#1. Entrance to the rodeo where we begin to rust
#1. Entrance to the rodeo where we begin to rust
Your weekly Osmanthus link rodeo featuring the Death of Pitchfork, Charles Bernstein reading Jackson MacLow, and others.
Everyone is welcome at the Rodeo.
The bull arrives in my peripheral moments before I’m supposed to enter the ring. The coldness of the bars in the bullpen. Rusted brittle flakes stick to my hand as it clasps the bar.
The cycles - yesterday’s iteration stuck in a holding pattern in the bucking chute. The rodeo clown picks up his blood-speckled hat. Denny Bookchin yells through the chute’s pannelling, all of that money where did it go? Some intuition that any sort of slowhand would bring about a hospital ride.
My mind recursed to yesterday’s interaction, where did it go? It was just a thought, perhaps an observation. Denny across the ring slipping his hands in somebody’s pocket.
Weekly Link Rodeo
Every Friday, Osmanthus will post 5-6 links that resonated with the editors. The weekly link rodeo will always be concluded with a writing prompt. It is our hope that whether you are a fiction writer, poet, or multi-disciplinary artist that you can take the links and use them as inspiration.
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“How Platforms killed Pitchfork” by Casey Newton states “AI plays the role that Pitchfork once did.” The value of music journalism has diminished. The ways that younger listeners engage with music has changed from the ways that older generations listen as well.
Earlier in the week, I navigated to YouTube to watch some music videos. The video player immediately prompted me, we notice you are using an ad-blocker. Disconnect from your ad-blocker and please try again. I continued to watch some music videos, albeit at what seemed like a degraded bit rate. While at some point, economic explanations attest for problems in legacy media, technological shifts are equally important factors.
Even with Pitchfork providing value to listeners, Pitchfork stepped into its role as curator and historian. Newton points out that Spotify later leaned into a similar role. Later de-centering that historical role when Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced in 2020 that the company would place more emphasis on personalized, machine-learning-driven recommendations to drive listening. Spotify’s machine-learning algorithms have replaced Pitchfork.
Pitchfork was able to give an unflattened narrative that datapoints can never fully replicate. AI will for the most part always miss the mark.
To end here with Casey Newton’s final words in the article:For that, in other words, you needed Pitchfork. And while it may have dimmed in its power over the years, it will always loom large in my mind — as a publication that met its moment with actual, discernible taste, and shared its tastes with the world, right up until the moment that the algorithms flattening our culture washed Pitchfork away, too.
For as much as Spotify has attempted to disrupt the podcast industry, Radiohead’s release of In Rainbows briefly disrupted the traditional business model of the recording industry.
In 2007, Thom Yorke and the other members of Radiohead released In Rainbows as a pay-as-you-go scheme. Somewhat akin to the current Bandcamp model - which I believe Bandcamp’s cut is 15% of sales, until a $5,000 threshold is crossed. Please fact check me on that. Those are just the numbers I found in an article titled “Why I Love Bandcamp…”.
Not to mention Bandcamp, after purchase, allows unlimited free downloads, DRM-free, and includes variety of lossy and lossless audio formats.
Here’s a recently premiered video from Thom Yorke and friends - The Smile. Original video is here.
Cory Doctorow’s online pamphlet “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism” precedes his 2023 book Chokepoint Capitalism co-authored with Rebecca Giblin. Takeaways from this link range from creating organizations that fairly distribute capital to artists, DRM-free media, to the use of SEO by Google and Facebook to siphon ad-revenue from smaller outlets and creators.
This link is a somewhat multi-part link. The first is an audio-recording of Charles Bernstein reading Jackson Mac Low’s poem, “32nd Light Poem: In Memoriam: Paul Blackburn — 9-10 October 1971”:
Bernstein first references a poem titled “One Hundred” in the book Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works, edited by Anne Tardos. Here is that poem:
The poem demonstrates Mac Low’s range where in works sound and meaning are segmented — even broken sounds that aren’t made into words, much less words made into syntactical sentences still have meaning states Jackson MacLow.
The following pictures are the text from Charles Bernstein reading Mac Low. The poem is an elegy, a farewell to a friend that is common in many poetic traditions around the world:
To listen to the original audio and others which can be found here at PennSound.
To purchase a copy of Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works
“Flash Fiction TV: Why China is Betting Big on Ultrashort Dramas” by Li Xin and Ye Zhanhang. The Chinese film market is saturated with generic films domestically. Scrolling through iQiYi, a Netflix-like equivalent, most genres have AI-generated film posters with mismatched typeface for the title card. Due to the saturation, media companies are looking to capture viewership not only domestically in China, but pushing overseas to international markets.
TikTok with slightly more plot-lines and a better soundtrack.According to the article, the micro-dramas plots are inspired by Chinese web-novels, but remixed for Western audiences. The incorporation of slang, attitudes, and understanding of local culture seems to be taken into consideration by the micro-dramas’ producers, but at what point does it turn into problematic, exotic travelogue? Some critics have pointed out that the micro-dramas might mis-represent cultures. In response to critics, Huang Mingxiao - owner of a small media firm in South China - responded that his company strives to put out only high-quality, highly-researched videos.
Themes popular within the micro-drama industry include:
Werewolves, vampires, zombies, and tales of vengeance in North America; Islamic culture and values in the Middle East and Indonesia; and sappy romances, conflicts within wealthy families, and tragedies in Thailand.
Research has shown that previous attempts to tap Western audiences for micro-films has produced poor viewer retention rates and has led to low payment conversion rates. Maybe this time will be different.
A reminder that RSS feeds are great. Here’s a brief description and use cases for them.
From a Spotify presentation a couple years ago RSS feeds are used a lot in podcasting and many other areas in the web. I can only guess this was a huge diss from when Spotify was acquiring a huge lineup of shows, distribution channels, and technologies to enter the podcasting market. Every other medium on the internet.
Our editors are curious to hear your thoughts about the rodeo links. Whether you share your thoughts on the micro-film industry expanding internationally, or just want to share your admiration/disdain for Jackson Mac Low’s work, our editors would sincerely love to read your comments.
Writing Prompt
The following is a picture of an AI-generated poem.
Expand on the program’s limited dictionary.
Smash the poem’s mechanics as a Luddite.
Rebuild the smashed poem into a regenerating machine.
Scale the walls of the computer tower.
Fashion jewelry from the microprocessors and electrical components.
Write a poem with the detritus of graphics cards and SSDs.
Open Call for Submissions
We are still mapping things out an our website, but it’s live at OsmanthusTV. Please have a look through our submission guidelines. We are reading year-round for all genres, with a keen interest in poetry and multimedia works.
We would love to consider your work for inclusion in one of Osmanthus’ Quarterly Reports, a quarterly digital edition of the literary arts.
Submission information and guidelines can be found on Osmanthus’ submission page.
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that is a very beautiful video.