Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 147

Pitchfork: Musician Damon Krukowski on Earning Money via Pandora and Spotify

Damon Krukowski of Damon & Naomi and, earlier, of Galaxie 500 walks us through the math of artists’ earnings from streaming music services. This made the rounds quite a bit yesterday when it was published, thanks in no small part to the fact that it’s very well written and chock full of quotable lines and eye-opening figures:

“My BMI royalty check arrived recently, reporting songwriting earnings from the first quarter of 2012, and I was glad to see that our music is being listened to via these services. Galaxie 500’s ‘Tugboat,’ for example, was played 7,800 times on Pandora that quarter, for which its three songwriters were paid a collective total of 21 cents, or seven cents each. Spotify pays better: For the 5,960 times ‘Tugboat’ was played there, Galaxie 500’s songwriters went collectively into triple digits: US$1.05 (35 cents each).”

I have a soft spot for Galaxie 500; their three amazing albums figured prominently into my misspent youth. For my money, the band is responsible for some of the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard. So it’s very disheartening to hear that even artists of that calibre are so ill-served by streaming economics. Read the full column at Pitchfork.

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Bean: A Counting App

Bean is a very simple app for iPhone that lets you increment counters with whatever labels you choose. If you want to remember, say, how many donuts you’ve had this week, just label one of the pre-made counters and tap it each time you scarf one down. If you over-count — or just want to cheat a little bit — a two-finger tap decrements the counter. Easy.

The functionality isn’t earth-shattering, but the interaction design is really nicely done: the counters are arrayed in a colorful grid reminiscent of the Metro design language of Windows, and you pinch and zoom to bring focus to each counter.

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The app debuts today so you can grab it right now for US$0.99. Find out more at the developer’s site.

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Kohei Nawa

Longtine sculptor Kohei Nawa’s “Trans” series features human silhouettes produced from 3D scanning combined with texture mapping to create abstract, organism-like forms.

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The People vs. James Bond

Last weekend I went to see “Skyfall,” the twenty-third entry in the now fifty year old James Bond franchise.

As an action film, it’s more than adequate, thanks largely to its overqualified crew: it was directed by Oscar winner , whose name few people expected to see attached to popcorn franchises like this, given his past highbrow features like “American Beauty” and “Revolution Road.” I’m not a big fan of those movies, but they’re easily better entertainments than the majority of what has been issued under the 007 moniker through the decades.

Just as meaningfully, “Skyfall” was shot by one of today’s most accomplished cinematographers, . The first half of the film features a fight sequence in a Shanghai skyscraper that, thanks to Deakins’ almost audacious stylization, surely qualifies as the most visually stunning Bond scene since Honey Ryder emerged from the sea in “Dr. No.” On its own, it’s almost worth the price of admission.

Defensive Postures

Despite all this abundant talent, there is a clumsy brittleness at the film’s center, when it endeavors to make a half-baked argument for itself. It involves Judi Dench’s M character, who has suffered through appallingly slight character development for years, testifying acidly before a government panel on the necessity of her absurdly destructive band of “double-oh” spies.

The whole premise strains credulity, but what’s worse is that it attempts to inject a bit of righteous urgency into its fantastical notion of secret agents. James Bond has always been outrageously bereft of accountability, and that’s as it should be; his over-the-top “license to kill” is part of his wide appeal. But “Skyfall” goes further than this; it turns its airport novella conceit into a shrill, almost Cheney-esque defense of the security state. Dench’s M argues that there are untold dangers out there in the world that can only be dispatched by men who only nominally answer to authority, and to question that need is dangerously naïve. She delivers this diatribe so stridently, and to a caricatured audience of government ministers so conveniently craven, that the scene is virtually propagandistic.

This defensiveness is actually nothing new though. Since at least the time that Pierce Brosnan first put on his Brioni suit in “Goldeneye,” the Bond franchise has been consistently and curiously defensive about its continued existence. Each installment makes obligatory nods to the creakiness of its Cold War premise, and the rotating cast of support players in Bond’s universe seem to continually harp on his methods and worldview, criticizing his unchanging habits through stilted, expository script lines.

These exchanges are a half-hearted way of acknowledging the unvarnished truth: at twenty-plus sequels over the course of fifty years, the Bond series has far outlived its original brief, if not its usefulness. The admonitions really only amount to lip service though, as no one really expects Bond to act on any of this advice to ‘get with the times.’ The character’s exploits invariably validate his own recklessness, and by the end of each sequel, Bond remains unchanged and irrepressibly himself.

There is in fact nothing wrong with that. Bond endures because of (and not in spite of) the fact that he is an unchanging, enormously attractive archetype of mid-Twentieth Century, post-colonial notions of Western manhood.

For some reason though, the filmmakers seem to believe that they must attach a more modern context for the character, that they must somehow root him in contemporary mores to make him more believable or relatable, even if they do so only cursorily. This is what “Skyfall” is trying to do by evoking the global war on terror, and effectively endorsing its many infractions on human rights.

It’s important not to get carried away with politics here, though. It’s not my complaint that the movie puts forward a political argument that I disagree with; it’s that it feels compelled to defend itself at all.

For my money, there is no need to ground Bond in real world rationality. There is no need to put forward a version of this character that even pretends to understand his geopolitical context, because that’s not what we want from the character.

This is the same mistake that I’ve seen “serious” genre films commit again and again over the past decade or so, as these previously whimsical movies have become markedly darker and grittier. Today’s genre filmmakers seem to think that in order to make these characters and premises more ‘real,’ they must be made to operate by the rules of the real world. Instead, I think the truth is that characters must operate realistically by the rules of their own world.

