You Own This

 

In a 2019 article for the British Broadcasting Corporation, Sharon George and Dierdre McKay wrote, “If you only listen to a track a couple of times, then streaming is the best option. If you listen repeatedly, a physical copy is best . . . ” They were referring to the comparative environmental costs of listening to music either over the internet or reproduced on an electronic device. They could just as well have been giving excellent advice on the best strategy for enjoying all types of entertainment media in the digital age.

 

Owning physical copies only of favorite movies, television shows, books, and music, while streaming more transitory entertainments, is not only better for the environment, but better in all sorts of other ways. Buying an entertainment you may enjoy only once or twice is expensive and takes up shelf space in the home. Streaming choices are often limited to the most popular or the newest entertainments, leaving outright purchase from a vendor or borrowing from a library as the only options for enjoying more obscure, less widely popular works.

Cinerama historians John Harvey and Willem Bouwmeester 1987
Cinerama historians John Harvey and Willem Bouwmeester photographed in 1987 examining the back covers of vinyl record albums devoted to music used in Cinerama productions. After many years years researching all things Cinerama, they eventually collaborated on the Cinerama installation in Bradford, England, in 1993. Photo by LarryNitrate2Cinerama.

There are indeed thousands of movies and television shows available on the streaming services, but a close examination reveals that the majority of those on the advertisement supported services are public domain properties that will be familiar to anyone who has rooted through the bargain DVD and Blu-ray bins at big box stores. The subscription streaming services are meanwhile moving toward a vertical integration model reminiscent of the Hollywood studios in the days when they owned production and distribution from top to bottom.

If you want to watch the latest Star Wars franchise release and you missed it during it’s brief theatrical release, then you must subscribe to Disney’s streaming service or go without. Some films these days don’t get a theatrical release at all. Another option is to buy the physical media if and when it becomes available. But in that case you would still want to watch the movie first to be sure it’s worth buying. It’s likely there will be always be a hardware means of playing back most electronic media, the trick is in guessing correctly which ones will stand the test of time.

 



30 years ago, many people thought vinyl record albums were all but dead. Only a tiny niche market of record collectors and audiophiles would continue to have need of record players and record player parts. Few people in 1991 would have guessed that by 2021 sales and production of vinyl records would have reemerged from the dustbin, while compact discs and players, for a brief period the predominant music delivery system on the market, would be overtaken first by digital downloads, and then by streaming music services.

A similar dynamic appears to be at play in the visual media market of movies and television shows. Despite the close resemblance of DVDs and Blu-ray discs to music compact discs, they are more comparable to vinyl records in quality of reproduction and in the way consumers use them. Blu-ray discs in particular are attractive items for ownership by collectors and cinephiles due to the outstanding quality of their video and audio reproduction, which can often outstrip what’s available for the same title on a streaming service.

Despite big manufacturers like Samsung discontinuing Blu-ray player production a few years ago because they noted the decline in the market to niche status, and similarly Warner Brothers recently moving toward ceasing production of discs, there will always be a demand for new Blu-ray players and new Blu-ray discs, however much the market shrinks for now. Just ask the manufacturers of vinyl records and the turntables needed to play them.


— Techly


 

The Public’s Domain

 

Police employees in Beverly Hills, California, have gotten the clever idea that they can effectively jam a live streaming broadcast of their activities by playing copyrighted music from their phones, thereby causing the automated filters of a platform such as Instagram to shut the video down for copyright infringement. The filters have been around for several years, and they can be either too aggressive or too timid unless monitored by a human being, presumably one with common sense.

RKO Radio Pictures transmitter ident
The RKO Radio Pictures transmitter logo that signaled the beginning of a motion picture from that studio from 1929 to 1957. This image is now in the public domain.

But monitoring and moderating by a human being comes after the fact; to shut down a video in real time, the filters have to be automated and act independently. The police employees have figured this out and are now counting on the filters being set too aggressively so that they can exploit the feature for the purpose of frustrating citizens’ rights to film them as they go about their public duties at the behest and expense of the public. This tangled mess will surely end up in the courts.

Meanwhile, at this time like no other before, technology bestows benefits on those who enjoy listening to radio programs from around the world, whether that involves copyrighted music or not. Internet streaming of radio broadcasts has been around for decades, but never has access been as easy for casual listeners or the choices as broad as they are now. Radio Garden is a Dutch non-profit project that makes picking out a radio station anywhere in the world to listen to as easy as spinning the globe and then jabbing a finger at a green dot somewhere on it. Let police employees everywhere know that they are in the public’s domain, and that copyright – as easy as access to copyrighted works may be – is not theirs to wield as a baton.

