Month: July 2008

bread and fire

Artillery howls from just outside the city
while jets circle overhead.
Buildings crumble under the bombardment.
Days and nights. Tanks move forward
in clouds of soot. A Russian spokesman declares,
“The situation is coming under control;
we will set up kitchens to feed the city.”
Chechen boys in native battle dress
place grenades under the Russian tanks.
Old men hide in piles of debris to
shoot at movement on the street.
Women curse. Demoralized and half-destroyed,
the remaining Russian tanks withdraw
to take up shelling from outside the city.

Like an old coat, my friends’ apartment is
comfortable and warm. In the main room,
on a bed folded into a couch, we drink and
laugh and argue and eat. Stepping out
on the snowy street, not far from Patriarch’s
Pond and the church where Pushkin wed,
we meet a babushka from the apartment below.
“Have you voted?” my friend asks. “No,”
she says, and adds defiantly, “And if
I would, I would vote for the communists.
They fed us!” We walk on to the voting place,
across the street from the blinking neon sign
of the Cherry Casino. We joke about
the candidate who tomorrow will
win, who has promised to restore
the armed might of the Russian empire.

entertainment that scales well

In addition to big-screen public movie theaters, popular personal video display devices now range from mobile phones to personal computers to huge home television sets. Video first shown on a big screen to a silent crowd gathered in a darkened theater might come to be viewed on a small, mobile-phone screen by a single person on a noisy bus traveling in the afternoon.

Phone companies, software companies, and advertising agencies are developing “three screen” strategies for integrating information and serving advertisements across personal video display devices. But content convergence cannot be taken for granted. What sort of video content works well across display sizes and viewing circumstances remains largely an open question.

Liao Wen Ho Puppet Theater is an example of highly artistic entertainment that works well across a wide range of display sizes and viewing circumstances. The Liao Wen Ho Puppet Theater draws upon a rich tradition of Taiwanese puppetry. Taiwanese puppetry began with mid-eighteenth century theater performances displaying classical Chinese culture. In the 1920s, Taiwanese puppetry began to incorporate heroic martial arts fighting (wuxia). This produces the sort of performance that could draw a crowd on a street corner like that for a Punch and Judy show in late eighteenth-century England. Recently at the Sackler Gallery, Liao Wen Ho Puppet Theater performed an episode from Journey to the West, a great classical romance of Chinese literature. The performance combined classical Chinese culture with an attention-grabbing displays of heroic fighting.

The performance worked across a large scale. The individual puppets moved in subtle and expressive ways that could be fully appreciated only up-close or with a tight camera focus. At the same time, the performance occurred across a stage that I would guess was several meters long. The performance included large scale effects such as darting flames and clouds of smoke, and the dynamic spatial arrangements of the multiple puppets was an important part of the show. These aspects of the performance were best appreciated at a distance or with a wide focus. The puppets themselves ranged in size from traditional glove puppets (about 20 cm tall) to much larger hand puppets (about 120 cm tall).

In Taiwan, puppet shows have been hugely popular on television. Hand puppets, like shadow puppets, are framed in two dimensions, like video displayed on a flat panel. Television cameras offer the opportunity to give many viewers both close-up and long views of the puppets. Not surprisingly, Liao Wen Ho Puppet Theater has been successful both in theater performance and on television.

Liao Wen Ho Puppet Theater also provided a great example of interactivity. After the show, Liao Wen Ho and his company came out from behind the stage to demonstrate puppetry to the audience. They then shook hands with members of the audience, spoke with them, and patiently posed for photographs and videos with them. They thus combined new media possibilities with ancient human hospitality. That’s both smart and generous.

print fills the streets

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s award-winning CEO, recently predicted the end of print media:

In the next 10 years, the whole world of media, communications and advertising are going to be turned upside down — my opinion.

Here are the premises I have. Number one, there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.[1]

Newspaper boxes crowd high-attention street sites around Washington and other cities. Don’t bet on IP networks changing this urban streetscape.

newspaper boxes crowd the streetscape

Thirty newspaper boxes stand outside the main entrance/exit to the Court House metro stop in Arlington, Virginia. Five boxes sell four daily newspapers — the Washington Times (25 cents), the Washington Post (50 cents; two boxes), USA Today (75 cents), and the Wall Street Journal ($1.50). All the other boxes offer free newspapers or print publications. These free publications include four Spanish-language newspapers (two dailies, two weeklies), two Catholic-Church-sponsored weekly newspapers (one in Spanish, one in English), two gay-lesbian-bisexual-trans news weeklies, a Capitol-Hill news weekly, a city-life weekly, a weekly reporting national news conspiracies, and a satirical news weekly. Eight boxes offer free print publications oriented to particular products or services, mainly homes and automobiles, but also books and employment. Within a hundred-yard radius of this site stand another forty newspaper boxes that together provide largely the same publications. [2]

Newspaper boxes are a distribution network with some important advantages. Newspaper boxes stand for free on public property. Because U.S. law strictly scrutinizes content-specific government regulation of print publications, very different types of print publications have an equal legal opportunity to establish newspapers boxes.[3] Because many persons travel through public spaces outside areas such as metro stations, newspaper boxes located there have good opportunities for attracting attention. Moreover, metro rides, by limiting alternative actions, favor opportunities to read. Because paper is cheap, portable, and durable, free print publications can effectively take advantage of these opportunities to serve advertising to everyone.

IP networks aren’t competitive with newspaper boxes. Perhaps some time in the future networked news boxes will advertise content and provide means for downloading it to portable reading devices that everyone carries. There are many, many obstacles for such a development. It’s unlikely to happen even in twenty years.

General-coverage print newspapers that persons pay to buy probably will disappear within a decade. Such publications already are a minority among those offered through newspaper boxes. Unless cities ban newspaper boxes, newspaper boxes and the print media they contain are likely to continue to exist for decades.

Notes:

[1] Postful insightfully observes that all content is already aggregated and distributed digitally and is only pushed to print for output.

[2] Here’s a list of the individual publications, along with some additional information about them.

[3] In Lakewood v. Plain Dealer Publishing Co., 486 U.S. 750 (1988), the U.S. Supreme Court overruled a city ordinance that gave the city’s mayor wide discretion to determine what publications were allowed in newspaper boxes. In City of Cincinnati v. Discovery Network, Inc., et al., 507 U.S. 410 (1993), the Supreme Court declared that a selective and categorical ban on “commercial handbills” was unconstitutional. Practical challenges to establishing new newspaper boxes and maintaining existing ones are significant. Some cities are pondering new regulations for newspaper boxes while publishers are fighting strongly against restrictions.

plenitude

A priest offers his services
against the isms.
His eighty-year-old mother wants
to go to Jerusalem.
She makes him lead her
up and down every hill
in Jerusalem, as if thirty
years of saying daily mass
were compressed into a five-day
trip.

Thirty years ago
he was the head of his
high-school class, a young man
thought to be on the trail
of greatness, unlike Monet,
painting and repainting
breaking ice floes and stacks
of wheat in winter.