McCartney on Imitation and Originality

McCartney’s own musical beginnings weren’t too different from picking up Rock Band and pretending to be a star, he pointed out. “I emulated Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis. We all did.” The group might have kept going that way, he said, except that they’d find themselves backstage, “and we’d hear our complete set being played by the band before us.” That’s the reason, he said, he and Lennon started writing their own songs. “It’s grown to something so big, but it really just started as a way to avoid the other bands being able to play our set.”

From
Magazine
While My Guitar Gently Beeps
By DANIEL RADOSH
Published: August 16, 2009
A Beatles video game arrives at a time when participation and simulation are changing the way we listen to music.



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Distributing the risk (pre-pirate bay)

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25739026-2703,00.html

The project began 44 years ago with Michael Samuels, then Professor of English Language at the University of Glasgow. Several of the project's founders have since died.
His team began transcribing information from the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary (OED) on to slips of paper.

They plugged away for more than a decade, and disaster almost struck in 1978 when the building housing the only copy of their work caught fire.

The entire building was gutted, but the slips remained intact because they were stored in metal filing cabinets.

After that the slips were written in triplicate and stored in three different locations.

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Distributing the out-of-the way town

David Farley on the perils of travel writing

“Is that a good article?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t have come here if I hadn’t seen this in my local paper,” the woman from Houston said. It turned out, the article went out on the Times’ wire service and was picked up by a dozen or so other newspapers. There was even an article about my article in La Stampa, the daily newspaper of Turin. In the coming weeks, I’d see versions of my article in numerous newspapers, including the Seattle Times, the Boston Globe, and the Toronto Star. Interestingly, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Dallas Morning News cut the two paragraphs about the town’s famous relic, the Holy Foreskin; the newspapers in Poland and Mexico, however, did not.

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Holden Caufield meet Dorian Grey

"A lawyer for Mr. Salinger, Marcia B. Paul, told Judge Batts that the author had a right to keep Holden Caulfield “frozen in time” for the life of his copyright." (via Clyde Haberman's "‘Rye’ Dispute Is Gateway to City’s Past"

Judge Rules for J.D. Salinger in ‘Catcher’ Copyright Suit
By SEWELL CHAN
Published: July 2, 2009
A federal judge banned publication in the United States of a book containing a 76-year-old version of Holden Caulfield.

Cheap Trick release new album on 8-track

Cheap Trick adventures with 8-track in 2009!

Globe & Mail's Report

Fair Syndication and copied content

It's unfortunate that the authors equated 'copied' with 'stolen' but Attributor's idea seems fair at first glance if it allows for the following:

1. It facilitates social distribution, that is, the reposting of entire articles without having to seek permission
2. It allows blogger to profit from their aggregating or curating activities while creating a simple solution for any ad revenues generated to be shared. This is fine if the publication owns the copyright. What happens to the freelance writer who granted a paper one-time rights?
3. It allows for non-commercial use. That is blogs like this one that don't collect ad revenue.
I run this blog entirely for my own convenience and benefit--it's just so I can find articles again--which is why I mostly point and copy rather than point and comment. But if I help a reader finds content from another site, I hope this would be seen as a benefit to the publication (eg helping to generate buzz) rather than 'stealing'.

Should Ad Networks Pay Publishers For Stolen Content? The Fair Syndication Consortium Thinks So.
18 Comments
by Erick Schonfeld on April 21, 2009

As newspapers and other publishers watch their revenues diminish, one common refrain among them is that maybe they should somehow go after Google or Yahoo for aiding and abetting the destruction of their businesses and sometimes the wholesale theft of their content. We’ve seen how the Associated Press wants to handle this: by aggressively going after anyone who even borrows a headline. Today, a consortium of other publishers including Reuters, the Magazine Publishers of America, and Politico are taking a more measured approach, but one which will no doubt still be controversial. They are forming the Fair Syndication Consortium, which is the brainchild of Attributor, the startup which tracks the reuse of text and images across the Web for many of these same publishers.

