Archive for May 27th, 2008
Def Jux Rapper/Producer Camu Tao, R.I.P.
Ånother young hip-hop artist, barely into his third decade of life, has passed away.
MC and producer Camu Tao has died at the age of 30.
Tero Smith, aka Columbus, Ohio MC and producer Camu Tao, died May 25 at the age of 30. His passing put an end to a year-and-a-half-long battle with lung cancer.A member of the Definitive Jux family, Camu Tao worked with RJD2 and Copywrite in MHz, with Cage in Nighthawks, and Metro in S.A. Smash. He collaborated frequently with El-P, both on solo projects and in their groups Central Services and the Weathermen (which also included Cage and Copywrite).
El-P eulogized Smith on his Okay Player blog:
“Today, at around 2 p.m., our dear friend, family member, and musical collaborator Tero ‘Camu Tao’ Smith passed away in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio. Tero had been quietly fighting for his life for the last year and a half after being diagnosed with lung cancer.
To those who knew Tero, he was an almost uncategorizable force of nature. Wild, hilarious, proud, loving, tough, outspoken, spontaneous and brilliant. He wore his heart on his sleeve, and he dripped creativity, leaving inspiration and awe in the hearts and minds of anyone who was fortunate enough to see him work.
Source: pitchforkmedia.com via Jarrett Martineau
Tags: artist | camu tao | Culture | def jux | DIES | hip-hop | lung cancer | Music | rapper | tero smith
Sometimes Crowds Aren’t That Wise
This seems to suggest that all it takes is one rotten apple to ruin the collective’s wisdom, but I don’t know that I agree.
Every online community is different; and if the crowd’s wisdom is strong, and its critical faculties rigourous enough, proposed disinformation can easily be discovered, amended, and collectively put to rest. Not always, perhaps, but often.
What do you think happens when the crowd is let “run wild”? Is it for the best or the worst?
Last week, computer book publisher SitePoint relayed a story about recent experiences with Digg that demonstrates that the Digg system is far from perfect. We’ve written recently on ReadWriteWeb about the decline and fall of quality on Digg, but SitePoint’s anecdote demonstrates that sometimes the wisdom of crowds approach is, well, kind of dumb. Now is probably a good time to revisit the rules for harnessing the wisdom of the crowds we published on this blog a year ago.SitePoint Marketing Manager Shayne Tilley talked about the company’s efforts to promote a recent book giveaway via Digg on an SP blog. Within an hour after the promotion went live it had been dugg 30 times, but then, just as quickly, it was buried. Was it because SitePoint had submitted their own content to Digg, something that Digg users generally frown upon? No, SitePoint hadn’t done that, they just put a “Digg This” button on the campaign page.
Source: readwriteweb.com via Jarrett Martineau
SitePoint’s experience is an example of herd behavior or groupthink, where the Digg group acted blindly on poor information, without rationally thinking it through. This is a problem with the wisdom of crowds concept: if unchecked, rather than coming to the best conclusion based on the wisdom of the group, a crowd can come to the worst conclusion based on dumbness that spreads from a single bad node.
Source: readwriteweb.com via Jarrett Martineau
Tags: Media | Crowd | Crowdsourcing | Culture | culturite | Digg | internet | knowledge | sitepoint | Web | wisdom of crowds
Elvis Costello, The Roots to Rock Whistler Music Fest
Another big music fest makes its way into BC’s thriving outdoor concert landscape. With the Pemberton Festival already booked and set to rock, the Whistler Music Festival promises to deliver an equally fun and eclectic summer mix of bands and genres. And, of course, all at the low low cost of almost $70 a day. Ah yes, accessible to all…or not.
Elvis Costello and the Imposters, the Roots and Broken Social Scene have been tapped for this year’s inaugural Whistler Music Festival, to be held July 19-20 at Tube Park at Base II on the side of Blackcomb Mountain in Whistler, B.C.Other artists performing at the festival include Robert Randolph & the Family Band, Medeski Martin and Wood, Bedouin Soundclash and Serena Ryder. Additional acts will be announced in the coming weeks. Tickets for the event go on sale beginning May 29 via whistlermusicfestival.com. Single-day tickets are priced at about $67.50, and two-day passes cost $120.
