Skip to content →

Category: media

The Trumpian Wager

This presidential election will test the maxim that there's no such thing as bad publicity. The Republican candidate is operating on the theory that policy and issues don't matter. If the candidate can dominate the news cycle, meaning that he is the topic of more televised conversations than his opponent, he will win the election. He believes he's doing very well, and by his measure, he is. He dominates the national news every day and every night. He's all anyone can talk about. He's confident he can continue to dominate every news cycle between now and the election. Every voter in the country will have heard his name more than any other. No one has ever run a presidential campaign on that theory.

The reason the Republican candidate doesn't need to know any policy is because he only uses a single measure for his relative success or failure each day. If he's the lead story on a majority of national and cable newscasts, then he's won the day. He's quite right in saying that people will be writing books about his campaign. Critics of his methods miss the point. The more outrage they express, night after night, the more he believes he's winning.

The wager he's making is that the winner of the election will be the candidate who has the best ratings.

 

Comments closed

Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good

There are many pursuits where it's wise not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But we've reached a point in technology, entertainment, apps and design where there are an abundance of “good” things. We've hit “peak good.”

Linda Holmes, writing for her NPR media blog reported that John Landgraf, CEO of the FX Network, has called a top in the TV business. We've reached peak television.

Landgraf predicted that 2015 or 2016 would represent what he called “peak television” in the United States in terms of sheer volume, followed by a period of contraction. And note well: He doesn't believe all the excess inventory comes from bad and mediocre shows. He says good shows are part of the problem, too: “There's just too much competition, so much so that I think the good shows often get in the way of the audience finding the great ones.” (Do you hear that, people who make good shows? You're getting in the way of greatness.)

Entertainment networks now come in two flavors, realtime (old school), and random access catalog. Both have the same basic ingredients: one is a programmed stream of shows; the other is a set of options / suggestions to help you program your own stream. Both have a catalog of new and old material, while realtime networks include live sports and news.

Netflix, when it was the only game in town, seemed like a universal library of almost all the films and television shows you'd want to see. Once other players entered the space and began competing for “content,” the game changed. HBO, Netflix, Showtime, Starz, Hulu, Amazon, and Acorn are the new networks. And the realtime networks have adopted the catalog strategy as well by making their shows available via “on demand.” It's rumored that Apple will be joining the fray with its own original productions in the near future. (It'll be interesting to see how being a content producer changes a technology company that has traditionally been an intermediary with no skin in the game.)

With all the new and historical content now available through various contortions of cable, airplay, computer and app, it's still necessary to apply Sturgeon's Law. 90% of it is crap. In 2015 there will be around 400 scripted original English-language television series. Because we've grown the pie, the 10% that might be considered good is still too many. Most these new programs won't find an audience. Even the “good” ones. The audience has simply been over-served, which means the economics of production will work out for roughly the same number as in the past. The rest will be available to view on-demand from the back catalog.

In these so-called economies of abundance, it's important to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Lots of entertainment, music, games, apps and social networks may be good, but that doesn't mean they're worth your time. Good isn't good enough anymore–it's the new baseline. It's the new “C” grade. As an audience member, these networks are competing for our attention (to sell memberships or sell to advertisers). When we deem something “good,” we need to acknowledge that the scale goes up from “good” to “very good” to “excellent.”

The bubble of “goodness” may be short lived as investors begin to experience losses, and the oversupply of new programs can't find audiences and advertisers to sustain them. This particular bubble has been inflated by the technology bubble. When there's a lot of money floating around, inevitably, rich guys are talked into investing in show business. It's a story as old as show business itself.

 

Comments closed

The Allure of “Is She Available?”

igor-goldkind
 

It’s a book of poetry, although in it’s most complete form, it’s not exactly a book. It’s more of a CD-ROM, if there were such a thing anymore. You could describe it as a multimedia presentation with words, animated images, music, comic strip panels and recitations. Igor Goldkind’s new publication “Is She Available?“, despite its intentional defiance of category, probably should be called poetry.

Full disclosure: I’ve counted Mr. Goldkind as a friend for almost four decades. This reading is of the text, a little of my friend, and the journey of a poet.

Perhaps the best example of poetry making in this mode would be the work of William Blake — the poet, painter and printmaker. Blake was also a technologist. He invented relief etching to combine words and imagery on to the same printing plate. When we read his poetry today, for the most part, we read it extracted from its original context — simplified as though we were looking at a web page in “reader view.” The poem’s text is transformed into its most legible and conservative form. The images are removed and the typography tamed. Although we find it fascinating, critics have trouble producing a close reading of a work that broadcasts on so many different channels. Film, or video game, criticism may come closest to accounting for all the levels.

This reading will focus on the text of “Is She Available?”, but there’s much more in this work that merits investigation. Return visits to view, and review, the work from different angles will be rewarded.

 

odysseus and sirens4
 

I put these poems into the larger frame of a poet’s journey. Joseph Campbell called it the Monomyth, or the “Hero’s Journey.” The poet leaves home, wanders and experiences the world, and then returns home, both changed and unchanged. For this poet, home was San Diego, California, when it seemed like the city lacked everything. It was a time before the Internet and corporate franchising made every place much the same. Looking outward, the rest of the world appeared filled to the brim — the location of danger, culture, and life. I’m going to examine four parts of the text that bring this theme into relief.

