From: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org (loud-fans-digest) To: loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Subject: loud-fans-digest V2 #436 Reply-To: loud-fans@smoe.org Sender: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk loud-fans-digest Friday, December 20 2002 Volume 02 : Number 436 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: [loud-fans] Record industry self-inflicted wound? [Michael Mitton ] Re: [loud-fans] 24 (ns) ["Aaron Milenski" ] Re: [loud-fans] Record industry self-inflicted wound? [Jeffrey with 2 Fs ] Re:Re: [loud-fans] Record industry self-inflicted wound? [dana-boy@juno.c] [loud-fans] Jill Jones? (ns) [dana-boy@juno.com] [loud-fans] New Order box update [Aaron Mandel ] Re: [loud-fans] Record industry self-inflicted wound? [Michael Mitton ] Re: [loud-fans] Jill Jones? (ns) [Stewart Mason ] Re: [loud-fans] Not really a surprise... ["John Swartzentruber" ] Re: Fwd: Re: [loud-fans] Record industry self-inflicted wound? [Jeffrey w] Re: Fwd: Re: [loud-fans] Record industry self-inflicted wound? [Aaron Man] Re: [loud-fans] Record industry self-inflicted wound? [dmw ] [loud-fans] oh, those reliable RIAA numbers... [jenny grover Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Record industry self-inflicted wound? On Wed, 18 Dec 2002, dmw wrote: > but i think anyone who says they know for > sure is either lying or deluded. Let's let this stand as a general rule for all things economic. One of the most interesting numbers in the Azoz tables was casettes sold in 1991. Both 1991 and 2001 were similarly mild recessions. You'll note that the number of casettes sold dropped about 80 million, or 20%. Some of this undoubtedly went to Cds, which increased about 50 million units. Now, we're mixing two products so it's hard to say exactly how much "music sales" declined in the recession year, but they certainly did decline by at least 30 million unitys. In 2001, CD sales fell about 5%. This is just the gut talking, but this seems entirely consistent with the experience in 1991. That is, we know that entertainment is one of the first things to get pinched in a recession, and the decline in 2001 is at least similar (and maybe even less) than the decline in 1991, when MP3s were irrelevant. Doug's right, at least in so far as I've seen, that there are no good studies measuring the impact of downloading on sales, but one *could* do a study that measure the impact pretty well. I haven't thought too much about this, but if I were Philosopher Economist, this would be the easiest way to tell: Randomly assign albums into two categories. In one category, albums would be completely available for free download while in the other category, no downloads would be allowed. Then check for a difference in sales between the two groups. Note the different approach--everyone is searching for a control group of consumers, when one could much more easily create a control group of records. And yeah, the chances that the record companies would do this has the proverbial snowball's chance. Anyway, that's my first thought. This is more or less what I do for a living, so I'm going to keep thinking.... - --Michael np Low TRUST ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 04:25:58 -0500 (EST) From: dmw Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Record industry self-inflicted wound? On Thu, 19 Dec 2002, Michael Mitton wrote: > Doug's right, at least in so far as I've seen, that there are no good > studies measuring the impact of downloading on sales, but one *could* do a > study that measure the impact pretty well. I haven't thought too much > about this, but if I were Philosopher Economist, this would be the easiest > way to tell: Randomly assign albums into two categories. In one category, > albums would be completely available for free download while in the other > category, no downloads would be allowed. Then check for a difference in > sales between the two groups. there is a huge problem with this, and i'm not being flippant -- the music industry is NOT reliably able to predict in advance how well a given album will sell. locked content pipes aside, there are still duds (and, thank god, unexpected hits). i think it would be easy to argue for a long time that any difference (or lack of) between the groups was due to an intrinsic variation between the sales potential of the two groups. one thing you can say is that some records that have been streamed/made widely available for download (coldplay's _parachutes_, wilco's _yankee hotel foxtrot_ authorized; _eminiem show_ unauthorized) have sold quite well ... but there's no control group for those albums. would _eminem show_ have sold better if it hadn't been leaked in advance? i don't see how it's possible to answer that question. i think you're stuck with anecdotal cases no matter what you do. did music sales really dip in 1991? the year of _nevermind_? the RIAA has recently been claiming loudly that their sales variance has been completely independent of fluctuations in the US economy at large over the past, um, i think forty years was the claim. