TECHNOLOGIES
A White Dwarf of Meaning
by William Deresiewicz | The American Scholar
Words are memories. What we’ve forgotten, they still know. Consider the following: amazing, awesome, fabulous, fantastic, great, marvelous, terrific, wonderful. Today they may be synonyms, but each bespeaks a vanished form of experience, a lost feeling or idea. Awesome comes from awe: dread and veneration at the presence of the royal or divine. More...
Central Park Lite
by William Zinsser | The American Scholar
Central Park and I go back almost as far as a man and a park can go. In the early 1930s, when my sisters and I were children, we sometimes stayed overnight with our grandmother, who lived at 1 West 69th Street. Unskilled at amusing the young, she would give us loaves of stale bread, saved for just such an emergency, and send us across the s More...
Twits for the Arts
by Chloe Veltman
I'm impressed by Twitter's attempt to reach out to local arts organizations here in the Bay Area.
The San Francisco-based social media company invited a bunch of arts marketers and media types (me included) to their offices in the South of Market neighborhood yesterday afternoon for a "Performing Arts and Social Media Discussio More...
Whither Humanities in Silicon Valley?
by Chloe Veltman
I spent most of yesterday at a symposium at Stanford University all about career prospects within the tech industry for students graduating with humanities Ph.Ds from American academic institutions.
The organizers invited a lineup of high-powered speakers from silicon valley to address the audience at the Bechtel Conference Center. Lumin More...
Creepy Cloud
by Andrew Taylor | The Artful Manager
Google's announcement of its Music Beta service adds yet another opportunity to push our social and cultural lives into the cloud. The system allows you to upload your music collection, liberating your hard drive or phone memory space currently cluttered by MP3 audio files, and making your music available anywhere through multiple devices.
More...
We’re All Robert Capa Now
By Adam Leipzig
Or are we?
In case you don’t remember Robert Capa, he was the first great war photographer of the twentieth century, who made a name for himself by getting in the middle of the action. He was born Endre Friedmann, but changed his name to Capa in homage to Frank Capra, because he liked Frank Capra’s movies. Capa fir More...
Reality is a Flip-Cam
By Adam Leipzig
Video posts coming out of the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa give us a new visual language to depict “on the ground reality,” and I suspect this language will infiltrate other media and artists’ work in the coming decade.
One hundred years ago Expressionist/Futurist painters used mechanical imagery and multiple v More...
Make a Video, Get a Job
by Adam Leipzig
“That’s creepy,” my daughter said. “It’s just an internship. But to apply I have to post a video on You Tube.”
Creepy or not, that’s the future. Two generations ago, you sent a letter of inquiry. One generation ago you sent an email. Today you send a video.
With good reason. We get so much more information with a More...
Indie Films: State of the Union
By popular demand, I have edited together all 3 parts of my indie films series.
By Adam Leipzig
There were some surprisingly hefty deals announced at Sundance 2011, but despite major media reports that indie films are making a comeback, the overall news isn’t that good. If we meet back here in a year, we’ll learn that some of those More...
