Nick Zedd ends up on my radar again. Writing for Vice, Avi Davis profiles Cinema of Transgression icon Nick Zedd and traces Zedd’s career from New York underground celebrity to someone who found that the underground movement in New York was over and done. Determined to forge on, he moved to Mexico:
Zedd has deliberately spent his career on the fringe, creating films that few people can tolerate. So his bitterness about not making money was hard to understand. Was his move to Mexico the ultimate rejection of New York’s yuppification, or was it just a concession to poverty and middle age? Did he truly scorn friends who’d profited in the internet age, or was he jealous of them? Was he well preserved or childish? Deep down, Zedd seemed to think that history had cheated him, and he wanted me to think so too.
In the article, Zedd appears to be making a personal comeback. He is getting by in Mexico, he has a family, he’s painting, and he’s planning to make films again.
I do have one issue with the article. The teaser headline on the Vice website bears the title, “A New Breed of Asshole.” It’s an unnecessarily mean-spirited bit of click bait.
The second part of broadband is latency, which he compares to pneumatic tubes. Although he abandons the highway metaphor because he didn’t find it fit his understanding of latency, the pneumatic tube example didn’t work for me. As I’ve always understood it, latency is the delay in starting a transfer. Perhaps, if we could go back to the highway metaphor, latency could be compared to those traffic signals at freeway on-ramps that I remember seeing as a child in Los Angeles. (If you are driving with one or more passengers, you can bypass the signal, but who would ever do that?) At any rate, you can’t travel on the highway until you actually get on the road. Incidentally, the purpose of the signal is to reduce highway congestion, but I don’t think it makes anyone’s overall trip any faster.
Planes Are Fast… Sometimes
Speaking of transportation metaphors, my favorite way of comparing latency and throughput is in terms of airline travel. It can take hours to move a few miles to get started on your trip. For example, you take a taxi to the airport, wait in line to get check a bag (if you still do that), clear security, wait for your flight to begin boarding, board the plane and get to your seat, wait for the flight crew to secure the aircraft, and wait for your pilot to queue up for take-off. At the end of all that, you’re finally airborne. All that waiting is latency, and it’s why it’s much faster to take a train to Philadelphia from New York than to fly there, unless you’re just traveling from one airport to another.
Throughput, on the other hand, is the time you’re in the air, en route to your destination. In airline travel, that’s relatively fast, but as anyone who flies in and around New York knows, there’s plenty of congestion which slows your travel time. And because so many flights go through New York, it wreaks havoc on the nation’s air traffic. The same thing happens in inclement weather in other airports, such fog in San Francisco and snow in Chicago. In those cases, the capacity of each airport diminishes because fewer flights can get through.
By most technical accounts (and even these may still be wrong), the recent agreement between Comcast and Netflix seems to have addressed a throughput problem through an effort at latency reduction. Where many net neutrality advocates worried that Netflix was paying Comcast to give them faster throughput, the agreement is more oriented around removing a middle agent that was introducing latency into the system. Cogent, the company that transported Netflix data to Comcast for delivery to consumers, was not keeping up with demand – not enough staff in the tube transfer room, so to speak – so Netflix worked out a deal to tie their system more integrally to Comcast’s.
Another way of thinking about it was that Netflix cut out some steps towards getting on the plane. It no longer checks a bag, it got PreCheck to go through security faster, and it maybe even gets a ride on a Mercedes right up to the aircraft. Oh, and it always fly nonstop. All that makes the trip faster, cutting down on latency, but it doesn’t get you to the next airport any faster because as far as we know, the Netflix-Comcast peering agreement doesn’t include increased throughput.
A NBC television crew sets up outside of the RCA Pavilion at the New York City World’s Fair, 1939.
Last Tuesday, a bunch of people went to Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, the site of the 1964 World’s Fair to tour the Phillip Johnson–designed New York State Pavilion. The Pavilion was open to the public to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the opening of the 1964 World’s Fair. As with any free event in New York City, there was an hours-long line, and two people I know that went didn’t even get inside despite waiting over four hours.
