Basil Iwankh

The most recent episode of the BBC Radio 4 program ‘In Our Time’ is on The Statue of Liberty, which was gifted to the US by the French in the very early 20th Century, although planning had been going on in the last quarter or so of the 19th Century.

This is makes it kind of odd the anti-french movement that arose in the US around the time of the invasion of Iraq (do you remember the US Congress renaming “French Fries” as “Freedom Fries”?). Not only did the French give the US one of its most potent symbols of freedom, the Statue of Liberty, but more importantly the US probably wouldn’t exist if not for the French. It was the intervention of the French Fleet in the US war of independence that probably tipped it for the US, who had no significant naval force of their own.

Anyway, putting that aside, the interesting discussion that occurred in the show was about the gender of the Statute of Liberty, no one in the discussion group had much of an idea as to why Liberty was a woman (when in the 19th century the philosophical and political Liberal movement was almost solely male).

This is the face of the State of Liberty.

Which always reminds be of “Liberty Leading the People” by Eugène Delacroix, which may be described as a more “earthy” depiction.

Earthy is some ways quite appropriate, on In Our Time one of the academics ventured to suggest that the link was through Nature. The Liberals believed that freedom was part of the State of Nature, and as nature is represented by the female rather than male (ie reproduction in particular, this turns up in various areas such as the Yin and Yang).

Its certainly a nice theory, although I am not sure how convincing it is, but then I don’t have a better idea myself.

I can across this YouTube video recently. And while I don’t have much to say about the content, the more interesting thing about it is that it is all text. In fact I didn’t watch the whole thing, it is too annoying to watch it because it is so slow, a text document (blog post anyone?) would have been far simpler.

Does this say something about the YouTube generation? Who are so used to communication via youtube videos that it is easier to communicate to them by putting text into a video, rather than just, like, writing it down?

This YouTube video was featured on the Insiders this morning, I think it is an actual real video that fell through a time warp and arrived in our present from the future.

It’s been known for a long time that the future for record labels has been bleak, CD sales have been falling and it would appear that digital downloads are not making up for the difference. This is having a big impact on some firms. Recently EMI was taken over by a private equity firm and they are making big changes:

The new owners of music label EMI Group — home of the Rolling Stones, Coldplay and the Spice Girls — said Tuesday that they plan to cut up to 2,000 jobs, or more than a third of its work force, in a restructuring aimed at offsetting the impact of falling revenue from CD sales and the departure of several of its major artists. (Source AP)

What is happening in the music industry? Technological and cultural change is altering the landscape in which music is bought and sold, and it a way that is not good for the labels.

In a way the record labels have always existed as a means of “narrowing” the music selection. While there are multitudes of musicians and bands making music, there has been limited access for them to be aired on popular radio, one of the traditional means for them to become known to the public. There are only a limited number of opportunities to become mega-famous and it is a bit of random process as to who will get selected to fulfill that role. The record labels labels attempt to reduce some of that randomness and control who becomes mega-famous by a combination of skill and marketing.

What has changed? There are probably four inter-related changes.

One. Reduction in production costs. The technological requirements to produce an album – both to record it, and to publish it – have fallen. CD reproduction has gotten cheaper and cheaper, and with digital downloads, anyone can now produce a quality music production. You no longer need the record label’s studio.

Two. A fragmentation of the music market. There is no longer a monolithic “Top 40”. the are many music markets, and sub-markets (emo), providing multiple entry points for musicians.

Three. Distribution costs have dramatically fallen. It is now easy for anyone to sell their music online, and it is easy for bands to cut out the middle-man and go straight to their fans (see Radiohead).

Four. New intermediaries are springing up. Last.fm introduces music to consumers, iTunes and Amazon sells it.

Obviously we are only at the beginning of this process, but you can see a future where the record labels simply cease to be relevant, and new and more innovative markets and businesses develop. Individuals use a multitude of means and processes for discovering new music, and then access multiple means of getting the music, with the music labels no where in the picture.

And the music labels don’t like it.

Listening to the radio over the weekend, there were some excerpts from an interview with Colin Powell (ex-Secretary of State under Bush and ex-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff).

About the United States election, he said:

And I will ultimately vote for the person I believe brings to the American people the kind of vision the American people want to see for the next four years. A vision that reaches out to the rest of the world, that starts to restore confidence in America, that starts to restore favorable ratings to America.

