Blog About Photography

I’m straight up steal­ing a post from Con­sci­en­tious, but that’s ok, but that’s ok because Amy Stein is a great pho­tog­ra­pher who we can all learn some­thing from. From what she puts on her web­site, it would seem that her work adheres closely to the themes she sets forth, using a com­bi­na­tion of found and posed sub­jects. Some of these speak to me more than oth­ers since I belong to the school that says it’s more inter­est­ing to dis­cover inter­est­ing things out there in the world than to set them up your­self. Even so, her work is engag­ing and thought pro­vok­ing, par­tic­u­larly her “Women and Guns” series. And, bet­ter yet, she writes an inter­est­ing and insight­ful blog which is some­thing every­one can behing.

This is a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle from Slate about a seri­ous prob­lem fac­ing emcees these days: the Sam­ple Troll. What is a sam­ple troll, you ask? From the article:

Sim­i­lar to its cousins the patent trolls, Bridge­port and com­pa­nies like it hold port­fo­lios of old rights (some­times accu­mu­lated in dubi­ous fash­ion) and use law­suits to extort money from suc­cess­ful music artists for rou­tine sam­pling, no mat­ter how min­i­mal or unno­tice­able. The sam­ple trolls have already lever­aged their posi­tion into mil­lions in set­tle­ments and court dam­ages, but that’s not the real prob­lem. The trolls are turn­ing copy­right into the foe rather than the friend of musi­cal innovation.

The arti­cle is long, but it really is worth read­ing. There’s an audio ver­sion of it float­ing around some­where, too.

This trolling thing is seri­ous busi­ness. I hadn’t heard of the sam­ple trolls before, but I remem­ber read­ing an arti­cle in the New Yorker about a patent trolling com­pany that was tak­ing down RIM, the com­pany that devel­oped the Black­Berry. They had patented a crude wire­less email sys­tem that is sort of like RIM’s, and they were suing them for like a gajil­lion dol­lars. It was going to totally sink the com­pany but then of course Microsoft bought them out and solved the problem.

This arti­cle only relates only periph­er­ally to what I just said. It’s inter­est­ing though, because unlike the New Yorker arti­cle, it gives sug­ges­tions about how the music indus­try might address the sam­ple troll threat. I hope to see some lively dis­cus­sion about this here, assum­ing that any­one is read­ing this. Post com­ments if you’re out there! Let’s make this a back and forth!

Well, maybe funny. Fox News is get­ting ready to try out a “Daily Show”-esque polit­i­cal satire show that leans right instead of left, accord­ing to Hol­ly­wood Reporter, via the HuffPo. It’s going to have writ­ers from “24,” “Polit­i­cally Incor­rect with Bill Mahr” and the “Late Late Show with Craig Fer­gu­son”. So you know it’s going to be hilarious.

I, for one, wel­come this new pro­gram which for now is called, “This Just In.” After the repu­di­a­tion of their world view, I appre­ci­ate that Fox is try­ing to get cre­ative with their pro­gram­ming. I mean, they have 24 hours of air­time to fill with hatred and bile and lies, so I’m glad that they’re think­ing about mak­ing it funny as opposed to infu­ri­at­ing. They still call them­selves a news net­work; they may as well admit it’s just a joke.

The Jen Bek­man Gallery has announced the win­ners of the Hey, Hot Shot com­pe­ti­tion for fall 2006. I won. No, not really. I didn’t even get hon­or­able men­tion. All the work is really good though from some pretty seri­ous and tal­ented pho­tog­ra­phers, some of whom I’ve heard of, so I’m more awed than dis­ap­pointed. I entered:

This is what won:

So there’s a pretty clear aes­thetic dif­fer­ence, and um, you know dif­fer­ence in say, ease of exe­cu­tion and, you know. Qual­ity. So I guess I have some work to do. Con­grat­u­la­tions to all the win­ners. But know that Spring ’07 is going to be an total shut out. I’m comin’ back, baby!