If Saddam had written more bad novels and murdered fewer people, the world would be a better place.
While maybe true in this case, I have to think that there are some novels that, to paraphrase Faulkner "are worth any number of old ladies" to have not written...
It was recording technology combined with radio that killed that culture in the first place, or at least rendered it moribund: When you can play a recording of the original artist performing the latest hit, or tune in to a radio show of the same thing, who's going to settle for somebody's-sister-who-took-piano-lessons doing her damnedest with the help of sheet music and the family upright? Art, especially musical art, became something that even ordinary people paid professionals to do for them, instead of doing it for themselves, and "musical amateur" became an insult rather than simply a description.
Funny, I look at it as those who first took advantage of the new technology and learned how to use it best, the pioneers in the field, were the ones who hit it big:
The few vaudevillians who understood how to make their acts work on radio.
The stage actors who figured out how to make their performances work on the screen without sound, and the directors who stopped filming what was on the stage and started filming movies. And then later, the ones who stopped filming movies for TV and started making television.
The singers who learned how a microphone worked best with their voice, and made their singing style subtle and intimate, rather than loud enough to fill a theater. (Frank Sinatra vs. Ethel Merman.)
Often, nothing sparks. Occasionally, you get flameouts. But sometimes-- you make magic.
And if the tech is simplified enough that anybody can do it, then it's no longer in the hands of those folks who alone can master the tech.
For a great example, look at http://www.bushin30seconds.org -- 1500 30 second spots, with average quality quite good, if not professional, and a significant percentage being brilliant. And few of them being the common, expected and predictable stuff.
Re: Five Geek Social Fallacies -- BLESS YOU.
Now if only unnamed individuals will take the hint when I forward it to the mailing list...
Re: Chicago -- most people are unaware just how big Chicago looms in acting, improv, and theater. Second City, ImprovOlympics, Goodman, Steppenwolf, Organic, Mamet-- incredibily influential.
Architecture: I can't believe no one's mentioned Frank Lloyd Wright yet, and the chance to rebuild the city after the fire.
Politics: does no one remember 1968? Or the Daley machines?
All this is off the top of my head and I've never even been there.
(And then there's the other reasons why NYC is world known; the UN, the NYSE, the WTC...)
As a tall beautiful person, I thank you. But could you do something about where you put the chandeliers in living rooms?
Had I been asked, I would have considered adding Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Moses.
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