Frankly, we’ve lost a lot in recent years. I am going to be looking for the candidate that seems to me to be leading a party that is fully in sync with the candidate, and a party that will also reflect America’s goodness and America’s vision.

This statement seems to be pretty spot on. I have a some respect for Colin Powell, who seems like a fairly decent, moderate Republican. However, Matthew Yglesias has not been kind to Powell in the past:

Powell was the public face of the Iraq sales pitch. He’s also a man who did have enough independence from his commander-in-chief to undermine her husbands efforts to bring gay equality to the military when Bull Clinton was president and Powell was in uniform. But as Secretary of State he raised some skeptical questions about the war, heard some answers, and then not only hopped on the bandwagon, but used his leverage as someone with a reputation for skepticism to make the sales pitch all the more effective.

With the lesser of the two accusations, the opposition to gay-equality in the military seemed like a pretty universal military disposition, I am not sure singling out one soldier for that failure is particularly fair (even a senior one).

On the issue of the Iraq War, I expect that Colin Powell would regret his role in the entire fiasco, but as a political player with a military background, I can see how he could have ended up playing the role he did. In any organisation, political or otherwise, you voice your opposition to policies up to a point, and then once the decision has been made you support the decision and the organisation. At some point Powell had to toe the line on Iraq, and I don’t think at that point in the Bush administration it was so obvious how on-the-nose the administration was.

I still think Powell would have a useful contribution to make to any future administration.

I have been watching a nature TV show, Planet Earth, which uses the fairly ground breaking technique of helicopter cameras to film amazing closeups from a kilometre away (and thus not disturbing the animal). Of course, it also uses the time honoured method of large amounts of resources to record amazing shots of hard to get to animals.

The point driven home by these shows is the amazing complexity of life, its diversity, specialisation, adaptation, wierdness etc. At the same time you can read about the minutia of cell development and operation that occurs billions of time over inside these creature. The world really is amazing huge and complex.

The US style christians, creationists and Intelligent Design advocates see all this as proof that God exists (who else could create something so complex?) I tend to see the opposite. How could any one create design something so large and complex? Are we expected to believe that one creature had his had in each cell, putting in place the DNA, the proteins the bacteria and their interactions? For billions of cells in a creature, for the millions of creatures of that species, and then moving on to the next species and so on for millions of species? (and that it not to mention the geological formations). It just seems a bit absurd to me. Isn’t it a much simpler explanation that there is natural selection and adaption to the environment acting over millions of years to develop this complexity?

To my mind in makes more sense that a bundle of fairly simple rules, operating over enormous space and time, produces complexity, than one being sitting there and engineering it all themselves (well unless maybe it is something like a flying spaghetti monster with enough noodly appendages to do it all).

I don’t know how I came across it, but I was looking at the blog site of Meika Loofs Samorzewski and saw a like to a book he wrote, available from Amazon. The book description contains this gem:

“The last story, The Isle of the Dead, relates a moment of metamorphosis. Rooted in personal agency, the hero Smith seeks a treasure but his outsider perspective rewrites the kernel and creates a new beginning. This directly lay the way for the ecosocial emergence of Country, when Starkey founded the legendary Ripplinglee, the first steadhouse. These tells prequel the three Books of Country (Fall, Born, Home) which best describe the time of the steaders. These will be released some time in the future.”

I don’t know who writes the summaries on Amazon, but I would have thought that this is an example of how to not write a summary. By using terminology coined in the novel I assume the objective is to create some ‘sense’ of the novel, but over used, as it is here, it makes the summary incomprehensible.

The New York Times is reporting that the The Atlantic Magazine is removing is paywall and putting all its content online. The Atlantic is a high quality US politics and culture magazine that is well worth reading if not for its very high cost as an airmail magazine in Australia, so an online version is very attractive. It already has a bundle of good bloggers, the best of which is Mathew Yglesias, a daily visit for me. But wait there’s more! They will also be putting their archives online, and as a magazine with a 150 year history this will provide access to all sorts of interesting material of historical value.

Just back from a week in the Queensland sunshine, blogging to resume.

One thing that strikes me when traveling north is the different quality of the light, it is a brighter more stark light in the north and I wonder if it effects the way people view the world around them?