Whatever the format, the reader will be faced, first of all, with the title. The work is called “Is She Available?” Who is this “she?” Is “she” that obscure object of desire? Is she a lover, a daughter, mother, or perhaps she’s the muse of poetry itself. Whoever she is, she’s absent. There’s a separation, an aesthetic distance from which she’s viewed. The phrase also gives us a sense of her allure, her magnetism. At the outset of the poet’s journey, “she” may well be the call of the road — the as yet unfulfilled promise of the wider world.

 

peter-wendy
 

In the poem “What Peter Said to Wendy” we see the mechanics of desire, and of the journey. If desire were to be fulfilled, then the journey would be over before it had even begun. For the journey to continue, the object of desire must be desire itself — the desire of desiring. In the story of Peter Pan and Wendy Darling, Peter resides in Never Never Land. It’s a place where time idles in childhood reverie. Wendy knows at some point she must return to the world. Peter knows that he needs to give Wendy something she can take back, even if he can’t follow her there.

From “What Peter Said to Wendy”

Fear not my audacity Wendy.
I do not care for your heart, as you might think, I care for mine
And the reflection of truth’s desire I see hiding
in the forest of your eyes

It’s in the journey that the contours of the poet’s life come in to focus. Each of the poems in the volume encapsulate a moment along the path. Textures that were invisible in the youth of small town Southern California are now clearly visible. Family connections received and created take hold with real and vital force. There are battles with daemons both internal and external, and the poet tries on a series of masks to see how they fit. Think of it like a medicine man tasting all of the plants in the surrounding landscape to get of sense of their effect on the human mind and body. There’s nothing more real than this.

 

Berlin-Wall-Liesen-Strasse
 

At the far edge of the journey, the poet encounters a mirror image of his starting point. For a long time San Diego felt like a very large village. Perhaps, it’s a city now, but it remained a small town for the longest time despite its ballooning population. At first walls were built to keep the poet in, and he had to escape. Now, in this village out in the world, they’re built to keep him out. In the poem “Dry Stone Walls”, he encounters the narrow attitudes that first inspired his journey into the wider world.

You can’t build a wall round a village
You can try
You can stack honeyed stone upon stone, fashion judgement upon judgement,
into a long pretty barrier of decorative limestone
to keep the outsiders out and the insiders in
But you can’t build a wall round a village
the sun and the wind
will always find their way in

In the prototypical “Hero’s Journey”, the hero engages in a climactic battle and emerges victorious. This moment signals the change that allows him to return home. In this work, it’s the poem “Dry Stone Walls (You Can’t Build a Wall Round a Village)” that serves this purpose. The battle that he didn’t wage at home is fully engaged here. And it’s not that Frankenstein’s Creature somehow turns round and defeats the villagers, with their torches and pitchforks, but rather like “the sun and the wind”, the poet can now come and go as he chooses. The walls don’t and can’t keep the wider world at bay. The narrow attitudes of the village have lost their force, and the atmosphere of the wider world has equalized with his point of origin. San Diego has become a part of the wider world; the spell has been broken.

 

 

gullivers_travels_ships
 

The poem “San Diego Bay” marks the poet’s return. Filled with the experiences of the world, he is gigantic compared to the young man of so many years ago. San Diego Bay is now the size of a bath tub, and the giant poet washes off the dust of the road in its waters.

San Diego bay… Oh San Diego bay
Your leaden toy war ships cast a heavy grey cloud
on my sunlit-blue sky return.

San Diego bay… San Diego bay
You rounded sheet of crinkled foil at six AM in the morning looking out, looking in, at the sheet of this world, I bathe in you now.

San Diego bay
San Diego bay
You’re my Dirty
bathwater
now.

Igor Goldkind’s “Is She Available?” is filled to the brim with sparkling and challenging poetic sketches forged during his travels. The e-book is a thrill ride that’s built up layer-upon-layer on a bedrock of poetic text. This collection of poems isn’t the well-behaved straight lines of text you may be used to; they explode into sound, music and image; refusing the standard-issue poetry container.

The form of this “book” is another dimension of the journey these poems take us on. The physical form of the poems, their inscription on a multimedia surface, stops the reader’s internal voice from assuming an open-mic night, timid, confessional, “poetry voice,” and demands something more. It’s a loud book and may not be appropriate for reading in a quiet library. In fact, one of its more challenging technical aspects is figuring out the dynamic range of the poem’s sound. There may be a temptation to let the “book” read itself to you. But to take in its full effect, you’ll need to perform it yourself, at full volume.

Comments closed

Driving the Map, Not the Territory

It's classic slight of hand. What's breathtaking is that it caught the entire country in its misdirection. Google demos its driverless car, the tiny one with no steering wheel and no brakes. The media shows us the pictures and then asks Detroit why this car is coming from the Silicon Valley and not the car manufacturers. Clearly another sign that U.S. manufacturers are hopelessly behind the times.

A few weeks ago Alexis Madrigal wrote an article for The Atlantic called “The Trick That Makes Google Self-Driving Cars Work.” In his piece, Alexis explains how the trick is done. Self-driving cars have very little to do with the machinery of the car itself. In case you hadn't noticed Google has an extremely robust mapping application. The self-driving car can only drive itself through a territory with a sufficiently fine-grained 3-D map. That's because the car isn't really driving on the streets, it's driving on the map. This is a story about virtual reality for cars. And it's not about who builds the cars, it's about who owns the virtual streets.

 

Comments closed