From: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org (loud-fans-digest) To: loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Subject: loud-fans-digest V5 #22 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 Sunday, January 23 2005 Volume 05 : Number 022 Today's Subjects: ----------------- [loud-fans] =?ISO-8859-1?Q?L'=EAtre_et_l'avoir_and_other_documentaries?= [Richard Gagnon ] Re: [loud-fans] Lost in the Grooves [Sarah Gordon Subject: [loud-fans] =?ISO-8859-1?Q?L'=EAtre_et_l'avoir_and_other_documentaries?= Marie wrote: A film that might appeal to some Loudfans is TO BE AND TO HAVE, a French > documentary about an elementary school teacher, George Lopez, who > teaches the > 3-11-year-olds in a little French village. It's subtitled, and is > very much like > a "foreign film" in that it is excellent in portraying mood, and > finding the > subtle nuances of beauty in the everyday. It's a couple of years old, > but I > just caught it, and wanted to mention if nobody's heard of it, or > wondered if it > was good. The box touts it as "the highest grossing French > documentary. I agree, it's a wonderful film. What happened after the film is a little less sweet, as the teacher sued the filmmakers for a share in the profits. The rules of documentary film making a quickly changing. A good example is LE PEUPLE MIGRATEUR (WINGED MIGRATION). You get a far different perspective on what the film portrays if you see the making-of film also. I don't want to spoil anybody's fun, but it's very illuminating. Rick ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 10:54:43 -0800 (PST) From: zoom@muppetlabs.com Subject: Re: [loud-fans] =?iso-8859-1?Q?L'=EAtre_et_l'avoir_and_other_documentaries?= > I agree, it's a wonderful film. What happened after the film is a little less sweet, as the teacher sued the filmmakers for a share in the profits. Aw heck, Randall Dale Adams did that to Errol Morris after Morris saved Adams from the electric chair by making THE THIN BLUE LINE! > The rules of documentary film making a quickly changing. A good example is LE PEUPLE MIGRATEUR (WINGED MIGRATION). You get a far different perspective on what the film portrays if you see the making-of film also. I don't want to spoil anybody's fun, but it's very illuminating. Assuming, but not proving, that the two fetch up together on one DVD. Don't know if THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS counts as a documentary, but I'll add it to my 2004 Top Ten anyway. Means I gotta bump...what...INTERMISSION...sheesh, that's a hard call to make. Film diary...must start 2005 film diary... Andy Memories gone in a snap By Maria Puente, USA TODAY There's one in almost every American household: a shoebox stuffed with faded snapshots of days gone by, the kids' baby pictures, the ugly dress you wore to the prom, innumerable views of the Grand Canyon, the college roommate passed out drunk. Americans have been filling such shoeboxes for generations, and now, thanks to the delete button on digital cameras, this widespread custom is coming to an end. As digital cameras take hold, will our boxes of baby, vacation and prom pics disappear? By Suzy Parker, USA TODAY For more than 100 years, ever since the introduction of the Kodak handheld film camera, ordinary Americans have taken pictures of themselves, forming a massive archive of the individual and collective histories of a nation. Everything  the perfect pictures and the imperfect pictures, the ones in which eyes are closed, the frame askew, the pose unflattering, the image blurred  all of them went into photo albums and shoeboxes, to be laughed at or puzzled over later by families seeking memories or anthropologists seeking insight about a culture. So what will future anthropologists think when they look back on our pictures (assuming there are any) from the dawn of the digital era? Will they wonder, "Why do all these people look so good?" (Related story: Get the most out of digital) By now there are an estimated 54 million digital cameras in American hands, and digital sales have outstripped sales of film cameras for the past two years. An estimated 10 million digital cameras were shipped in the USA just for the holidays, with millions upon millions of pictures snapped at parties and family gatherings in the past month alone. As growing numbers of amateur photographers are discovering, digital technology allows you to delete an unwanted image while it's still in the camera. Did Junior cross his eyes for the Christmas photo? No matter  just press a button and it's gone, ready for a retake. Does everybody do this? The International Data Corporation, which conducts industry surveys, estimates that about 23% of all digital images captured by cameras are deleted. That still leaves a lot of images captured  a projected 28 billion in 2004, up from 12.7 billion in 2003. But even if people preserve all those images, survey data show that they don't print as many of the images they capture  good or bad. According to Certified Digital Photo Processors, a group of independent photo labs