My Quiet Life

So, I’ve seen Weezer taking a lot of shit lately. Suddenly it’s not cool to like them anymore. SOME PEOPLE have even gone as far as to postulate that they’ve done nothing good since 1996. Ignoring the fact that Pinkerton came out in 1996, making the assertion questionable already (since Pinkerton is a masterpiece that doesn’t need defending), this is still provably false. Okay, so.. I’ll admit it’s been a while since Weezer had an album that was really, really good from start to finish. But there have still been a lot of really, really good songs on their albums post-Pinkerton. These are some of them:

See? Rivers still has it. I win. Bonus: Weezer with the Muppets

Bonus bonus: Weezer with Alf.

And yes, I included Island in the Sun, because it’s a really good song, despite being used as the themesong to a Mary Kate and Ashley movie.

The LA Times turned its eye to commoditized stock photography, last week, and the languishing industry in general. It’s extremely silly. Never before have I read such a melodramatic sob story for the woebegotten creative photographic industry:

The New York Times this week announced a plan to charge frequent online readers for the stories and photos it spends millions to create. Hulu executives said they plan to begin charging for some of the TV shows they previously put on the Internet for free.

Now the freelancers — the sensitive, right-brain souls who sell their creative power one byte at a time — are going to have to get just as aggressive as the big boys. That means struggling mightily to find the audiences who appreciate their work and make them pay.

It won’t be easy.

Photographers are among those who found out most painfully what happens when their work (or a reasonable facsimile) becomes readily available online at little or no cost.

A decade ago, professional photographers thought nothing of selling pictures to stock photo houses. But what once provided a source of income went into catalogs of nearly endless size and accessibility.

Seemingly overnight, a publisher who wanted a picture of a sunset could choose from thousands on any number of databases. Why pay a photographer hundreds, or thousands, of dollars to go out and shoot a new one?

Oy. Now, what makes this article so silly is that they’ve made a grievous error: they’ve conflated stock and/or product photography with creative arts. It’s not the same thing. Sorry. There are two angles to this. First, the consumptive angle. Why indeed would any consumer of photography pay a photographer “hundreds, or thousands, of dollars” to go take a picture of a damn sunset? You’d have to be a fool. Digital photography has made brilliant sunset pictures as ubiquitous as cats on the internet. It’s not an evil conspiracy — the work of dastardly corporatist overlords. It’s just reality. The advantage that you, mister product photographer, once enjoyed by virtue of the high cost of film cameras, film cost and processing cost is gone. The advantage in archival, organization and distribution is gone. Technology marches forward.

Then there’s the production angle — the skill (and the art?) that goes in to this work. Is the march of technology obliterating genuine artistic talent, condemning it to languish in obscurity, unrecognized and uncompensated? Hardly. The industry that is evaporating isn’t artistic, it’s utilitarian. I realize that throughout the course of history, there has been much artistic merit found in the work of “professional” photographers being paid to do otherwise bland, “commoditized” work. (The FSA photographers come to mind, of course.) But, let’s not get too sentimental. Technology is making photography easier, and the niches of the photography industry that are evaporating just aren’t that hard, folks. Product photography isn’t that hard. You basically buy your way into it. Lights, softboxes, cameras. Action. Naturally it can still be done badly, and it can be done quite well, but the market (it turns out) doesn’t really discriminate that much. They just want a picture of a [whatever]. Similarly, taking a picture of a sunset isn’t that hard either. (I should know.) It’s easy. It happens almost every day! Point and shoot. It doesn’t take a “sensitive, right-brain soul”. I could pretend that my oh-so-stunning sunset pictures are a reflection of some facet of my inner soul and artistic spirit, but they’re just not, sorry. The emperor has no clothes! As a photographer, I know what goes into this sort of professional photography, so I’m a little unimpressed by this article making it sound like these are hapless creatives losing their patron:

I’ve now heard it hundreds of times: fear that the technology providing the world entree to an unimaginable trove of art, images and information is also obliterating the boundaries that once allowed the creative class to make a living.