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 06:58:41 -0500 From: Dave Walker Subject: Re: [loud-fans] 24 (ns) On Wednesday, December 18, 2002, at 10:57 PM, Aaron Milenski wrote: > On the other hand, the show still has its main fault, and it's > possibly even worse than last year---every woman on the show is either > evil or absolutely helpless. It's really pathetic that they haven't > been able to write one single decent female character. Maybe Lynne > has some promise, but otherwise... That said, I'm loving the performance of the woman acting the role of Sherry "Lady MacBeth" Palmer. There's an ongoing thread on TelevisionWithoutPity on this very topic: http://tinyurl.com/3od6 -d.w. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 08:48:56 -0500 From: "Aaron Milenski" Subject: Re: [loud-fans] 24 (ns) >What was the deal with the guys in the van anyway? That seemed pretty out >of the blue. I like the fact that the show is totally implausible. If they had acually had the terrorists smartly drive in a good car instead of a beat up old wreck, we never would have met the pool guy! _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 08:03:51 -0600 From: Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Record industry self-inflicted wound? Quoting dmw : > On Thu, 19 Dec 2002, Michael Mitton wrote: > > Randomly assign albums into two categories. In one > category, > > albums would be completely available for free download while in the > other > > category, no downloads would be allowed. Then check for a difference > in > > sales between the two groups. > > there is a huge problem with this, and i'm not being flippant -- the > music > industry is NOT reliably able to predict in advance how well a given > album > will sell. locked content pipes aside, there are still duds (and, > thank > god, unexpected hits). i think it would be easy to argue for a long > time > that any difference (or lack of) between the groups was due to an > intrinsic variation between the sales potential of the two groups. Not to mention that unlike, say, boxes of Kleenex, units of recordings aren't interchangeable. It's unlikely that, if sales of Kleenex are down, one could plausibly speculate that maybe this year's Kleenex just isn't as good - it's perfectly reasonable to do so with music. What struck me about the article Roger linked to is that "music" or "the music industry" is imagined almost entirely in terms of major label, popular-selling artists - which is just weird, to me. And when the writer notes that CDs have lost, downloading has won...in what sense? Are more songs bought or listened to downloaded than on physical discs? Even now, I don't think so. What I found most interesting about the Register guy's article was the note that if the industry had released 12,000 more albums (bringing it up to the total of previous years) and that if each of those had sold only 3,000 copies, profits would be at the same level. He then goes on to suggest that perhaps the industry's promotional strategies are partially at fault...since it would seem not *that* difficult to sell 3,000 of a major label album. And then there's the relatively unheralded, but I think rather important, aspect of this whole argument: the death of the single. For years, singles were the way younger, more casual music fans bought music - they lacked both the commitment and the money to buy albums in great numbers, but they could afford to buy singles. Somewhere along the line, the industry moved to a model in which, at its opposite extreme, if you want one decent rap song, you have to pay for a bloated double set each of whose discs is 78 minutes long. After buying a few of those, any smart consumer is going to say fuck it, I'll just download the decent song. (BTW: radio's censorship doesn't help. The very youngest listeners used to be able to tape a song off the radio for free - now, to have the *real* song, because of profanity, people have to either buy the bloated two-disc set or download.) I think the industry's gigantism is a huge factor (major labels anyway): depend upon the mega-selling title, do not accept smaller scale popularity, kill the single, etc. (This extends to financing the recording, and promoting it, as well. It seems as if either a record is left completely in the dark promotionally, or the market is absolutely flooded with advance copies and other forms of promotion.) ..Jeff J e f f r e y N o r m a n The Architectural Dance Society www.uwm.edu/~jenor/ADS.html :: "Shut up, you truculent lout, and let the cute little pixie sing!" :: ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 14:44:40 GMT From: dana-boy@juno.com Subject: Re:Re: [loud-fans] Record industry self-inflicted wound? What I found most interesting about the Register guy's article was the note that if the industry had released 12,000 more albums (bringing it up to the total of previous years) and that if each of those had sold only 3,000 copies, profits would be at the same level. He then goes on to suggest that perhaps the industry's promotional strategies are partially at fault...since it would seem not *that* difficult to sell 3,000 of a major label album. