As Occupy Wall Street appears to slip below the cultural horizon, is it a sign that Americans are more accepting of the "New Normal" ?
Poorer Americans as the "middle class" shrinks further here
Robert Reich on the forgotten American worker - the economy is expanding incrementally, but paychecks aren't. Link here
The President depends on High Tech Industry supporters, but is this causing him to overlook potential abuses of the H1-B foreign worker visa for the purpose of replacing American high tech workers with lower paid staff recruited from oversees? Link here
Beyond the free market: Alex Gourevitch and Aziz Rana in Salon write:"Despite the ambiguity of their goals, the Occupy protests have made one point abundantly clear: The mainstream Democratic alternative is paltry stuff. For the most part, Democrats disagree that tax cuts and deregulation are the solution, and instead argue that the state should be used to guarantee equal opportunity. For instance, cheap, publicly available education, job training and affirmative action are all justified on the grounds that each American should have the skills to compete and the labor market should treat everyone equally.
"Yet, the two parties differ only on means, not ends. While Republicans profess a more abiding faith in a self-regulating economy, Democrats believe carefully tailored state interventions are needed to ensure equal opportunity.
"The question becomes: Equal opportunity for what? For both parties, opportunity basically means a market-oriented ideal where individuals are given the chance to fight over a limited supply of high-status jobs. As it turns out, the end that each party agrees on is largely same: the equal opportunity to become unequal." Article here
Ideas in Art, culture, technology, politics and life-- In Brooklyn or Beacon NY -- and Beyond (anyway, somewhere beginning with a "B")
Monday, March 5, 2012
Synthapop for a Late Winter Monday: A-ha's "Take On Me"
Pure 80s Synthapop for a late winter Monday morning, A-ha's classic "Take On Me" went through numerous iterations using a progressively more synthesizer-based sound, approaching liftoff on UK charts, but even then it didn't breakthrough to real commercial success until Warner Brothers produced a cutting edge music video that helped propel the tune to #1 in the US. Two videos were made for the song. The first release of "Take on Me" in 1984 includes a completely different recording, and was featured in the first video, which shows the band singing with a blue background.The second video was directed by Steve Barron, and filmed at Kim's Café and on a sound stage in London, in 1985.The video used a pencil-sketch animation / live-action combination called rotoscoping, in which the live-action footage is traced-over frame by frame to give the characters realistic movements. Approximately 3,000 frames were rotoscoped, which took 16 weeks to complete.
More on the production of the tune here
On the Norwegian pop band A-ha here
And on singer Morten Harket with his amazing vocal range here