The Fair Syndication Consortium is initially trying to address a legitimate problem on the Web: the proliferation of splogs (spam blogs) and other sites which do nothing more than republish the entire feed of news sites and blogs, often without attribution or links. There are tens of thousands of these sites, perhaps more. Rather than go after these sites one at a time, the Fair Syndication Consortium wants to negotiate directly with the ad networks which serve ads on these sites: DoubleClick, Google’s AdSense, and Yahoo primarily. For any post or page which takes a full copy of a publisher’s work, the Fair Syndication Consortium thinks the ad networks should pay a portion of the ad revenues being generated by those sites.

'Archival Auteurs' at the UNSW Creative Media Conference

Research Showcases

Creative Media Showcase & Energy Showcase


The Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research), Professor Les Field, has announced the winners of the Presentation and Poster Prizes for the Creative Media Research Showcase and the Energy Research Showcase.

The quality of the all presentations was exceptionally high and he thanked all those who had contributed to the success of the showcases. Both days had been entertaining, educative and exciting and had raised awareness across disciplines of the research being undertaken in the field.

The prizes of $1000.00 each are to be used to foster collaborative research, particularly by more junior researchers.

Creative Media Showcase Winners

creative media showcase
Photo: Getty
Presentations
Session 1: Professor Rob Brooks, Science, BEES
Session 2: Professor Jeffrey Shaw, COFA, FASS, Engineering, iCinema
Session 3: Mr Ian McArthur, COFA, Design Studies
Session 4: Ms Margaret Borschke, FASS, Journalism and Media Research Centre

Poster
Dr Daniel Woo, Engineering, CSE

Hulu, huh?

AP Reporter Jake Coyle named Hulu.com, a video streaming site backed by NBC and News Corp, best web site of the year.

I can't comment on the reporter's pick as I've never seen the site--it is only available for streaming in the USA.

Given this failure to work with the *world wide* nature of the web, holding Hulu up as a model of "how professional content can thrive on the Web" is problematic. I'm beginning to wonder if the entertainment industry's licensing habit will turn out like the financial market's addiction to deriviatives.

So for those of us on the outside, I'd have to say it's still Pirate Bay that takes the cake.

And the Hippos were Boiled in their Tanks

Michiko Kakutani, writin in The New York Times on Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs' early collaboration:

The best thing about this collaboration between Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs is its gruesomely comic title: “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks,” a phrase the two writers said they once heard on a radio broadcast about a circus fire.

Kerouac, writing in the persona of Mike Ryko, tends to sound like ersatz Henry Miller without the sex or fake Hemingway without a war (“There was a long orange slant in the street and Central Park was all fragrant and cool and green-dark”); his chapters possess none of the electric spontaneity of “On the Road,” none of the stream-of-consciousness immediacy of his later work.

Burroughs, writing as Will Dennison, serves up passages that feel more like imitation Cain or Spillane: semi-hardboiled prose with flashes of Burroughs’s famous nihilism but none of the experimental discontinuities and jump-cuts of “Naked Lunch.” In fact, both writers lean toward a plodding, highly linear, blow-by-blow style here that reads like elaborate stage directions: they describe every tiny little thing their characters do, from pouring a drink to walking out of a room to climbing some stairs, from ordering eggs in a restaurant to sending them back for being underdone to eating the new ones delivered by the waitress.

I'm curious to look at the book to consider the role that imitation plays in the development of personal style. The beats use of found material has always been notable. It will be enlightening to see their clumsier attempts (even if it would make the writers themselves wince.)

