The Off Topic Topic

[Malthus]

A thought. You hear a lot these days about the damaging effects of porn on kids, the scandal of its easy availability, etc... Lots of efforts to setup mandatory porn blocks which never seem to get anywhere.
Banning porn is of course a terrible, stupid idea.
Though we really should be looking at setting up pretty strict bans on porn advertising. It worked for fags. Albeit in a very different context.
It just annoys me to no end the amount of "hot cam girls!" and "hi I'm in random village near your ip and want to shag!" adverts all over the net.

I have to remind myself that, to a Brit, "fags" = "cigarettes". 

[Sheilbh]

Very cool article and interactive from the Economist:
https://www.economist.com/interactives/graphic-detail/2022/01/29/what-spotify-data-show-about-the-decline-of-english

[crazy canuck]

A thought. You hear a lot these days about the damaging effects of porn on kids, the scandal of its easy availability, etc... Lots of efforts to setup mandatory porn blocks which never seem to get anywhere.
Banning porn is of course a terrible, stupid idea.
Though we really should be looking at setting up pretty strict bans on porn advertising. It worked for fags. Albeit in a very different context.
It just annoys me to no end the amount of "hot cam girls!" and "hi I'm in random village near your ip and want to shag!" adverts all over the net.

I have to remind myself that, to a Brit, "fags" = "cigarettes". 

I had a flashbulb moment to the first time I heard a brit say that he wanted to smoke a fag.

[celedhring]

Very cool article and interactive from the Economist:
https://www.economist.com/interactives/graphic-detail/2022/01/29/what-spotify-data-show-about-the-decline-of-english

I saw a scholar study a year ago that ultimately concluded that this was kinda always the case, and the cultural supremacy of English had always been overrated. It's just that now we have better data.

There has always been a disconnect between what's part of the cultural conversation and what people are actually consuming. Some years ago my union met with the guy running Netflix for all Spanish-speaking countries and he told us how that Stranger Things was their largest trending topic in Spain, yet their most watched shows were the Spanish-language soaps nobody talked about.

I think the cultural conversation is becoming more democratic in recent years though.

[Josquius]

Maybe. I do think there could also be a factor at play in the democratisation of music. Where before you were fairly beholden to what the radio stations, the taste maker elites, played to you, today people are far more free to seek out and listen to what they actually like.

Back when I was at uni, as Spotify was starting up, a teacher wanted me to pursue a PhD in this. But €€€.

[celedhring]

Maybe. I do think there could also be a factor at play in the democratisation of music. Where before you were fairly beholden to what the radio stations, the taste maker elites, played to you, today people are far more free to seek out and listen to what they actually like.

Back when I was at uni, as Spotify was starting up, a teacher wanted me to pursue a PhD in this. But €€€.

Yeah, but in Spain the radio played Spanish songs, not English ones.

I just checked, and among the 30 top selling music albums in Spain of all time, only 4 are from English language bands (Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, ABBA and Michael Jackson in that order)

[The Larch]

Maybe. I do think there could also be a factor at play in the democratisation of music. Where before you were fairly beholden to what the radio stations, the taste maker elites, played to you, today people are far more free to seek out and listen to what they actually like.

Back when I was at uni, as Spotify was starting up, a teacher wanted me to pursue a PhD in this. But €€€.

Yeah, but in Spain the radio played Spanish songs, not English ones.

I just checked, and among the 30 top selling music albums in Spain of all time, only 4 are from English language bands (Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, ABBA and Michael Jackson in that order)

Out of curiosity, which artist is #1? How many Julio Iglesias records? 

[celedhring]

Maybe. I do think there could also be a factor at play in the democratisation of music. Where before you were fairly beholden to what the radio stations, the taste maker elites, played to you, today people are far more free to seek out and listen to what they actually like.

Back when I was at uni, as Spotify was starting up, a teacher wanted me to pursue a PhD in this. But €€€.

Yeah, but in Spain the radio played Spanish songs, not English ones.

I just checked, and among the 30 top selling music albums in Spain of all time, only 4 are from English language bands (Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, ABBA and Michael Jackson in that order)

Out of curiosity, which artist is #1? How many Julio Iglesias records? 

You can check the full list here, it's compiled from official sales figures. Tracking didn't start until the 1980s, so it misses Iglesias' heyday, he's still #2 overall. #1 is Alejandro Sanz.

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anexo:%C3%81lbumes_m%C3%A1s_vendidos_en_Espa%C3%B1a

I honestly wasn't aware La Oreja de Van Gogh were *that* big.

[The Larch]

Even worse... Luis Cobos is #6! 

[Josquius]

Maybe. I do think there could also be a factor at play in the democratisation of music. Where before you were fairly beholden to what the radio stations, the taste maker elites, played to you, today people are far more free to seek out and listen to what they actually like.

