Thursday, April 16, 2009
Inka
Martha Mears has some serious competition.
Listen.
Listen.
Watch.
Watch.
= = = = =
Sidenote: Before the web and especially Youtube came along, there was almost no chance to hear and 'discover' music and movies outside the very narrow temporospatial slot of this week's Top Hits. If you lived in a big city and had lots of spare money, you could occasionally find rare items in a used record store. If you listened to shortwave radio, you could hear obscure foreign music. But those were sporadic opportunities. If you happened to catch the end of one song by Inka Zemánková on Radio Prague, that was all. No more. No way to hear the song again, no way to find others, unless you could afford to travel the world in person.
Printed matter has never suffered the same limitation. Before the web era, if you got interested in late '30s Czech culture, any small-town library would let you check out and read books by Kafka and Čapek. Same for almost any time and place where literature flourished.
Odd, isn't it? Text has been printed for 300 years, globally distributed and catalogued from the very start. (In fact libraries existed long before printing.) Moving images and music have been reproduced for 100 years, but not globally available in library style until just three years ago. ¶ 8:59 PM
Listen.
Listen.
Watch.
Watch.
= = = = =
Sidenote: Before the web and especially Youtube came along, there was almost no chance to hear and 'discover' music and movies outside the very narrow temporospatial slot of this week's Top Hits. If you lived in a big city and had lots of spare money, you could occasionally find rare items in a used record store. If you listened to shortwave radio, you could hear obscure foreign music. But those were sporadic opportunities. If you happened to catch the end of one song by Inka Zemánková on Radio Prague, that was all. No more. No way to hear the song again, no way to find others, unless you could afford to travel the world in person.
Printed matter has never suffered the same limitation. Before the web era, if you got interested in late '30s Czech culture, any small-town library would let you check out and read books by Kafka and Čapek. Same for almost any time and place where literature flourished.
Odd, isn't it? Text has been printed for 300 years, globally distributed and catalogued from the very start. (In fact libraries existed long before printing.) Moving images and music have been reproduced for 100 years, but not globally available in library style until just three years ago. ¶ 8:59 PM
