Jesse Newhart writes that for a few hours today, apparently all Google search results displayed the dreaded "This site may harm your computer" message:

As I reported earlier while the news was breaking, at 9:27am eastern, all Google search results appended This site may harm your computer to the top of the listing. The topic was wildly speculated on Twitter as everyone tried to decipher the problem.

At first it was reported that perhaps outsourced malware partner, the non-profit www.stopbadware.org was responsible. Stopbadware.org quickly rectified the confusion with a blog post declaring that it was in fact Google that caused their site to crash as millions of people followed the "This site may harm your computer" links back to their site.

It turns out it was human error at Google, when a likely now fired technitian, entered the '/' character into the database as a component of all URLs that contain malware. Of course there is a '/' in EVERY URL ON THE WEB!!! Matt Cutts describes the problem thusly on The Official Google Blog:

Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file.

By quickly they meant the problem only lasted one hour. For one hour EVERY PAGE ON THE INTERNET was reported as Malware.

The '/' is truly mightier than the sword.

What does this mean for Google search? I don't know, but for me it brings Google's search dominance and lack of any real competition into acute focus.

Indeed--for a time it seemed that Google only added the "This site may harm your computer" tag to conservative Websites. Newhart notes how easy it is for a Google tech to add it to every site's listing.

The key word is definitely "mini!"

With Kodak and RCA putting out so-called HD versions of their YouTube-friendly mini camcorders, we knew it was only a matter of time before Pure Digital Technologies, the maker of Flip Video mini camcorders, put out an HD model of its own.

Calling it the "world's smallest HD camcorder," the $229 Flip Mino HD looks identical to the standard-definition Flip Mino. It weighs just over 3 ounces, boasts 720p resolution, and has 4GB of memory that allows for 60 minutes of recording time. The release also says that the Flip Mino HD features "all-new built-in FlipShare software for easy saving, organizing and sharing of video from your computer." We're not sure how it's different from the software on the existing Mino, but when we get more details, we'll let you know.

Like the standard Mino, you'll be able to customize the look of the Mino HD at theflip.com/store. I did an earlier post on the whole customization thing, and the one drawback is that while the service is free, you do pay the full $229 list price for the product. Most likely, the Mino HD will retail for less on Amazon and other online stores--I'd guess $199.

Via Skye of Midnight Blue on Twitter; for my recent Videomaker buyers' guide to camcorders in general, click here.

Set the Wayback Machine for 1981, fire up your TRS-80 and experience the magical new world of...online news!

Much more retro-futurism here.

Perfect inner zen perfected across pond:

Theologists and Buddhist gurus have today begun a complete re-think of the path to enlightenment after a thirty-six year old man from Bristol achieved perfect inner Zen after buying a middle of the range Toshiba television from the Dixons electrical store at a retail park on Saturday.

Or heck, you could just eat a nectarine...

I interviewed Blade Runner production designer Syd Mead back in April of 2001 for Nuts & Volts Magazine (amazingly, the article is still online, here), and happily, I'm still on his email list. When Detroit gets its act together, this is what I want to pull up to a Christmas party in:

In the meantime, Boing Boing has a pretty cool interview with Mead online at YouTube.

Just received my copy of the December issue of Videomaker magazine, which contains my Camcorder Buyer's Guide 2008--complete with a cameo appearance by James Lileks, fresh off documenting hecklers at the GOP convention for the Strib.

(For what to aim those camcorders at--besides protests and hecklers--click here.)

Both my prerecorded Silicon Graffiti video blog and PJTV, Pajamas' live Internet TV coverage out of L.A. use virtual sets, and this new article of mine at Videomaker magazine explains how they work. (This demo reel for Adobe's Ultra 2 product is a pretty good video intro in and of itself.)

Of course, first you need a green screen--but that's a topic I explored at Videomaker last year.

It's been a while since I've posted at Blogcritics, but I have some initial impressions over there of the beta version of Adobe CS4, focusing on Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects, all of which have some spiffy new features. I hope to follow-up with the final release version in the not too distant future.

Roger L. Simon looks at two very different, but sadly both fairly mediocre political movies: Oliver Stone's W and David Zucker's An American Carol and describes want sunk both movies: "It's the Quality, Stupid"--or the lack thereof:

I feel badly writing that about An American Carol because its director David Zucker and co-screenwriter Myrna Sokoloff are terrific people and I very much wanted for their movie to work for admittedly political reasons. Almost no "conservative" films are made by the movie industry and when one slips through you root for it fiercely, so I waited until the film mercifully disappeared from the marketplace before making this opinion known. But I think it is important that negative "inside" opinions be known; because if there is one thing that is bad for conservative filmmaking in general, it is to make bad films. Because of the bias, they have to be better than the liberal ones.

Want really sinks both movies is the desire to produce agitprop, to tell an overtly political story. I hope that there are many more conservative movies--both to compete in the marketplace of ideas, and to reduce the near-monopoly that the left currently has on moviemaking. But I'd like to see them evolve to the point where their politics are subordinate to a good story, instead of vice-versa, as An American Carol seemed to me when I watched it in rough cut form at the Republican National Convention in late August. I had hoped that some of the flaws that were evident in this pre-release version would have been reduced in the final tweaking before the film hit the theaters, but it appears that that didn't occur. (You can hear the segment featuring Roger, Glenn Reynolds and myself interviewing those associated with the movie from an early September edition of PJM Political.)

Budding filmmakers on the right could learn much from the lefties of the 1950s, who were forced, because of the Hays office, to bury the more subversive elements of their films. Which worked in their favor--it produced infinitely more enjoyable movies than say, the World War II-era Mission To Moscow, arguably the most extreme example of leftwing agitprop to emerge from the Golden Era of Hollywood. As I wrote last year:

In the 1950s and up until the mid-1960s, it was possible to sneak all sorts of leftwing ideas into films by burying them deep into the subtext of the shooting script. Did you think that The Hustler was merely a film about a down-on-his-luck pool bum brilliantly played by Paul Newman? So did I--until I listened to the audio commentary on the DVD, and discovered that it was a film about the Blacklist. (Hey, if you say so, guys.) Similarly, on one level, it's possible to argue that The Manchurian Candidate is a leftwing fantasy concerning the assassination of Joseph McCarthy, but the film's incredible pacing, plot twists, and eye-popping cinematography help to soft-sell that it's yet another anti-McCarthy movie. And from the same era, while Dr. Strangelove is obviously an anti-military/anti-Cold War film, its Swiftian absurdity and brilliant screenwriting, and pox-on-both-sides message makes it all go down remarkably smooth.

There was less need for this once the G/PG/R/X rating system replaced the Hays Office. (Which had a variety of unforeseen consequences.) But the craftsmanship built up over several decades of moviemaking still showed through in numerous films in the post-Hays, post-Bonnie & Clyde, pre-Star Wars late 1960s and 1970s.

And speaking of the latter, it's a textbook example of a filmmaker employing exactly the methods I describe above to produce what turned out to be a staggeringly commercially successful movie.

As I said, budding conservative filmmakers could learn much from this period.

Videomaker has a sneak preview of CS4, the latest version of Adobe's flagship product line. Watch this space for more on this powerful addition to the Army of Davids' multimedia toolkit.

Two new multimedia software updates will be making their way into the toolkits of many in the Army of Davids this fall. This week, Adobe announced their latest CS4 lineup of products, updating Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and other Adobe products. Meanwhile, Cakewalk has announced Sonar 8, their more-or-less annual update to their flagship Sonar digital audio workstation platform for Windows.

Along with Adobe's Ultra chromakey program and accompanying virtual sets, recent iterations of all of the above products are what powers my Silicon Graffiti video blog. And speaking of video blogging, I have an article in the September issue of Nuts & Volts magazine on that topic. (No, that's not me on the cover; and unfortunately, the article is only available on dead tree at the moment.)

This video, originally produced in January when I was still getting it all together, gives you a sense of what a product like Ultra 2 can do--this was only the second video I had shot with it; and was still learning my around the program, and yet, I think it does a reasonable job of walking the viewer through what's possible via DIY video.

What's next? RAM power! Lots and lots of memory will soon start appearing in your computers; as the 64-bit computing revolution is still in its infancy.

Viva Las Vegas, baby!

Nina and I are in town for Blog World, which kicks off on Friday. If the concentrated geekery of the event wasn't enough, we'll have this to contend with as well:

It's International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Sure, an' you'll be tellin' yar fav'rite piratical japes, now? Such as:

Which Texas politician is the pirate's favorite: Dick ARRRRRRRmey. Which Pixarrrrr movie is the pirate's choice? RRRRRratatouille. (Wrong! It's CARRRRRRrrrrs.) Some people find this day tiresome. I find it delightful.

To honor the occasion, it's too bad they're not holding the convention here, instead.

Glenn Reynolds links to this Wired item on a World of Warcraft terror plot.

Has anybody accounted for Leeroy Jenkins' whereabouts during this period?

"Dear SiteMeter: Please make SiteMeter Classic an option."

Update: Whew! Thanks, Sitemeter!

Glenn Reynolds asks:

IS IT JUST ME, or has Technorati become almost useless lately? Seems like half the time it doesn't work, and the other half the time it's days behind. What gives?

I found it to be that way for quite a while, to be honest. I sort of assume if one of their servers crashes, some sort of backup kicks in with old posts, but this seems to be happening at an accelerating rate in recent weeks.

Hopefully it will be back to 100 percent by the end of the summer, as this fall will no doubt be a peak period of usage, for obvious reasons.

Ten minutes of video, 55-minutes of satellite radio, 30-minutes of podcasting, and all for the price of your broadband connection; just another week here at Ed Driscoll.com.

Seriously--be sure to check out the latter two items: Steve Green energetically ties together the disparate elements of this week's PJM Political, and Austin Bay interviews General David Petraeus, who phoned in from Baghdad.

(For any podcasting boffins in the audience, here's some gear talk: because of the poor phone connection, Gen. Petraeus initially sounded more like a call from here until I applied a massive amount of Izotope's RX audio restoration plug-in, followed by compressing the daylights out of the recording with their Ozone mastering plug-in.)

It's official--everything does indeed cause global warming. But before we ban flat panel TVs and monitors, we might want to ask this fan of conspicuous digital consumption what he thinks about the idea:

Robophobia--it's not just for humans, anymore!

"I have finally decided to take the plunge. Last night I upgraded my Vista desktop machine to Windows XP, and this afternoon I will be doing the same to my laptop:"

To be honest there is only one conclusion to be made; Microsoft has really outdone themselves in delivering a brand new operating system that really excels in all the areas where Vista was sub-optimal. From my testing, discussions with friends and colleagues, and a review of the material out there on the web there seems to be no doubt whatsoever that that upgrade to XP is well worth the money. Microsoft can really pat themselves on the back for a job well done, delivering an operating system which is much faster and far more reliable than its predecessor. Anyone who thinks there are problems in the Microsoft Windows team need only point to this fantastic release and scoff loudly.

Well done Microsoft!

Geez--so Vista is Windows ME: The Next Generation?

Err, actually, in a way--it is!

(Via David Frum.)

Bill Hunt reviews the DVD version of Blade Runner: The Final Cut and likes what he sees. He also explores the extensive bonus material and earlier versions of the movie itself, available in the special five-DVD set due out next week.

In principle at least, it certainly sounds like a great way to end one the long-running Civil War between North & South.

(Via a Governor LePetomaine-quoting Glenn Reynolds.)

While the Internet has certainly made distribution of music and video much simpler, CDs and DVDs aren’t going away anytime soon, which is a good thing for all sorts of reasons in my book. (Books--another legacy media that's not likely to away anytime soon!) And I have some times on protecting and repairing those discs online at Videomaker as well.

Libertas's "Dirty Harry" writes that the format war between competing high definition DVD formats has slowed the acceptance of the successor to the DVD, which is now in its tenth year of existence. And the film studios are shooting themselves in the foot, since the money isn't in the player, but the back catalog.

A format war merely slows--or stops--Hollywood's efforts to resell its back catalog yet again, which is where the real long term money is, anway. When I go high-def DVD, I'll be on my fourth or fith copies of some movies, having gone from VHS to 12-inch laser disc (remember those?!), to DVD. And along the way, having bought pan & scan and letterboxed LDs, and original issue and remastered DVDs of some of the titles I was more obsessive about.

Meanwhile, I just downloaded my first MP3-only only album off Amazon.com. It's a complete win-win for both consumer and Amazon: there's no physical product to be inventoried, packaged and shipped, and it downloads so quickly over broadband that it's near-instantaneous consumer gratification. The individual tunes are MP3s so there's complete portability amongst the PC and iPod-style player. It's been licensed by the record company, so there are no Napster legal issues. And the MP3s are rendered in 256 kbps format, which is, I believe the second highest quality format available via MP3. (Per XM's request, we do PJM Political as a 320 kbps MP3, which is the highest quality MP3 format.)

There's little doubt that as broadband speeds increase--and they will--video will be soon be added to the download mix, and not just teeny YouTube clips. Eventually DVD collections such as these will be a download away. I don't think bricks and morter stores will fade away anytime soon, but the Long Tail is becoming increasingly easier for savvy online retailers to implement.

Oh, what album did I buy? This.

No, really! Fooling around with Roland's new VG-99 guitar modeling system and its built-in recreation of their classic original GR-300 guitar synthesizer got me in the mood to hear 1984's version of "The Future of Guitar." (Would that that future came true, as compared to what passes for pop music on the radio today.) And speaking of the VG-99, if you're a guitar aficionado, you may enjoy my review of Roland's latest guitar modeling system, which I knocked out for Blogcritics over the weekend.

Not since the early days of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and New Shimmer have two-two!-great tastes come together in a full metal redorkulation overload.

Two quick technology updates:

Found via Steve Green, I hadn't planned to buy an Apple iPhone, but I'm starting to change my mind...

And while I often have sushi while sitting in front of my PC's twin LCD monitors, apparently the in-thing amongst the really hip members of the digerati is preparing the sushi right on them. That sounds good to me, but aren't they worried that the wasabi will melt the plastic?

Allahpundit explores the boffo box office--which a different kind of PC industry, politically correct Hollywood, would kill for--of Microsoft's Halo 3, which ties in with an apt comment Glenn Reynolds made a while back:

It occurs to me that the media sectors that are doing badly -- movies, music, newspapers, TV women's shows -- seem to be the most highly politicized, while the sectors that are doing well, like games, aren't. I'd be interested to see more analysis on that subject.