and camera stores, only 13% of digital images captured ever end up on paper. By contrast, an estimated 98% of film images captured eventually were printed. Instead, most digital photos are stored on computer hard drives or the increasingly popular online photo-sharing archives, making shoeboxes unnecessary. "People are editing their family histories, deleting precious moments they will treasure years from now," laments Jim Leibrock of PicturesMatter.com, a Web site set up by the digital processing industry to promote picture printing. "And they're ill-educated about how fragile these digital images are. Sooner or later computers are going to crash, and these images have a chance of being lost." So these trends suggest intriguing questions: Will any imperfect pictures be preserved and printed in the future? Will their absence present an edited, even misleading, picture of our collective memories? What will happen to the billion-dollar picture printing industry? And what about the children? Children, says child psychologist Kenneth Condrell of Buffalo, actually need photographs they can hold to foster a sense of emotional well-being. In other words, all those family slide shows your parents made you sit through were actually good for you. Condrell is so convinced of this that he has been hired by the digital processors for a media tour of the country to promote the printing of family photos. "Pictures that show kids with loved ones add to their sense of feeling secure and loved," Condrell says. "Children love to go back and see themselves as babies and toddlers and how important they were to everybody. It helps develop a memory bank and an identity as a family member." 'The human element' Historians and artists are beginning to wonder about the future of candid photography, too. "Mistakes" are often the most revealing kind of photographs, says Weston Naef, curator of photographs at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which just concluded an unusual exhibit, Close to Home: An American Album, that took a serious look at amateur snapshot photography as "the chief visual instrument of social memory." Nearly 200 photos were in the exhibit, most of them taken in America from 1930 to the mid-1960s, most of them black-and-white, abandoned by their owners and rediscovered in flea markets and secondhand shops. "It turns out that 'mistakes' are what make many photographs, especially snapshot photographs, because they represent the human element," Naef says. "Some of the most interesting pictures are being deleted because they seem 'imperfect,' so the concern is that future snapshots are going to become more conventional, more perfect  and less interesting." Non-historians have thought about this, too, even as they jab the delete button on their cameras. "I always delete pictures that aren't up to snuff, but not every icky picture," says Dana Marsh, a software company worker in Washington, D.C. "There are always those goofy pictures that you have to keep  if only to embarrass someone later on. It's that type of goofy picture that will hold the truth of our society generations from now." Says Sara Brown, a waitress in Kearney, Neb.: "Pictures  even bad ones  are precious moments in time. I always shriek when my parents pull out old pictures or home videos of me to my boyfriend, but I let him see them anyway, because the person in those pictures made me who I am today." For some people, the question of whether and when to delete is just silly. You have to delete. "When you spend $5,000 on a trip, you want to make sure the mementos of the trip are as good as can be," says Derek Osolind, who works in advertising in Ann Arbor, Mich. "I never have to wonder if the rainbow near the lake will show up in the shot or if my eyes were open. I know within seconds." Professional photographers may use the delete button even more often than amateurs. "A professional will be more inclined to delete images for technical reasons or because they have better images," says Mike Sargent, a photographer and vice president of editorial operations for Getty Images, a photo archive and wire service. Still, he says, failure to delete can have positive and negative consequences: What if the soldiers who snapped pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused in Abu Ghraib prison had deleted those images? Would the abuse have come to light? Would the abuse have continued if the pictures had not come to light? Indeed, the end-of-an-era hand-wringing may be overstated. Maybe people are deleting memories, but "they're bad memories," jokes Gary Pageau, a spokesman for the Photo Marketing Association, who wonders wryly whether people suffer from occasional "deleter's remorse." In any case, he says, there's no reason to panic. "As the industry evolves and people become more digitally literate, you're going to see more solutions, such as online storage for pictures and lots of photo albuming," he says. "Accidental, loose pictures are not going to be saved, but people are going to have a lot more access to whatever is