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Interestingly, this was one of the parts of that article that I found the most self-evidently pointless. Difficulty #1 (which comes up a lot in the azoz article) is that there weren't 27,000 *major label* releases. According the the RIAA article, there were about 7,000, and the azoz guy doesn't indicate if there was a decrease in major lable releases. A lot of the problems in the article come from lumping indie releases together with major label ones: the economics are completely different. It's as if you're discussing the movie industry's economics but include home movies in your statistics. When the author of this article talks about "the industry" he's including international corporations, and some guy living in a van down by the river and running a micro-label with the money he gets from selling pot. I doubt that the two coordinate their promotional strategies. Difficulty #2 is that there's no relationship between number of titles released per year and number of individual CD's manufactured/sold in a year. Any attempt to correlate the two is meaningless. Difficulty #3 is that he assumes that increases in inventory equal increases in sales, but there's no evidence given to indicate that this is true. It's possible that an extra 12,000 releases would just cannibalize sales from the other titles. I wouldn't say that it's impossible that a decrease in number of titles resulted in a decrease in the number CD's sold, but I don't see anything in the azoz article that proves that case. Finally, he leaves production costs almost entirely out of the article, and I don't see how you can get any meaningful information about the industry without them. Um, I'm writing this quickly at work, so it's open to correction. - --dana ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 14:48:25 GMT From: dana-boy@juno.com Subject: [loud-fans] Jill Jones? (ns) Somehow while reading about the Millenium on allmusic, I got linked to Jill Jones. I really liked Prince circa Purple Rain, and her self titled CD looked interesting, but it really does go for a lot on eBay. Has anyone heard it? Is it worth $20 or so for an lp? - --dana ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 12:46:29 -0500 (EST) From: Aaron Mandel Subject: [loud-fans] New Order box update I still don't know what I have to do to get the fifth disc that the New Order box supposedly comes with in some places, but amazon.co.uk says that it has the original "Temptation" someone mentioned here. The US release isn't until January something... a np. Kylie - Fever (considering that I thought I was just buying this for "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" it's disturbing how many of these songs I've heard before and enjoyed an amount just below the 'find out who this is' threshold) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 12:48:59 -0500 (EST) From: Michael Mitton Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Record industry self-inflicted wound? On Thu, 19 Dec 2002, dmw wrote: > > way to tell: Randomly assign albums into two categories. In one category, > > albums would be completely available for free download while in the other > > category, no downloads would be allowed. Then check for a difference in > > sales between the two groups. > > there is a huge problem with this, and i'm not being flippant -- the music > industry is NOT reliably able to predict in advance how well a given album > will sell. locked content pipes aside, there are still duds (and, thank > god, unexpected hits). i think it would be easy to argue for a long time > that any difference (or lack of) between the groups was due to an > intrinsic variation between the sales potential of the two groups. Actually, this is not really a problem, due to the fact that albums would be randomly assigned to each group. This process is no different than what is done every day in, say, medical experiments where a person is randomly assigned to receive either the new drug or a placebo. (And medical experiemnts are often done with 24 people in each group, whereas we would have a few thousand if we did the experiment for one year.) There may be more variation in record sales than reactiveness to a drug, but the statistical models account for the increased variation. Moreover, we could still control of any number of factors, like sales by the group in past years, whether it was the group's first album, or whether it got a good review in Rolling Stone. Whichever factors we control for (in the regression), you can no longer argue that those factors constitute differences between the two groups that would affect the conclusion (since those differences are factored out in the regression). If you still wanted to argue that there was an intrinisic difference between the two groups, despite the improbability of any intrinsic differences in 7000 albums randomly assigned to two groups, you could only make the claim for differences which are unmeasurable. (And unmeasurable after the fact, not before the fact, as record companies do when trying to predict sales.) > did music sales really dip in 1991? the year of _nevermind_? the RIAA According to the article under discussion, and that's all I was going off of. - --Michael ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 10:09:45 -0800 (PST) From: "Pete O." Subject: [loud-fans] Not really a surprise... Compact discs for several popular bands are programmed to track your listening habits and report back to the record company.... http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1035775740795&call_page=TS_Business&call_pageid=968350072197&call_pagepath=Business/News - - Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 13:18:37 -0500 From: Stewart Mason Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Jill Jones? (ns) At 02:48 PM 