Wonderful, impassioned Boing Boing post by Cory. I’m reproducing it in full.
The Philadelphia Free Library system is broke, and they’re shutting it down, including cancelling “all branch and regional library programs, programs for children and teens, after school programs, computer classes, and programs for adults”; and “all children programs, programs to support small businesses and job seekers, computer classes and after school programs”; and “all library visits to schools, day care centers, senior centers and other community centers”; and “all community meetings”; and “all GED, ABE and ESL program.”
Just look at that list of all the things libraries do for our communities, all the ways they help the least among us, the vulnerable, the children, the elderly. Think of every wonderful thing that happened to you among the shelves of a library. Think of the millions of lifelong love-affairs with literacy sparked in the collections of those libraries. Think of every person whose life was forever changed for the better in those buildings.
Think of the nobility of libraries and librarianship, the great scar that the Burning of Alexandria gouged in human history. Think of the archivists who barricaded themselves in the Hermitage during the Siege of Leningrad, slowly starving and freezing to death but refusing to desert their posts for fear that the collections they guarded would become firewood.
Think of the librarians who took a stand during the darkest years of the PATRIOT Act and refused to turn over patron records. Think of the moral unimpeachability of those whose trade is universal access to all human knowledge.
Picture an entire city, a modern, wealthy place, in the richest country in the world, in which the vital services provided by libraries are withdrawn due to political brinksmanship and an unwillingness to spare one banker’s bonus worth of tax-dollars to sustain an entire region’s connection with human culture and knowledge and community.
Think of it and ask yourself what the hell has happened to us.
The adult-film industry is concentrated in the San Fernando Valley—“the Valley” to Angelenos—on the northern edge of Los Angeles, so the slump in porn is yet another factor depressing the local economy. Pornography had been immune to previous recessions, so the current downturn has come as a shock.
Most of the industry consists of small private production companies whose numbers are secret, but Mark Kernes, an editor at Adult Video News, a trade magazine, estimates that the American industry had some $6 billion in revenues in 2007, before the recession, mostly in DVD sales and rentals and some in internet subscriptions. Diane Duke, the director of the Free Speech Coalition, the adult industry’s trade group, thinks that revenues have fallen 30-50% during the past year. “One producer told me his revenue was down 80%,” she says.
If the Valley used to make 5,000-6,000 films a year, says Mr Kernes, it now makes perhaps 3,000-4,000. Some firms have shut down, others are consolidating or scraping by. For the 1,200 active performers in the Valley this means less action and more hardship. A young woman without …name-recognition might have charged $1,000 for a straight scene before the crisis, but gets $800 or less now. Men are worse hit. If they averaged $500 for a straight scene in 2007, they are now lucky to get $300. For every performer there are several people in support, from sound-tech to catering and (yes) wardrobe, says Ms Duke, so the overall effect on the Valley economy is large.
The Economist — and the industry — think that piracy is to blame. I wonder: surely the rise of user-generated porn has something to do with it too. At any rate, those stories of ‘amateur’ porn being sold freely in pubs might not all be urban myths. And some of those camcorders being sold by the truckload must be used for, er, creative purposes.
En passant And don’t you just love the irony of the porn industry trade association calling itself “the Free Speech Coalition”? Almost as funny as the Irish alcoholic drinks industry calling itself the “Hospitality Association”.
Microsoft continues its attempt to unseat Google as the king of search. Today, someone from the team behind its Bing search engine took the stage at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco to announce the latest feature: Visual search.
The most obvious way to use visual search is when you’re shopping for products. So if you want to buy a new handbag, you could look at images of thousands of handbags in Bing, scroll through them quickly, and narrow down your search based on brand, price, and other attributes. Unusually for Microsoft, the user experience is actually quite impressive, with the image results and the transition between search pages providing some nice eye-candy. It’s certainly a much flashier experience than Google Image Search. Bing Visual Search is supposed to be live any second now, so you can see it for yourself.
“So, let me get this straight. Bush inherited a $7 Trillion surplus, turned it into a deficit by funding an illegal war, fought by murderous private contractors, but Obama is the bad guy because he wants healthcare the entire rest of the developed world has had since the early 1950s?”
This is the bust of Charles Darwin that used to be in Down House, his home in Kent. (It’s now in Cambridge University Library).
I prefer the profile view, though, because it brings out his essential gentleness as a person (which is most in evident in his anguish over the death of his daughter Annie — and which is a central theme in the recently-released feature film Creation).
“When a true genius appears in the world,” wrote Jonathan Swift, “you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” So it was with blogging. It was ridiculed as self-indulgent, lazy vanity publishing; lampooned as the product of obsessives tapping feverishly in their pyjamas; blasted as a parasitic activity, feeding on the blood of hard-working professional journalists; and derided as a doomed fad because there was no ‘business model’ to support it. After all, virtually no one makes money from his or her blog, so the thing clearly didn’t have a future.