Meanwhile, James Lileks has online video of the haves and have-nots of the videogame world as Halo 3's launch approached.

Ahh, but what sort of space would be worthy to qualify as the perfect rec room in which to play such an awesomely awesome game? There can be only choice:

This.

Want to get into digital video? Over at Blogcritics, I review three books that make a fine introduction to medium cool.

The latest in Libertas' series of "Put Up Or Shut Up", an excellent guide to indy film/digital video making, is online, and deals with audio. There are loads of great tips, including this comment right at the start:

Sound matters more than picture. If the picture’s fuzzy, out of focus, or gone completely, it’s better than bad sound. Bad sound immediately takes you out of the film.

And speaking of location sound, I've been having lots of fun with this product, Samson's Zoom H4 portable digital recorder. I'm not sure if I'd recommend it for the types of projects Libertas has been describing, but for location work for short video podcasts, it seems to do a pretty darn good job. The base of the recorder has a pair of XLR-inputs for use with professional mics. And for certain applications, it's small enough to hold on camera as a handheld mic itself, especially with the black foam cover over the two small condenser microphones located at the top of the unit. It records audio onto a Smart Card, which can simply be popped into the computer to import into your audio or video editing program afterwards.

It's also useful in the studio as well--I've been using it as a digital backup recorder for the Pajamas' Blog Week In Review audio podcasts, just in case.

Some bleeding edge high-tech home music stuff over at Blogcritics, where I have a lengthy review of two harmonizer plug-ins for PC-based recording. The first is Audio Damage's Discord4, which recreates the classic Eventide H910 Harmonizer (remember Bowie's "Fame...fame...fame...fame...fame swirling up and down in pitch? That was the Eventide Harmonizer). The second is TC-Helicon's sophisticated Harmony4, which is specifically designed for vocals and create up to four independent lines of harmony from a single vocal.

In his latest column, James Pinkerton explores "The Importance of DIY Movies":

As a movie critic for TCS Daily, I sometimes feel like a bicyclist at a Harley-Davidson convention: My presence is tolerated, people are friendly enough, but I'm not exactly necessary. I know that most TCSers want to get their brain-motors running, reading-wise, on heavy-metal issues of technology and society. And any techster today knows that movies are just a small part of the show -- a legacy medium, shrinking relative to the endlessly proliferating content to be found online.

This is something I spotted back in March, when I wrote:

Hollywood is rapidly becoming just another niche entertainment product. And as it rewards films that are aimed at coastal niche audiences, and critically shuns the movies that reached the widest viewers, it has only itself to blame.

At this point, I’m sure I risk coming across like my parents, wondering why so few people are making entertainment these days that interests me. But then, as Mark Steyn recently noted, Tinseltown's sounding even more antediluvian at the moment, trapped mining controversies that are no long controversial; both ignoring today's issues, and half its potential domestic audience.

On the other hand, my parents' generation had to rely almost exclusively on Hollywood for their entertainment: only the stars themselves could afford their own in-home recording studio--and video production at home was strictly science fiction.

But yesterday's science fiction has a way of becoming reality. And these days, reality is often much more enjoyable than Hollywood.

For Pinkerton, the manifestation of this new reality in action is "the trend toward do-it-yourself -- or at least do-it-without-Hollywood -- moviemaking and distributing.":

One such samizdat film is a documentary, "Border War," produced by David Bossie, president of Citizens United, a DC-based activist group. Bossie, a veteran conservative activist, told me that about five years ago he decided to "do something different" to promote his beliefs. And so he traveled out to Hollywood, got turned on to documentaries, and started making them -- nobody told him he couldn't.

Libertas has written on numerous occasions that documentaries are indeed often the best place for a budding filmmaker to start. Just ask seminal DIYer Stanley Kubrick, who was shooting cheapie newsreels for RKO 17 years before MGM handed him $10.5 million to shoot 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Back in 1968, believe it or not youngsters, $10.5 mil was serious money in Hollywood, funding an entire big-budget Cinerama movie, from cast to catering. Now it's half of one movie's B+ level star's salary.)

But I digress. Back to Pinkerton's look at David Bossie:

The best known of his documentaries so far is "Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain... Begins to Die," a response, of course, to Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 911." And while Bossie didn't win any Oscars, he did make a splash, even turning a profit for his group.

As for "Border War," it's going to appeal to conservative immigration hawks a lot more than libertarian immigration doves. So be it. Those with other points of view should be making their own movies, and it's never been easier.

Bossie's insight is the realization that today movie-making talent is widely distributed. All those high schools and colleges and garages are cranking out kids who know their way around a videocam -- and also know how to upload to Youtube. Moreover, not all these talented kids are liberals and left-wingers, not by a long shot; an up-and-coming cineaste doesn't need to pass through the ideological strainer of NYU or UCLA anymore. And it's rich beds of talent nationwide that make "alt.conservative" movies possible.

Only a few days before the niche-solidifying Oscars, I interviewed conservative documentarian Evan Coyne Maloney. His filmmaking advice is well-worth re-reading. And as Kubrick himself once said:

The best education in film is to make one. I would advise any neophyte director to try to make a film by himself. A three-minute short will teach him a lot. I know that all the things I did at the beginning were, in microcosm, the things I'm doing now as a director and producer. There are a lot of noncreative aspects to filmmaking which have to be overcome, and you will experience them all when you make even the simplest film: business, organization, taxes, etc., etc. It is rare to be able to have an uncluttered, artistic environment when you make a film, and being able to accept this is essential.

The point to stress is that anyone seriously interested in making a film should find as much money as he can as quickly as he can and go out and do it. And this is no longer as difficult as it once was. When I began making movies as an independent in the early 1950s I received a fair amount of publicity because I was something of a freak in an industry dominated by a handful of huge studios. Everyone was amazed that it could be done at all. But anyone can make a movie who has a little knowledge of cameras and tape recorders, a lot of ambition and -- hopefully -- talent. It's gotten down to the pencil and paper level. We're really on the threshold of a revolutionary new era in film.

That was from 37 years ago. And if anything, "the pencil and paper level" is infinitely--infinitely--easier today than it was in 1969.

In the latest Blog Week In Review, Austin Bay and Glenn Reynolds discuss Rupert Murdoch's recent acquisition of MySpace for $580 million. Is Murdoch shifting his attention primarily to the Web? Variety writes that he's seriously considering dumping his holdings in DirecTV:

In a splattering blow to the satellite biz, Rupert Murdoch supposedly dubbed DirecTV a "turd bird" and is considering selling News Corp.'s controlling stake to Liberty Media.

FCC chairman Kevin Martin on Thursday shot down another possible outcome for the satcaster. He indicated regulators still would be reluctant to greenlight a merger between DirecTV and smaller rival EchoStar.

News Corp. owns 38% of DirecTV, the nation's largest satellite provider. But Murdoch's been down on the business lately. Cablers are successfully rolling out a triple play of video, Internet and telephone -- service that satcasters can't easily match.

DirecTV stock fell 3.23% Thursday to close at $19.19 after a Morgan Stanley analyst downgraded the shares.

A person close to the conglom said a DirecTV sale is being discussed as one of several possible ways to unwind Liberty's large stake in News Corp.

CNBC reported that Murdoch had made the "turd bird" remark.

The current architecture of satellite TV does make it vulnerable to end-runs by both digital cable TV (which offers video-on-demand, something currently difficult, if not impossible with satellite architecture), and especially, the phone companies' IPTV format, which, if all of its proponents' forecasts pan out, could be a remarkable advance in television technology.

DirecTV better do everything it can to hold onto its NFL Sunday Ticket monopoly. It could very well be the only thing keeping millions of viewers attached to the format, if new technologies continue to pass it by.

Over at TCS, Glenn Reynolds has harsh words for Amazon's new online video service:

So, in summary, to be allowed the privilege of purchasing a video that I can't burn to DVD and can't watch on my iPod, I have to allow a program to hijack my start-up and force me to login to uninstall it? No way. Sorry, Amazon.

[CNET reviewer Tom Merritt's] advice to Amazon: "Try again."

Talk about Not Ready For Primetime Players.

Update: Jeff Jarvis has equally harsh words for "The National Broadband (ugh) Company", NBC's foray into, well, broadband:

* “If we really want to compete with big aggregators like Yahoo and Google, we need our video in as many places as possible,” Mr. Falco said.

No, if you wanted it as many places as possible you would follow the YouTube model and let us distribute it for you. But you don’t trust us. Odd not to trust the people who make you money.

* And my favorite: “When ‘Saturday Night Live’ had a great clip of Lazy Sunday, YouTube made a lot of money off it,” Randy Falco, the president of the NBC Universal television group, said at a news conference yesterday. “In the future, when we have a Lazy Sunday clip, NBBC will make a lot of money on it.”
No, fool, you made a lot of money from YouTube because your long-dead stinker of a show, SNL, got new audience because your public — the ones you don’t trust — put the video up and got it seen … until you foolishly made them cease and desist.

The Times says lots of companies are trying out NBC’s service because it’s nonexclusive (including About.com, where I consult, but where I was not involved in this). It’s a what-the-heck. But I’d sure as hell have a strategy for YouTube, Revver, Veoh, et al. If NBC had any brains, it would, too.

Just think of it as the Supertrain of the Internet.

While this could be a decent service for the right person, I'm happy to stick with my Slingbox when I want to view TV on my computer. But it certainly sounds like AT&T is trying to maximize its investment in IPTV.

I probably haven't posted much home recording stuff lately, but I have a review of Korg's Digital Legacy Collection, which contains software versions of Korg's M1, the best selling digital synthesizer in history, and its successor, the Wavestation over at Blogcritics. You can click through to hear samples of the M1 in action.

For those musicians in the audience--or those laypersons interested in home recording in general, I thought I’d explain how I put the Pajamas Podcast theme song together.

The first step was booting up Cakewalk Sonar, my primary recording program. I then began to fire up various software synth applets and started experimenting.

A couple of months ago, Cakewalk introduced their Rapture software synthesizer, which contained a variety of sequencer patterns. These are pre-programmed riffs designed to unfold as the musician holds the key or keys down. Play one note and get ten--or a hundred. That certainly appeals to me!

Apparently, one of the programmers at Cakewalk is a big Blade Runner fan, as both Rapture and Project 5 Rev 2 have contained patches strongly reminiscent of the sound Vangelis invented for that seminal movie. In the case of Rapture, there was a sequence patch inspired by the Vangelis’ sequencer on the film’s end titles. I knew I wanted to start with that as the “music concrete” to build the theme around, so the first step was experimenting to find a tempo that the patch sounded best at (about 110 beats per minute).

The next was to find a drum pattern that sounded nice against the sequencer. I have a collection of various drum loops, mostly from Sony’s Acid Loops series. One of their more offbeat (heh) drum collections is called “Zero Gravity Beats”, and a pattern from that disc matched up nicely with the Blade Runner sequencer.

I knew the theme wasn’t going to be much longer than 30 second at most, so I laid down 30 seconds of the Blade Runner sequencer in A--which meant programming one long A note, and the sequencer would automatically chug up and down in its pattern, always returning to that note.

I then decided to craft a simple chord sequence in that key, and found another sequencer pattern in Rapture that sounds great as a sustained chord. It would hold the chord for almost a bar, and then play a sequence of notes as it trailed it off. So I played a series of simple acending chords in the key of A: A major, B major, C#minor, D major, E major, returning to A.

With two layers of synths burbling away, I figured some electric guitar would sound great for contrast, so I dusted off my Gibson 1959 Les Paul reissue, and fired up Line6’s aging but still very functional GuitarPort, which allows me to plug in an electric guitar’s standard quarter-inch guitar cable via its floor pedal into the computer’s USB port.

I chose GuitarPort’s “Brit Hi-Gain” patch, which convincingly models a late 1960s Marshall stack--the perfect amp for a fluid, lightly distorted Les Paul lead sound.

I then improvised a few melody ideas on the Les Paul and eventually, started recording them. The final lead line is the best of two takes spliced seamlessly together.

I then edited the drum loops, pasting in various drum rolls and cymbal crashes to the give the aural impression of a drummer reacting in sympathy with the lead guitarist.

Sometimes ideas that are clichés are useful because they just can’t be beat, so I launched Zero-G’s Nostalgia software synthesizer and found its recreation of the infamous Fairlight “Orchestra 5” patch. I say “infamous” because it seemed that every recording MTV ran in the mid-1980s had one or twenty orchestra hits from this patch. Frankie Goes To Hollywood seemed to have based their career on it.

But that was twenty years ago, and orchestra hits seemed like a useful way to kick off and end the song, so I dropped in a few hits: one at the start, and a couple at the end.

Then I added a simple Fender bass part using another software synthesizer. I chose a very conventional bass sound to contrast with all of the non-conventional synth sounds in the frequencies above it.

Since it was the lead instrument and would feature prominently in the mix, I wanted to give the Les Paul a slightly more fluid, modern sound, so I fired up Izotope’s Spectron processing applet, and ran the guitar their “Sweet & Sour” patch, which processed the guitar with a light combination of delay, filtering and smearing, that’s a tad more exotic than the typical chorus or flanger patch.

Izotope’s effects typically sound great, but are very processor-intensive. So a track with one of their treatments on it usually won’t play in time with the rest of instruments. To offset this, I first cloned the original Les Paul track and then muted its original version. Next I processed the cloned track with Spectron. I used the original track as a guide to visually slide the new version backwards in time so that it lined up with the old track.

The song was beginning to take shape, but it didn’t seem quite done yet.

the chord sequencer part served as a nice counterpoint to the start of the lead guitar part. But as the piece progressed, I decided to introduce a second guitar part to add a little additional excitement. So I took off the Les Paul and plugged my Fender 1952 Telecaster reissue into the same GuitarPort patch and played some simple licks, in a higher register than the Les Paul’s lines. It was also on the Tele that I played the bent, heavily vibrato-ed A note that i mixed in under the first orchestra hit.

After listening to the track as it stood, I wanted some interesting noise or effect to subtly begin the tune before the first orchestra hit went “boom!”. I rifled through my collection of Acid Loops from Bill Laswell’s collections, and found a nifty tape rewinding effect--it was part of a collection of DJs scratching records and creating other hip-hop/techno licks. The symbolism of the podcast starting with a tape rewinding seemed irresistible, and even if nobody “got” the effect, it at least added some subliminal ambient weirdness to create some subtle initial tension, resolved when the actual instruments enter.