12/19/2002 GMT, dana-boy@juno.com wrote: >Somehow while reading about the Millenium on allmusic, I got linked >to Jill Jones. I really liked Prince circa Purple Rain, and her self >titled CD looked interesting, but it really does go for a lot on eBay. >Has anyone heard it? Is it worth $20 or so for an lp? I've never heard the album, but around the same time, she had a ballad called "The Ground You Walk On" put on the mostly rather ghastly soundtrack to EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY, and it's probably the album's standout track. The woman could sing, and based on this song at least, she's refreshingly free of the scale-jumping histrionics of your Whitneys and Mariahs. Might be worth a go. S ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 13:19:23 -0500 From: "John Swartzentruber" Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Not really a surprise... On Thu, 19 Dec 2002 10:09:45 -0800 (PST), Pete O. wrote: >Compact discs for several popular bands are programmed to track your listening habits and >report back to the record company.... ... if you install their tracking software on your computer. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 14:00:14 -0500 (EST) From: Aaron Mandel Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Not really a surprise... On Thu, 19 Dec 2002, John Swartzentruber wrote: > On Thu, 19 Dec 2002 10:09:45 -0800 (PST), Pete O. wrote: > > >Compact discs for several popular bands are programmed to track your > >listening habits and report back to the record company.... > > ... if you install their tracking software on your computer. Yeah. The whole first half of the article doesn't mention that. It's really lame of the record companies to even float this idea, but it doesn't seem to have caught on -- the first few multimedia CDs I saw had some bogus proprietary thing on them, or wanted you to go to a website, but recently they're just plopping MPG videos on. a ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 14:06:34 -0500 From: "John Swartzentruber" Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Not really a surprise... On Thu, 19 Dec 2002 14:00:14 -0500 (EST), Aaron Mandel wrote: >Yeah. The whole first half of the article doesn't mention that. But it did reassure us that the CDs would not cause our non-computer CD players to spontaneously sprout an ethernet connection and transmit our every move to big brother. Only not in those words. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 11:08:51 -0800 (PST) From: Mike Curley Subject: Fwd: Re: [loud-fans] Record industry self-inflicted wound? Dana points out some of the major problems with the Register guy's article pretty well. The only thing I'd like to add is that the Register guy is making the calssic amateur error in Economics -- that changes in supply (the number of products available) influences the overall demand (how much the consumer wants to buy). This is only the case when there is not enough supply to meet the overall demand in the economy (for example: Tickle Me Elmo dolls a couple of years ago). I'd argue that there's more than enough product out there (both old and new releases), and that most people have some sort of loose budgets on entertainment, and that they choose from what's available. Oh by the way, who am I? I have been on and off this list a couple of times since 1996 (mostly as a lurker). Most recently, I left the list when our twin boys were born last July. Why did I choose this thread as my first posting...when I'm not out searching for rare Dream Syndicate and Guadalcanal Diary CD's, I'm a finance controller at a large high-tech company. dana-boy@juno.com wrote: Interestingly, this was one of the parts of that article that I found the most self-evidently pointless. Difficulty #1 (which comes up a lot in the azoz article) is that there weren't 27,000 *major label* releases. According the the RIAA article, there were about 7,000, and the azoz guy doesn't indicate if there was a decrease in major lable releases. A lot of the problems in the article come from lumping indie releases together with major label ones: the economics are completely different. It's as if you're discussing the movie industry's economics but include home movies in your statistics. When the author of this article talks about "the industry" he's including international corporations, and some guy living in a van down by the river and running a micro-label with the money he gets from selling pot. I doubt that the two coordinate their promotional strategies. Difficulty #2 is that there's no relationship between number of titles released per year and number of individual CD's manufactured/sold in a year. Any attempt to correlate the two is meaningless. Difficulty #3 is that he assumes that increases in inventory equal increases in sales, but there's no evidence given to indicate that this is true. It's possible that an extra 12,000 releases would just cannibalize sales from the other titles. I wouldn't say that it's impossible that a decrease in number of titles resulted in a decrease in the number CD's sold, but I don't see anything in the azoz article that proves that case. Finally, he leaves production costs almost entirely out of the article, and I don't see how you can get any meaningful information about the industry without them. Um, I'm writing this quickly at work, so it's open