Big Hollywood links to an article by Lynda Obst, the producer of Contact, Sleepless in Seattle, and TV’s Hot in Cleveland (among many other projects) in Salon, setting up her quotes by first noting that “For consumers, the decline of the DVD market has meant switching over to both Blu-ray and, more recently, streaming options for their viewing pleasure.  The end of the DVD format’s dominance meant something much more, and far worse, for Hollywood.”

In Salon, Obst writes:

“The DVD business represented fifty percent of their profits,” [20th Century Fox executive Peter Chernin] went on. “Fifty percent. The decline of that business means their entire profit could come down between forty and fifty percent for new movies.”

For those of you like me who are not good at math, let me make Peter’s statement even simpler. If a studio’s margin of profit was only 10 percent in the Old Abnormal, now with the collapsing DVD market that profit margin was hovering around 6 percent. The loss of profit on those little silver discs had nearly halved our profit margin.

This was, literally, a Great Contraction. Something drastic had happened to our industry, and this was it. Surely there were other factors: Young males were disappearing into video games; there were hundreds of home entertainment choices available for nesting families; the Net. But slicing a huge chunk of reliable profits right out of the bottom line forever?

This was mind-boggling to me, and I’ve been in the business for thirty years. Peter continued as I absorbed the depths and roots of what I was starting to think of as the Great Contraction. “Which means if nothing else changed, they would all be losing money. That’s how serious the DVD downturn is. At best, it could cut their profit in half for new movies.”

* * * * *

“When did the collapse begin?”

“The bad news started in 2008,” he said. “Bad 2009. Bad 2010. Bad 2011.”

It was as if he were scolding those years. They were bad, very bad. I wouldn’t want to be those years.

“The international market will still grow,” he said, “but the DVD sell-through business is not coming back again. Consumers will buy their movies on Netflix, iTunes, Amazon et al. before they will purchase a DVD.” What had been our profit margin has gone the way of the old media.

But it was in 2010 that James Cameron told the Washington Post that DVDs were bad for the Gaia and other living things, and needed to be eliminated (while simultaneously having multiple versions of Avatar coming out that same year on DVD):

It’s a consumer product like any consumer product. I think ultimately we’re going to bypass a physical medium and go directly to a download model and then it’s just bits moving in the system. And then the only impact to the environment is the power it takes to run the computers, run the devices. I think that we’re not there yet, but we’re moving that direction. Twentieth Century Fox has made a commitment to be carbon neutral by the end of 2010. Because of some of these practices that can’t be changed, the only way to do that is to buy carbon offsets. You know, which again, these are interim solutions. But at least it shows that there’s a consciousness that we have to be dealing with carbon pollution and sustainability. …

And the following year, many in Hollywood went all-in with Occupy Wall Street, which was obsessed with the “obscene” profits made by gigantic multinational corporations. You know, like movie studios.

Presumably, losing the cushion of DVD sales is part of the reason why Steven Spielberg recently told a USC audience that, as the Hollywood Reporter paraphrased, “an ‘implosion’ in the film industry is inevitable, whereby a half dozen or so $250 million movies flop at the box office and alter the industry forever.”

But it’s not like Hollywood has much respect for the audience who pays the tickets to see those $250 million products during their initial run in theaters. Obst’s article on the collapse of her industry appears in Salon, which isn’t exactly sympathetic to Hollywood’s core audience in flyover country, when its editor at large has a new book titled, What’s the Matter with White People?: Finding Our Way in the Next America.

Similarly, in 2008, the late Nora Ephron, who in the previous decade had written and directed the Obst-produced Sleepless in Seattle, wrote in the Huffington Post, “This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don’t mean people, I mean white men.” Incidentally those people in Pennsylvania that Ephron was writing off as troglodytic racists were her fellow Democrats, who were about to decide between Obama and Hillary in the PA Democrat primary — the same primary voters that Obama wrote off at the time as bitter, gun and God-obsessed clingers.

“For men, the more the better,” he says. “The typical man who has 350 orgasms a year, versus the national average of around a quarter of that, lives about four years longer.” And more than those extra four years, Roizen says, the men will feel eight years younger than their contemporaries. Is there an optimal number of orgasms for the average man? Roizen suggests, with a straight face, that 700 a year could add up to eight years to your life. This is an ambitious prescription: The average American adult male has sex just 81 times a year.

Roizen’s formula may be new, but the benefits of sex and orgasms have been tracked for years, and there’s some compelling hard evidence to back Roizen’s claims. A Swedish study done in the ’80s found that 70-year-olds who made it to 75 were the ones still having sex, and a Duke University study that followed 252 people over 25 years concluded that “frequency of intercourse was a significant predictor of longevity.”

But the big kahuna of longevity studies was completed just 10 years ago in Wales. British scientists interviewed nearly 1,000 men in six small villages about their sexual frequency, then arranged for all death records to be forwarded so the scientists could record their life spans. Ten years later they determined that men who had two or more orgasms a week had died at a rate half that of the men who had orgasms less than once a month. “Sexual activity seems to have a protective effect on men’s health,” the researchers concluded.

