March 12, 2008

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Some advice for artists with websites

March 12, 2008 in Art, Blogroll, problems | 15 comments

In my last post I quoted some Doors lyrics. Uncharacteristically, I did not do any linking.

I didn’t link to The Doors’ site because it’s full of Flash and other crap that is not only at stylistic variance from the spare and artful nature of The Doors’ work, but likely to either annoy you or crash something. (My Linux box can’t see or hear the Flash stuff, my Windows box wants to download all kinds of stuff and then fails with it anyway, and my Mac just flat-out crashes on it. I don’t recall any other site recently that actually brings down a computer. But that’s what The Doors site did in this case.)

I didn’t link to any lyrics pages because all of them, far as I can tell, bury what the reader wants — just the lyrics, please — inside walls of advertising. Go do a phrase/keyword search for “When the music’s over” and “doors”, on Google. Click on the top results and you’ll find that every one has a pop-up window, plus lots of other advertising jive. Of course, you can block those in your browser; but still, pop-up windows suck. They break the Web’s social contract, which says (among other things) that the publisher should not abuse the reader’s intentions. Nobody goes to a page saying “I want a pop-up window”.

These lyrics pages exist for a good (though bad) reason: most artists don’t publish their own lyrics. People want to see lyrics, however, so the advertising baiters publish the lyrics anyway. Copyright be damned.

So my advice to artists such as The Doors is to publish their own lyrics, in ways that respect the music and their own artistry — as well as the readers’ good will and good intentions.

And while they’re at it, quit making the sites so damn fancy and complicated. Quit burying text inside graphics (where the type can’t scale up and down). Make the pages into blogs that are live and written, rather than static and built. It’s cheaper, too.

I say this, by the way, as a fan of the Doors since the band was new. At one time or another I’ve bought every album, both in vinyl and CD form. I’d love it if the band (or whoever constitutes them now) would just give us a nice simple site that’s easy on readers and their browsers.

Are humans an itch the Earth wants to scratch?

March 12, 2008 in Uncategorized | 14 comments

The music that comes to mind is When the Music’s Over, by The Doors. These lines especially:

  What have they done to the Earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her.
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn and
Tied her with fences and
Dragged her down.

(Warning: be careful what you click on.)

I suppose there are more charitable ways to view how human beings have gouged and stained the Earth. Charitable toward humans, anyway.

The older I get, the more I view the human contribution to geology — that is, toward the Earth itself — as catastrophic. That is, a moment of difference recorded in the fullness of time.

Most of your large geological features are catastrophic in nature. The Himilayas are mostly sea floor pushed northward by the prow of India, which broke away from Africa a few dozen million years ago, plowed across the ocean and smashed hard into the side of Asia — an event that’s still in progress. (The east coast of Madagascar and the Malabar coast of India are two straight lines that used to touch.) As John McPhee likes to remind us, all of geology can be encapsulated in a single fact: that the summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone

And no one fact about human habitation of the Earth sums our contribution more than amount of dead matter we have burned for energy — and will continue to burn until it’s gone. Never mind the elemental materials — the ores of copper, iron, uranium and other solids in the periodic table. Mining and burning of oil and coal will do. At best these materials — which took many millions of years to make, and which won’t be renewed for millions more, if ever — will be gone in a few hundred years, tops. Most of us don’t care because we won’t be here. And we care no more about our nameless descendents than we do about our nameless ancestors. We hardly care that burning fossil fuels is melting the ice caps and raising the seas. Humans on the whole don’t seem to be built for that form of contemplation. What we are built for is plunder. We do that out the wazoo, and we rationalize every bit of it, from burning rain forests to emptying mountains and prairies of coal.

After taking thousands of pictures out the windows of airplanes, it is clear to me that our species is pestilential, and that we’ll continue to exploit the Earth until it can stand no more, and collapse will follow. This event will also be recorded as a momentary discontinuity in the long saga of Earth’s history — one that went for billions of years without us around, and will surely continue for billions more, until the Sun burns out and the larger cycles continue spinning.

Of course, we can attempt to educate ourselves, and I salute the good folks who try. One is Patrick Gregston, who says here that we should watch this video here. Do that. It’s one among many wake-up calls we’ll all be getting in our short lifetimes.

Odds are, however, that most of us will keep hitting “snooze”.

Live and kicking

March 12, 2008 in News, Uncategorized | Comments closed

Nice to read by Phil Windley that Kathy Sierra is back in the game.