Although it is still standing, the New York State Pavilion is in dire need of attention. Restoring or repairing it could cost as much as $75 million, and demolishing it would still cost around $14 million. These huge sums however have not deterred many groups from trying to restore the structure, a rare example of Googie architecture in New York City.
Some of the efforts to preserve the Pavilion include:
Flashing back even further, Flushing Meadows–Corona Park was also home to the 1939’s World Fair, and on April 30, 1939, seventy-five years ago today, the 1939 World’s Fair opened to the public. This date, by the way, was also the 150th anniversary of the inauguration of George Washington.
A statue representing the Freedom of the Press stands opposite a statue of George Washington, inaugurated 150 years earlier as the first president of the United States. (AP Photo.)
Speaking of presidents, President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened the Fair, the first such exposition in his home state.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt opens the 1939 World’s Fair. (AP Photo/John Lindsay)
The theme of the 1939 World’s Fair was the “World of Tomorrow.” Many of the corporate exhibits, such as General Motor’s Futurama, anticipated the role that consumerism would play in revolutionizing culture. The highways that would reshape the American landscape a decade later, for example, were on display as models at the Futurama exhibit.
Highways of the future. “Futurama” exhibit. New York City World’s Fair. (New York Public Library, Digital ID: 1674383.)
Now We Add Sight to Sound
To media scholars, the 1939’s World Fair is synonymous with the introduction of television. Although they didn’t invent it, RCA introduced television to the American public and, in very simple terms, explained its purpose.
RCA President, David Sarnoff, at the RCA Pavilion, New York City World’s Fair, 1939. (New York Public Library, Digital ID: 1681003.)
David Sarnoff, the president of RCA, clearly defined how television would work:
Now we add sight to sound.
Regardless of what television could do, RCA’s presentation of television introduced it with a clear purpose. RCA would guide television as an extension of radio. It would offer similar programming to what Americans heard on the radio in the 1930s, but with the addition of pictures. In the next decade, television would in effect supplant radio as the dominant entertainment medium, but it would still offer mostly entertainment programming sponsored by advertisers.
Almost six months ago, I sported a white wig to class. It was Halloween, and we were covering Andy Warhol, among other New York–based experimental filmmakers. When I wrote about my “costume” I said that Andy Warhol was an “was an artist who didn’t actually make any art.” To illustrate that point, I embedded a video of Warhol “painting” a portrait of Debbie Harry using a Commodore Amiga, a personal computer that was ahead of its time in graphics processing.
Aside from painting the Blondie lead singer and star, Warhol made many more images using the Amiga. Although not common, it’s not unusual for a technology company to supply artists with equipment to make art. For example, video artist Bill Viola received early video equipment from Sony in the 1970s as part of a residency with the Japanese electronics maker.
Commodore Amiga computer equipment used by Andy Warhol 1985-86, courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.
Because Warhol had created these works using an obsolete computer system and saved them on deterriorating storage media, his digital art was thought to be irretreivably lost. Over the last two years, a very determined and resourceful “team of new-media artists, computer experts, and museum professionals” rescued these works from their digital tomb, including this image of a Campbell Soup can.
The problem with a lot of digital art is that it requires the original equipment to retrieve it. The Commodore Amiga was state of the art in 1985, but it is almost forgotten today. Moreover, the media used to store those files are nearly thirty years old, and have become brittle with age. Even trying to read those disks with a fully functioning Amiga computer and disk drive set up could irreversibly damage those disks, making those files lost forever.
It was not known in advance whether any of Warhol’s imagery existed on the floppy disks-nearly all of which were system and application diskettes onto which, the team later discovered, Warhol had saved his own data. Reviewing the disks’ directory listings, the team’s initial excitement on seeing promising filenames like “campbells.pic” and “marilyn1.pic” quickly turned to dismay, when it emerged that the files were stored in a completely unknown file format, unrecognized by any utility. Soon afterwards, however, the [Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer] Club’s forensics experts had reverse-engineered the unfamiliar format, unveiling 28 never-before-seen digital images that were judged to be in Warhol’s style by the [Andy Warhol Museum] experts. At least eleven of these images featured Warhol’s signature.