Source: billboard.com via Jarrett Martineau
Amazon.com Cuts Price of Kindle e-Book Reader
I don’t know about you, but 40 bucks off a Kindle isn’t enough to convince me to buy one. I’ll still happily haul my beat-up hardcovers and dog-eared paperbacks around in boxes, if only to be able to read them without a power adaptor or battery, and to feel my fingers on actual printed pages. I’m far from a luddite but, like Borges, I too “have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library”. An actual one. With real books. Not a Paradise filled with infinite digital e-books.
Web retailer Amazon.com Inc. has nipped $40 from the price of its Kindle e-book reader.The $399 Kindle launched last November and sold out in hours. Amazon sorted out its supply chain and manufacturing problems, and the device was back on sale in April.
Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener said Tuesday that Amazon’s cost of manufacturing the Kindles dropped as it increased the number produced. He would not say how many of the e-book readers have been sold to date.
The Kindle’s new $359 list price is still higher than Sony Corp.’s competing Reader, which retails for $299.
Source: newsvine.com
Tags: culturite | e-book | Kindle | reader | Tech & Biz
$13.3 Billion U.S Porn Revenues Exceed Combined Sales of ABC, CBS, and NBC
If there was any doubt about what’s really driving the internet’s economic engine, here’s a hint: it’s not online gambling. It’s porn.
The pornographic industry (world) is larger than the revenues of the top technology companies combined: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix and Earthlink.There are 4.2 million porn websites (12% of total)
Daily, 65 million pornographic search engine requests are made (25% of total)
and 2.5 billion porn emails are send.42.7% of internet users view porn. US Internet porn sales alone are $4.9 billion.
40 millions US Adults regularly visit internet porn websites (72% male-28% female)
Source: current.com via Jarrett Martineau
Tags: industry | Media | sales | ABC | Amazon | apple | CBS | companies | culturite | earthlink | eBay | Google | internet | Microsoft | NBC | Netflix | porn | PORNOGRAPHIC | revenues | Tech & Biz | Technology | Web | websites | Yahoo
RIP: Sydney Pollack, 1934-2008
As NowPublic has reported here and here, acclaimed actor and director Sydney Pollack has died of cancer at the age of 73.
Accolades and remembrances are beginning to pour in. Here is a sample of recent posts from around the web. May he rest in peace.
Sydney Pollack, the director and producer who won a pair of Oscars for Out of Africa, died Monday at his home, of cancer. One of Hollywood’s premier directors of the eighties — in addition to Africa, he helmed Tootsie and Absence of Malicein the first half of the decade — Pollack’s impact on film for the pasttwenty years has been as a sometime actor (playing benevolent or, inthe case of Michael Clayton, malevolent grandfatherlyfigures) and as a prolific producer with excellent taste. Often inconjunction with Scott Rudin or Anthony Minghella, Pollack helpeddevelop dozens of terrific, intelligent movies, shepherding films asdiverse as The Talented Mister Ripley, Sense and Sensibility, Iris, Searching for Bobby Fischer, and Michael Clayton to theaters.Pollack had been ill for some time, and indeed just Sunday Recount,a film he was originally slated to direct, premiered on HBO; Pollackwas listed as an executive producer on the acclaimed project but had tobow out of directing the movie, replaced by Jay Roach.
Source: nymag.com via Jarrett Martineau
SydneyPollack made movies for grownups. He didn’t make movies aboutteenager-stalking slashers or CGI monsters or men in tights (well,except for Tootsie). The director, who died yesterday at 73,seems like the last of a breed, a filmmaker who specialized inold-fashioned, star-driven, sweeping romances and epics of the kindthat used to win Oscars but that Hollywood has all but forgotten how tomake. (About the only other director of recent years who still madesuch anachronistic spectacles was Pollack’s producing partner, Anthony Minghella, who died just two months ago.) It’s hard to imagine anyone trying nowadays to make a romance with the sprawl and scope of The Way We Were or Out of Africa,movies with artistic ambition, star-powered glamour, and faith thatthere are enough adult ticketbuyers to make them hits without pandering.