saved." Already, online photo archiving and sharing has exploded. One of the largest sites, Webshots.com, has nearly 120 million archived photos available for view and gets about 15 million visitors a month. Every day, people upload more than 500,000 photos to the site; to date, more than 5 billion photos have been downloaded. Narendra Rocherolle, vice president of the San Francisco-based archiving company, says there has been an explosion in photography in the digital era because people perceive digital photos as "free," compared with buying film and paying to process it. So deletions are more than made up for by the soaring number of images being captured. Moreover, people are not really editing the streams of images they post online for all to see. "If you go to the shots being posted, they're reality-based and authentic," he says. "People find comfort and connectedness in that we all share the embarrassing moments." At Shutterfly.com, which helps people make prints of their digital images, most customers are mothers who take the kind of pictures that mothers have always taken. "We are still seeing the majority of pictures are of young children," says Bridgette Thomas, communications director. "Next are weddings, travel pictures and pets. And people are taking even sillier pictures now. People think, 'If it's free, why not load them all?' " Dusty, faded treasures But are they really pictures if they exist only in the online ether? John Wells, a San Francisco lawyer, thinks not. Ten years ago, after Wells' father died, he was going through his things, including a pile of floppy disks that no longer fit into any functioning computer. So into the trash they went. Then he found a real treasure: a dusty box in the garage rafters filled with thousands of slides that chronicled nearly 40 years of his family's history. He could hold them up to the light and see his half-remembered past  kids' birthday parties, Christmas mornings and long-dead loved ones full of life again. "Looking at them now, all of them were fascinating, even the goofs," Wells says. "Once a picture is in digital format, you need to go through an unnatural act to see what it is, and there's a real danger it'll never be seen again." So, as he prepares for the birth of his first child, he's made a decision: "I'm not getting a digital camera. I'm sticking with Kodachrome. [--from this weekend's USA Today] ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 14:00:54 EST From: LkDylaninthmvies@aol.com Subject: [loud-fans] Moz news MORRISSEY is set to release a new live album and separate live DVD this Spring. The singer is aiming to put out his first concert LP in over a decade - bLive From Earlbs Courtb - along with a separate DVD bWho Put The bMb In Manchesterb, which will chronicle his 2004 tour in support of his latest album, bYou Are The Quarryb. The tracklisting for bLive At Earlbs Courtb is still to be finalised. Filmed at his May 22 homecoming show at the Manchester MEN Arena, bWho Put The bMb Manchesterb will feature a mix of solo tracks as well as Smiths songs. The setlist on the night ran: bFirst Of The Gang To Dieb bHairdresser On Fireb bIrish Blood, English Heart' bThe Headmaster Ritualb bEveryday Is Like Sundayb bI Have Forgiven Jesusb bI Know It's Gonna Happen Somedayb bHow Can Anybody Possibly Know How I Feel?b bRubber Ringb bSuch A Little Thingb bDon't Make Fun Of Daddy's Voiceb bThe World Is Full Of Crashing Boresb bLet Me Kiss Youb bNo One Can Hold A Candle To Youb bJack The Ripperb bA Rush And A Push And The Land Is Oursb bI'm Not Sorryb bShoplifters Of The World Uniteb bThere Is A Light That Never Goes Outb According to Billboard, the DVD was filmed by Bucky Fukumoto, who shot the three of the music videos for singles taken from bYou Are The Quarryb b which will also be included on the DVD release. And a bit from the Advocate article: AD: All right, I never know the smooth way to ask this question, but because this is The Advocate, it's the question I have to ask. Doug, are you gay? DC: Well, only if you'll be my date at the Tonys. AD: It's a date. DC: [Laughs] There was a funnyb&do you ever watch Will & Grace? The minstrel show? AD: Occasionally. DC: Karen says to Jack, "You're gayer than a clutch purse at the Tonys." [Laughs] I thought that was one of the best lines. How come The Advocate has never called up before? AD: Well, frankly, it's because you've never gone there in interviews before. But I heard you had a new book coming out, and I thought, Damn it, I want to ask. DC: Well, there you go. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 11:48:42 -0800 (PST) From: Sarah Gordon Subject: [loud-fans] misc notes from 2004 I rarely recap the year because I hear so few new releases. This year is no different, but I'll pass along my notes below on what I enjoyed from 2004. I didn't spend too much time on this, so I'm sure I'm forgetting some stuff I truly loved in 2004. - -Sarah Some Great Records of 2004 (alphabetically) - ------------------------------------------- ADD - Divider Why Are You Doing This? (Thanks for the rec, Aaron) http://www.actdead.com/ ARCADE FIRE - Funeral http://www.arcadefire.com/ CITIZENS HERE AND ABROAD - Ghosts of Tables and Chairs http://www.citizenshereandabroad.com/ EL OLIO WOLOF - El Subconscious Celestine Olio Wolof http://www.eloliowolof.com/ FROG EYES - Ego Scriptor (I _love_ The Oscillator's Hum off The Folded Palm, but I enjoy the acoustic versions of Frog Eyes' songs more) http://www.absolutelykosher.com/frogeyes.htm HINT HINT - Young Days http://www.hinthint.org ROBOTNICKA - Spectre En Vue http://robotnicka.org/ STATUESQUE - Choir Above Fire Below http://www.statuesque.org.uk/ XIU XIU - Fabulous Muscles http://xiuxiu.org/ Live Music Highlights of 2004 - ----------------------------- I can't count the ARCADE FIRE because I saw them in 2005, but it was rad! Don't miss them when they come to your town. Or, if you missed them, console yourself with this: http://www.bradleysalmanac.com/2004/11/live-arcade-fire.htm DRESDEN DOLLS http://dresdendolls.com/ ELENI MANDELL http://elenimandell.com/ MENOMENA http://menomena.com/ The STATUESQUE/SCOTT MILLER/ANTON BARBEAU August 2004 Extravaganza (Shout out to Bradley who made this incredible week happen) http://www.statuesque.org.uk/ http://www.loudfamily.com/ http://antonbarbeau.com/ XIU XIU http://xiuxiu.org/ Favorite Song on a Mix That I Hadn't Heard Before - ------------------------------------------------- "Cherry Tree" by NATIONAL - http://www.americanmary.com/ Low-fi 2 minute sample: http://www.cdbaby.com/mp3lofi/thenational3-04.m3u Best 2003 Album That I Discovered in 2004 - ----------------------------------------- DRESDEN DOLLS - s/t http://dresdendolls.com/ Favorite Recent Emusic Discovery - -------------------------------- VITESSE (So you say "it sounds like the Magnetic Fields but not as good." And I say, "I don't care. I dig it.") http://www.emusic.com/artist/10559/10559691.html Best Theatre Performance of 2004 - -------------------------------- THE BRIGHT RIVER http://epicarts.org/brightriver/ Obscure Album I'm Excited About Being Released in 2005 - ------------------------------------------------------ JUDITH AND HOLOFERNES' second album should be released imminently. Yay! http://www.fadocore.com/ ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 17:12:25 EST From: LeftyZ@aol.com Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re:=20[loud-fans]=20L'=EAtre=20et=20l'avoir=20an d?= =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=20other=20documentaries?= In a message dated 1/22/05 11:03:12 AM, zoom@muppetlabs.com writes: << So, as he prepares for the birth of his first child, he's made a decision: "I'm not getting a digital camera. I'm sticking with Kodachrome. >> This USA Today article raises some interesting issues (though much of it is misplaced wistfulness). But, the person quoted, I believe, is making a mistake. I have three wonderful Nikon film cameras that I have used almost not at all since I got my first digital camera four and a half years ago (I've bought two more since and I'm using a nice Olympus 4 mp and a Nikon SLR 6 mp about 50/50 these days). I was backing up my photo files onto my external hard drive yesterday. During the process, I noted that, in those four and a half years, I have taken (and kept -- I never delete anything, except complete mistakes) almost 18,000 pictures. I print out two or three pics, 8 x10, from every "event" (I have two young kids, and let me tell you, their lives are DOCUMENTED, baby [and, of course, this doesn't include all the digital video I shoot and goof with on my Mac]). My office walls are papered with 8 x 10s, and I have several looseleafs full of 'em too. I suspect that, no matter my dedication to photographing my kids and my trips and my concerts.....there is NO way I'd have taken HALF that many pictures if I'da stuck with film. Funny thing too -- as to the "shoebox full o' prints" concept: How often do we actually break out the shoebox? On the other hand, during quiet times here, I often flip on a slide show on my 19" monitor and live my memories in 12 x16 size. Sometimes I find an old favorite and print it out...on the wall it goes. (Not to mention all the CDs full o' pics the grandparents get [and same day Christmas and ski trip pictures by email]....and print out 8 x 10.) As for film photography: my dad used to say "Even nostalgia ain't what it used to be." Left ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 14:39:49 -0800 From: "Steve Holtebeck" Subject: [loud-fans] Lost in the Grooves Has anyone seen this book? It's assembled by the folks at Scram magazine (Kim Cooper and David Smay), and features a guide to lots of underappreciated records in various genres, including one Game Theory album (REAL NIGHTTIME) and one Loud Family album (INTERBABE CONCERN). It was supposedly released in early December, and I had it on my Christmas wishlist, but didn't find it until a few days ago. It's an interesting read, and well worth owning. Reviewers include Doug Gillard (plugging Marshall Crenshaw's MARY JANE + 9 OTHERS album) and Steve Wynn (plugging the Flamin' Groovies JUMPIN' IN