Warhol is an important artist, and it’s great to see a preservation effort succeed in recovering his digital art. But for every successful recovery of a high-profile artists, I wonder how many more artists‘ works are lost to digital rot.
Late to the party yet again, I finally watched the first two episodes of the new Mike Judge–helmed comedy series, Silicon Valley. If you haven’t yet traded for someone’s HBO Go credentials, you can watch the first episode, temporarily, of course, on YouTube.
The series traffics in some of the most well-worn stereotypes of software engineers and Internet entrepreneurs that are familiar to even the most casual observers of the tech-business world. The series centers on three budding software engineers living in an incubator started by a veteran of the Valley. Played by T.J. Miller, Erlich cashed in on his start-up years ago. Housing these engineers is his way of giving back, but not without taking a ten-percent stake in any product they develop while in residence.
The first two episodes of the series portray some of the more ludicrous aspects of Silicon Valley. As I watched it, I kept thinking of Evgeny Morozov’s latest book, To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. Morozov argues that the titans of tech are guilty of two hubristic sins. Solutionism is the relentless need to solve problems, including those than might not even need solving, and to strive for perfection. The second, Internet Centrism, is the fervent belief that the Internet and digital technologies are the tools to solve every problem. As I am yet to finish the book, it appears that these two function as rhetorical justifications for creating new digital industries that enrich those developing these solutions. In short, it’s about getting paid.
We see the vapid speeches given at a TED Talk where audiences listen in awe of rhetorically flashy speeches on changing the world without much substance. We see an anti-intellectual venture capitalist who, like Peter Thiel, advocates that young people take $100,000 of his money to drop out of college to pursue their entrepreneurial ideas.[1] We learn that an algorithm, properly deployed, can do something as mundane as search through a compressed data stream or something as important as curing cancer, the ultimate human miracle. We also see how spiritual advisors coddle super-rich CEOs are hell-bent on disrupting everything and are out to change the world, provided they make a ton of money doing so. Real money, too, not Bitcoin.
Read the book and watch the series for two contemporary and poignant critiques of an industry that is inflated in just about every sense of the word.
The above link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you buy something that link, I will earn a commission fee.
Evegeny Morozov, To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, New York: Public Affairs, 2013, 129. ↩
Yes, folks, it’s Tax Day in America. Some taxpayers might have received refunds and are spending them on vacation homes, boats, or funding some silly Internet start-up. Some, like me, have put off until today to pay the government treasuries in Washington and Albany. Either way, unless you filed for an extension, the tax year known as 2013 is over. Congratulations, you made it!
Now that the tax year is finished, let’s reflect on what we’re going to do with all that money.
To get in the Tax Day spirit, the White House set up a web widget to show you how your money is spent. Enter some of your tax data and the tool will show you where your Social security, Medicare, and income taxes go.
Take a minute to fill it out. I’ll wait right here until you’re done.
I bet you most of your income tax money goes to war. How did I know? Lucky guess…
In my case, defense and health care each get about $1,700 of my taxes. However, only $112 of it went to elementary, secondary and vocation education, and a little more than $75 went to science, space, and technology programs. For whatever reason, a negative amount of my federal tax money, $-1.35, went to financial aid for college students. This must be my share of any tax credits or deductions that I’ve been milking for almost of my entire adult life, which is why I get it back.
This breakdown seemed especially poignant after finding a U-Matic tape of an independent news-documentary television series from the 1990s, titled The ’90s. In trying to identify the tape, I searched the web for the series and came across an especially timely segment about persons who refuse to pay taxes that fund war. The segment has been digitized and available on YouTube.
One person in the segment says that half of tax revenue goes to war. Do you think they would feel differently if I told them it was only a quarter? Probably not.
