Is God-Man Dead?


Genius. "God-man: The superhero with omnipotent powers". Find em all here.

Even more genius:

The Free Market is for Chumps

... Bronfman [CEO of Warner Music] apparently doesn't think that "variable pricing" might include lowering the price of some tracks below 99 cents. Said Bronfman, "Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be raising our wholesale prices and preventing people from discounting."

-- Warner Music CEO: Price-fixing is for iTunes, too

Sigh. Who wants competition when Copyright gives you a legally endorsed monopoly? As Richard Posner pointed out in The Intellectual Structure of Property Law one of the most curious developments in post-Keynesian economics is that while industrial trade regulation has been liberalised over the last 30 years, intellectual property regulation has only gotten stronger.

In other words, somehow the Copyright Industries have convinced the Power That Be that they are MORE deserving of protection in a free market...

... but hey, thats political economies for you: interest groups over ideology.

Film Grammar as Information Architecture

As regular readers of this blog probably aware, I've got a side interest in design and enjoy drawing parallels between design and filmmaking, because I think filmmaking debt to design has been overshadowed by its debt to literature and theatre and photography. So, I was reading a Signal vs Noise (a design weblog) post on Information Architecture and began thinking about making a post comparing Information Architects to Screen Directors... in that both of them have to build image structures for communicating with their audience. Then I began doing some link surfing and found this comparison:

At the other end, the Big Information Architect may play the role of "an orchestra conductor or film director, conceiving a vision and moving the team forward," as described by Gayle Curtis, Creative Director at vivid studios.

-- Peter Morville on 'Big Architect, Little Architect'

Heh! I'm not using this as evidence that I'm "right" (I care less about being right than being interesting when I'm playing with ideas)... but as a curious example of how we explain concepts using parallel examples. I want to explore the notion of directing as a form of semiotic construction (cough information architecture cough) whereas others are exploring information architecture through parallels with screen directing.

That said, while comparing IAs and Screen Directors to Conducts makes *some* sense in the whole 'bringing people together to sing with one voice' thing, conductors - ultimately - aren't the ones building the structures to house the music. That's the role of composers. Whereas, even if Directors are working from someone else's screenplay, the ultimate act of communication occurs between the audience and what the director has put on screen....

Perhaps its just the 'interpretation' gap between screenplay->film is larger than that between score->music.

[shrug]

... and then there's the whole electronic music thing where the score IS the music.... I wonder if there could be a similar paradigm shift with filmmaking in the future? Where the screenplay becomes the movie interactively. Like a highly advanced scripting language for XSI/Maya/Lightwave/Modo... It'll take a while to happen, but I'd say contemporary pre-viz tools are the beginning of that possibility. Hmm.