Finally, I mixed everything down to a stereo .Wav file adding some subtle reverb on most of the instruments to bind them together, and processed the entire track with Izotope’s Ozone mastering applet, to give it all a nice professional sheen.

If that sounds like a lot of work, well, a lot of it is based on tried and true techniques I’ve either learned or developed over several years. The whole thing from start to finish took an evening--a very pleasant evening indeed, as I find music recording to be an extremely rewarding hobby.

Hope you liked the finished result--please tune in each week to the podcast it was created for!

Eugene Polley is a 90 year old man--who just happened to invent one the greatest devices in the history of mankind: the television remote control. Raise your Philips Pronto up in honor to him, next time you're in your den or home theater!

(Via Nick Schulz, my editor at TCS Daily, on his Transistion Game sports blog.)

Les Paul was once asked if anybody taught him his incredible knowledge of electronics at it relates to music. And he instantly replied, "Just the library. I'm a real book man. If it's in a book, I can get it." And over the years, I've found that to be great advice. Over the past twenty years, I've read dozens and dozens of music books, and a few of these have permanently remained on my shelf.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, budding guitarists such as Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton had little to go on but their ears and trial and error--rock and roll was a new form of music, with little or no written instruction. Today however, it's a different ballgame. For guidance, there's a host of magazines, instructional tapes, CDs, DVDs, and books available.

Read More »

I interviewed documentary video maker/blogger Evan Coyne Maloney for my recent TCS Daily piece about the future of video on the Web. Unfortunately, because of the article's structure, I could only use a couple of paragraphs of Evan's detailed responses in the article, so I asked him if he'd mind if I reprinted the rest here. For anyone interested in DIY video--whether it's for the Web, DVD, or their own personal archives, there's a wealth of information here. As I once mentioned on my main blog, his suggestion about camera choices is an invaluable tip in and of itself to any budding documentarian.

Ed: What sort of hardware do you use to record video?

Evan: When I shot my first web video, I didn't own a digital video camera. I wanted something professional-looking enough that my interview subjects would take me seriously. I rented a Sony PD-150. It's a highly-regarded professional/consumer ("pro-sumer") DV camera that has been used for low-end broadcast production, and it's large enough that I didn't look like some jerk goofing around with a handi-cam. (Instead, I looked like some jerk goofing around with a PD-150.)

I used the PD-150 once more for another shoot, and I was very happy with the results each time. However, when it was time to buy my own camera, I opted for the Panasonic DVX-100. It gets phenomenal picture quality and has a feature that the Sony lacks: a 24P shooting mode, which many contend gives a more "filmic" look to the motion. Also, as an editor, I find that progressive scan video gives me more flexibility than interlaced video.

You can generally get these types of cameras for under $3000 now. And if you have the money, there are a number of high-definition HDV cameras getting attention these days. You can find them for under $5000, and will allow you to distribute high-def DVDs when those become commonplace.

Ed: Do you use different gear for material that will be released to DVD as opposed to simply uploaded to your blog?

Evan: If you're shooting on any reasonable-quality DV camera, you should be able to use the same gear for the online and DVD versions of a given work. The real issue, though, is often audio. These days cameras are advanced enough that it is very easy to get a decent picture, but you really have to know a lot about your shooting location, how windy it gets, how much background noise there will be, what types of mics to use for different situations, etc., in order to get decent audio. And in most cases, if you get bad audio, you're screwed. Your footage won't be usable.

Many people assume that the on-camera mics are sufficient, but they tend to work well only in a very limited set of circumstances. If you're only looking to distribute low-resolution videos online, then people will generally be forgiving with substandard audio. But on a TV, especially one hooked up to a decent set of speakers, bad audio
will ruin the experience for the viewer. So, if you're looking to make DVDs of your video production, and you plan on having an audience that extends beyond friends and family, I would recommend investing in a decent set of mics. I would recommend a pair of lavalier mics, a handheld omnidirectional mic (like the Shure SM58--good for recording voiceovers) and a shotgun mic with an attachment that can make it a "short shutgun" or a "long shotgun". A pair of wireless attachments is also useful in cases where a wire between the mic and camera would be unwieldy. (I've had good luck with the mid-range Sennheisers.) But don't ever rely on wireless exclusively...they are sometimes beset by radio interference and static, so it's always good to have a backup channel of audio from a non-wireless source.

Lastly, to get the best audio, look for cameras with XLR audio inputs. These are much less susceptible to electrical line noise and radio interference, and all professional mics use XLR connectors.

Ed: Any thoughts on where video is going on the Web in general and/or the Blogosphere specifically?

Evan: What we're seeing with online video is just the beginning. Three factors point to a future explosion in the availability of online video.

First, simple economics. Ten years ago, the expense associated with putting together even the most rudimentary online video would have put it out of reach for most people. Even if you had your own camera, you probably didn't have video editing software or a computer capable of running it. If you did have access to an editing suite, then you probably didn't have sufficient bandwidth to make the resulting video available online. And even with unlimited bandwidth, the people on the other end--the potential viewers--probably didn't have enough bandwidth to watch what you made. Today, however, none of those are limiting factors. You can buy a usable consumer-level DV camera for around $500. You can buy a "pro-sumer" DV camera for under $3000. You can even shoot in high-definition HDV for under $5000.

Second, near-ubiquitous bandwidth availability. Although high-speed broadband has been available in most corporations for a few years, broadband is just beginning to penetrate the home market in large numbers. This means that we're really at the very beginning stages of mass viewing of online videos. We haven't hit the inflection point yet, but I suspect we'll see, within a few years, the same massive growth with online video that we saw with the web in the mid-1990s. Eventually, maybe 10 years from now, we'll have full-screen, full-motion on-demand high-definition video available directly to the home. That's the ideal video delivery platform, and if we're still a decade away, it means there's plenty of room to grow in this market.

Third, there will be an ever-increasing number of devices available for watching video. Whereas online video now requires you to sit in front of a computer, in a year, people will be watching it on video iPods, cell phones, Sony PSPs, etc. When high-speed wireless data networks become deployed nationwide, online video will eventually
mean wireless video-on-demand streamed from the Internet. It will no longer be necessary to sit in front of a computer to watch video. If you take mass transit, you can watch video on your morning commute. You can watch video while waiting in the doctor's office or standing on line at the post office.

Of course, all this means a massive democratization in the production and consumption of online video. More people can afford to put out their own unique messages via video, and more people can watch videos in more settings. Traditional broadcast and cable networks will find themselves facing smaller audiences as people spend their time with other outlets. Shrinking audiences mean shrinking ad revenue, so it will become more difficult for big media to spend as much money producing content. Traditional outlets will be lowering their production values at the same time that individuals or small groups are increasing theirs.

In the future, anyone can be the mass media.

For quite a while now, Adobe's Premiere Elements DVD-authoring program has managed to combine a variety of attractive features at an extremely affordable price--it streets for about a C-note. All of which makes the program suitable for a wide range of applications and users. It's certainly easy enough for beginners to plug in a camcorder and transfer and edit their first DVDs, but it's powerful enough to create some surprisingly professional looking finished discs.

However, as I wrote in PC World last year, there were several areas where the program lacked horsepower, especially when compared with more full-featured programs (not the least of which is Premiere Elements' own big-brother, Adobe Premiere).

Several of these areas have been rectified with version 2.0, which we'll address in a moment. But first, an overview of the basic concepts of the program and the minimum horsepower a computer needs to run it.

Minimum Requirements

With a program like Premiere Elements, it helps to have a fairly speedy computer and a fair amount of RAM. Adobe recommends running the program on a Windows XP PC with an Intel Pentium 4, M, D, or Extreme Edition or AMD Opteron or Athlon 64 and 256 MB of RAM; anything beyond those minimums would be all the better. I used a machine with 2.5 gigahertz Pentium 4 and a gig of RAM, and the program ran very smoothly.

A FireWire card and a FireWire-equipped digital video recorder are both fairly essential elements for getting the most out of Premiere Elements; the program is tailor-made for them. (If your PC lacks a FireWire card--as mine did until earlier this year--installing such a card is a breeze; for most computers, only a screwdriver is necessary.) Having both of those components will make importing video a surprisingly seamless task.

Essentially, the DV camcorder and Premiere Elements merge into one component. Pressing fast-forward, play or rewind on Premiere Elements' GUI sends those commands to the DV camcorder, which responds accordingly. And another button on the GUI will capture the camcorder footage and import into the PC and into Premiere Elements. (And of course, if your camcorder has A/V inputs, a conventional VCR can be connected to it, and then via the FireWire cable, video can also be input into Premiere Elements).

A new feature of PE 2.0 makes the program compatible with camcorders and PC's supporting the USB 2.0 standard. Otherwise, it's possible to import video via a video-USB interface such as Pinnacle Systems' Dazzle 150, or a comparable device.

PE's Great GUI

Once data is imported, Premiere Elements' graphical user interface is extremely intuitive, and makes editing, then inserting special effects a snap.

Premiere Elements stores all of a project's video in its media window. These elements can then be dragged and dropped into the program's timeline, where they can be edited and modified.

By clicking on "File" then "Interpret Footage", it's possible to set the aspect ratio of any clip stored in Premiere Elements. This is useful both to ensure that all of a project's footage is in the same aspect ratio (whether it's 4X3, 16X9 or 2:1, all of which are supported by PE), or to customize your DVD for a specific play-back format.

This is highly useful, especially for projects with a disparate variety of sources. Premiere Elements works with video in a wide range of formats, which include DV, AVI, MOV, MPEG/MPE/MPG and WMV.

The program also allows for a reasonable amount of straightforward audio editing. It won't make you give up Cakewalk's Sonar, or Steinberg's Cubase, but for many applications, it can get the job done. Premiere Elements accepts a variety of Windows-supported audio formats including WAV, AVI, MP3, and WMA. So it's possible to have a background song from an MP3, sound effects in WAV, and the dialogue in the default Windows Media format from the video it was recorded with--or in any other combination. (PE 2.0 will import Dolby Digital AC-3 files, but exports them as stereo. Adobe still appears to want keep surround sound the province of its full-blown version of Premiere.)

The Timeline: Premiere Elements' Nerve Center

Whether working with video, still photos, or some combination of the two, photos and video are edited and conformed via Premiere Element's timeline window, which is where the bulk of the work in the program is carried out.

The timeline has a time stretch tool, making it easy to adjust the duration of a shot, either by dragging it forward and slowing it down, or by right clicking on the shot and typing in a percentage number for its speed. 100 percent is normal speed, a smaller number speeds it up (by reducing the frame count), a number greater than 100 percent slows it down, and a negative number reverses the shot's motion.

Premiere Elements also works with BMPs, GIFs (including animated GIFs), JPEGs, TIFFs, PSDs, and other still photo formats, which allows the program to create a slideshow on DVD, for those producing, for example, a wedding production that combines professional videography with still photos shot by the attendees. To create a slideshow, simply insert still photos (such as gifs or jpegs) into the media window, and then click it's "MORE" command, which brings up a dropdown window. Click on "Create Slideshow". A dialogue box will allow you to adjust the duration the images display.

Menu Templates Now Allow For Motion Video

If all of this makes the program sound like a very user-friendly program for someone new to video editing you're absolutely correct. But the new menu templates included with the program make it even more useful to professionals who wish to use it as an element (pardon the pun) of their trade.

While PE 1.0 had a variety of extremely serviceable menu templates they were silent and static; their lack of audio and motion video was an obvious defect, which version 2.0 corrects. It includes several menus with either or both, in addition to the previous static templates.

What's the bottom-line on PE 2.0? With its street price of $100 or less, Adobe's Premiere Elements Version 2.0 packs a surprising amount of bang for the buck, even when compared to its full-featured $700 big brother, Premiere Pro.

Having written my share of "Here's what life will be like ten/twenty/thirty years now" articles (including this one, which I think I originally wrote in 1999 or 2000), I always enjoy looking back at other attempts to predict the future.

In 1987, the now defunct Omni magazine polled its readers as to what life will be like 20 years from then. In other words: today. All in all, they did a pretty reasonable job on their profile of the future.

(Via The Corner.)

While I was busy installing a new A/V receiver, I figured I'd also install what's frequently called "a media bridge", to allow me to play all of the Windows Media files on my computer in glorious 7.1 surround sound, rather than the small speakers of my PC. I had actually purchased a D-Link DSM-320 and a few days later, it was still sitting in the box, ready to be installed when I picked up the issue of PC Magazine devoted to video on the Web, that I had previously mentioned here.

They gave the D-Link unit so-so reviews, but raved about BuffaloTech's LinkTheater High Definition Wireless Media Player, giving the issue's editor's choice award. OK, I can take a hint: the D-Link unit went back to Best Buy, and since they didn't have the BuffaloTech player, I drove down the road to Micro Center and bought it.

Boy, that was fun: it took forever to get the unit to talk to my computer, but I expected this segment of the process to be finicky. Once I did get them talking, that part worked great: the BuffaloTech unit and the A/V receiver sounded dynamite together, and my Windows Media audio files never sounded better.

But the BuffaloTech unit also comes with a progressive scan DVD player, and I thought--well, I'll kill two birds with one stone: I'll make this my primary DVD player, one that I can also play Windows Media through.

So I popped in a DVD to test it out. It wouldn't play. Would. Not. Play. Wouldn't detect the disc; it just ground to a halt.

So I got on the phone to BuffaloTech HQ in Austin, Texas. While they advertise 24 hour tech support, at 1:00 AM on a Sunday morning, there's either one guy manning the phone's who's very busy (probably dealing with other LinkTheater purchasers), or he's off visiting the local Burger King, or he's asleep.

So after about a half-hour or so, I bailed and called again during the day. Other than hearing the exact same on-hold music as the night before (much as I love Dave Brubeck's classic Time Out album (the one with "Take Five"), knowing you'll be hearing it endlessly while on-hold somewhat ruins the experience), that part worked great: quickly got somebody who was knowledgeable, friendly, and suggested I upgrade the firmware and see if that would get the DVD player working. And it did. Yay!

So I spent each night for the next week happily watching DVDs. Except...at least once, each disc would fast-forward several frames. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Black Rain each seemed particularly affected, speeding up several times during the movie. But no disc seemed completely immune: Capt. Kirk would skip a word here and there. Dr. Zhivago would lurch forward once or twice during the movie wildly while gesturing. Audio would occasionally speed-up, then resume normal speed.