Pollack will be remembered mostly as a director of such glossy,Academy-approved fare (and for helping to make Robert Redford anenduring star by casting him in seven movies), but he dreaded directing,and I wonder if he wouldn’t rather have been remembered as a producer.After all, he directed only about 20 movies over his 43 years makingfeatures, but he produced more than twice as many, including such gemsas The Fabulous Baker Boys, Sense and Sensibility, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Iris
Source: popwatch.ew.com via Jarrett Martineau
n 1970, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” about Depression-era marathon dancers, received nine Oscar nominations, including one for Pollack’s direction. He was nominated again for best director for 1982’s “Tootsie,” starring Dustin Hoffman as a cross-dressing actor and Pollack as the exasperated agent who tells him, “I begged you to get some therapy.”
Source: news.yahoo.com via Jarrett Martineau
Pollack is survived by his wife, Claire; two daughters, Rebecca and Rachel; his brother Bernie; and six grandchildren.
Source: news.yahoo.com via Jarrett Martineau
From Salon:[q
url=http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2008/05/27/pollack/index.html]It’s
true that good actors are often good regardless of the direction (or
lack thereof) they get from a filmmaker. But you can usually tell when
a director is driven by the impulse to bring out the best in everyone.
Pollack had a way of orchestrating the performances in a movie as if he
were a conductor placing each instrument to greatest advantage in a
piece of music. He could often bring an actor’s best qualities to the
fore, and make his or her worst ones register as little more than
background noise. Not all directors are good actors themselves, nor do
they need to be. But Pollack had a way of turning his own intuitiveness
as an actor into generosity toward others, the sort of alchemy that
should never be taken for granted when you’re talking about an industry
filled with fat egos.
I didn’t love every movie Sydney Pollack made, but I can’t
remember a single time I didn’t feel a rush of joy at seeing him show
up in a picture.[/q]
Tags: Film | hollywood | Los Angeles | Sydney | actor | Culture | culturite | DIES | Director | Movies | pollack
Canadian Short Film ‘Next Floor’ Wins Prize at Cannes
“Next Floor“, the first short film produced by Phoebe Greenberg and the Montreal arts production company PHI, and developed with writer Jacques Davidts and director Denis Villeneuve, has won the Canal+ award for best short film at this year’s Cannes film festival.
An 11-minute film by Quebec director Denis Villeneuve and co-producer Phoebe Greenberg of Ottawa has won a top prize in a competition showcasing new talent at the Cannes Film Festival, which wrapped up Sunday.Next Floor, a surreal, metaphorical film about gluttony shot in a Montreal warehouse, won the Canal+ award for best short film at the International Critics’ Week portion of the festival. The competition runs parallel to the official Cannes selections and highlights seven feature films and seven short films by up-and-coming directors.
Canal+ is a French TV network that acquired the right to broadcast the film as part of the prize deal, which also included 6,000 euro.
Greenberg is credited with coming up with the idea for the film, which depicts a group of diners in formal dress gorging themselves on a banquet of exotic meats such as rhinoceros and armadillo, as servers and valets attend to them inside a warehouse. As the meal progresses, they crash through each floor of the warehouse one at a time.
Villeneuve is the director of the 2000 feature film Maelstrom, which won critical acclaim and more than two dozen international prizes.
The screenplay for Next Floor was written by Jacques Davidts.
Caroline Binet co-produced the film with Greenberg, who is the daughter of the late Irving Greenberg, the Ottawa businessman and philanthropist who co-founded Minto Developments.
Source: cbc.ca
Tags: Culture | denis villeneuve | festival | phi