THE NIGHT, due to be reissued on CD soon - -- yay!). Wynn also covered "Shake Some Action" at the NYC release party for the book (there's an mp3 at stevewynn.net). There's talk of a SF Bay Area party sometime, featuring a performance by Steve Wynn's former UCD classmate. And while I'm veering toward on-topic, here's an update from Anton Barbeau about the Scott/Anton album. It triggered my spam filter, so people on Anton's mailing list with decent spam filtering may not have seen this yet. Quoting in lowercase.. ++ the Ant/Scott record is rolling along well. we've got a couple cover tunes, some wonderful scott miller songs, a couple dusty tracks from me and a tune that scott started and i helped finish. really goodly vibe to the whole thing so far, and word on the street so far says "watch it!" 125 records is aiming for a sometime-this-year release. ++ Sometime-this-year sounds like it might happen, and in the meantime Anton's episode Sarah's cable show "Finger On The Pulse" (plus two other episodes featuring Xiu Xiu and Subimage), are available for download at http://www.fingeronthepulse.org (search for "downloads"). Scott's performance still isn't available yet - -- maybe it will if lots of people ask for it?? - -Steve ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 14:47:52 -0800 (PST) From: Sarah Gordon Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Lost in the Grooves > Sometime-this-year sounds like it might happen, and in the meantime > Anton's episode Sarah's cable show "Finger On The Pulse" (plus two other > episodes featuring Xiu Xiu and Subimage), are available for download at > http://www.fingeronthepulse.org > (search for "downloads"). Scott's performance still isn't available yet > -- maybe it will if lots of people ask for it?? Actually, probably not. The folks who put those 3 episodes online don't seem to be interested in putting up more of my episodes, as they are interested in getting more diversity in their content. We'll see, but for now it will probably be just those 3. And I still don't have the resources to do it myself (nor the permission from the other artists). - -Sarah ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 18:01:30 EST From: JRT456@aol.com Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Lost in the Grooves LOST IN THE GROOVES (which is certainly a fun read) has now become a blog that anyone can join to promote their favorite underheard releases. It's at lostinthegrooves.com. If you contribute a posting, incidentally, you'll be paid the same amount of money as the critics who wrote reviews for the book. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 23:43:27 -0500 From: Jenny Grover Subject: [loud-fans] Re:(wow, that's an ugly subject line) other documentaries Even though I take fewer film pictures than I used to, and don't print many of my digital images (though if I ever make enough space to store them as prints, I will likely print up more and make physical albums), I do take and keep tons more photos than I did before I got a digital camera. The digital has allowed me not only to take more quantity, but also allows me to take photos in light conditions that my standard cameras and films can't handle. That's one reason I went digital. I was tired of paying processing fees for club photos that turned out terrible, if at all, and left me no worthwhile document of the show. I don't delete that many pics. Something entirely out of focus or too dark or bleached out to see will go, but I don't edit the life out of my photo collections. I back up everything on CD-R as well as my hard drive because I am paranoid about losing images. Freedom from processing costs means I can now shoot a scene or person from many angles, bracket the exposures, and experiment around much more than I did with film, and I can see what is happening as I go. I now have vacations and people and places I love documented in far more detail and in livelier ways than I did when I was shooting film alone. So, far from perfecting the life out of my photo collections, digital has allowed me to bring them to life in richer detail. And yes, I do look at my digital images more than my prints these days, because it's easier to call up a folder on my computer than to haul out old albums. I love to hold prints in my hand as much as anyone, but I also have more prints stored up around here than it is practical to go through in even a week. Shoebox? Ha! Shoe store is more like it. And I can't imagine condensing my life down to a shoebox of prints. My grandmother had a hatbox of them, and a couple of albums. They are family treasures (except all those unmarked ones of people we don't know who they are), but I was always wanting more. A better shot of the old house. A clear shot of great aunt so and so. I wanted more of the story. More detail. The mystery and the filling in the blanks with imagination are wonderful too, of course, but so many "truths" of those pasts are just approximations. Jen ------------------------------ End of loud-fans-digest V5 #22 ******************************