technology -v- culture ... and whatever else is on our minds today

Very good. Very funny. See it.

It’s bad enough having to hear Boomers drone on about how New York has lost its edge. These tend to be folks who rarely leave Manhattan and have almost certainly never been to, say, an illegal Todd P show in Bushwick, surrounded by naked dancers and kids doing lines in plain view. Distressingly, though, this loss-of-edge notion has gone global:

“I’d hate to see Berlin smoothed over, with no critical voices left, the way the alternative art scene has been sanitized away in New York,” said Felicitas Adler, 54, clad in a trash-art sculpture she made out of cardboard and empty plastic bottles painted black at a recent demonstration to save Tacheles.

Ms Adler, please contact me before your next visit, and I’ll show you a thriving “alternative art scene”. In Brooklyn. Which is still, last I checked, part of New York.

My latest World Cup-themed podcast for PBS’s Need to Know is now available. Includes gratuitous clips of right-wing nutjobs bloviating about a sport they hate.

My new PBS podcast examines Big Pharma’s rush to find a sex drug for women. It’s a kind of preview of a piece that should air on Need to Know on June 11 or 18.

This week’s topic is the finale of Ashes to Ashes, with some thinking about the future of digital media, of course. Earlier episodes on vulnerable voting machines and l’affaire iPhone are online. And yes, we’re working on getting it syndicated to iTMS. That ain’t so easy in the PBS world.

In other words, what’s the value of the cloud when the cost of storage is declining precipitously? Or, conversely, what’s the point in buying lots of storage — however cheap it is — when we all have access to the cloud pretty much whenever and wherever we want?) Last year, my pal Sandy Pearlman and I discussed this during a session at the Future of Music Coalition’s annual Policy Summit in Washington DC.

Below the fold, I’ve posted an essay Sandy wrote to set up the topic, followed by a couple of responses:

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Six weeks? I am crap, aren’t I? Not even ambitious-but-crap. Just crap.

Atrios gets at the underlying problem with assigning journalists to “trends” beats: We aren’t typical consumers of culture; nor do our friends tend to be.

At NPR, when I was (briefly) assigned as “cultural trends correspondent”, the Assistant Managing Editor who supervised my desk kept pushing me to do two stories, one on women in late middle age having kids, the other on a certain TV show that was newly on the air.

I dug a bit and found that the rate at which women 35-45 were giving birth hadn’t changed; there’d simply been a slew of pregnancies among DC journalists in that age range. Likewise, the ratings for the show in question skewed to women 35-45 with college degrees, i.e. women much like the aforementioned Assistant Managing Editor.

I never did the stories.

… get over yourself!

Fred Clark rules my world every shabbos. He’s my rebbe, for real.