It’s not that I lack sympathy — having your entire industry wiped out in under a decade has to be jarring. But, that’s life. Time to find a new niche. The human instinct towards self-preservation is strong, and in the face of changing economic circumstances, it manifests in futile defensive measures — just look at over-reaching labor unions, protectionist trade tariffs, etc. Rarely do they combat reality for long. This bit highlights the real shift in what’s going on:

This winter, for the first time in two decades, Berger didn’t shoot a single company or family Christmas party, work that used to bring him as much as $5,000 once he’d sold prints to all the participants.

Berger sent me a few of the photos one group had come up with as a substitute. “They stood them against a wall, wide angle, with an on-camera flash, looking up their noses. Static. Lame. Absolute junk,” Berger said.

The problem here is that Mr. Berger is overestimating the economic value of his artistic work, sadly. People want good pictures of their memories, of course, but it turns out they’re not as concerned about the relative artistic/creative merit. At least not compared to the cost of buying PnS cameras and doing it themselves. Berger’s technological advantage is gone. Oh well. Time to do something else.

Despite all this commotion, nothing fundamental has changed for the creative/artistic market. Technology can’t change this, and it never will — the elusive nature of art and the ever-changing market behind it guarantees this. Speaking as someone that has contemplated the various ways I could be making money with my photography, I can commiserate with the plight of a lot of photographers. What I don’t have sympathy for is the exasperated cries of the slighted supposed-artists. Perhaps you weren’t as good as you thought. Nothing is stopping you from making art, and nothing ever will. Digital technology has made photography a lot easier and a lot more popular. The industry has changed. Get better, or get out. (But definitely shut up, either way.)

UPDATE: Kenneth Jarecke, at the Online Photographer, tackles this as well. It has the same sort of lamentations that I think are somewhat silly. Though I think I could paraphrase his larger point as being that outfits like Time or Newsweek really are (were?) the modern day equivalent of the artistic patron, supporting and subsidizing genuine art. And that as they resort to cheaper alternatives, the artists relying on them starve. I think this is a decent point, but I think this intersection is a rather small (miniscule) data point in the grand scheme of things.

Apple fanboys will see this article as a testament to how non-apple fans are cynical bastards who fail to realize the potential and beauty of true, mind-blowing, revolution-inspiring technological magic. Everyone else will see it as an example of how apple fanboys are truly brain-damaged. I personally have no dog in this fight — I don’t really want an iPad. I could see how someone might want one. The relative merits of the device are inconsequential to how bizarre this article is to me:

Choice quotes:

They weren’t selling technical features. They were selling you magic. Real magic. The kind of magic where, thanks to world-class designers and programmers and marketers, it actually comes true.

…

Apple’s not actually selling a computer. Or a flash drive or multitouch. They needed to make those things for their product, but that’s not what the product is. The product is, simply put, a magical screen that can do anything you ever want it to, no matter what that is. Here you go. It’s five hundred dollars. If you pay me that, I will give you this magical thing that can do anything. You don’t have to read a manual. It will do anything, and it will do it right now, out of the box.

Other companies are selling computers. Apple’s selling magic. Which one would you rather have?

Uh, I’d rather have a computer? Because magic isn’t real? Get a fucking grip. Seriously, though — as a pure commentary on the success of Apple’s marketing, I think he’s 100% right. I’m sure that a significant portion of Apple’s customers will buy one of these because of the above marketing. But that’s only because I have a rather dim view of a significant portion of the human population. If I were someone that actually wanted an iPad, and arrived at that conclusion via a normal process of rational decision-making regarding computer equipment, I’d be a little offended that someone thought it was because I think it’s a “magical screen that can do anything I ever want it to.” Do I get to ride a special short bus, too?

So, I’ve never had particularly healthy sleep habits. I stay up too late, and want to sleep in late. Exercise in the past has been my only weapon against the otherwise sedentary computer nerd lifestyle — if I exercised regularly and vigorously, I could maintain a normal sleep schedule. Lately, though, everything just got out of whack. My sleep schedule was completely inverted and broken up. I’d want to be asleep from 4AM to 10AM, roughly — and every day in the middle of the day I’d be overcome with a near crippling desire to take a nap. As a whole, in addition, my energy levels have just been really, really low. This wasn’t exactly conducive to regular exercise, either, and so it was a fairly vicious cycle.