Back when I was at uni, as Spotify was starting up, a teacher wanted me to pursue a PhD in this. But €€€.

Yeah, but in Spain the radio played Spanish songs, not English ones.

I just checked, and among the 30 top selling music albums in Spain of all time, only 4 are from English language bands (Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, ABBA and Michael Jackson in that order)

Curious. Maybe Spanish is an outlier
I do know in many countries they've had to put laws in place limiting the amount of English music and demanding local stuff be played as the temptation to just go with the international stars all the time was too large.


Incidentally a different point....but I really love when smaller language zones have their own celebrity cultures and music scenes. It just makes no sense by British logic. I can't imagine somebody being an absolute mega star only in the north. Yet in Denmark for instance, similar population, it happens.

[Syt]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/02/arts/design/gold-cube-niclas-castello.html

It's Gold, Baby. But Niclas Castello's Cube Is Nothing New in Art.

The artist's solid gold cube, which appeared for one day in Central Park, was Instagram bait, an NFT promotion and even kind of pretty.

The fun thing about conceptual art is that it's totally easy to create. You can say something about the increasingly virtual way many of us experience the world, and the explosive popularity of NFTs (nonfungible tokens) — or seem to say something profound, anyway — just by staging a Central Park happening around a knee-high cube of 24-karat gold.

At least, that's what the German pop artist Niclas Castello has done. His "Castello Cube," cast from more than 400 pounds of Nevadan gold, appeared in a patch of icy slush opposite the Naumburg Bandshell on Wednesday, preceded by an over-the-top marketing campaign that included a wraparound ad in that morning's edition of The New York Times. Related NFTs from the artist and even a new digital currency, Castello Coin, will drop later in the month. The artist did privately presell enough of the coins to finance this project, according to Marina Dertnig, a member of the production team. The cube is not solid all the way through: it has a hollow core. But the gold alone is worth more than $10 million at current prices. And Castello, 43, underlined the rarity of the cube as an art object by displaying it for only a single day, and by promising that it wouldn't be sold.

When I visited, the cube was surrounded by a steady trickle of gawkers, some of whom had come to see the art and others drawn by the crowd itself. "I love a group of people staring at a box," said Isabel Robin, an actor and tour guide.

After all, the last time New Yorkers got to see such a sizable chunk of gold in public was in 2016-2017, when Maurizio Cattelan installed his 18-karat gold toilet, "America," at the Guggenheim Museum.

Some visitors in Central Park were swayed by the beauty of the material. "The reflections are incredible," said Brigitte Bentele, a watercolorist and retired educator, "and putting it there in the snow seems really inspired." Others, like a private security guard, Jamel Rabel, were dismayed by the gap between the hyperbolic advertisements for the piece — "Never before in the history of humanity has such an enormous amount of gold been cast into a single, pure object" — and its rather more modest presence. "It's pretty plain," he said.

I'd say they're both right. From a few feet away, the top face of the cube looked as slippery and delicate as a sheen of rainwater, reflecting the tree line. Stepping in close, I found a few little black marks left in the soft metal by the compressed sand in which the cube had been molded in Aarau, Switzerland. When the artist's crew set up pink lights for their camera, the cube seemed to change color from dusky copper to bright yellow. The edges looked sharp but also, somehow, giving. There's a reason people like gold.

Castello, who hung out at the site, was chic in black, with long hair and bright blue glasses. In the past, he created what he called "cube paintings" with canvases crumbled inside acrylic, and was involved in the European street art movement.

But does his current public work add anything to what the Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi already said about shiny surfaces in the 1920s-30s with his gorgeous abstracted bronze birds? Or to Donald Judd's exhaustive exploration of cubes in the 1960s? Does a one-day-only pop-up display really update 1960s happenings in the Sheep Meadow, or the release of a limited-edition Supreme T-shirt, in any meaningful sense? Can it compete with the majestic lines of the saffron-orange gates Christo erected in Central Park in 2005? Does it elucidate the tension between aesthetic and commodity value, or offer a fresh insight on the gold standard 50 years after Nixon junked it?

What the "Castello Cube" really speaks to is the self-sustaining power of capital. If you have the resources to get hold of $10 or $11 million dollars' worth of gold from a UBS Bank in Switzerland — as Castello did — and then pay a centuries-old bell foundry there to shape it into a cube, and finally to ship this cube to the most visible park in the finance capital of the Western world, you can get people to look at it, talk about it and review it — and then, in what is shaping up to be the new gold standard, sell the whole experience as an NFT.

[The Brain]

Is it about my cube?

[DGuller]

I'm sure there was some highly sophisticated artistic concept behind making the cube hollow. 

[The Larch]

So, it turns out that there are a couple of things that Italians consider even worse than putting pineapple on pizza. 

[garbon]

Ketchup with pasta?!