Category Archives: Sat-uh-day
Of new media, reluctance and form vs content.
@s3rioussam sent me the link to the awesome TED talk by Chip Kidd, who’s famous for designing the book covers of Jurassic Park and Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha among others.
Watch.
None of us are Luddites like this guy. We embrace new technology as it comes and yet, we still pay for physical copies. The question of why we do when we do, has been the topic of many of our discussions. As in, the books we still buy, why do we buy them? The CDs or videogames we pay for, why do we pay for them?
Listening to the talk helped me consolidate my ideas. We buy the books and music because the experience is multi-sensory. What the book lovers describe as the smell of ink, the touch of the texture of book cover, the pictures on the spine, the dog-earing of pages. Or, what the LP lovers describe as the beauty of keeping the pin onto the right track and waiting for the crackle and pop. In a way, the entire digital movement has made every experience very one-dimensional. But whose fault is it really that we don’t feel the need to own stuff?
I recently watched Thermal and a Quarter (TAAQ) performing at the Mosaic Music festival. Because the show was awesome, we went the next day again to catch their acoustic set. They played a song which they dedicated to the filthy downloaders, urging us, the people of digital age, to go buy the CD from the shop at the venue. So we went to the shop just to extend the experience of the two evenings, and to show our solidarity towards the full time musicians from home-town. And man, was I disappointed when I held the CD? It was one of those eco-sleeve things, without as much as a bar code. Since the shop at Esplanade couldn’t scan it, they couldn’t keep it on the shelves. You had to go ask the lady at the counter for the same, and she’d bring it out surreptitiously. A two-CD set, with undoubtedly loads of awesome songs, but with a cover so flimsy, the glue had already started coming off. When I came back and slipped one of the discs into the tray, and sat down to bask in the music for a little while more instead of letting it play in the background as I went about my activities, I couldn’t help but feel shortchanged. There was no reading material on the CD cover, nothing in the sleeve, nothing but a link to twitter and facebook and the names of the band members.
Ordinarily, if I didn’t know the band, and I found the disc while browsing the shop shelves, would I have bought it? The answer is no.
That’s where the problem lies. The artists complain about people not paying for physical form, but they often don’t invest time, energy or money in making the form desirable. They’re arrogant enough to believe that their content itself is good enough and they’re *entitled* to receive money from everyone who consumes it without giving them any added value beyond the content in the form itself. If it was just about the content, they could just put it on their website, and put a paypal button or something, why print a physical and expect the audience to fork out money for it each time?
By making their material one-dimensional, they sort of force the audience to treat it the same way.
As s3rioussam says, the art of designing something physical has become so much of a rarity now, that physical media has to designed specifically to extend and accentuate the experience. And that experience has to be exaggerated to appeal to *all* the senses. The onus of this lies on the artist/publisher, not on the audience.
The sooner they realize that, the better.
Starlight
Slash – check. Awesome fun, and did I tell you I am majorly in lust with Myles Kennedy.
This one stuck by, even after the concert, for reasons unknown. This one’s for you, child:
You will see as the mountains fall and turn to dust
That there’s one thing that won’t change
I believe there’s something within each of us that always stays
That will always remain as long as love never fades
And the acoustic one, which I don’t dig much, but pasted here for completeness.
Madhuri Madness
There is undoubtedly a serious Madhuri Mania going around town. Five people in the past three days have put something Madhuri related on Facebook, and I have diligently put ‘like’ on each of them. It’s like the world is going through a phase of having a collective crush on her. For me, it’s back to school days I was really mad about her. I would pray that they played more Madhuri songs on Rangoli and Chitrahaar, and I still have the India Today with her on the cover. She even made that hideous blingy saree of HAHK look good. And looking at her after all these years, just flashing a smile here and there, I feel that crush coming back, and I grin from ear to ear when I spot her on screen. (Someone random once told me I smile like her, and I am still preening from that compliment. Like really!)
I think of the reason why the mania has come about, and I think it’s her grace, her dignity and her quiet exit from the space where she was once the queen, which is a stark contrast to current bunch of catty actors (and senior actors as well?). I think people are just exhausted from the bitchiness and twitter-this and blog-that, and she’s just the breath of fresh air and sunshine that was prescribed.
And then there the way she dances. Move aside Munni and Sheila, this one just doesn’t move her arms and legs and thrust her bust in our face, she really puts in joy even when she does the movements sitting in her chair. To dance from the very spirit, that joy is something to learn from.
Watch this, here, because, well you should.
I think I should stop now.