A few weeks ago, I found this app for the iphone called Sleep Cycle. It uses the accelerometer in the iPhone to measure your movement through the night. Of course this doesn’t correlate perfectly to actual sleep cycles, but it’s probably a reasonable approximation. It graphs your this movement through the night, and also sets off an alarm (at a target time range) when you come out of a “deep” sleep cycle. Pretty clever. So I’ve been tracking my sleep for the last week or so. This is a pretty typical example:

I tended to feel about as good as you might imagine after a night of “sleep” like that. So I talked to my doc and got a prescription for a low dose of Ambien, in the hopes that this might help break the horrible cycle I was in. Generally I’m opposed to taking drugs like this, but something had to be done. Honestly, the side-effects of Ambien sorta scare the shit out of me. Temporary amnesia?! I’ve never blacked out from alcohol (or anything else) — the general idea sorta scares me silly. But I digress. So, last night, I took 5mg of Ambien before bed. The results?

Um. Holy crap? Did I die overnight? I honestly thought something went wrong, or that it was broken last night — except that the alarm did in fact wake me up as designed around 4:30 (I set the alarm for 5) with the iphone ringing its alarm right there on my bed.

Pretty amazing (and kinda scary). Obviously, this is not a solution, but a corrective measure, so I’m hoping this will help me get back a normal schedule. Drugs are weird. Graphs are cool.

I took a peek at Marginal Revolution this morning, and decided to start reading it again.

Why, you ask? Well, I had this dream that I was assigned to go take pictures of “Her Lady’s Pond at Leeds”, which was an ornate baptismal pond (uh, in Leeds, I guess?) that had been decimated by some sort of Woodstock-magnitude festival pollution. I fell into the tar-like quagmire but managed to save my camera, and as I was wading back to the shore, I see Tyler Cowen and some girl, who help me up out of the muck. I have no idea what Tyler Cowen looks like, but in the dream he was some tall lanky British dude. I am not sure what this all means, except that maybe I should lay off the hot wings right before bed.

Anyways, I saw that in this post he linked to this paper, which I find intensely interesting:

It is argued that drug consumption, most commonly alcohol drinking, can be a technology to give up some control over one’s actions and words. It can be employed by trustworthy players to reveal their type. Similarly alcohol can function as a “social lubricant” and faciliate type revelation in conversations. It is shown that both separating and pooling equilibria can exist; as opposed to the classic results in the literature, a pooling equilibrium is still informative. Drugs which allow a gradual loss of control by appropriate doses and for which moderate consumption is not addictive are particularly suitable because the consumption can be easily observed and reciprocated and is unlikely to occur out of the social context. There is a trade-off between the efficiency gains due to the signaling effect and the loss of productivity associated with intoxication. Long run evolutionary equilibria of the type distribution are considered. If coordination on an exclusive technology is efficient, social norms or laws can raise efficiency by legalizing only one drug.

This paper continues the fine tradition of economics/sociology in rephrasing in mathematical or painstakingly lexical terms what we already kinda know as common sense. Some of the comments are interesting, as well:

I don’t think the authors are saying signally and sorting are the only reasons people drink, just one. and their framing does nicely explain the hostility teetotalers often encounter in social drinking situations.

Indeed.. And as a single guy, I’d like to extend that line of thought to the world of dating. This may sound insane to those of you that know me, and how I spend the dominant portion of my social life: I don’t actually like drinking alcohol that much. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I have a great time on many an occasion out drinking with friends, and I’m a fan of the connoisseurship aspect (as catandgirl pointed out: connoisseurship can make anything interesting). But as a general factor in my life and lifestyle, I don’t particularly care for it. It makes me feel like crap. It exacerbates health problems I already have (alcohol is both dehydrating and an inflammatory agent, making it not the best thing for chronic sinusitis). It takes a not-insignificant chunk out of my workout routine. Yoga while hungover is not fun. Drinking coffee and sitting in front of a computer is. (okay, well, maybe not fun, but less painful)