Google to e-publish out-of-print books

Google Signs Deal to e-Publish out-of-print books
Book Publishers Take Leaps Into Digital
By ERIC PFANNER
Published:
New York Times
November 10, 2008

Two Bits

Two Bits

Flickr vs youtube: competing models oF Participatory culture

Seminar – Journalism and Media Research Centre
Title: JMRC 2008 Seminar Series
Dr Jean Burgess
Post-doctoral Fellow
Queensland University of Technology

Date: 18/9/2008
Time: 4-6pm
Location: Room 127, Goodsell Building, UNSW
Notes

Whether celebratory or critical, too much scholarly discussion of 'Web 2.0' and participatory culture fails to fully engage with the specificity of the branded online communities where it happens. in this presentation Jean Burgess compares two such spaces -- flickr and youTube. Both of them are highly popular commercial platforms for user-created content, but they have very different business models, user communities, and aesthetic and social norms. Through this comparison Burgess demonstrates the importance and methodological challenges of treating particular branded spaces as research objects. She argues that an understanding of their specificity and complexity is essential to understanding the competing futures of participatory culture.

Journalism and Media Research Centre

Photography & the Transformation of Culture @ UTS

Last night, I attended Prof Christopher Pinney's talk, Photography & the Transformation of Cultures. The lecture was a part Transforming Cultures.

He spoke at great length about photography as an event but I kept having a nagging question about both the specificity and multiplicity of the print. I look forward to reading the longer version of the paper.

UNSW's Journalism and Media Research Centre launched

The press release and footage from the new Journalism and Media Research Centre where I am working on my PhD:


News Ltd chief opens UNSW Centre
5th September 2008

The Chairman and CEO of News Limited has told a gathering of media insiders and researchers that there is a growing need for relevant, high quality research into the media, during a period of great change in the industry.

Speaking at the launch of UNSW's prestigious Journalism and Media Research Centre, John Hartigan has welcomed its commitment to industry-focused research through better collaboration with those in the industry.

"You are embarking on your quest to become the leading research centre in its field at an ideal time," he told the gathering. "The internet is the biggest thing to happen to the media since the telephone. And there is still a lot we don't know and don't understand about the social, political or industry implications.

"There is a place I believe for a new body of high quality research - a big gap in the market if you like - that you are well positioned to occupy."

Mr Hartigan who has been a journalist for more than 40 years has been at the forefront of a recent campaign by the Australian media to get governments and the judiciary to reform more than 500 pieces of legislation that restrict the public's right to know how it is governed and how courts dispense justice.

Led by Professor Catharine Lumby and including some of the country's leading media and journalism experts, the Centre conducts public and private sector research into three key areas: new media audiences and business models; the social, cultural and health impacts of media consumption; and the regulation, ethics and practice of journalism.

"We want our research to be independent, expert and excellent," said Professor Lumby.

"Our focus is on research that assists our journalism and media industries to be competitive and flexible and that also sets an evidence-based agenda in public policy.

"Academic research in our field has to be applied, relevant and engaged with real issues confronting the private and public sectors," she said. "What sets us apart is that all of the key researchers in the Centre have been involved in journalism and in the private sector."

The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Fred Hilmer, said the Centre sits well with UNSW's professional and scientific focus.

"It's a good fit with where the University is heading and shows the sort of leadership that the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences can provide," he said.

The Centre, which is part of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, is offering a Masters in Journalism and Communciations next year that will be taught by industry professionals.

Media Contact: Susi Hamilton | 0422 934 024 | susi.hamilton@unsw.edu.au

John Berger's Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead

Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead
by John Berger
from Left Curve, 31

1. The dead surround the living. The living are the core of the dead.
In this core are the dimensions of time and space.
What surrounds the core is timelessness.

2. Between the core and its surrundings there are exchanges, which are not
usually clear. All religions have been concerned with making them clearer.
The credibility of religion depends upon the clarity of certain unusual exchanges.
The mystifications of religion are the result of trying to systematically produce such exchanges.

3. The rarity of clear exchange is due to the rarity of what can cross intact the frontier between timelessness and time.