Last night I picked up a new copy of Lost In Translation at Borders. Virgin, pristine, right out of the shrink-wrap. And about halfway through, it did the same thing. And nobody messes with Bill Murray in town! (To paraphrase one of the good Dr. Venkman's great riffs in Ghostbusters.

This afternoon, I was on the phone to Austin again. They told me there was nothing they could suggest, other than take the unit back and get a refund. So I did, thinking it was a bum drive, and I get another unit. Micro Center was out of stock, but I looked on Amazon to see if they sold the unit.

They did. But one of their customer reviews had this to say:

Some weird glitches. About 8 minutes into "Liar Liar" Jim Carrey started walking twice as fast and speaking really quickly in a high-pitch. I tried watching several times and the same thing happened at the same point in the movie every time.

And that happened to me as well: each weird speed-up would repeat exactly. (In retrospect, I noticed several of the other glitches this fellow was referring to, but they weren't as severe as the intermittent speed-up/dropped frames thing.)

Does that mean that every unit has this problem, or that PC Magazine hyped a faulty product? In both cases, probably not--the tech support person said that he hadn't heard of any similar cases, and the magazine review obviously didn't mention anything about it. But that was more than enough for me to move to multimedia plan B.

Which is? I'll tell you in a few days. This could be interesting.

Update: Faster than a speeding bullet! The same night a week and a half ago that I couldn't get the DVD play to work, I first emailed a request for tech support to BuffaloTech before eventually calling. The response to that email arrived in Outlook today (2/9/06). Speedy, guys!

The San Francisco Chronicle has a profile of Dave Barry, who tells the newspaper that "Newspapers are dead":

Several years ago, Barry created the blog www.davebarry.com. It features typical "Barryisms," odd news stories sent in by ubiquitous "alert readers," columns, and a recurring feature called "A Fine Name for a Rock Band." (Most recent submission: Loincloth Outrage.)

"About five years ago, I went to the Herald and I told them, 'I've got this blog and maybe you'd like to run it,' '' Barry said. "And they said, 'It's a what?' But then they had a committee meeting or something and now they want everybody to have a blog. They want the security guard to have a blog."

Barry's blog has taken off like gangbusters, and like podcasts, blogs are the Next Big Thing in journalism. More and more newspapers are offering blogs covering everything from the local sports scene to the business world. (See The Chronicle's "culture blog" and others at sfgate.com.)

So it's clear that although there may be doubts about the future of the newspaper industry, there are directions in which it can expand and thrive. The future is digital.

It has to be said, however, that Barry is not optimistic. A little more than a year ago, he announced that he was taking a sabbatical from his column, and has now decided to make the break permanent. The reason, he stresses, was not that he had a lack of faith in the industry, but that he was ready to move on. Still, he has grave doubts about the future of newspapers.

"It has to start with the kids," he said. "My son is 25. He's been around newspaper people all of his life. He doesn't get the paper. That's the first problem. The second problem is: We can no longer compel people to pay attention. We used to be able to say, there's this really important story in Poland. You should read this. Now people say, I just look up what I'm interested in on the Internet."

Meanwhile, Arnold Kling asks, "Is Blogging a Fad?"

He doesn't think so, and I don't either--but with one caveat: individual self-publishing on the Internet is not a fad--but it's possible its form could change radically in the coming years. I picked up the February 7th issue of PC Magazine to read on a flight to L.A. last week--and wide swatches of the issue are devoted to its cover story: video on the Web. It's entirely possible that within a few years, Blogs could be supplemented by much more dynamic multimedia formats. But in a way, that just proves Kling's argument. There will still be millions of blogs, just as television didn't eliminate movies, and didn't eliminate radio--and the 'Net hasn't eliminated any of those mediums either. (Pace Dave Barry, it's a fairly safe prediction that any metropolitan area with a large number of commuters will have dead tree newspapers of some sort for decades to come--but they probably won't have the same level of prominence they once took for granted.)

Note: I wrote this review a couple of years ago for Blogcritics. While consumer electronics technology advances so rapidly these days, much of the book holds up well, particularly for those seeking a primer on building their first home theater.--Ed

Having written one of the best, easiest to read books on home automation with Smart Homes For Dummies (written in 1999, but revised earlier this year), Danny Briere and Pat Hurley have an obvious sequel in this year's Home Theater For Dummies.

As I wrote in my review of the revised version of Smart Homes:

Perhaps one reason for their emphasis of home telecommunication networks, is that unlike many home automation experts who come at home automation through their mastery of home-based technologies, it was in the telecommunication industry that Danny and Pat have made their careers, prior to writing Smart Homes For Dummies. Briere is CEO of TeleChoice, Inc., which he started in 1985. "Today, just about every major telecom player in the world is our client," he says. And Pat Hurley is a consultant and DSL analyst for Telechoice.

This background has helped them to come up with a number of ideas that are "outside of the box" of the traditional home automation industry.

It also grew out of a practical need to expand their own knowledge base. In the mid-1990s, Briere began to renovate his then recently purchased house in Maine, to convert it into what he calls a "'vacation home for the next sixty years' type of place". Briere often spends a month at a time both working out of there, and spending time with his family. (His primary residence is near the University of Connecticut, where Briere's wife is an assistant research professor.)

When Briere began to ask his contractor about what would be needed for a sophisticated home office in his vacation home, Briere says, "he didn't know anything. And we started talking to all sorts of people, and we went to various stereo stores, and other people, and couldn't really find anybody who knew anything."

That same outside-the box thinking drives Home Theater For Dummies.

Home Theater Versus Media Room

Part of the problem is that in the 1990s, home theater became a term that's so nebulous to be almost meaningless. In the late 1980s, when Audio/Video Interiors magazine debuted, home theater meant just that-a recreation of a movie theater in your home. The term was created when people such as Theo Kalimarakis began to convert their basements into recreations of the classic movie theaters of the 1930s. (Kalimarakis, one of the first, got so good at it, that he went from working at a magazine, to making his living designing and installing ultra-high-end theaters in others' homes.)

What the vast majority of home owners desired however, were media rooms, multi-purpose rooms with some sort of large TV, a laser disc (later DVD) player, a VCR, some set-top boxes, and a surround sound system. Whereas the home theater is purpose-built and pretty much dedicated to watching movies, in a media room, music can also be listened to, regular TV shows can be viewed, and even video games can be played.

For whatever reason, the public glommed onto the term "home theater", so that just about any electronic component larger than a 13-inch black and white TV is slapped with a label that reads "home theater ready!"

So at this stage of the game, home theater is ubiquitous, and us old-timers are left fighting a rear-guard linguistic battle. I guess I can't blame the authors or their publishers. To paraphrase the line from Jaws, it's psychological: you write a book called Media Rooms For Dummies, and people go "huh?!". You call it Home Theater For Dummies, and you'll sell some copies.

The Home Theater PC

One very interesting concept in HTFD is the home theater PC. (I've written a few articles about these myself, incidentally). There are all sorts of reasons why a PC in the media room makes perfect sense. (Of course, they're also arriving there in pieces: component size MP3 players and PVRs like ReplayTV and TiVO are essientially simple computers dedicated to singe functions.) But in the past, getting a PC's display to look good on a fuzzy NTSC screen has been difficult. Fortunately, the growing number of HDTVs, DTVs, computer-grade projection systems, plasma screens, et al, in media rooms have made this easier to accomplish, as Briere and Hurley explain in their book.

The media room PC reflects one of the goals of HTFD: have a home theater that's capable of anything, that can be used to surf the net, play videogames, listen to music (whether it's CD, MP3, SACD, DVD-A, etc.), and with a little help from the advice in Smart Homes For Dummies, be accessible by TVs and speakers in other rooms in the house.

If you're new to the idea of media rooms, err home theater, and like the idea, Home Theater For Dummies is a great place to start. If your media room is starting to look a little long in the tooth (no PVR, no MP3 player, a first-generation DVD player, etc.), and you'd like to bring it into the 21st century, Briere and Hurley's book is equally recommended.

Don Surber writes:

Western Union Telegrams. Stop.

Why? The company stopped telegraphing on Friday. No one noticed until Wednesday.

Wow, and I thought VHS was passé.

(Via Pajamas Media.)

Look for loads of cool Warners Brothers DVDs in 2006, according to the Digital Bits, including several titles sure to please dedicated Kubrickologists like myself:

Look for 4 new Stanley Kubrick SEs including 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Shining (1980) and the original unrated version Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Each will include new documentaries and never-before-seen footage blessed by the Kubrick Estate (although don't look for deleted scenes - Stanley himself never wanted them released).

But the most wanted Warners title may not be out until 2007:

And finally, here's a bit of news that's going to get a lot of you excited (and I made a point to specifically ask about this title, believe me)... Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) is currently on track for release as a multi-disc special edition in time for its 25th anniversary in 2007. The release is far from certain (as usual, there's a lot more that I can't post about this title yet - think of the old saying, "Loose lips sink ships"), but Warner says that work is proceeding, most of the key players are involved and things are "looking good" for release next year. We'll see.

It can't come soon enough: I watched my DVD copy of Blade Runner this weekend, and as one of the first discs released in that format in 1997, it's truly showing its age, especially since remastering has come so far since then.

Incidentally, something else I noticed while revisiting Blade Runner. while the production design still holds up, I was really surprised, how poorly its expository scenes were edited, in virtually every scene where there's background info that moves the story along. Notice that so much of it was delivered in long shots, where the actors' mouths ca barely be seen (such as when Sebastian takes Pris up to his apartment, and when Harrison Ford's Deckard character leans on the Egyptian in a fez to find Zora's location). Or, in during the scene in which Bryant tells Deckard the number of "skin jobs" on the streets, notice that so much of this information is spoken during cutaways to Deckard.

Clearly, this was a case of trying to salvage the film in the editing room, perhaps after initial preview audiences were confused by the film's action. (Hence the original addition of narration, as well.) Critics, used to regularly seeing films with this sort of editorial tune-up work are likely to spot it immediately and instinctively think "uh-oh, this one's a turkey", which may be why so many panned the film initially.

That's what Charlie Richards of BeyondtheNews.com writes about 2005, quoting from Steven Spielberg, who blames those movies on--who else--President Bush:

"These movies are asking sensitive questions about racial intolerance and Middle East politics," said Spielberg. "It's been an amazing year, very much like 1968, '69 and '70, when you suddenly see all of these political movies coming out at the same time, out of the watershed of politics. Some of it is due to our own insecurity about the voices representing us in government right now. We feel like our government has set us adrift, and we're trying to make our voices heard. We're telling them to be worried about these things."

Or as Richards writes, "Goodbye Schindler’s List, hello Munich".

Spielberg seems to be implying that films magically appear out of thin air as "the will of the epoch translated into celluloid", to paraphrase Mies van der Rohe's aphorism about architecture.

Which is pretty ironic, because who knows the reality of the process better than Spielberg does?

Novels can be crafted out of thin air and their manuscripts presented to editors and agents ready to be published. But with budgets running into a hundred million dollars--and occasionally double that--films need their concepts and budgets approved before shooting begins. Which means all of Hollywood's box office turkeys last year were probably debated in board meetings, or at a minimum, greenlighted by various studio executive mindful of both their companies' annual budgets, and what return, if any, these films would potentially bring, both in the US, and abroad. That so many studio chiefs would throw out all the rules about what sorts of films have the best chance of filling the coffers is pretty astonishing, however.

And note that with his line that "It's been an amazing year, very much like 1968, '69 and '70", Steve is yet another member of the left stuck in the late sixties/1970s mobius loop. All the more ironic and disappointing, since it was he and George Lucas, 30 years ago, who did the most to break Hollywood's cycle of dark, not-very-profitable political films during that period.

Update: John Scalzi ponders just how uncommercial this year's crop of Oscar nominees are:

Consider this: a nominee for Best Documentary -- March of the Penguins -- has made more money than any of the Best Picture nominees. I guarantee you that has never happened before, ever. When Hollywood's best films can't compete with chilled, aquatic birds, there's something going on.

Heh, Indeed^TM.

Sadly, one of the surest signs that an audio or video format has made the big-time is that the funky proprietary retailers specializing in it during its early adopter cult phase ascendancy begin to bite the dust.

Back when I was living in New Jersey, shortly after I bought my first CD player around 1984 or '85, I have fond memories of driving out to this really hip CD store in Mt. Laurel, which had imported CDs of albums not yet available otherwise in the US on compact disc (such as the double CD-imported-from-England version of George Harrison's mega-opus All Things Must Pass). You sort of felt like you were touching the future a little--because you were.

A couple of years afterwards, that store closed, as CDs became ubiquitous. There was less need for such a boutique dealer, especially in a somewhat out of the way location.

But laser discs, another new technology of the 1980s, really needed boutique dealers. I got involved in LDs when I read an article in Billboard around 1987 or '88 about some new company called "The Criterion Collection" that was releasing letterboxed movies on laser disc. They had already released a letterboxed version of Blade Runner, and Billboard mentioned that 2001: A Space Odyssey was coming later in the year.

Seeing these movies letterboxed? The full widescreen frame the way the director intended? Sold!

But because laser disc was such a cult item, film freaks such as myself invariably either bought them mail order, or drove, as I did, to distant specialty shops. One of those shops was Rock Dreams in Hamilton Township, New Jersey. As the name implies, it was started by two budding entrepreneurs (I think in the early 1980s) who were also serious rock fans. The store was a good half hour drive for me, but man, it was exciting: in addition to selling laser discs, they also sold high end home theater equipment, such as Pioneer's Elite line. (And in those days, when its equipment had rosewood-veneered side panels, and outstanding build quality, it really lived up to its name.)

Rock Dreams is still in business, but unfortunately, having moved 3000 miles away in 1997, I'm no longer a customer.

Eventually, I discovered a similar business in Cupertino, California that was only about 20 miles away. Called LaserLand, they rode out the transition from laser discs to DVDs fairly successfully. Like Rock Dreams, they sold both software and hardware. But sadly, they folded last year, as I discovered a few weeks ago, when I went shopping for my new A/V receiver and loaded up their Webpage.

As an early adopter of laser discs and their successor format, I'm thrilled that DVD has succeeded beyond its designers' wildest dreams. It has usurped not just the high-end 12-inch laser discs, but the lowly videotape as well. And while the Long Tail of the Web allows both huge enterprises such as Amazon.com, and 724,000 one-man operations to make a living on eBay, there's something to be said for walking into a small store run by guys who really live and breath the products they sell, and then browsing through three-dimensional merchandise, rather than flipping through pages on Internet Explorer.