And yet, time after time, I encounter social situations where it’s awkward or ungainly to not imbibe. This goes double for the world of dating. Rarely do I not cringe inside as I ask a girl to go “grab a drink” sometime, doing the internal calculus on my schedule and realizing what portion of it involves alcohol (or food) in some social capacity. But the above paper does at least make me feel a little better about the whole situation. It’s not that I’m so socially awkward or self-conscious that I can’t “have a good time” without alcohol — it really is a socially-ingrained mechanism for establishing mutual trust. Opting not to drink at such an occasion isn’t just “not fun” — it’s painful because you’re rejecting, one way or another, a well-established pattern of social negotiation.

At least there’s potential as always for better living through chemistry: research into various benzodiazepines that can accomplish a lot of the same effects of alcohol without all the negative stuff.

So, wanna go grab a diazepam? I know this great little place.

It can’t quite compare to the pure piano rendition in the heart-wrenching sadness department, but I really love Les Baxter’s MOOG version of Chopin’s prelude in E minor:

The first couple of times I heard it, it took me a minute to realize it was Chopin and not just some random 60’s film score.. It makes you realize how much stylistic overlap there really was between a lot of these guys and their romantic predecessors.

Kevin Carson has a good article today over at c4ss.org that you should read. He first tackles the notion that libertarian thought is weak or “soft” with respect to progressive social norms that historically have been (or can only be) furthered by state authority.. Anyone that has had even a casual dinner conversation about libertarianism has probably run into this.. It’s inevitable that racism or sexism will come up — used as an example of something that would be “allowed” in a stateless society, since it’s non-coercive.

But critics of non-coercive unfairness like racism and sexism are also in danger of being led astray by the same tendency. Libertarians, in advocating for libertarianism on the left, are constantly confronted with the objection that people would be “allowed” to engage in racial or sexual discrimination, to deny food to the needy, etc.

But as Brad points out, this word “allowed” is perverse insofar as it “conflates ‘allows’ with what would be more precisely understood (in terms of libertarian theory) as ‘does not necessarily justify use of violence to compel restitution for in all cases’.” But this obsession with what’s “allowed,” in the narrow sense that nobody’s entitled to use force to prevent it, ignores “the holistic integrity of a stateless society arising from non-violent mechanisms of social normatization that cross the arbitrary topical boundaries one imposes on one’s self when analyzing and advocating various potential state policies.”

Civil society is prior to the state, and those “mechanisms of social normatization,” voluntary social safety nets, etc., predate it by millennia. One of the worst evils of the state is that it has crowded out or actively suppressed such mechanisms of civil society, as described by Pyotr Kropotkin. As Kropotkin argued in both Mutual Aid and The State, for most of the human race over most of human history, the state was merely a parasitic layer of tax collectors and feudal landlords superimposed on the peasant commune—the latter including the Russian mir, the English open field system, and Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production.” Had the Tsar and nobility vanished in 1700, Russian village life would have continued exactly as before—only with the peasants keeping all they produced. It was only in the past few centuries that the state actively attempted to supplant civil society, and to suppress private associations for mutual aid and social cooperation as rivals to its power.

He concludes with a comment on violent revolution which seems like it should be a given by now, but still bears repeating:

The way to achieve victory is not by seizing the state, or violently overthrowing it, but quietly confronting it with a reality already on the ground: the reality that a rapidly expanding share of its laws are either no longer enforceable or cost more to enforce than it’s worth.

Wow. Just … wow. John Stossel on Haiti:

George Mason University Economist Don Boudreaux again opens my brain to what should have been obvious:

(T)he Haitian earthquake killed tens of thousands of people. But the quake that hit California’s Bay Area in 1989 was also of magnitude 7.0. It killed only 63 people. This difference is due chiefly to Americans’ greater wealth. With one of the freest economies in the world, Americans build stronger homes and buildings, and have better health-care and better search and rescue equipment. In contrast, burdened by one of the world’s least-free economies, Haitians cannot afford to build sturdy structures. Nor can they afford the health-care and emergency equipment that we take for granted here in the U.S.

These stark facts should be a lesson for those who insist that human habitats are made more dangerous, and human lives put in greater peril, by freedom of commerce and industry.