4. To see the dead as the individuals they once were tends to obscure their nature.
Try to consider the living as we might assume the dead to do:
collectively.
The collective would accrue not only across space but also throughout time.
It would include all those who had ever lived. And so we would also be thnking of the dead.
The living reduce the dead to those who have lived, yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.

5. The dead inhabit a timeless moment of construction continually rebegun.
The construction is the state of the universe at any instant.

6. According to their memory of life, the dead know the moment of construction as, also, a moment of collapse.
Having lived, the dead can never be inert.

7. If the dead live in a timeless moment, how can they have a memory?
They remember no more than being thrown into time, as does everything which existed or exists.

8. The difference between the dead and the unborn is that the dead have this memory.
As the number of dead increases, the memory enlarges.

9. The memory of the dead existing in timelessness may be thought of as a form of imagination concerning the possible.
This imagination is close to (resides in) God, but I do not know how.

10. In the world of the living there is an equivalent but contrary phenomenon.
The living sometimes experience timelessness, as revealed in sleep, ecstasy,
instants of extreme danger, orgasm, and perhaps in the experience of dying itself.
During these instants the living imagination covers the entire field of experience
and overruns the contours of the individual life or death. It touches the waiting imagination of the dead.

11. What is the relation of the dead to what has not yet happened, to the future?
All the future is the construction in which their “imagination” is engaged.

12. How do the living lie with the dead? Until the dehumanisation of society by capitalism,
all the living awaited the experience of the dead. It was their ultimate future. By themselves the living were incomplete.
Thus living and dead were inter-dependent. Always. Only a uniquely modern form of egotism has broken this inter-dependence.
With disastrous results for the living, who now think of the dead as eliminated.

The Dead Media Project

The Dead Media Project

Uppity Audiences and the Crisis of Author(ity)

"You'll Shut up. You're the Audience. I am the author. I outrank you!"
World's Worst Playright Franz Liebkind in The Producers

And this is fresh...

Excerpts from
The DJs They Couldn’t Hang
by Stuart Cosgrove
Originally published in the NME, August 9, 1986
(See whole story in the archives at DJhistory.com)

House music is dedicated. There are one or two releases which have the familiarity that hit records depend on, but most of them are for the dedicated. It is meta-music, a sound that constantly refers outwards to other sounds

House music is far from original, it’s a celebration of ten years of club music, strung out and remixed. If the last ten years of club music say nothing about your life then House music will be a massive disappointment, but if you feel club music communicates then smile for the hangman.

Frankie Knuckles, Farley Jackmaster Funk, radio mixers The Hot Mix 5 and young mixers like DJ Pope and Jackmaster House have transformed the DJ’s actions into an art: the aesthetics of house. Record decks, found sounds, simple drum machines, snatched backing tracks, sound effects and samplers are brought together to create live music from records, These in the words of current controversy are the ultimate musicians: the DJs they couldn’t hang. The House Mix style is creative, brash, extreme, dub crazy and soulful in the most modern and technological sense, The DJ becomes a creator and the hangman just an artisan performing two-bit rope tricks.

It’s the sound Chicago invented by borrowing from everywhere else.

Also See Cosgrove On the Wheels of Steal (1987)

House has broken the mould forever. The first theft as exploitation, one-way cultural traffic in which the authentic voice of black America was taken and toned down. But that was then and this is now. In 1987, theft is emancipatory, the traffic flows in both directions, every tune is a victim and every musician has the ability to mug a passer-by.

Lethem on Copyright as Art

From Copy This Book, an interview with Jonathan Lethem in Wired, 04.19.07

"I wanted to say any artist could make up their own way of dealing with copyright," Lethem explains. "I wanted to possess the activity. Some novelists have already done that by using Creative Commons licenses. But I'm saying we can make up a new set of rules every time we offer something to the world. Artists should take possession of the transmission of their art. In fact, that could be part of the art. Each copyright could be particular to with the art itself.

"The point is, it ought to be up to the artists."