— Techly


The first clip here is from the 1963 Blake Edwards film, The Pink Panther. The second clip is from the 1964 film, A Shot in the Dark, also directed by Mr. Edwards. Both films starred Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau.

 

Respectfully Yours

 

“Where words fail, music speaks.” — Hans Christian Andersen

 

Divan-of-Hafiz-Binding-Gul-u-Bulbul
Binding of a Divan of Hafiz, from April 5, 1842 in Iran. Original lacquer “gul-u-bulbul” (flower-nightingale) motif with gold, red, and black decorative frame. The metaphorical relationship of the nightingale (active lover) and flower (passive beloved), frequently used in Persian poetry, especially by Hafiz, serves as an appropriate theme for the binding covering this manuscript.

The French musician and composer Camille Saint-SaĂ«ns wrote incidental music in 1901 for a play called Parysatis, based on a novel by the French archaeologist and explorer, Jane Dieulafoy. The play, about an ancient Persian queen and produced in 1902 for a summer festival in the southern French town of BĂ©ziers, has not stood the test of time as well as Saint-SaĂ«ns’s music.

 

“Le Rossignol et La Rose” is a musical piece for wordless voice in Act II. The title in English is “The Nightingale and The Rose”, and refers to Persian symbolism around love. There is a peculiar 1888 short story by Oscar Wilde titled “The Nightingale and The Rose” which is unrelated to music for the play Parysatis or to the play itself. Wilde wrote his story ostensibly for children, but its deeper themes are really beyond their understanding. Reading Wilde’s story is nonetheless instructive about love because of how he frames respect as an integral part of love.


Natalie Dessay sings “Le Rossignol et La Rose”, by Camille Saint-SaĂ«ns. Is the song sorrowful? Joyful? That probably depends on the mood of the listener. The pacing lends an air of melancholic contemplation. The song contains within it, in other words, the varied emotions of love itself. Incidentally, Ms. Dessay has sung the lead role in Igor Stravinsky’s 1914 opera Le Rossignol (The Nightingale), notably for a trippy French film adaptation in 2005 which aired on American public television. Stravinsky based his opera on an 1843 story by Hans Christian Andersen.

Without respect there is little in love beyond shallow self-interest and the words spoken sound out hollowly, like an echo. Giving respect to another is as essential as giving love, indeed is at the heart of love. Where there is little or no respect, there is little or no love, no matter the words uttered. Respect is demonstrated, is shown to another as well as to oneself. Understanding and remembering this is crucial if love is to deepen and widen beyond the initial merging of two souls, where the two converge to form a third part all its own, its own world composed of and known only to the two lovers, like two circles partially overlapping. With respect comes trust, and with trust comes the will to acknowledge fears and the courage to not run away. And then there is music, bringing love ’round full circle by singing directly to the heart and soothing fears.
— Vita   “Music fills the infinite between two souls.” — Rabindranath Tagore


“Southern Cross” a 1982 song by David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash.

 

Good Odds

 

Gardeners may have heard it’s best to use odd numbers of similar plants in groupings and wondered why odd numbers are supposed to be more aesthetically pleasing than even numbers. Perhaps some authoritative figure in garden design plucked that rule out of the air and everyone has followed it blindly ever since. The rule doesn’t apply in situations where pairs work best, such as one columnar arbor vitae on each side of an entrance. A gardener would have to be daft to try to force another arbor vitae in there somewhere in order to obey the odd number rule, disrupting the natural harmony of pairs at entrances, gates, and arbors, where the architectural feature itself presents a third, central element.
Plumeria (Frangipani) flowers
Plumeria (frangipani) flowers in Don Tao, Si Phan Don, Laos. Photo by Basile Morin. Humans and other animals often present paired symmetries of even numbers, while plants more often than not have odd numbers of parts, as in the five petals of these frangipani flowers.

No one seems to know for sure why odd numbers in plant groupings are more pleasing, at least in an informal garden. Informality could be the key, since some people find the formality of even numbered groupings pleasing, but that appreciation doesn’t appear to come naturally to our brains, which look for a central focus in a grouping, something that presents itself naturally in odd numbered groupings. More than seven plants in a grouping starts to lose coherence and people can only vaguely get an idea of the center, rather than zeroing in on a central plant.

In a 2008 appearance on Sesame Street, Feist sings her song “1234” with help from groups of Muppets. Four is of course an even number, but you may note as you enjoy the music whether the presence of Feist herself changes the dynamic from even to odd groupings, dissimilar as she is to a Muppet. There’s certainly nothing stiff or formal about the presentation.