On Monday morning, I bought the season pass for the final season of Mad Men on iTunes, and I noticed the price was $35, based on fourteen episodes, not seven for this year and seven for next. Apple figured it out and even included an explanatory note: “Mad Men, The Final Season is expected to include 14 episodes (actual number of episodes may vary).”
The price is a little steep because of the upfront cost of buying fourteen episodes. It’s not as nice as getting the early adopter credit of buying the first eight episodes and getting the back eight free. However, come next year, I’ll be relieved to find seven episodes appearing each week in my queue, ready to stream.
Magazines make money in two ways: consumer sales and advertising. Since advertising revenue has been steadily declining over the last two decades, magazines are likely to push sales numbers higher by pushing evergreen subscriptions.
An evergreen subscription is one where you provide a credit card number when you subscribe. It’s framed as a convenience since you don’t have to mail a check[1], and you can continue to receive your magazines without interruption. This way there won’t be any gaps in that rack you keep by the toilet.
As convenient as this is for you, the true beneficiaries of an evergreen subscription are the magazines themselves. This provides them with a steady stream of income since most people forget to cancel their subscriptions. And they have your credit card number.
I fell for this ploy when I subscribed to the cooking magazine, Saveur, last year. It was a one-year digital subscription for $5.00. The print issues are lovely. They have great looking layouts, beautiful photographs, and some great recipes. However, the digital version is shovelware. It’s nothing more than a digital reproduction of the print magazine. And everything—the text and images—are all graphic files that eat up a ton of storage space on my iPad. The experience does not translate.
The digital version of Saveur is difficult to read.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the promotional rate was just a way to convert me to an evergreen subscriber:
Continuous Service Program: I understand that unless I tell you otherwise I will receive uninterrupted service and delivery of these digital magazines, and my subscriptions will be automatically renewed at the end of each subscription term, at the rates then in effect. I authorize that you send my information to the applicable publisher to fulfill my subscription and charge the credit/debit card provided. I won’t be bothered with any renewal notices; instead I will receive clearly marked reminder notices with the then current rates at least 45 days before my credit/debit card is charged or I receive an e-bill. I may opt out of the automatic renewal at any time and receive a refund on all remaining issues by contacting the applicable publishers’ customer service at supportticket@bonnierstore.com.
When I signed up, I fully understood the terms. I would be receiving a cheap promotional rate to start me as a reader, and since I had provided a credit card number for the subscription, they would charge me full price after the promotional period had lapsed. At the time, my plan was to stop the subscription before it renewed. However, since they were going to notify me at least 45 days in advance of the renewal, I didn’t bother to create an OmniFocus task reminding me to cancel this subscription.
But there was no such reminder.
This week, I saw a charge for emagazines.com on my statement. After some investigating, I determined that this was indeed a renewal for Saveur. In all fariness, the renewal rate was not predatory: $19.99 for nine issues over the next year, which is reasonable. However, I didn’t want to pay for the digital issues because, as I mentioned earlier, the iPad version of this magazine sucks.
After writing customer service, I received this reply:
The $19.99 charge was associated with an automatic renewal of a subscription to Saveur magazine, ordered 3/26/2013. Due to a processing error, many custoemrs[sic] did not receive the renewal reminder email- due 45 days in advance. We have canceled this automatic renewal, and issued a $19.99 refund to the card used in the original purchase.
Even if I don’t know what a “processing error” is, we did resolve this like adults. They’re refunding me money, and I’ll be made whole. But evergreening (if that’s even a real word) works because most people are lazy. What if I didn’t bother to spend fifteen minutes poring over my bank statement, investigating the charge, and kindly requesting a refund (and then spend about 700 words blogging about it)?
I’d still be out $20 and still be getting issues pushed to my iPad. And it’s not like I can put those “issues” in the bathroom magazine rack.