Listening to Lethem, one imagines a world where every artist crafts an idiosyncratic copyright notice, with its own strange rules, to adorn the front page or liner notes or gallery notice fronting her creations.

Lethem doesn't think of himself as a copyright activist, nor does he claim to understand every aspect of intellectual property law. He just wants to tweak people's cultural perceptions, which is perhaps the first step toward changing laws.

"I urge people to think and feel differently about societal mores regarding originality and plagiarism," Lethem says. "I want to provoke people to reexamine the realm of imperfection that is copyright."

Artist-run print co-ops Fag and Fagette

Sydney-based Artist-run printing co-operatives Big Fag and Fagette in Throw Shapes:

THE BIG FAG PRESS IS A NOT-FOR-PROFIT CO-OPERATIVE. YOU ARE NOT A CLIENT. YOU ARE A PARTICIPANT. THERE IS NO GUARANTEE OF A PROFESSIONAL OUTCOME.

Thus warns the brochure for the FAG 104, a huge old offset proof printing machine which an Alexandria-based artist collective snapped up at a liquidation auction five years ago. A $50 bid was all it took to drop the gavel on the machine which, considered obsolete technology in the commercial printing world, is actually worth two thousand times more. Four days later, the four tonne beast was lovingly re-named THE BIG FAG and dropped by crane into 'The Barn', an artist-run studio in Alexandria. And since then it's been offered non-profit as a self-publishing DIY facilitator to social media makers, activists and artists alike. We were pretty interested in the whole initiative, so went to The Barn to meet The Big Fag and hear his story. According to artist Lucas Ihlein, one of the people behind the Big Fag Press, “it was just sort of serendipity.”

The Machine

It took two years for the Big Fag's new parents to get to know him, and to start getting the best out of him: low-run, hi-quality prints on B2-sized paper and card, which have an aesthetic and potential for customisation that you can't achieve anywhere else. Lucas puts it well;"It's a bit like having a 1950s Cadillac or something. It's beautiful, but it takes a long time to learn how to use it… It's going to be a lifelong journey, you know?" So is it the only one of its kind? "We call ourselves Sydney's only artist run offset printing co-op. Which is pretty safe."

Most printing companies today have become 'printing brokers', who email files to China for cheaper prints which then get sent back to the client, usually without being looked at by the company. Serves a function, sure, but the hard, clean plasticity of commercial printing sits uncomfortably with the art world and the principles of DIY. "There's a real joy and pleasure in being able to do it yourself, and also in being able to get a result that you wouldn't be able to get in any other way. We try to make sure that whoever's doing the job with us is here on the day of printing, so that if some issue comes up we can make decisions on the run." When artist James Dodds was making his pole posters on the press and accidently scratched the fragile metal plate used to make the print, he just went with it, enhancing the scratch with sandpaper. "If we were a commercial printer, we would have just chucked out the plates and started again, because you know, you have to deliver the Best Quality Work For The Client. But here, since the client is an artist…"

Art Vs Activism

Because use of the Big Fag hasn't extended too far out of the networks it belongs to, a lot of the clients have been artists. But the Fag Press network is more complicated than that, with members wearing hats in a bunch of other collectives at the same time. Many have an anti-Establishment bent. Lucas, for instance, is also a key member of the Network of Uncollectable Artists, who print swappable bubblegum-card packs featuring 50 of Australia's Most Uncollectable Artists, "collect them all!" - a spoof on Art Collector Magazine. Lucas also wears a badge in Squatspace, an initiative which run various projects and programs to engage with, demystify and reclaim space in the city - in 2002, they set up an Un-RealEstate agency in a Newcastle shopping mall, mapping out unoccupied residential "empties" in the area and offering copies of their Squatters' Handbook. They also run a Redfern - Waterloo Tour of Beauty, where residents get taken on bike or bus to learn about the inner-West from unexpected vantage points. Their next one is this Sunday, June 22.