to correction. - --dana ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com Yahoo! News - Today's headlines ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 14:12:20 -0500 From: Stewart Mason Subject: Re: [loud-fans] EW Top 10's At 02:20 PM 12/18/2002 -0800, Elizabeth Brion wrote: >However, "Welcome Black" I simply cannot get into at all. There are a >few tracks I'll probably put on mixes, but I've gotta say it's the first >TNP-related purchase I regret. I'm listening to it again for the first time since the week I got it, and it does have flaws, but I'm getting more into it. I love how Heidi is much more thoroughly integrated into the songs than she was on JOYS AND CONCERNS. (Jill Blair's vocal contributions to POST-MINSTREL SYNDROME are one of my favorite parts of the album.) And it's both lighter in tone and more varied than JOYS AND CONCERNS, which is a great album but it's awfully bleak in parts. The problem for me is that, like PMS, the songwriting is awfully hit-or-miss, but the high points aren't as high as they are on that album. That said, side two ("Astro Sister" through "Bermuda Love Triangle" - -- a much better version than the one on SWEETBOOT, complete with the belated coda with the clavinet and muted trumpet solos) is far superior to side one, which really only has "Is This The Single?" to recommend it. I do miss the really lush, slightly overproduced quality of POST-MINSTREL SYNDROME, but Stew's been stepping away from that ever since JOYS AND CONCERNS, so I guess that ship has sailed. S ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 13:45:06 -0600 (CST) From: Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: [loud-fans] Record industry self-inflicted wound? On Thu, 19 Dec 2002, Mike Curley wrote: > Dana points out some of the major problems with the Register guy's > article pretty well. The only thing I'd like to add is that the > Register guy is making the calssic amateur error in Economics -- that > changes in supply (the number of products available) influences the > overall demand (how much the consumer wants to buy). This is only the > case when there is not enough supply to meet the overall demand in the > economy (for example: Tickle Me Elmo dolls a couple of years ago). I'd > argue that there's more than enough product out there (both old and new > releases), and that most people have some sort of loose budgets on > entertainment, and that they choose from what's available. Which would suggest that the industry's jeremiad about downloading is motivated less by any economic harm they can help and more by a desire to stop downloading they can't control. If they can get their mitts on legit download sites - and get a piece of other entertainment-dollar slices of pie (DVDs, videogames, etc.), that's the real issue. They're losing to their being more stuff to do in an equivalent amount of time. Real-life example: ever since I've been on the internet, I've hardly played the guitar at all. It seems that the time during which I used to play guitar I now spend typing away to you folks. Be thankful: I'm not playing the guitar at you folks. - --Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey J e f f r e y N o r m a n The Architectural Dance Society www.uwm.edu/~jenor/ADS.html :: The possibility of Klingon slash fiction :: fills me with mild apprehension. __ Michael Quinion __ np: Cat Power _The Covers Record_ ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 14:47:42 -0500 (EST) From: Aaron Mandel Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: [loud-fans] Record industry self-inflicted wound? On Thu, 19 Dec 2002, Mike Curley wrote: > I'd argue that there's more than enough product out there (both old and > new releases), and that most people have some sort of loose budgets on > entertainment, and that they choose from what's available. But, as many have pointed out, that budget goes to 'entertainment', not to CDs specifically. Even if the music industry's sales are dropping more than one would expect in this economy (and are they?) they certainly seem to be shrinking demand with their strategies for what's released and promoted. So, okay, the problem may not be the number of new albums released, but rather WHICH albums they aren't releasing. That's not all on the RIAA's hands, given the state of affairs with Clear Channel and "independent promoters" and so on. a ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 16:07:49 -0500 (EST) From: dmw Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Record industry self-inflicted wound? On Thu, 19 Dec 2002, Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey wrote: > What I found most interesting about the Register guy's article was the note > that if the industry had released 12,000 more albums (bringing it up to the > total of previous years) and that if each of those had sold only 3,000 > copies, profits would be at the same level. He then goes on to suggest that > perhaps the industry's promotional strategies are partially at > fault...since it would seem not *that* difficult to sell 3,000 of a major > label album. when i was given access to year-old soundscan data, one of the interesting points was that the average (arithmatic mean) sales for the CDs tracked by SS (about 35K for the year in question, which i think was 1999) was considerably LOWER than one thousand. Wasn't there a big story in