Olympic moments I saw this year, the above photo of Andreas Wank after he landed his final team ski jump was my favorite. It’s a winner’s pose to inspire us all. I really felt the burn that day. I found energy reserves I didn’t know existed. Thanks Andreas. (photo via Zimbio)
2010/3/3 article
Restricting embedded videos is a bad idea. It doesn’t benefit the business, the artists, or the consumers. In a succinct response to the restrictions record companies like EMI have placed on embedded YouTube videos, Damian Kulash, from OK Go, writes:
“[EMI] needs to recognize the basic mechanics of the Internet. Curbing the viral spread of videos isn’t benefiting the company’s bottom line, or the music it’s there to support.”
So why do large companies keep trying to work against the system? Sharing is what makes the Internet go round — one of the “basic mechanics” — but some companies missed that memo. The figures in Kulash’s article leave no room for suggestion: by restricting video sharing, companies are burning their profit, damning their artist’s popularity, and throwing away the best advertising tool on the market. Would they be happy to watch the smoke rise if they knew what started the fire? (more…)
2010/3/2 music or die
“It’s not about the hair, it’s not about the shoes, it’s about the music. The best way to experience the music is and has always been to listen to it, to watch the performance. We sometimes forget that as fans, we get sidetracked by the other crap.
I wanted to expose people to the depth of sound hiding in the cities they live in. After talking to friends, I realized that many of the bands I consider great and even popular are completely unheard of to most people. I’m not bitter towards mainstream music, but the Canadian music scene has so much to offer — minus the shoes and the hair.”
Straight from the mouth of the man himself. Check out Jeff’s project at Minus the Music to be enlightened, to be exposed, to hear the many flavors of indie music flowing out of Canada’s great cities. No decorative distractions, just the music.
2010/3/1 the perennial reading list
School and a new job have been devouring my free time at an exasperating rate. I always have to read something, but my list this month is a lot shorter.
I found Carson McCullers’s first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, slightly battered and buried in the bargain bin. It was beautiful and sad. I’ve never read anything by McCuller’s before, but her praises are well deserved.
I am also halfway through a very different novel I got from my Dad, The Aquitane Progression by Robert Ludlum. He likes to read these espionage-action novels, and I thought I’d give it a try. The military jargon is a bit of a tangle, but the descriptions of Europe and the spy drama keep it interesting.
2010/2/27 excerpt
The word depression is used as a “catch-all” term to describe a “spectrum of symptoms.” I am wary of the medical standard which of late seems to prefer to medicate first and diagnose later, especially in children. Jonah Lehrer helps us to see that depression should not be dismissed so quickly:
“If depression didn’t exist — if we didn’t react to stress and trauma with endless ruminations — then we would be less likely to solve our predicaments. Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain.”
A hefty price. However, it’s not always that simple, either:
“To say that depression has a purpose or that sadness makes us smarter says nothing about its awfulness. A fever, after all, might have benefits, but we still take pills to make it go away. This is the paradox of evolution: even if our pain is useful, the urge to escape from the pain remains the most powerful instinct of all.”
Read more about Depression’s Upside on the New York Times website.