Economic freedom saves lives. The ultimate tragedy in Haiti was not the earthquake. It was Haiti’s lack of economic freedom. That tragedy plays out every day in most of the third world.

I knew I wanted to comment on this the minute I read it, but it took me a few minutes to calm down before I could write anything more substantial than “Dear John Stossel, fuck you.”

Leaving aside for the moment that Stossel has taken a nearly incomprehensible tragedy and used it to make his childishly inane argument for “free markets”, we have the fact that he’s so incredibly, infuriatingly wrong.

The implication that Haiti lacks a “free” market is laughable. Haiti’s economy is “free”, in a sense, to the extent that Haiti exists in a nightmarish mire of post-colonial chaos. (I won’t use the word “anarchy” here, for obvious reasons.) The only plausibly accurate sentence above is “This difference is due chiefly to Americans’ greater wealth”. Anyone want to take a guess why Haiti is so wretchedly poor? No? I’ll give you a hint: it has a lot to do with the aforementioned oh-so-very “free” economy Boudreaux puts on a pedestal — the good ol’ U S of A, among others. In what alternate universe does Stossel live where the US has a “free” economy, anyway? Also, there’s the ultimate irony in the example he cites as the result of the free economy at work: San Francisco, California, liberal mecca and refuge to latte-sipping bureaucrats everywhere. Two words, dude: building codes.

Haiti is a truly, truly fucked up country. There is indeed a lot we could learn from this tragedy, and it would have nice maybe if America could be bothered to give two shits about Haiti before tens of thousands of people died at once. But to hold the US up as a shining example of economic purity that the Haitians should aspire? It’s so deeply offensive and ignorant of history I don’t even know where to start. Maybe I should have just stopped at “fuck you”.

Ross Mantle (b.1985, USA) is a freelance photographer based in Pittsburgh, Pa. He holds a degree in Visual Communication from Ohio University and has worked for newspapers and on projects throughout the United States and abroad. His work has been featured in publications worldwide, including The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times among others. Ross’ personal work often focuses on the quirks of American life and the unique relationship between person and place. Ross enjoys riding bikes, eating cheap burritos and making iced tea. He’d be happy to play you in air hockey or take an assignment anywhere you may want to send him.

Best artist statement ever. (Admittedly, not a high bar.) He must have missed the “how to write an incredibly douchey artist statement that makes everyone want to punch you in the face” lesson. His photography is pretty good, too — go check it out. (via Verve Photo)

So, on any social networking site, people can carry on about a lot of crap I really don’t care about. at all. Not you, of course. That other guy. I mean, I didn’t know who Lane Kiffin was before yesterday, and I resent the fact that I’ve unwillingly spent energy exercising even a few braincells learning who he is. It pains me. Luckily, my twitter client of choice, ttytter has built-in filters, enabling me to exact a fair amount of control over what I see — filtering out the crap I don’t care about. Current filters:

filter=/Preds|Predfans|nascar|oscars|AmericanIdol|wwdc|squarespace|followfriday |CMTMA|go+a+l|cbnash|google.*wave|#ifiwasfamous|balloon|titans|movember|Brownlee |CMA|tiger.*woods|#ndfb|gowal\.la|DealsPlus|foursquare|twittascope.com|4sq.com |#gkffl|formspring|#jobs|Moonsatellite|conan|leno|kiffen|kiffin/i

(Sidenote: the go+a+l regular expression I am particularly proud of.. You have no idea how useful this was during the world cup. Seriously.)

Anyways: Dear facebook, I wish you would implement something like this. Please.

Speaking of facebook, does anyone know if it’s possible to “mute” or unsubscribe or otherwise silence a thread you may have inadvertently gotten yourself mixed up in on facebook? I don’t mind email notifications from facebook on certain things, but I don’t really need to get email notification for the 800 replies to someone’s birth announcement because I made the poor decision to “like” that post. Nor do I care to get the 8 million replies to a message sent to me in bulk that I can’t in any way unsubscribe to. It’s extremely annoying. If I could at least get a “mute this thread” option, I’d be in a much better place.