NYT just about a year ago about how some hotly-tipped young R&B singer's disc had sold basically nada? That was even someone with some promotional push, if memory serves. which is maybe not even the most significant thing wrong with that logic, but is definitely wrong. incidentally, this is a big part of why is till kinda disagree with Michael M about the feasibility of creating control groups -- the standard deviation in sales is very high; i think it is high enough that if you randomly divided releases into two categories and and compared total sales for the two categories you'd be quite likely to get something that looked like a statistically significant variation. come to think of it, if anybody does have soundscan numbers lying around, y could do it. at least for the SS-tracked stuff, and although there's debate about how incomplete those numbers are, i think it'd be an interesting exercise. hrm. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 17:16:20 -0800 (PST) From: "Joseph M. Mallon" Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Re: 24 (ns) On Wed, 18 Dec 2002, Jo Brown wrote: > Not to criticize too harshly, because I really do enjoy this show, but there > was a big, whopping continuity blooper the week before last involving a > "now-you-see-it, now-you-don't" bandage on the head of Kim's employer, the > abusive husband and father. It was so blatant, I can't believe it wasn't > caught--especially for all the press that show got at the beginning for being > so meticulous about such things. The Kim plot is the worst part of this season. The kid is annoying, the abuse is horrifying, and Kim's main role in the show is to get into trouble so Jack can keep worrying abuot her. How long was she babysitting for the kid that she'd risk her life to go back for her? OTOH, Kim's really cute, and doesn't look spindly at all. Joe Mallon jmmallon@joescafe.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 22:49:27 -0500 From: jenny grover Subject: [loud-fans] oh, those reliable RIAA numbers... Check out this interesting bit of mathematics-- http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/28574.html ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 23:34:05 -0600 From: Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Re: 24 (now with tangential Scott content) Quoting "Joseph M. Mallon" : > The Kim plot is the worst part of this season. The kid is annoying, > the > abuse is horrifying, and Kim's main role in the show is to get into > trouble so Jack can keep worrying abuot her. How long was she > babysitting > for the kid that she'd risk her life to go back for her? A few months, I suppose? How much time is supposed to have elapsed since the end of last season? (An early episode told us, but I don't remember.) Kids are always annoying on TV - I just try to overlook that. I guess I don't mind the Kim plot so much this season, because the fact that she's always getting into trouble only highlights the conflicting demands upon Jack in terms of public servant vs. father (not to mention vs. avenger of wife's death...). The bit in last week's episode - where Jack is on the phone with Kim & CTU simultaneously, trying to be fatherly in an impossible situation while also trying to, uh, save the world (or at least LA*) - brought that tension forth excruciatingly. Not to mention that Nina conveniently chose that moment to slit Faheen's (sp?) throat... (I'm waiting for a credit card ad to use that...I suspect I'll be waiting a while.) Plus, Kim seems a bit less clueless and helpless this season: even when she does dumb things, they seem to result from better decisions as opposed to sheer idiocy. And do recall she's supposed to be, what...17? * Of course, one miscalculation on the part of 24's writers is that much of the country might just say, ah, let 'em have LA... > OTOH, Kim's really cute, and doesn't look spindly at all. Yep. And subtracting "really cute" (from my pov), same w/the late Paula. Actually, I was talking w/Rose about the "evil or ineffectual women" notion that Aaron Milenski brought up - and she mentioned (almost simultaneously with my thinking it) that well yeah, but how many of the show's male characters have been paragons of much? Surely not Jack (hacksaw, anyone?)! Mason's been either deceptive or ineffectual...Palmer is perhaps the most decent character, but he had neglected his family for his political career. Tony seems to be pretty decent - but he seems like one of those guys who, intentionally or not, seems only able to relate to women by flirting: he's smart, kind, and very good-looking, and probably all of his life he was able to get his way by being charming. And of course, this has gotten him into trouble...workplace romance, anyone? So I don't know...the more thoroughly drawn characters, male and female, seem to cover a wide range of character, and I'm not sure that it's any more gendered than reality is (not saying the show models reality - I mean, yeah, outrageous plot contrivances abound). What I really want to know is how come they've yet to use the show's eponymous theme song? (And am I the first person to mention that?) ..Jeff J e f f r e y N o r m a n The Architectural Dance Society www.uwm.edu/~jenor/ADS.html :: Solipsism is its own reward :: :: --Crow T. Robot ------------------------------ End of loud-fans-digest V2 #436 *******************************