It’s only the constraints and crises of the pretend world in which 007 exists that matter. And if they call for a fantastical idea of a secret agent who is reckless, womanizing and homicidal, let him be just that, for those are the very things that make him interesting. Don᾿t offer meek apologies for him in the form of haranguing dialogue; don’t drag him in front of comically unrealistic tribunals; and for goodness’ sake, don’t try and explain him away with the same vapid arguments that we see in real world politics.

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Beauty Is Embarrassing

A documentary about Wayne White, the artist, cartoonist, animator, painter and co-creator of the iconic “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.” The film “chronicles the vaulted highs and the crushing lows of a commercial artist struggling to find peace and balance between his work and his art. Acting as his own narrator, Wayne guides us through his life using moments from his latest creation: a hilarious, biographical one-man show.”

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It looks wonderful. I haven’t watched it yet, but it’s just US$7.99 to download, so that could happen really soon. Find out more at the movie’s official site.

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Evernote Alone

Evernote 5 for iOS is new and available in the App Store today. It sports a revised, beautifully executed user interface with a clever, smoothly animated ‘stacked cards’ metaphor. So far, I find it very impressive, especially for an application that has always been, in my view, more useful than elegant.

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Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been a happy Evernote user for some time (since finally giving up the ghost on Yojimbo). It’s true that the product has always struggled with a certain level of awkwardness, but that hasn’t diminished its utility. Evernote is pretty much the only game in town if you want a well-maintained, truly cross-platform note-taking and random bits-collecting app backed by a robust, reliable cloud service. There’s nothing out there that compares.

Why is that, I’ve often wondered? It seems to me that being able to jot notes down quickly and stash away assorted and sundry snippets, pictures and documents, and have them all transparently and instantly synchronized over the Internet would be one of the most universally sought after software solutions out there — and would therefore inspire lots of competition.

Of course, when I write it out like that, it does strike me that it’s a tall order to build such a product. Evernote is not just an app, after all. It’s a full-scale service, too, and replicating even just a few of its client apps would be a major undertaking, to say nothing of building a comparable cloud service. Still, I know I spend a tremendous part of every day in Evernote (I used it to draft this blog post, in fact) and consider it indispensable. I know lots of Evernote users who also feel the same way, and don’t hesitate to tell everyone they know about it. You would think someone else out there would want a piece of that business too.

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New York Magazine: The City and the Storm

New York Magazine’s 03 Nov issue is easily a contender for cover of the year: a startlingly expansive shot of Manhattan last week, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. The shot, taken by Dutch photographer Iwan Baan, captures the eerie darkness that cloaked downtown Manhattan, which went without power most of the week. The magazine’s editors discuss their coverage of the storm and the cover image over at NYMag.com.

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A Prediction about Presidential Predictions

Tomorrow is Election Day, so get out there and vote. Barring any major polling malfunctions, by the end of the day we’ll finally have an answer to the question of who will reside in The White House for the next four years. Almost as interestingly, tomorrow could also mark a definitive change in the way we look at Presidential campaigns, potentially for decades. In particular: if Nate Silver’s ongoing, deeply statistical analysis of the race at Fivethirtyeight turns out to be an accurate predictor of the final outcome, it may alter political punditry for a long, long time.

If you’re not familiar with Silver’s work, it’s probably a reasonable if gross characterization to say that he is a kind of ‘meta-pollster.’ Each day, he surveys the most recent state and national polls, aggregating their results using a sophisticated — but proprietary — statistical model that accounts for such factors as polling methodology, past accuracy and tendency to favor one party or another. The result is what some believe to be an exceedingly accurate picture of who is ‘winning’ at any given stage of the campaign — and, of course, a prediction of who will actually win at the close of Election Day.

Silver began doing this work in the lead-up to November 2008, and produced eye-popping results. His model correctly predicted the winner of forty-nine of the fifty states in the presidential election, and all thirty-five of the senate races held that year.

Whether that was pure luck or not is the question that will be answered when the results of tomorrow’s election are in. If his predictions are largely accurate, it will go a long way towards validating Silver’s approach. It’s my feeling too that if that happens there’s no going back; in at least the next few election cycles, you can expect to see much more attention paid to this sort of statistical evaluation of a campaign’s progress.

Punditry Disruption

You might also expect to experience a lot of what I’ve felt as I followed along with Fivethirtyeight throughout this year: a growing dissatisfaction with the largely unquantified nature of traditional punditry. Silver’s blog makes for gripping reading, day in and day out, both because he is a good writer and because his evaluations of current polling events are so grounded in numbers, so well-argued, so rich with detail, that they seem far more rewarding than what normally passes for political analysis. Take for example his recent explanations of what it will take for Mitt Romney to outperform his polling and why he felt confident in saying that Barack Obama is the favorite. Both are thoughtful, compelling defenses of his thinking, but they’re really remarkable in that they exist at all. What other political commentators can be bothered to regularly lay out their thought processes so extensively?

After months of reading Fivethirtyeight on a daily basis, traditional political commentary is looking more and more outdated, even analog, to me. Most of it seems more like bloviation or superstition, and not true explication. My tolerance for it has been markedly reduced, whether it’s of the blue chip opinion columnist variety, or the more free-wheeling blog sort. My sense — or, to be fair, my hope — is that Fivethirtyeight is effectively disrupting the punditry industry, that in the coming years commentators will be expected to be much more quantitative than they are today.

On the other hand, Silver could turn out to be disastrously wrong tomorrow, in which case never mind.

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