Category: Words

I have (almost) promised myself that this won’t become a parenting blog. (My excuse is we are busy at work building a portal and series of interactive media for children at the moment.)

But here is another great article from the New York Magazine – The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids – New York Magazine.

Alex Malik writes on the lack of reporting of digital downloads in Australia and supposes some of the reasons for this.

Why are digital only singles discriminated against? No one outside the ARIA inner sanctum knows how many authorised Snow Patrol downloads were sold last week or this summer. It’s an industry secret. Could it be that a #1 digital only single might only appear at #5, or #10, or #15 on a combined digital and physical chart? If so, would this demonstrate that the Australian authorised digital download market is not nearly as developed as the Oz recording industry would like us to believe?

Further, no matter how popular the song, it can’t be certified gold or platinum. Therefore an artist who choses the digital market rather than the physical market cannot be recognised for their commercial success. While for record companies, the physical CD single “priorities” can “ship” gold or platinum based on the quantity of CDs sent to stores but not sold to consumers, genuine download hits purchased by consumers go uncertified and receive little recognition.

The disparity in treatment between artists who chose the digital market and those who stick to the traditional physical market is best characterised by the story about the Australian artist who reportedly shipped 4 times platinum to record stores in November, only to see all of the CDs returned to the record company in the following February. Obviously it wasn’t a digital download-only release!

Music magazines are starting to annoy me. I have been a subscriber to The Wire since the mid 90s, I get Wax Poetics as well. Both offer a transitory read and are good for a few short trips to work and back and then they head off to the great pile in the corner. For all the good writing and laudable intentions they are quite insular and inward looking – Wax Poetics’ best articles have been when they have stepped out of their crate digger land, and The Wire is very dependent on their interview subjects.

Res Magazine arrives every so often and lasts one train journey – its hyper-short attention span articles are like advertisements and it will be very interesting to see what their ‘new hybrid’ magazine is going to be like. Their subscriber-only DVDs were a nice touch until Youtube arrived and basically filled the niche for interesting music videos, albeit at a much lower resolution. The digital shorts niche is more than adequately filled with great blogs like No Fat Clips.

But, just over a week ago I subscribed to Cabinet Magazine. I had been recommended it by a trusted source and thought it was worth a shot – hell, their website sounded interesting enough on its own. I added a couple of back issues to tide me over until the next issue arrives.

The back issues arrived on Friday and, well, it is an excellent read. The writing is fantastic, witty, quirky, and intelligent. Each issue is ‘themed’ and the contributors write broadly around the theme, plus a few regular bits – including a lovely piece on a colour each issue. The layout is neat and tidy with plenty of full page, full colour plates, plus some bookmark style card inserts, sometimes a CD, othertimes a poster or another treat.

It really is quite excellent. I’d highly recommend Cabinet.

My favourite ‘annual’, Strange Attractor arrived by post just after Christmas. Since picking up volumes 1 & 2 in Berlin in 2005 I eagerly await each issue. Packaged as a book, Strange Attractor is a series of quirky articles about the strange end of anthropology, culture, science, mysticism and religion.

In Issue 3 Erik Davis of Techgnosis fame writes about his travels to see the transvestite priests of Burma, for example, whilst there are other stories of the psychoactive animals, time machines, Arabic alchemy and a fascinating look at Hans Christian Andersen’s screen art (screen as in ‘room divider’).