But hey, I still have my original CD copy of All Things Must Pass, and a surprising number of discs from Rock Dreams. And catalogs of home theater gear past.

And Amazon isn't that bad, either...

Virginia Postrel has a great post on how content and aesthetics drove the launch of radio in the late 1920s and 1930s. Long before the Web--heck, long before television, radio was the new technology of the pre-World War II era. We take it for granted today, but how remarkable it must have seemed when it first debuted.

(Woody Allen, before auguring his career into the ground, did a wonderful job of capturing that era with Radio Days.)

I TiVo’ed an interesting documentary on Pete Rozelle on the NFL channel last week. For those who aren’t fellow NFL junkies, Rozelle was the NFL commissioner from the early sixties to the late 1980s, during whose reign the NFL merged with the rival American Football League, resulting in the Super Bowl.

About halfway in, the documentary features a sportswriter who says that he once told a group of NFL owners that once a day, they should kneel in the direction of Rozelle and thank him for the millions his business acumen put into their pockets.

Rozelle passed away in the mid-1990s, but the consumer electronics industry should probably give him daily thanks as well, at least this time of the year: how many big screen TVs, TiVos, and other pieces of home theater gear are sold in January, the post-Christmas month that used to be dead for big-ticket retailers, in anticipation of the Super Bowl?

My wife and I host an annual Super Bowl party in which about 20 to 30 people stop by and partake in all sorts of munchies. The party invariably breaks down into two groups: the hardcore football junkies who inhabit the den with me, and the casual viewers who remain close to the food in the kitchen (the game is also on in the kitchen, just not on a 50-inch screen with surround sound).

The food and the game are taken equally seriously: at halftime during Super Bowl XXXVIII, no one saw Janet Jackson’s mammarian protuberance escape; we were all in the kitchen noshing in anticipation of the second half of the game.

Over the years, we’ve used the Super Bowl as an excuse to upgrade the electronics in the media room: several years ago, I installed new cabinetry to house all the equipment; the 50-inch JVC rear projection followed us home around this time last year after I wrote a piece on HDTV on the cheap for PC World in late 2004 and had some idea of what to look for.

This year, I finally gave in and bought a new A/V receiver, to replace the Pioneer Elite unit I bought in the late 1990s, about five minutes before new inputs were required for DVD-Audio/SACD players, and the Dolby EX surround sound technology was launched. (Its debut film was the little-known art house sleeper, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. You may have heard of it.)

I try to buy the most full-featured receiver I can afford; partially because it’s such a bear to hook these beasts up. There’s a moment near the end of Goldfinger where James Bond is trapped within the bowels of Fort Knox with a ticking atomic bomb, and is finally able to open the case.

Prior to its opening, he thinks he’ll be able to defuse it. Afterwards, his eyes bug out for just a moment as he finds it absolutely crawling with miles and miles of indecipherable wiring.

Other than worrying about blowing up Kentucky, that’s pretty much how I felt on Saturday night, after lugging the big cardboard box containing the receiver home from my local strip mall's big box retailer.

On one level, it’s easy to pull out the old receiver: just yank out the wires, and then the receiver itself. But I wanted to document all of the wiring--and if there weren’t the miles of it that 007 encountered, there’s certainly a good several hundred of feet of it--plus, I wanted to remove any cabling rendered superflous by the new unit. While many of the leads had already been labeled, not all had--and I tried to remedy as much of that as possible with the handy-dandy Brother P-Touch.

Eventually I extracted the old receiver, and set-up the new one enough to watch TiVO and DVDs again; the rest took a little while longer.

It’s a lot of work--and much of it down in the cramped space between the rear of the cabinet and the wall. Hopefully I won’t have to repeat the process for another five or ten years. And even if the game is a blowout (we’re due, after several years of reasonably entertaining Super Bowls), I know the sound and picture will be pretty killer.

Remember the "Five O'Clock Charlie" episode of M*A*S*H? Where a pathetic North Korean pilot flew overhead daily in a rickety prop-driven plane to drop what look like a one pound bomb that invariably landed miles from the ammo dump near the 4077? There was a scene in that show where the visiting general looks at the ammo dump and says to Henry Blake (and I'm paraphrasing): "Henry, it's classic: store the ammo near hospitals, where it's less likely to be attacked by the enemy. We learned it from the Germans in World War II." To which Hawkeye quips, "What, we're taking advice from the losers now?"

That seems to be the strategy behind the poster created to promote this Bloodrayne movie, which I've been seeing everywhere on billboards. It's obviously based on the poster to promote Jennifer Garner's Elektra movie from last year. The look, the background, even the costume is virtually identical. And I can certainly understand Hollywood wanting to associate a new film with a blockbuster to subliminally alert a potential audience that hey, if you liked that film, have we got a movie for you!

But in this case, there's just one problem: Elektra tanked at the box office: Shot for a budget of 43 million dollars, it barely grossed half that at the theaters.

Of course, judging by the poor reviews on the IMDB, Bloodrayne looks like it'll need all the help it can get: it will probably be an infinitely bigger bomb than anything Five O'Clock Charlie could hope to drop.

More and more I do my DVD shopping at Amazon, but the Digital Bits DVD review site has a tip to a pretty nifty Best Buy exclusive:

Best Buy has got a very special deal going on. If you buy the King Kong: Two-Disc Collector's Edition there, you get the tin packaging version... bundled with BOTH Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young, AND a set of 5 additional poster art collector's postcards (different from the ones included in the tin), all for just $33.99! It's a great deal, and it gives you everything you want as a Kong fan DVD-wise. Just FYI.

It's listed as sold out on their Website, but I just picked up a copy at my local Best Buy.

The Bits also has a great interview with film historian Robert A. Harris on what a bear (so to speak) Kong was to restore before it could be released onto disc. I'll let you know if it was worth it at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Jerry Goldsmith died on July 22, 2004, at age 75. In 1999, he said he scored 175 films--and looking back at his career, there’s some terrific and memorable work and more than a few pieces that appear to have been done strictly for a paycheck.

Of course, any composer who’s written that many soundtracks is bound to have a few skeletons in his closet. In the “strictly for a paycheck” category, I’d nominate the “Barnaby Jones” theme, and 1988’s eminently forgettable “Rent-a-Cop”, which featured Burt Reynolds and Liza Minelli. But the all-time stinker has got to be 1981’s “Inchon”, which featured an aged Laurence Olivier under an inch of waxwork makeup as General Douglas Macarthur. The film’s $44 million budget came from Rev. Tsung Yung Moon--yes that Rev. Tsung Yung Moon, he of the Moonies. There is no music that could elevate that bomb.

But despite those misfires, Goldsmith has become a permanent part of movie history because of four great scores: “Patton”, “Chinatown”, “Planet of the Apes”, and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”.

That last title was far from a great movie, but Goldsmith’s theme became a big part of pop culture seven years after the film was released at Christmastime in 1979. Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek’s creator, who produced “Star Trek: The Next Generation” for TV in 1987, liked Goldmith’s “Star Trek” movie theme so much that he recycled it and tacked it onto the first 16 bars or so of Alexander Courage’s original theme from 1966.

Blaster Beams and Echoplexed Trumpets

Goldsmith wasn’t afraid to use unique instruments, effects and genres in his scores. For “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”, Goldsmith used an instrument called “The Blaster Beam” for an deep metallic percussive “sprrrrrrrong!!!!” effect. The Internet Movie Database describes it as being “15 feet long, incorporating artillery shell casings and motorized magnets. It was used as part of any scene featuring V'ger.”

In his 1968 score for “Planet of the Apes”, Goldsmith merged primitive instruments and dissonant 20th century classical composing techniques to create an atmosphere that’s simultaneously primitive and futuristic. 1974’s “Chinatown” had a subtle jazz influence with its prominent muted trumpet. And in later years, Goldsmith used synthesizers along with traditional orchestral instruments in several of his scores.

Perhaps the best-known effect Goldsmith used was the Echoplex, a piece of electronic gear designed in the 1960s, which created delays and echoes (hence the name) via a spool of analog tape in the unit. Compared today’s digital effects, it’s remarkably crude, but a few die-hards, such as famed electric guitarist Jimmy Page, still cling to it.

Goldsmith used it for arguably his most important (and most emulated) score: “Patton”. Specifically, the echoed trumpets used in several key scenes, most famously the scene were General Patton (played by George C. Scott) visits an ancient cemetery where countless young men over thousands of years had been buried, and more would soon be joining. Goldsmith’s Echoplexed trumpets highlighted both the magnitude of war in our history, and its costs--and reminded the audience that Patton was simultaneously a brilliant field commander, and a man who believed in his own reincarnation.

The Internet Movie Database has a list of films and TV series that Goldsmith scored that are available on DVD--and you could have a far worse weekend of movie viewing than renting “Planet of the Apes”, “Patton”, “Chinatown”, and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”, to experience Goldsmith at his best. As for the rest? Who knows--maybe one day a season or two of “Barnaby Jones” will be out on DVD as well. (Let’s hope “Inchon” does not return!)

Resource Links

Jerry Goldsmith Online: A well-done fan site, with much more additional information about the composer.

The Internet Movie Database: Goldsmith’s page has links to all of the films and TV series he wrote for.

An Interview with Goldsmith: Interesting discussion from the late 1990s, on Goldsmith’s oeuvre.

(From my August 2004 Electronic House newsletter.)

Having written a pretty nifty piece (if I do say so myself) earlier this year on Chris Anderson's concept of The Long Tail of the Internet, I had planned to link to his recent blog post illustrating its poweful impact on assorted legacy medias. I found it (as you probably did as well) via Glenn Reynolds, who has since added this addendum to his post:

UPDATE: Reader Frank Hujber emails:

Regarding your post on the media meltdown, every six months or so, we encounter an article disparing why the loss of the male audience. Every time, I parse the article and try to find the organization responsible for the survey, and I send them an email pointing out to them the possibility that perhaps they are not showing men enough respect. I might be wrong, but in my view, the media gives so much to the women's point of view that they demonstrate disrespect, or at the very least, dismissiveness, for men and masculinity and fatherhood. I'm convinced that this is the reason men are no longer interested in watching anything but sports.

Anyway, whether I'm right or wrong, I never even get the shortest of replies. It occurs to me that they're so well steeped in their own view that they won't even listen to the notion that they might be wrong.

It seems like there MIGHT be some significant business opportunity there.

You'd think. This is a theme that's been addressed here before. Send 'em a link to Doris Lessing! Or, if you're really angry, to Steve Verdon. Yeah, people notice this stuff.

The biggest offender is television, if only because it's such an image-driven medium. When I flew down to L.A. for Pajamas stuff in September on Southwest, their inflight magazine had an article suggesting some ways for television to woo men back into the fold. But the double standard that Glenn and others have written about has become such a hard-wired component of the MSM's mindset.

The technology of television has become much smarter over the past decade at an exponential pace (DBS, HDTV, TiVO, et al), which if anything will quicken its pace as it goes forward. But the collective mindset of the folks in New York and Hollywood who create the media that goes into our set-top boxes is probably too reactionary to reverse course in any timeframe could remotely be called the foreseeable future. And as with the movie industry, they don't seem to care much about the audience it's cost them.

Back in February of 2001, I gave a brief, capsule history (as opposed to a long capsule history...) of HDTV in America in Nuts & Volts magazine, as the intro to a feature article whose text is sadly not available online:

In the US, HDTV began entering the public’s eye in the mid to late 1980s. This was the period when the nation was in awe of Japan. Remember when Hollywood cranked out films like Gung Ho, Black Rain, and Rising Sun? When the Japanese stock market was going through the roof? It was against this backdrop that the FCC made HDTV sound like a national emergency. As Jeff Taylor, the author of Reason magazine’s weekly email newsletter on technology and politics (www.reason.com) describes it, “This was the period when the Japanese were building great cars. They were building all of the consumer electronics. We used to lead the world in those areas. What are we going to do for technology? They’re going to do digital television, so we should do something about that. So that’s what got a lot of people in the FCC being very concerned about HDTV. So you have that whole backdrop of, ‘The government has to get involved or this is not going to get done right.’”

Unfortunately, the combination of government hearings, competition between the phone companies, the cable companies and the networks, and the general ramp up time that a new technology always faces, especially one designed to replace a very entrenched existing technology, meant a very, very long gestation period.

During which, in the mid-1990s, the Internet gave a tremendous boost to the phone and computer industries. So it was now doubly important that the television get HDTV off the ground.

If you noticed, one thing I haven’t mentioned is consumer interest, and feedback. As Taylor describes it, “At no part in this process, was anyone saying, ‘what about the average consumer out there who might want to look at this high definition television?’ I think that has been the missing link all along in that no one has tried to figure out if there is a market demand for this and how would you go about filling it if there was. So what we have is all of these different interests motivated by different things, trying to come up with a system that the general public may or may not want. This has taken up a better part of a decade now, just to get to the point where we just might start building things.”

By early 1998, HDTV antennas were starting to appear on skyscrapers, mountains and other locations with sufficient height across the US, along with early programming. Today, HDTV is firmly entrenched, and even with the deadline to discontinue all analog over-the-air broadcasting pushed back to 2009, Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) wants to fund digital converter boxes for those few remaining viewers, despite the seemingly universal prescence of digital and analog cable, and satellite TV.

In Tech Central Station, Glenn Reynolds writes:

I suppose that there are worse ways to waste the taxpayers' money -- I can't actually think of any at the moment, but given Congress's ingenuity I suppose that Ted Stevens and his colleagues probably could -- but this strikes me as pretty pathetic, especially when the government is laying off scientists for lack of money. Subsidizing TV and starving science seems like a recipe for something short of national greatness.

Meanwhile, technology is, as usual, passing Congress by. Because while the long-planned switch to HDTV creeps along, video technology is advancing by leaps and bounds in areas that, in what I'm pretty sure isn't really a coincidence, Congress hasn't managed to get its hands on yet. The result, widespread video podcasting, is likely to bring about something far more revolutionary than higher resolution commercial broadcasts: It might actually produce TV that people want to watch.

Podcasting is already big, with people producing "radio" programs for Internet distribution using nothing more than a computer and an Internet connection. Video podcasting will make producing and distributing TV programming nearly as easy. Podcasting and audio MP3 technology have demonstrated pretty clearly that in the audio world people care more about hearing what they want, when they want, than they care about super high sound quality. I suspect that video podcasting will demonstrate the same thing: a pretty good picture coupled with a show that you actually like is worth more than a stupendous picture coupled with a show you don't care about that much. And according to some people, the Video iPod is already good enough to ensure that video podcasting will be "huge."