Experiment with different numbered groupings of similar shrubs, perennials, or annuals, and you will most likely find that without thinking about it you find odd numbers more pleasing and natural if you prefer a less formal garden, and even numbers naturally create a more formal feeling. These are arrangements nature appears to have adopted, like golden section proportions and Fibonacci spirals. The patterns most prevalent in nature seem to bypass our reason and appeal directly to our core because it’s what we are immersed in from birth, and that still begs the question of why nature prefers some patterns over others. Efficiency? Possibly that’s a part of it. Beyond that is a mystery, like the appeal of music. Many observable patterns are essentially visual representations of music, and we enjoy them because we typically enjoy harmony. When gardening, it helps to listen as well as look.
— Izzy

 

The Good, the Bad, and the Unpunctuated

 

The Oxford comma, also known as the serial comma, seems to be less in evidence every year. It’s difficult to understand why many people don’t like to use it, and it may be that they simply don’t understand what punctuation is all about. Punctuation is like musical notation, or at least the parts of it that indicate to the players where the rests are and indicate the rhythm in a piece of music. The players are the readers. If there were no commas or periods in writing, readers would not know where to take a break. Imagine listening to a piece of music played that way. For that matter, imagine listening to someone who runs on and on without a pause!

 

Eastern Comma (Polygonia comma), Chippewa Co., WI (6270394051)
If it’s confusing trying to sort out punctuation marks on the written page, try differentiating all the butterflies named for commas and question marks. This one is an Eastern Comma butterfly, Polygonia comma, from Chippewa County, Wisconsin. Photo by Aaron Carlson.

Take the title of the 1966 Italian movie The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which in the original is rendered as Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (the order of the nouns in the original Italian is good, ugly, bad). Never mind the difference in capitalization conventions for titles between English and Italian, and the change in word order from Italian to English, the key point is the inclusion of the serial comma in the original Italian and its absence in the English translation. It’s a simple thing, that comma. Why leave it out? Perhaps the translator was thrown off by the missing conjunction “and” in the Italian, which would have been rendered “e”, as in Il buono, il brutto, e il cattivo. In English, we are used to “and” coming before the last item in a series. It would not sound quite right to our ears if the title were translated as The Good, the Bad, the Ugly. That sounds choppy and abrupt. Throw in “and” before “the Ugly” and we have a rhythm that sounds right to the ears of English speakers. Except for one little thing.


The Danish National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sarah Hicks, perform a suite of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (main title)” and “The Ecstasy of Gold”, a piece from near the end of the film.

 

What happened to the last comma? Without it, not only the rhythm, but also the sense of the film title is off. Are we to rush through when we speak the last part of it? Instead of saying “The Good [pause] the Bad [pause] and the Ugly [full stop]”, are we meant to say “The Good [pause] the Bad and the Ugly [full stop]”? No one talks in the rhythm given in the second example. Does the phrase “the Bad and the Ugly” refer to one person only, in the same way that “the Good” refers to one person? Is that person both bad and ugly? Absolutely not, as is clear from the original Italian title and from the movie itself. There are three separate characters referenced in the movie’s title, and each is named by his outstanding characteristic.

In another rendition of the same suite, the composer himself, the great Ennio Morricone, conducts the Munich Radio Orchestra. The soprano soloist is Susanna Rigacci. The musical notes are the same in both renditions, but it’s interesting to hear the differences in their presentation.

It must be the “and” that throws people off when they write out a series. They must think “and” stands in for the serial comma, making it unnecessary. But it doesn’t. Listen to the music: TheGoodtheBadandtheUgly slowed down a bit is The Good the Bad and the Ugly, and slowed down a bit more in the right places, rendered in the way we actually speak, becomes The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. That wasn’t very hard, was it? We speak in words, and the words are like music, with rhythm and tempo. When we write down the words we speak, we need a way to convey to readers, to listeners, that rhythm and tempo, and that’s where punctuation comes in. That’s all it is. There’s nothing greatly mysterious about it, though semi-colons befuddle many, and the novelist and essayist Kurt Vonnegut disdained their use, remarking of them “All they do is show you’ve been to college.” Homer, who of course spoke his poetry for listeners and never wrote it down himself, would probably have agreed.
— Vita


In this scene from Sergio Leone’s film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Eli Wallach’s character, Tuco, encounters an adversary and ends up succinctly admonishing him that it takes too long to speak, shoot, and leave.