history / phiffer.org

Star Wars and Modernism introduction

Earlier this week on twitter I ‘tweeted’ what might be thought of as an 8-bit art history lecture. By “8-Bit” I mean that, in the same way an 8-bit portrait is accurate, if radically simplified, this is a blocky generalized history. I was spurred to give this lecture after Todd Florio passed on the artist, Tom Sachs’ observation that “Darth Vader IS Hitler. Yoda IS Buddha.” Sachs owns Foamcore, police barricades, and can make an almost entirely air-tight claim on NASA, but Star Wars is mine. Sorry Tom.

I’m pretty sure this is what the internet was invented for.

Darth Vader is a Modernist — “Darth Vader was not a German Fascist, he was an American fascist (lowercase f)”

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Jun 7, 2012 in Links

RIP Charles Moore

I knew some of his photos without knowing who it was that took them. Here’s a quote in the BBC gallery, linked from the article:

Pictures can and do make a difference. Strong images of historical events do have an impact on society.

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Mar 16, 2010 in Links

The cultural heritage of the music video

I posted earlier about OK Go’s fantastic Rube Goldberg music video. I had assumed that because that video is embeddable the band had made inroads in convincing EMI to reverse their prohibition on video embeds. It turns out that OK Go decided to drop their label and form their own. From Fast Company:

OK Go rocketed up through the indie rock world in large measure due to the band’s brilliant, lo-fi music videos, which have spread like wildfire on YouTube. But EMI, in a misguided attempt to wring every penny out of the band’s success, decided to block embedding on the YouTube videos – meaning the videos were unable to disseminate out through music and pop culture blogs, news sites, and personal blogs the way they did before the restriction. And that’s not a minor detail: the band saw a 90% drop in views when that restriction went into effect. As in, 100,000 views one day, 10,000 views the next.

It’s obvious what the bands have at stake in this situation: more people watching their music videos translate into more exposure. Which means more income for the band. One would assume that what’s good for the band is also good for the record labels. Why would they undermine their own success?

The second post

This is my second post here. That is, if you only count the longer-form stuff and ignore my prior attempts at blogging. I wrote a sufficient amount of explication in my first post, but I’m going to indulge just a bit longer with the meta blogging. I’ve been an enthusiastic blog reader for several years now and thought I’d look back at some other Second Posts of my long-time favorites. I’m hoping to ape these blogger-heros to the extent that I can.