If Congress cared about promoting video distribution technology, it could do a lot -- without even spending taxpayer dollars -- by reforming intellectual property law to make it easier on amateur producers and distributors. (Some general advice on that, from J.D. Lasica, can be found here.) That seems like a better enterprise than forking out taxpayer dollars to help buy set-top boxes, but one that's unlikely to materialize since it would involve making the entertainment industry unhappy.

On the other hand, I should probably be thankful that Congress doesn't seem to "get" the coming video revolution. As its behavior with HDTV has demonstrated, Congress isn't much good at helping new technologies along anyway, and it may well be that in these overregulated times technologies need to be fast, nimble, and below the radar to flourish. In the 21st Century, at least, Congress's biggest contribution to promoting the progress of science and the useful arts may sometimes be to overlook them until they've become a reality.

That Third Wave technology is advancing beyond the speed of a First Wave institution is a definite feature, not a bug.

Paul Anka drops the hammer on his band.

(Don't listen to this at work: the language is, shall we say, colorful, to say the least.)

In Eric Lax's biography of Woody Allen (published about 30 seconds before the name Soon-Yi because a household word), he mentions that when Allen was writing for Sid Ceasar and other star comedians in the mid-1950s, his fellow writers on their staffs called it "Feeding the monster"--the celebrity comedian created a persona and his writers contributed material to feed it.

Apparently, comedians aren't the only monsters in show biz.

Glenn Reynolds has been tracking the progress of James Lileks' new book on Amazon, and is of course, partially responsible for its quick and blinding success. (I had no idea it would be out so soon, and immediately ordered a copy yesterday. Incidentally, can you still use "with a bullet"? Probably not if you're a New York teacher; fortunately for my sanity, I'm not.)

The other reason for its success is its theme, which sounds great, based on Lileks' own description:

It’s called “Mommy Knows Worst,” and the short description is thus: The Gallery of Regrettable Parenting. It’s a compendium of archaic child-rearing advice, going back to the 1920s, when parents were urged to give their kids sunburns and linseed enemas. It’s perhaps the only book I will ever write that devotes a substantial chapter to the greatest problem of the 1940s: CONSTIPATION. You have no idea how slow the bowels of American children moved in the forties. Dads will enjoy how stupid and useless they were made to look in the 50s; Moms will enjoy the detailed how-to-give-birth-at-home section from the WW1 era, and everyone will love the 1960s pamphlet on dealing with home stresses via industrial tranquilizers. It’s the usual retro-fest with many ads, laden with unfair commentary, and attractively priced; perfect for everyone who’s ever had a kid or a mother. I think that covers it all.

Many thanks to the Prof for the push. Now let’s get this thing into the top ten – if only for a minute. It’ll make me happy. It’ll make you happy, knowing that the continued success of these books keeps lileks.com ad-free. AND, if you like the Joe Ohio series, well, good sales figures on this one will make the book version more likely.

Twelve bucks! Cheap. And hours of laughs.

I thank you. Now buy! Or I’ll podcast twice as hard on Friday!

His last book, Interior Desecrations is still worth picking up as well of course--here's what I wrote about it last year for Electronic House magazine, when I suggested it would make a great Christmas gift:

Interior Desecrations
By Edward B. Driscoll, Jr.

12/09/04 - With the holidays rapidly approaching, you're probably looking for fun gifts for the holiday season. One book that might make a great gift, and at 24 bucks or less, not break the piggybank, is James Lileks' new "Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes From The Horrible '70s".

How hideous? The book's back cover flashes a stern WARNING! in a 48-point all caps bold sans-serif classic-1970s font, followed by this disclaimer:

This book is not to be used in any way, shape, or form as a design manual. Rather, like the documentary about youth crime "Scared Straight", it is meant as a caution of sorts, a warning against any lingering nostalgia we may have for the 1970s, a breathtakingly ugly period when even the rats parted their hair down the middle.

What does this have to do with furniture? Nothing. Everything. The kind of interior design you'll see in these pages is what happens when an entire culture becomes so besotted with the new, the hip, the with-it styles that they cannot object to orange wallpaper— because they fear they'll look square.

Please note that the author and publisher are not responsible for the results of viewing these pictures.

Hideous Photos, But Captions Make The Book

Hear me now and believe me later, these photos are staggering in their horrific ugliness. If any of your rooms look like those in "Interior Desecrations", you don't need a Roomba; you need a flamethrower and a gallon of napalm to start fresh.

But as frightening as the photos are, it's Lileks' captions that make the book so much fun. Lileks, who toils during the day for the "Minneapolis Star-Tribune" newspaper, and writes one of the Internet's best Weblogs at night, is a humor writer on par with Dave Barry and P.J. O'Rourke.

Underneath a particularly horrendous area rug combining patches of blue, teal, green, yellow, red, orange, and a dozen other colors not found in nature, arranged in a pattern charitably described as "abstract", Lileks writes:

"Mommmmmmmmmmm! Fido threw up Smurfs all over the rug again! To fully grasp the horror of the era, you have to realize a crucial, telling fact: this was the perfect rug for someone's room. They were happy when they found this rug."

Blame Park Avenue

Lileks alludes to the subtext of his book in its introduction, but it's worth repeating: by and large, these aren't photos of average, everyday 1970s American interiors. Rather, they're photos that Lileks has collected and scanned from 1970s-era home decoration magazines.

In other words, these photos reflect the collected wisdom of decorating pros working inside posh office buildings high above Manhattan's Park and Madison Avenues in the 1970s, and their take on what would be best for homes that wanted to stay contemporary.

I gotta say though, as much as I hate everything else pictured in "Interior Desecrations", that "2001"-style bathroom with the curved Orion Space Shuttle walls is pretty radical. Next time we remodel Casa de Ed, I'm soooo there! I wonder if I can find that abstract Smurf rug on ebay?

Resource Links

Amazon.com: If it sounds intriguing, you may buy the book here.

SmartHome.com: What the intelligent home wears—inside its walls.

Lileks.com: Both a sneak preview at the horrors of "Interior Desecrations" and an extension of the book: this section of Lileks' personal site contains material found after the book went to press.

In the mail today were two soon to be released books on the language of music: first up, Rikky Rooksby's How To Write Songs On Keyboards. I've interviewed Rikky a couple of times for magazine articles, and he has a seemingly endless knowledge of pop music's history--on both sides of the Atlantic--from the Beatles to the present day. He's already written several books on songwriting for the guitar (including this one, which was a tremendous eye-opener when I began playing seriously again around 2001); here he teaches songwriting craftsmanship to (as the title implies) keyboard players, who have many more options in terms of harmony more easily under their fingertips than the typical guitarist.

Also in the mail, a galley edition of The Language of the Blues, by Debra DeSalvo (with an introduction by the Night Tripper himself, New Orleans' favorite son, Dr. John). Due out in January, this isn't a music book per se--it's a glossary of blues-oriented lingo, including words and phrases such as The Dozens, Cutting Contests, Vestapool and many more. If you've ever wandered what exactly a Stingaree is and how the word was derived, then this is your book! (Warning for curious parents: there are definitions of 12-letter words that make this book more than a little unsuitable for children.)

I'll have more detailed reviews of both books over at Blogcritics--and I'll let you know when they're online.

Back in January, I wrote a newsletter for Electronic House on home theater cabinetry that begin with the supposition that my dad may have had one the first predecessors to today's high tech media rooms. (Its Google cache is still online, if you can get the interminably long URL to load in your browser):

Who owned the first media room? History may never know for certain, but I’d like to put in a vote for my father. In 1969, while Neil and Buzz were exploring the moon, and Jimi, Janis, and The Who were exploring the mud at Woodstock, my father looked around his sealed, finished basement, and decided, "Why yes, a custom-built cabinet to house my hi-fi gear would look wonderful down here". He hired a carpenter to design and build beautifully finished cabinetry to run the entire length of one of the narrow walls in the rectangular basement. The space was divided between housing several hundred of his thousands of LPs (and 78s!), and his multiple reel-to-reel and cassette decks, turntables, receiver, etc. A pair of hinged doors in the corners hid the speakers behind speaker cloth. The royalty of jazz (the Duke of Ellington, the Count of Basie, and Nat "King" Cole) played there nightly—or at least their recordings did.

Boy, was I wrong: James Lileks' wonderful Institute of Official Cheer looks at what might be the first home theater, from 1955, 14 years prior.

Revel in its advanced technology and a design so sleek, Raymond Loewy himself would have put down his conté crayon permanently in humble astonishment if he had gotten wind of it.

This was advanced technology and aesthetics, By God!

DirecTV has long had audio-only music channels in its ozone layer of 800-level channels. This sounds like a pretty cool addition:

If you eye your dish with loathing every time the signal slips--DirecTV Group wants to rekindle the romance. The No. 1 U.S. direct-broadcast satellite TV provider said Thursday it will start offering its customers 72 radio channels from fellow orbiter XM Satellite Radio Holdings.

Led by Chief Executive Hugh Panero, XM is the clear market leader in orbital radio: On Tuesday, it announced it crossed the 5-million subscriber mark, auguring 6 big ones by year's end--versus closest rival Sirius Satellite Radio's 2.1 million.

DirecTV, which boasts more than 14 million customers nationwide, said the XM broadcasts will begin in mid-November. The deal nearly doubles the TV purveyor's current aural programming lineup without an additional fee for customers, it said. The new offerings will include music channels, children's programming and "Home Plate," XM's Major League Baseball talk-radio channel. Unfortunately, the latter comes a tad late in the season.

Satellite radio may be the current next big thing, but it probably can't hurt to have some connections who are already entrenched. DirectTV just might be that well-established friend, as it's nearly 34%-owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. And if the Aussie-born Forbes 400 Richest Americans member doesn't know media--and how to sell it to people--who does?

Besides Panero, that is.

As the Forbes article notes, satellite radio is scheduled to come satellite TV in mid-November.

The Digital Bits has an extensive review of the new DVD release of Batman Begins. I originally reviewed the film on my main blog, in a lengthy post in June, when Batman Begins was one of the few hits at the summer box office, along with Star Wars: Episode Three: Revenge of the Colon:

Saw an afternoon showing of Batman Begins on Sunday. Short synopsis: as a fan of Batman ever since I was a kid, all I can say is that this is the film they should have made all along.

Well of course, that's not all I can say. Long, uber-geeky synopsis? I thought the pacing was just a tad slack, and the last act rather formulaic. (The heavy attempts to poison Gotham's water supply. Wasn't that the last act of the first Batman, with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson?) Batman slugs it out with said heavy on Gotham's "L", just as Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus fought on Manhattan's "L" last year. (But Manhattan doesn't have...I know, I know. Don't blame me, blame Sam Raimi.)

But of course it's going to be formulaic. Heck, Batman itself is pretty formulaic: we know Batman's core backstory pretty darn well by now: millionaire parents murdered, gunned down in front of a theater with young Bruce Wayne watching. Bruce decides to use the symbol of a bat to strike fear into the hearts of criminals. (Besides, Rabbitman or Grasshopperman would have been too silly.) Faithful family butler Alfred willing to assist. Discovers cave under mansion, decides to build crime laboratory there. Arms himself with more gadgets than James Bond. Gotham's underworld is never the same.

Like a bag of Tinkertoy parts, the trick of course, is assembling those elements in unique ways. Christopher Nolan begins his take on Batman by cross-cutting between Bruce as a child, and Bruce as an adult in the Himalayas, where's he's undergoing training vaguely reminiscent of David Carradine's mystical flashbacks in Kung Fu, but with extra added black-clad Ninjas for additional danger and mayhem, and an ultimately well-cast Liam Neeson as his mysterous mentor.

In the comics, Bruce's father was always a successful doctor, but here, he's a zillionaire philanthropist who's inherited his wealth, and both using it to help Gotham during "The Depression", and also working as a doctor on the side, as another way to do good. Based on Bruce's Age and when his father was gunned down, The Depression would have been around the Carter years. Or maybe the Ford years, prompting that famous New York Post headline, "FORD TO GOTHAM: DROP DEAD".

To help the citizens of Gotham, Bruce's dad has built a spectacular overhead monorail, which makes Seattle's or Disney World's look like an HO-scale toy. In the flashbacks, it's pristine, shiny and brand new, but these days, it looks like the 1974-era New York Subway, with cars covered inside and out with graffiti.

Fortunately, Bruce returns from the Himalayas, finds Morgan Freeman working in the basement of Wayne Enterprises, hires him to play the same role that "Q" plays in the James Bond movies, and is off to clean up the streets of Gotham--which look remarkably like the streets of Chicago, since that's where much of the film's urban landscape was shot. (I'm pretty sure I recognized One Illinois Center at 111 Whacker Drive, one of Mies van der Rohe's last office buildings. Gotham's homeless are apparently living under it.)

Rather than Pat Hingle or Neil Hamilton's distinguished and graying veteran police Commissioner Gordon, Batman's aided by young police detective James Gordon, played in remarkably subdued fashion by a mustachioed Gary Oldman, who really does look like a younger version of the comic books' Commissioner Gordon.

He's also aided by Michael Caine's as Alfred, doesn't look much like the comic books' balding 40- or 50-something Alfred, but who does look exactly the same age in the flashbacks with the young Bruce Wayne and his parents as he does in the present, but we're not supposed to notice that. But then, lots of people age very differently in the comics and the movies than they do in real life: Batman has been 35 for nearly 70 years, and James Bond has been 40 for almost 45 years, right?

Besides the film's occasionally languid pacing, if there's a weak link to Batman Begins, it's Katie Holmes as a crusading assistant district attorney: when you make Angie Harmon's Law & Order character more believable as a D.A., you know you're in trouble. Holmes was the one actor in Batman Begins who I never bought.

Beyond that, this is a well cast, well conceived updating of the Batman legend, and at a bare minimum, it's a great popcorn movie. My wife, whose idea of Batman is Adam West and Michael Keaton, loved it. And needless to say, so did I. And to bring this post full circle, when I was a kid, whether it was Adam West's campy Batman, or the darker, tougher Batman of the early 1970s, Batman was my superhero.

It took a long time, but Hollywood finally got him right.

Hopefully they won't blow it again too badly when the next round of sequels begin.

The next time you pop a DVD into your player and ogle at all of the bonus features and interactive menus, give some thought to where those features came from.