Still, ownership of the machine is tied up in a diversity of backgrounds and different ethical stances -and printing is not just reserved for subversive or activist media. The Big Fag has printed culture jams, promotional posters, beer labels and also just art for arts sake. Kernow Craig, another member of the co-op, has been behind us in the studio making colourful, Big Fag-themed silkscreen prints:"I mean, it's a printing machine, but it's not only that. And it's a printing collective, but it's not only that. Because of all those different stories, it's also constantly exceeding itself and going further than we could ever imagine."

The Fagette

The only limits to what can be printed are those imposed by the Big Fag himself - mostly to do with size, colour and time. "If you're doing fifty posters in two colours, that's gonna take you a day. If you get more than that, it's a bonus. So yeah, it's slow." Lucky there's an alternative then - an independent (but associated) collective have just purchased an old Riso Stencil Press they've dubbed the Fagette, a more manageably sized machine that offers all the benefits of a photocopier, while reintroducing the aesthetics of the handmade. One of the first things they're printing on the Fagette is a poster pack - 18 posters by 18 artists, including big names like Mambo's Reg Mombassa, and the Age's cartoonist Bruce Petty.

Censorship

But the story of getting the art together for this pack highlights the difficulties of self-publishing in a conservative society. Reg Mombassa had submitted his latest Aussie Jesus, a mainstay in Mambo theology; "Aussie Jesus' Address to Homophobic Bigots of Australia". But the company set to go ahead with the essential paper sponsorship deal wouldn't give the paper up unless Aussie Jesus was taken out. Kernow gets red around the ears here: "It's important never to forget what a fucking right wing, neoconservative, Christian country this is. Fred Nile's the most visible point, but it goes so much deeper!" I'm guessing they didn't go with the company? "No! I mean Fuck! Not wanting to put something out there that's provocative in such a progressive way? They can suck my cock - sorry, but I think that's an appropriate response."

At the recent MCA zine fair, the organizers allowed participation on condition that zines contained "no pornography, nudity, defamation, harassment, commercial advertisements, and material encouraging criminal conduct." Big Fag Press' response? A zine called PORNOGRAPHY, NUDITY, DEFAMATION, HARASSMENT, COMMERCIAL ADVERTISEMENTS AND MATERIAL ENCOURAGING CRIMINAL CONDUCT. The centerfold was an open letter to the MCA explaining why limits should never be put on a event encouraging self-publishing. As it happened, people brought all the sexy, gory stuff anyway and just hid it under their tables.

The Death Of Print?

While I sadly missed the bottom-drawer goods, what I did notice at the zine fair was the huge crowd that came out of the woodwork. According to Kernow, it was the best thing the Museum's done. "The MCA is generally so divorced from the meaning of people's everyday lives in Sydney, whereas this actually brought in a whole culture. It felt alive, I mean it really felt alive, and I was so surprised at how many people came, and the diversity of work as well!"

So when it feels like there's been a zine fair pretty much every fortnight in the last few months, it's got to be time for media naval-gazers to shut up about the Death Of Print, right? Lucas takes this question: "There's always surges in one direction and then backlashes in another, you know? We all got so excited about websites, and they turned out to be amazingly useful, but we use them so much these days that there's a sense of relief when you come across something you can hold in your hands." It's that resurgence in the value of slowness and the tactile qualities of a tangible experience that the Big Fag Press and their machines are all about. Talking about the philosophical underpinnings of DIY art and social print media, words like punk, Fluxus and even Dadaism are thrown around. But they summed it up best here:

Lucas: "It's anti-art, but anti-art is the high art of the 20th century. And of course we're now in the 21st century, so you have to bring nostalgia into that."
Kernow: "So what does that make us? The retro mixtape of the 20th century?"
Lucas: "This is like pulling shit off the garbage heap of 20th century technology."
Kernow: "Or maybe we're just creating the golden oldies of the future."