And guess what? Blogging is thriving. In virtually every area of human interest, the diversity and quantity of fact and opinion available online dwarfs what was available in the print era. In the old days the News of the World had a ludicrous slogan: “All Human Life Is Here”, a promise on which no publication could ever hope to deliver. The ‘blogosphere’ is the first medium we’ve ever had which could conceivably live up to the slogan…
Erratum: A computer scientist has emailed, objecting to my reference to Tim Berners-Lee as “a physicist working at CERN” when he was, in fact, “a computer scientist employed by CERN in that capacity, who just happened to have a first degree in physics”. He’s right of course. Mea culpa. My only defence is that, as an engineer, I regard physicists much as some people regard Catholics (as in the saying “once a Catholic, always a Catholic…”).
We went to see Julie and Julia, Nora Ephron’s film about two women obsessed with French cuisine. It’s based on a true story about Julie Powell (played by a waiflike Amy Adams), a lost young wife living in Queens in 2002 who fastens on Julia Child’s famous cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, as a way of giving purpose to her life. She decides that she will cook every recipe in the book (all 524 of them) in a single year — and write a blog about the experience.
Ephron’s screenplay weaves the lives of the two women — who never meet — into a charming tale. Julia Child is played by Meryl Streep in a performance that initially seems so over the top that one is reminded of the Monty Python portrayal of Mrs Jean-Paul Sartre. David Denby put it nicely in his New Yorkerreview: “Like a tall ship at full sail, she leans, tilts, and billows. Odd explosions of air—whoops, exclamations—come hurtling through the passageways. She runs out of breath, and then settles, mysteriously, like an old Bible that italicizes ordinary words, on a single syllable.” The effect is slightly off-putting at first, but it’s such a focussed performance that eventually one begins to wonder: maybe Child really was like this. After all, Streep is a great actress and she must know what she’s doing. Besides, the real-life Child was a very large woman (six foot two in height and with a presence to match). So I suspended disbelief and resolved to check it further when I got home.
At the artistic heart of the film is a conjecture: that cooking can change your life. Julia Child was the wife of Paul Child, a civilised and urbane minor US diplomat (played by Stanley Tucci) who is posted to Paris in 1948, just as Senator Joe McCarthy is beginning to stoke anti-Communist hysteria back home. She loved Paris and French food, but was lost for something to do (the couple had no children) and so eventually fastened on the idea of enrolling at the Le Cordon Bleu cookery school. After many twists and turns (nicely portrayed in the film and including Paul’s skirmish with McCarthyism) she wound up writing the book that introduced the American thinking classes to the glories of French cuisine. In a way, she was the Americans’ answer to Elizabeth David — except that Child was less fastidious as a person and took to TV like Fanny Craddock (and became just as famous). But, overall, it was an obsession with the details of haute cuisine that gave meaning to her life.
Half a century later, Julie Powell is drifting through life in New York. Married to a civilised, urbane magazine editor (nicely played by Chris Messina), she works by day in the office of a government organisation set up to deal with relatives of the victims of 9/11. The only thing she really seems to enjoy doing in cooking. She wants to be a writer (even wrote “half a novel” once) but is getting nowhere. Eventually she finds that one of her ghastly, power-dressing contemporaries has started a blog about her personal life which is going to be turned into a TV mini-series, and has the thought: I could write a blog too! But about what?
And therein hangs the tale. Julie starts a blog (using the old Userland software which powered Salon blogs and that I used to use before I switched to WordPress). Initially, nobody notices it (she’s a long way down the long tail), but eventually it gets some traction and one day the New York Times discovers it and — Hey Presto! — Julie’s on her way to fame and a book deal — and personal salvation. It isn’t all plain sailing, of course: she has reverses and crises (just as Child had) on the way; and even if she hadn’t, the dramatic demands of a screenplay would have necessitated them. But the story ends, satisfyingly, with the realisation that both women Came Through. And left the world a better place. And so we walked out into the twilight with the warm glow that comes from realising that Boeuf Bourgignon can change your life. (Which in my case, incidentally, it did. But that’s another story.)
But back to my original discombobulating concern: was Streep taking us for a ride? In the old days, we’d have no way of checking. Now, though, we have YouTube. So here’s a link to the trailer for the film. And here is the real Child on how to make an omelette:
And my conclusion? Streep did over-egg the pudding a bit. Or, as the French would say, un peu. Put it down to artistic licence; after all, you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggheads.
FOOTNOTE: Julia Child’s recipe for Boeuf Bourgignon (pdf) available from here. I’m afraid I disagree with her about the bacon rinds. Otherwise she’s spot on.