In 1980, Bob Stein was supporting himself as a waiter but he dreamed of being at the forefront of a technology revolution. Visits to the public library turned up articles on a new technology called the optical videodisc (soon to be known as the laserdisc). "I read until I got interested in something. And I got interested in this," Stein says.

Four years later, Stein bought the laserdisc rights to two classic films -- "Citizen Kane" and "King Kong" -- and hooked up with Janus Films, a distributor of classic and offbeat films, with the hope of releasing Janus' content on laserdisc.

Naming their nascent venture after a NASA deep-space probe, Stein and his Janus partners formed the Voyager Company to distribute interactive laserdiscs. The new company dubbed its classic films division the Criterion Collection.

Pushing the Technology Envelope

For Stein, the laserdisc had several elements that at the time were rarely taken advantage of by mainstream Hollywood studios. First, its original CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) format could display 24 frames a second, meaning that a film could be stopped and each frame individually examined. Second, because laserdiscs originally had a stereo analog audio track, and later, a stereo digital audio track in addition to the analog track, there were multiple audio tracks available on the disc. Those analog tracks could hold an optional audio commentary or two. And finally, the laserdiscs could be chapter-encoded, making it possible to click to certain spots before, during or after a movie. (At the time, most mainstream films on laserdisc didn't bother with chapter encoding.)

Unlike today's DVDs, in the mid-1980s letterboxed films were a rarity, but Criterion pushed letterbox into the mainstream by becoming the first company to fully commit to the format. And it did this in spite of being flooded by letters from viewers, who wrote: "I think my disc is defective. I can only see a third of the picture!"

Criterion Helps DVD Hit the Ground Running

Thanks to Stein's efforts, the laserdisc had a new lease on life as a vehicle for film buffs and scholars who could study films in a format close to original celluloid. In fact, Criterion emerged as a better format because of ancillary features such as trailers, documentaries, still photos, audio commentaries, and anything else Criterion could include.

Douglas Pratt, who began writing The laserdisc Newsletter (now The DVD-laserdisc Newsletter) in the mid-1980s, told me that in 1997: "When DVDs enabled interactive home video to reach the mass market, all of the home video companies were able to hit the ground running, using what they had initially learned from Criterion. The home video companies themselves are filled with people who like movies and are attracted to collector's editions, and there is a certain amount of vanity appeal for the filmmakers that encourages them to participate in creating the programming. When aspects of it caught on with the mass market -- particularly the inclusion of deleted scenes -- it helped to define home video as being the true end-product of the production of a motion picture."

By creating discs that contained both the movies and related interactive elements, Criterion had answered the question: "Why should I buy a laserdisc player? It can't record!"

And in so doing, Criterion paved the way for that DVD player in your den.

(From my February 2004 Electronic House newsletter.)

(The following is a true story, based on the real-life misadventures of your humble narrator in July of 2004.)

One issue we rarely think about with our media rooms and home theaters is safety. In a way, that's understandable. Safety? Excuse me, we're watching movies, not sky diving. Besides, safety's for wimps. Real men don't want to think about that stuff. We'd rather put "Full Metal Jacket" into the DVD player and kick back! Look--there's Lee Ermey. "What is your major malfunction, numb-nuts??!!"

Well, yesterday, my major malfunction was to discover--the hard way--that two objects cannot occupy the same space simultaneously. Especially when they're a glass coffee table and me. Which is why safety is on my mind today after taking a nasty spill in the living room: I took a wrong turn and slipped bass-ackwards onto our glass coffee table-and managed to put a pretty healthy slice into my left calf. One demolished table, two hours at the hospital and 11 stitches later, it's certainly given me some food for thought.

First, all those medical shows I watched as a kid on TV showed their viewers nothing. "M*A*S*H"? If Hawkeye had two or three red droplets on his otherwise pristine surgical scrubs, it was a sign the Red Chinese were clobbering our boys at the front. "Emergency" was even more sanitized: Randy Mantooth's hair getting mussed was a sign that Los Angeles was experiencing armageddon.

But you know those Sunday shows that the Lifetime Channel used to show that showed real surgery? I always tried to click past them as fast as possible to get to the football game, but they're certainly true to life, as I discovered yesterday. When you can see all seven layers of skin and fat, and a little muscle as well, you know you're not in Mantooth land anymore, Toto.

Making a Home Theater Safer

If you have a family and the biggest, best, most enjoyable home theater on the block, odds are you also have all of the neighborhood kids in there every so often. This is a good thing, because at least you know where your kids are. But it also makes you a little bit of an informal block parent.

So what can be done to improve safety in the home theater? Here are some suggestions-take them for what they're worth. I'm not saying it's necessary to incorporate all of them into a media room, but an ounce of prevention is worth ten or 11 stitches-or something like that. Having a smoke detector and nearby A-B-C fire extinguisher aren't bad ideas. When one considers how much electronic equipment is typically in a media room wiring it to its own circuit, apart from the main breaker, is essential.

There are all sorts of methods to reduce the clutter of speaker wire in the room, from running wires in walls to building a platform and having the wires run underneath. But at a minimum, keep them coiled up and out of the way of running feet.

Many X10 controllers have an all-on function to activate all of the lights in the house, which can save vital seconds in an emergency. Speaking of lights, most commercial movie theaters have exit lighting always on, even when the main light dim. Incorporating a similar design into a home theater would both add to its theater-like atmosphere and increase its safety.

Keeping a first-aid kit in the house-and knowing where it's located-is always good planning as well.

Finally, if you end up ever hosting movie nights for local clubs or groups, make sure you check out your homeowners' insurance policy to make sure you're covered; or see if the group has insurance in case someone gets hurt while in your home.

Remember kids, it's all fun and games until somebody takes a coffee table out.

Resource Links

CableOrganizer.com: Cable management tips for home theater systems.

Crutchfield: Good article from the online retailers, about hiding the wires in a home theater. (Adobe Acrobat required to read.)

SmartHome.com
The popular online home automation retailer's page on home theater drape and lighting control products.

R. Lee Ermey: The star of "Full Metal Jacket" and former Marine DI's home page.

Back in the 1990s, the big buzzword in the home theater industry was "convergence," i.e. computers merging with home entertainment and home entertainment merging with computers. Nobody was really sure what was going on, but there was a lot of merging and converging that was promised for the 21st century. It would end with a "Star Trek"-style Holodeck in every basement.

Well, the 21st century is here, and convergence is becoming more of a reality every day. It's entirely possible that within a few years as much audio and video will be coming via an Ethernet cable as from a length of RG-6 coax.

Products such as DVRs by ReplayTV and TiVo are beginning to ship with Ethernet jacks to allow for the routing of recorded shows from one unit to another. The idea is that if you record a show on your TiVo in the den, you should be able to watch it on your TiVo in the bedroom. Current units are equipped with 100 Mbps network connections, but there's no doubt they'll have Gigabit (1000 Megabits per second) connections when and if there's a large enough base of home Gigabit Ethernets to make them worthwhile for their manufacturers to install.

Lots of people also have multiple PCs in the home and they're routing photos, video clips, MP3s, CD-quality Windows audio files, and other files from computer to computer. So speeding up the home LAN with Gigabit connections is something to consider.

Speed Kills, But Not Necessarily the Bank Account

Gigabit cards for PCs aren't much more expensive than 10/100 Mbps, and switches are available for a sawbuck or two, depending upon how many ports you need. If you're starting from scratch, you might as well start with the fastest speed available.

However, before you jump to Gigabit, make sure the cabling is Cat 5e, not Cat 5. In a recent interview for an upcoming article for TechLiving magazine (Electronic House's sister publication), Ian Hendler, director of business development for the integrated networks division of Leviton, told me that Gigabit gear would more than likely slow to Megabit speeds if it's run on regular Cat 5 instead of Cat 5e. Cat 6, the newest standard for commercial networks, doesn't yet have the full range of jacks and other parts for residential work. Cat 6 isn't necessary unless you're planning for the next revolution that's to come after Gigabit networks have been played out: 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

I Feel The Need, The Need For Speed

The Internet as we know it first went online in 1969. It was -- and is -- a marvel of engineering, and the fact that it can do so many things its designers never intended it to do is a testament to its flexibility. But the speed limits of the Internet's current architecture prevent it from being a method of delivering multimedia such as HDTV-quality video.

Even at the highpoint of Internet Gold Rush Fever in the late-1990s, researchers were working on building Internet2; a better, faster, stronger, waaay-more than-six-million-dollar Internet. One of the earliest tests of the Internet2 program was to send an HDTV recording across its infrastructure, which required speeds of 270 Mbps to do so. And although this has been done on limited experimental levels, Internet2's speeds are not here yet.

But even before they arrive, the next revolution in networking is already on the drafting boards: 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

(Originally an August 2004 newsletter to Electronic House subscribers.)

Audrey Hepburn: Do you know what's wrong with you?
Cary Grant: No, what?
Audrey Hepburn: Nothing!
--From Charade, 1963

From the late 1930s to the mid-1960s, Cary Grant had the face that was the very definition of Movie Star Handsome; his voice the definition of suave sophistication.

Two new DVD releases, one a box set (whose titles are also available individually) show the man in his prime, and at the end of his career, which concluded at in 1966 at age 62, when he was afraid he was past his prime as a matinee star. (These days of course, Harrison Ford, Clint Eastwood and Sean Connery continue to be superstars in their sixties and seventies.)

Warner Brothers' recent box set, The Cary Grant Signature Collection, contains several of Grant's films from World War II and the immediate post-war years. (Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, Destination Tokyo, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, My Favorite Wife, and Night and Day are included in the set.) These aren't necessarily Grant's best films, but he brings something memorable to each of them.

1943's Destination Tokyo places Grant in the role of a US submarine commander whose boat is on a secret mission (guess where). In a way, the film is a bookend to Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, since one concerns Jimmy Doolittle's air raid, and the other concerns the preparation of it.

As a film, Destination Tokyo creaks--it really shows its age. The subplot has the same cast of seemingly every war film prior to Full Metal Jacket: the virgin, the grizzled veteran, the musician and the older wizened veteran for comic relief (played memorably here by Alan Hale, whose son would command his own memorable nautical journey, as captain of the SS Minnow in TV's Gilligan's Island.)

The All-American Englishman

Sean Connery has often been called Cary Grant's successor. Whenever he appears in an American production, modern Hollywood seems obliged to build some sort of back story to tell us what the heck he's doing with that accent playing a US military officer (The Presidio), the last survivor of Alcatraz (The Rock), or as a Chicago cop (The Untouchables). That last one must have seemed easy to the producers: we'll explain his Scottish burr by making him an Irish immigrant! But Connery both won the Oscar for his performance and topped a recent poll for having the worst accent in his performance, which seems oddly fair in a way.

In fascinating contrast, a running theme throughout Grant's career is that golden-era Hollywood had no reservations casting him as an American despite his thick cockney brogue, and never bothered to build a back story to explain it. He's a midwestern Navy officer in Destination Tokyo, and that theme holds true in other films in the Cary Grant collection: In Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, Grant is a Madison Avenue advertising man (a profession he'd take up again in Hitchcock's great thriller North By Northwest). And in Night And Day, Grant plays Indiana-born composer Cole Porter.

Night And Day is one of the more curious films in the Warner collection: Grant plays Cole Porter in a heavily whitewashed and Hollywoodized biography. Grant sort of talk-sings, but like Fred Astaire's singing, who cares? He certainly gets bonus points for being game to try. And I love this bit, from a recent Wall Street Journal article:

Take Cary Grant. Engaged to star in the Cole Porter biopic "Night and Day," the actor soon realized the script was a stinker. And so he focused his attention on what really mattered, nearly driving the director to quit with punctilious costume demands. At one point Grant brought production to a halt, standing on his God-given right to expose exactly one-eighth of an inch of shirt cuff beyond his tuxedo sleeve, not the sloppy quarter-inch the bumpkins over in wardrobe had given him. The movie may have been a disaster, but Cary Grant looked good.

I wouldn't call the film a disaster--in fact watching it, it's a real surprise. It's certainly not the reality of Porter's life: for one thing, Monty Woolley, born in 1888, was Porter's classmate at Yale, when the two graduated in 1913. But since he's playing himself as Grant's co-star in the 1946 movie, the writers made him Porter's professor, to account for the difference in the two actors' ages. More significantly, but understandably for Hays-era Hollywood, Night And Day omits Porter's bisexuality, something a Porter biopic being released this year with Kevin Kline is planning to remedy.

The Lion In Winter

If the Warner Brothers box set shows Grant at his physical peak, Criterion's recent re-release of 1963's Charade (now with a snazzy 16X9 anamorphic picture) shows the lion in winter. Grant looks older and heavier than he did just three years prior in North By Northwest, his peak role. But how can you beat a film that combines Grant with Audrey Hepburn?

In a way, it's almost a post-modern movie. We're not watching a film with actors playing beleaguered American citizens trapped in a dark conspiring Paris. At every point in the film, we're aware that we're watching Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn as superstar actors clearly enjoying starring in a film together. (And that the only way that the dialogue at the beginning of this post works: at the point in the film she says it, Hepburn's character doesn't know Cary Grant's character well enough to say anything like that. But it makes perfect sense coming from Audrey Hepburn to Cary Grant.)

Cary Grant retired from movies after 1966's Walk, Don't Run. He passed away at age 82 in 1986. But he can live on-both in his prime and his final performances--thanks to your DVD player and home theater.

(Originally posted July, 2004 at Blogcritics.org.)

It was really nice of Hollywood producer Michael Mann to invent the 1980s, wasn’t it? In 1984, he took the 60-minute TV crime drama, which up until then had been populated by middle-aged men who came from the Jack Webb school of Brylcreemed grooming and bought their clothes at Buddy Ebsen’s house of inflammable polyester, and completely revamped the genre.

In their place were cops whose cover allowed them to appear as cool the underworld they investigated—if not cooler. “Miami Vice” didn’t actually pioneer the idea that men could wear t-shirts under their suits—rock stars had been doing just that since the days of Woodstock had ended, but the show certainly put it front and center in the American psyche.

(For better or worse, of course. Brandon Tartikoff, the late former president of NBC once publicly apologized to America for the number of pot-bellied men who sadly adopted the suit and T-shirt look of Sonny Crockett. As another fictional cop once said, “A good man’s got to know his limitations”.)