A check is a transfer of funds from your bank account to another party. Crazy, huh? ↩
Since leaving CNN to make room for Piers Morgan, Larry King has been hosting two shows distributed through Ora TV: Larry King Now and Politicking. Last night, after an exhausting day, I watched a few episodes of both shows. The most recent installment of Politicking was an engaging interview with Errol Morris. Morris has been making the rounds in support of his upcoming documentary on former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, The Unknown Known.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/614498
I rarely watched Larry King Live during its long CNN run, but I appreciated him revealing his opinion on this program, acting more like a commentator than an observer. He revealed his skepticism about invading Iraq at the time, which he did not do on his CNN show, and he was self-reflexive on how Rumsfeld’s charisma and double-talk was both deceptive and convincing.
As far The Unknown Known, it’s easy to see this as a sequel to The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003), as both are films about secretaries of defense responsible for two long, calamitous wars. Based on the snippets in this interview, both films also trace how each man arrived at these positions of power and how they reflect on their decisions. But it looks like both men reflect on their decisions in different ways. Perhaps regret is that “unknown known,” whatever that really means.
Watch the whole interview. It’s funny and infuriating at the same time. Also, not since The Fog of War have I been looking forward to watching a Morris film: Standard Operating Procedure was too depressing for me to watch at the time.
The above link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you buy something that link, I will earn a commission fee.
For as long as I can remember, the American film-history canon lists Florence Lawrence as the first movie star and that she was first featured as a star in the 1910 film, The Broken Oath. It’s a great story because it reveals that the established dominant players in the film business were too busy maintaining the status quo in the early 1910s and missed that film audiences wanted more than a generic motion picture. They wanted something different.
Florence Lawrence, in 1908, when she was the “Biograph Girl.”
Film companies in the nickelodeon era, prior to 1910, would not promote their actors. The film manufacturing companies preferred to sell films as commodities, pricing them by the foot, and didn’t want to promote the actors for fear that they would demand higher salaries.[1] Instead, a foot of film was like a barrel of oil, a bushel of corn, or a pound of cotton.[2]
However, film audiences began to recognize certain actors and developed an affinity with them. One such actor was Florence Lawrence, who appeared in the dozens of films produced by American Mutoscope and Biograph. Audiences clamored for more films with the “Biograph Girl,” although they did not know her name, and pressured theater operators to book her films.[3]
Biograph was part of a dominant film-making cartel in the first decade of the 20th century called the Motion Picture Patents Company, but there were competitors who often broke the law to make films in violation of patent laws. One such intellectual-property scofflaw was Carl Laemmle, who lured the Biograph Girl to this company, Independent Motion Pictures (IMP).
Laemmle didn’t just stick Lawrence in his movies: he used her for the first movie publicity stunt. Laemmle had newspapers report a story that Lawrence, the Biograph Girl, had been killed in a streetcar accident. It was a tragic story. Shortly afterward, Laemmle bought space in those newspapers to report that the rumors of Lawrence’s demise were greatly exaggerated: she was, in fact, alive and well. You can see that in this ad, where they “nail a lie.” Oh, yes, and by the way, she will starring in the upcoming IMP film The Broken Oath.[4]
The IMP Girl stars in The Broken Oath or is it The Broken Bath?
The one part of this story that doesn’t make sense to me is the name of the film in the ad. The ad for the 1910 film, where they “nail a lie,” names the film The Broken Bath, not The Broken Oath, as every source I’ve read lists it. That raises a couple of questions:
Is this ad a fake? No, you can see the ad in the March 12, 1910 issue of Moving Picture World on page 365.
Did the name of the film change? Possibly, but in that same issue, on page 400, you can see the film listed as the The Broken Oath. Also, in subsequent issues of Moving Picture World, the film summary describes the film as follows:
To break a secret society oath requires a good deal of nerve, and there are certain situations connected with a sweetheart which also require nerve. Where these two come together it is quite likely to be doubly interesting.[5]
Clearly, the film is about an oath, not a bath. Besides, a “broken bath” makes little sense unless it refers to a broken bath tub.
Did I nail a lie? Or could the name just have a typesetting error?
Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction, 3rd. ed., New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010, pp. 30. ↩
Film companies were called “film manufacturing companies,” not studios, suggesting that they were similar to a company that manufactures a good like rubber or cotton, not the content on the films. ↩