Something For Everybody

“Miami Vice” had something for everybody: its art deco-inspired visuals made for beautiful eye-candy, as did the show’s conspicuous consumption, which allowed its stars to dress and drive as millionaire drug dealers even as they stayed on the right side of the law and apprehended the bad guy every week. Well, almost every week—“Vice” was one of the first shows where the bad guys occasionally got away.

Great Sound, Slightly Rough Picture

Universal’s new DVD release of the first season of “Miami Vice” has its pluses and minuses: On the downside, the picture quality is slightly rough looking: a fair amount of grain, grit and dirt on the pilot episode, as well as an overall slightly pixilated overly digitized look. The scuttlebutt on the Internet is that Universal shot its budget on securing the music rights for all of the original music the show employed each week (another first), and had little left over to restore the discs.

But that wall-to-wall original music, and the sound overall is fantastic, as Jan Hammer’s score and the film’s MTV-era rock soundtrack is gloriously remixed in 5.1 sound. The explosions, car chases and gunfire all have added oomph, as the soundtrack routes a surprising amount of power to a home theater’s subwoofer.

The show’s music befits how it was originally conceived. The disc’s bonus features rehash the legendary story that “Vice” began with a cocktail napkin scribble from Tartikoff: “MTV Cops”, and was built up from there. Early in the process, Mann hired Jan Hammer (whom I had the pleasure to interview in 2003), a keyboardist who began his career in the 1960s with Sarah Vaughn and shortly thereafter played in the Mahavishnu Orchestra, a groundbreaking jazz-fusion group. Having gotten off the touring circuit, Hammer agreed to do the show only if he could record its soundtracks from his home recording studio in Connecticut. The result was another touch that perfectly suited the show’s era, as Jan Hammer took advantage of every aspect of the 1980s fast changing musical technology.

If the dog days of winter have you down, the prescription for beating them is simple: pop in a copy of the new “Miami Vice” DVD, put on your Wayfarer sunglasses (especially if it’s at night), and crank up the sound. Repeat dosage as needed. The eighties—and network TV in general—never looked or sounded so good.

(Originally a newsletter for subscribers to Electronic House magazine.)

While the sounds of pop music have changed radically over the past four decades, one thing remains a constant. For most commercial music, everything on a recorded track is there to support the lead vocal, whether the song is rock, pop--or heck, even postmodern crunk. Getting the best sounding vocals remains paramount when recording, whether it's in a zillion dollar L.A. studio, or your basement.

Antares Audio Technologies burst onto the scene back in the mid-1990s with their Auto-Tune program, which has been a tremendous boost to singers, both professional and amateur, and their producers. An otherwise perfect take with one or two out of tune notes could be salvaged through careful application, and the average vocalist could now concentrate his her energies on performance, knowing that minor pitch errors could be cleaned up later. (And cranked up to ten, the Auto-Tune can deliver the infamous "Cher" effect, which, like its namesake, is best heard sparingly.)

While the sounds of pop music have changed radically over the past four decades, one thing remains a constant. For most commercial music, everything on a recorded track is there to support the lead vocal, whether the song is rock, pop--or heck, even postmodern crunk. Getting the best sounding vocals remains paramount when recording, whether it's in a zillion dollar L.A. studio, or your basement.

Antares Audio Technologies burst onto the scene back in the mid-1990s with their Auto-Tune program, which has been a tremendous boost to singers, both professional and amateur, and their producers. An otherwise perfect take with one or two out of tune notes could be salvaged through careful application, and the average vocalist could now concentrate his her energies on performance, knowing that minor pitch errors could be cleaned up later. (And cranked up to ten, the Auto-Tune can deliver the infamous "Cher" effect, which, like its namesake, is best heard sparingly.)

In early September of this year, Antares released several additional voice processing plug-ins, as part of their AVOX line. Available both separately and as part of a bundled package (or "vocal toolkit"), retailing for about $500, these plug-ins are capable of a wide range of vocal processing. Combined as a suite, it's possible to do a surprisingly complete range of vocal processing with the software:

THROAT Physical Modeling Vocal Designer - a radical new vocal tool that, for the first time, lets you process a vocal through a meticulously crafted physical model of the human vocal tract.

DUO Vocal Modeling Auto-Doubler: using a simplified version of THROAT's vocal modeling, along with variations in pitch, timing and vibrato depth, DUO automatically generates a doubled vocal part from an existing vocal with unmatched ease and realism.

CHOIR Vocal Multiplier: actually turns a single voice into up to 32 distinct individual unison voices, each with its own pitch, timing and vibrato variations.

PUNCH Vocal Impact Enhancer: as its name so ably implies, PUNCH gives your vocal more dynamic impact, allowing it to cut through a dense mix with clarity and power.

SYBIL Variable Frequency De-Esser: tames vocal sibilance with a flexible compressor and a variable highpass frequency to match any vocal performance.

These plug-ins are currently available in VST and RTAS (for Pro Tools users) versions. (Hopefully Antares will add DirectX versions to the roster in the not too distant future.)

Putting AVOX To Work

When using software such as the AVOX plug-ins, it helps to do some advance planning, beginning with getting as isolated and clean a vocal as possible. The AVOX Choir patch can take a single voice and make it sound like four, eight, 16 or 32 voices. The name is slightly deceptive, in that it doesn't harmonize the voice, but it will definitely make one voice sound like many. (I suspect that combined with a sampled chorus patch from a software synthesizer like Reason, it would be relatively easy to produce a huge vocal sound.

The Punch Vocal Impact Enhancer appears to be a cross between a compressor and exciter, adding a nice sheen to help make a lead vocal pop out of a mix without necessarily raising its volume level or dramatically lowering the instruments in the mix.

Deep "Throat"

Perhaps the most intriguing component is Throat, which can perform transformations both subtle and dramatic to a recorded human voice. So let's look at this one in detail.

As I found it when experimenting with the plug-in, it's important to set the size of the program's Source Throat Precision control to tell it the degree of virtual throat "surgery" you are intending. As Throat's Read Me file recommends:

If you are intending only very subtle changes, you would typically start with this control set to "subtle" while if you were intending major changes, "extreme" might be more appropriate.

Not setting this can result in a disappointing, sort of gauzy sounding effect instead of a really effective transformation.

While the obvious use of Throat is to make someone with a high voice sound like James Earl Jones (and vice-versa), it has far more subtle uses as well. Many commercial recordings add a unique sheen to a lead vocal by having the vocalist record a whisper track, which is then mixed subliminally in the background. They also frequently rerecord the same vocalist, or have a backup vocalist double the part an octave lower, which is also then mixed low in the background. Combined, both tricks can do much to strengthen an otherwise thin-sounding voice. (Err, like mine...)

Throat allows whisper and octave-lower tracks to be generated quickly and easily from an existing vocal. So if the lead singer has already gone home, just clone his or her voice to new tracks, and then process these tracks via Throat to create instant ear-candy.

Perhaps the nearest competitor to Throat is TC-Helicon's VoiceModeler software, which is also capable of some fine sounds. (Like Throat, it can make me sound like Orson Welles, Sammy Davis Jr., or Mickey Mouse, depending upon the effect I dial up.) But VoiceModeler runs on TC's PowerCore module, which requires a separate hardware-based component for the PC, attached externally via a FireWire cable, or installed internally as a computer card. The cost for the VoiceModeler software and a PowerCore can combine to easily run over $1000. And while PowerCore can run a variety of applications beyond VoiceModeler, similar versions of many of those applications, can now be found as internally driven plug-ins requiring no additional hardware. (Such as Antares' Throat.)

First impressions? AVOX is a comprehensive and easy to use suite of products that allows anyone with a PC-recording studio to fine tune a recording's vocals. And it's a handy suite for someone producing demos for his garage or basement band, a video soundtrack, or a commercial jingle--all the way up to the professional producer who installs it on his Pro Tools rig--right alongside the original Antares Auto-Tune.

(Originally posted at Blogcritics.org.)

While Hollywood's present and immediate future output looks grim (to say the least), an exception to the rule might be Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong, if his exceptional Lord of the Rings movies are any guide. It's due out on December 14th.

But even better, the original--and safe to say, still best-- King Kong from 1933 will be coming to DVD in November, according to The Digital Bits:

There's some big news today. The Hollywood Reporter has posted a feature story on Warner's new 2-disc King Kong DVD (yes, that's the classic 1933 Kong), which is at long last expected to street on 11/22. Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson is helping to produce extras for the forthcoming edition, even as he works on his own theatrical remake. Specifically, Jackson is working on a new 2-hour/7-part documentary, RKO Production 601: The Making of Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the World, that will be included on the set. Among other things, the documentary will include a segment on the infamous "spider pit" deleted scene (including a recreation of the lost footage). Other extras on the Kong release will include a documentary on director Merian C. Cooper, trailers for other films by Cooper, and audio commentary by legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, actress Terry Moore and special effects guru Ken Ralston. Warner's King Kong will be available in no less than THREE versions - a 2-disc special edition, a 2-disc collector's edition packaged in (according to the story) "a collectable tin and including a 20-page reproduction of the original souvenir program, postcard reproductions of the original one sheets, and a mail-in offer for a reproduction of a vintage 27-by-41-inch movie poster", and finally a 4-disc collector's box set which includes the 2-disc King Kong DVD along with The Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young. Each version will contain the same two Kong discs (just the packaging and the "in the box" extras differ). All I can say is it's about damn time. Very cool news indeed.

Indeed.

RKO's lifespan was a troubled one, but the studio certainly had its moments. A few years back, we looked at an even more fabled RKO production, from 1941.

Roger L. Simon looks at two sad Hollywood events, the death of actress Barbara Bel Geddes, and the end of hand-drawn animation at Disney:

DisneyToon Studios Australia, its last bastion, will be shutting down next year. For most of us, it's not to difficult to see the difference between digital work, terrific as it can be in films like The Incredibles, and the hand-drawn leaves of Bambi. This is one of the reasons some of us are so in awe of artists like Miyakzaki who are carrying on this tradition. On my most recent trip to Japan, I accidentally visited a small museum where his individual animation drawings for Spirited Away were displayed in giant stacks. It's hard to conceive one human being could accomplish so much (maybe his day lasts sixty hours).

Why is this related to Bel Geddes? Of course there are many reasons for the cinema's decline, but sometimes I worry that, for all its vaunted ease of use and accessibility, the digital revolution isn't a part of the increasing disappearance of film as an art or even as a significant cultural institution. Others vastly more accomplished evidently have the same fear. John Canemaker concluded his WSJ article this way:

As Disney's great admirer Steven Spielberg recently said, "If storytelling becomes a byproduct of the digital revolution, then the medium itself is corrupted."

There's a curious give and take these days between high-tech and pop culture. I can speak best about it in terms of music, where I've seen the tools of major recording studios filter down into the hands of anybody who can afford it, including such technology as digital recording, musical loops, pitch correction, software-based synthesizers, and remarkably powerful digital effects.

No doubt, there's some remarkable music being made by everyday folks, and I've certainly spent an enjoyable four years or so learning how to use PC-based technology to record my own material. Similarly, just as 35 years ago, computers were once solely the province of big business, today, the newspaper industry has given up an enormous amount of ground to empowered amateurs armed with little more than a PC, a broadband connection and a Weblog.

But you would think that big media would benefit the most from this technology, whether it's Hollywood, the recording industry or what we frequently abbreviate as "the MSM". And yet, is there anybody would argue that today's movies, as a whole, are better than Hollywood's product of 25, 35, or especially 50 or 60 years ago? Is there anybody who would turn on a rock & roll or pop station and describe its current offerings as better than the days of the British Invasion and Motown, both of whose offerings were recorded on equipment that was laughably crude compared to the way that a modern recording studio is kitted out?

Technology has done wonders to empower individuals. But it's very strange how it's done little to better the product created by commercial industries that were once the best at what they did.

The quote that Roger includes by Steven Spielberg is key, I think, to what has happened to both Hollywood and the music industry:

"If storytelling becomes a byproduct of the digital revolution, then the medium itself is corrupted."

If we use storytelling as shorthand for the craft of entertaining in general, then it's safe to say that in both music and film, that's already happened to a great extent. The music industry's desire to find the latest sex bomb diva or Jagger-wannabe has result in a dearth of entertainers hired far more for their looks than for their talent. Technology wasn't quite there 15 years ago, so when Frank Farian, the German-based record producer hired Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan to be the frontmen for Milli Vanilli, he had to rely on much more polished but far less photogenic performers to sing on his record. Today, he would have simply hired Rob and Fab, and then run their vocals through a battery of effects to correct their pitch, reshape their timbre, and perfect their phrasing.

My wife frequently bemoans the thin, breathy vocals to today's pop divas, but it's as much more of a visual trend than it is a stylistic one, as the video, the steamy pin-up poster, and hot chatroom-traded jpegs of this week's diva du jour are far more important to the boys in the PR department, than any sort of singing or musical talent appears to be. (I predicted the logical outcome of where all of this is going in a Tech Central Station piece last year.)

A similar trend is happening in Hollywood, as big budget film after big budget film junks writing and cogent storytelling for zillion dollar effects budgets, in the hopes of blowing the audience out of its seats, rather than telling them a story.

Well you know what? I've been blown out of my seat enough times. I don't mind movies as roller-coaster rides, when the plot flows logically into a climactic orgy of bullets and shards of plate glass (or lasers and exploding spaceships and planets), but too often, modern films are written solely to kill time in-between the two or three hellzapoppin' special effects sequences.

Back in 2001, John Podhoretz wrote a nifty history of Hollywood and its storytelling techniques that ultimately noted, just before its conclusion:

Movies today are awful because Hollywood no longer knows what a good plot is, what an interesting character is, or what genuine conviction is when it comes to telling a story.

But hey, how 'bout those bitchin' lightsaber battles and pod races!

I first began experimenting with multi-track music recording in the mid-1980s. This speech by Brian Eno, titled "The Studio As Compositional Tool", was the Rosetta Stone for me, opening my eyes as to the incredible possibilities of multi-track recording.

I was in the process of OCR'ing my old photocopy of it, when I found someone had already typed and uploaded it to the Web--which is fine by me. One minor correction to the piece: it's subhead says, "From Downbeat [magazine], probably 1979". It's actually from two issues: July and August of 1983.

For anybody who's thinking about home music recording and has never experimented with it, this article is an eye-opener. Everything that Eno describes as possible in a commercial recording studio is now available to the home recordist with a PC and a decent soundcard. All he needs to get started is a program such as Cakewalk's Home Studio or Sonar or Sony's Acid, and it's off to the races.

(Also on Blogcritics, where I'm a regular contributor.)