…Unless you’re Michael Douglas, apparently:

Michael Douglas – the star of Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction – has revealed that his throat cancer was apparently caused by performing oral sex.

In a surprisingly frank interview with the Guardian, the actor, now winning plaudits in the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, explained the background to a condition that was thought to be nearly fatal when diagnosed three years ago. Asked whether he now regretted his years of smoking and drinking, usually thought to be the cause of the disease, Douglas replied: “No. Because without wanting to get too specific, this particular cancer is caused by HPV [human papillomavirus], which actually comes about from cunnilingus.”

Umm, ooooooooooooooohhhhhkaaaaaaaay. But if it’s actually true, Joe Jackson didn’t know the half of it when he wrote in 1982 that everything gives you cancer:

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Cross-posted from Ed Driscoll’s Blog, where originally titled “Sexual Healing — Or the Lack Thereof”.

Primitive, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means: “Of or belonging to the first age, period or stage; pertaining to early times …” With respect to human development, primitivism is a pre-rational stage. It is a stage in which man lives in fearful awe of a universe he cannot understand. The primitive man does not grasp the law of causality. He does not comprehend the fact that the world is governed by natural laws and that nature can be ruled by any man who discovers those laws. To a primitive, there is only a mysterious supernatural. Sunshine, darkness, rainfall, drought, the clap of thunder, the hooting of a spotted owl— all are inexplicable, portentous, and sacrosanct to him. To this non-conceptual mentality, man is metaphysically subordinate to nature, which is never to be commanded, only meekly obeyed.

This is the state of mind to which the environmentalists want us to revert.

If primitive man regards the world as unknowable, how does he decide what to believe and how to act? Since such knowledge is not innate, where does primitive man turn for guidance? To his tribe. It is membership in a collective that infuses such a person with his sole sense of identity. The tribe’s edicts thus become his unquestioned absolutes, and the tribe’s welfare becomes his fundamental value.

This is the state of mind to which the multiculturalists want us to revert. They hold that the basic unit of existence is the tribe, which they define by the crudest, most primitive, most anti-conceptual criteria (such as skin color). They consequently reject the view that the achievements of Western— i.e., individualistic— civilization represent a way of life superior to that of savage tribalism.

Both environmentalism and multiculturalism wish to destroy the values of a rational, industrial age. Both are scions of the New Left, zealously carrying on its campaign of sacrificing progress to primitivism.

In addition to the shocking Islamic terrorist attack yesterday in London, a troika of pop culture-related stories making the rounds today remind us that reprimitivization is well on its way.

First up,  “Movement to Normalize Pedophilia Finds Its Poster Girl,” Stacy McCain writes in the American Spectator:

In January, Rush Limbaugh warned that there was “an effort under way to normalize pedophilia,” and was ridiculed by liberals (including CNN’s Soledad O’Brien) for saying so. But now liberals have joined a crusade that, if successful, would effectively legalize sex with 14-year-olds in Florida.

The case involves Kaitlyn Ashley Hunt, an 18-year-old in Sebastian, Florida, who was arrested in February after admitting that she had a lesbian affair with a 14-year high-school freshman. (Click here to read the affidavit in Hunt’s arrest.) It is a felony in Florida to have sex with 14-year-olds. Hunt was expelled from Sebastian High School — where she and the younger girl had sex in a restroom stall — and charged with two counts of “felony lewd and lascivious battery on a child.” The charges could put Hunt in prison for up to 15 years. Prosecutors have offered Hunt a plea bargain that would spare her jail time, but her supporters have organized an online crusade to have her let off scot-free — in effect, nullifying Florida’s law, which sets the age of consent at 16.

Using the slogan “Stop the Hate, Free Kate” (the Twitter hashtag is #FreeKate) this social-media campaign has attracted the support of liberals including Chris Hayes of MSNBC, Daily Kos, Think Progress and the gay-rights group Equality Florida. Undoubtedly, part of the appeal of the case is that Hunt is a petite attractive green-eyed blonde. One critic wondered on Twitter how long activists have “been waiting for a properly photogenic poster child of the correct gender to come along?”

Portraying Hunt as the victim of prejudice, her supporters claim she was only prosecuted because she is homosexual and because the parents of the unnamed 14-year-old are “bigoted religious zealots,” as Hunt’s mother said in a poorly written Facebook post. The apparent public-relations strategy was described by Matthew Philbin of Newsbusters: “If you can play the gay card, you immediately trigger knee-jerk support from the liberal media and homosexual activists anxious to topple any and all rules regarding sex.”

Meanwhile, giant cable television conglomerate Viacom must be especially proud of MTV today: “Trashy Former Pop Star Drinks Her Own Urine on MTV in Ratings Stunt,” Ace writes:

If you had questions about whether Ke$ha was a classy lady– questions that really ought not to persist, given that she really spells her name that way, “Ke$ha” — consider them now resolved.

Some are using this provocation as a justification for renewing the calls for a-la-carte cable subscriptions. “Some” are, in this case, correct.

Anyone who now has cable pays for MTV. Cable companies negotiate a flat payment to a station for carrying it. MTV also collects revenues from advertising, but a major source of its revenue is the automatic “tax” MTV imposes on your cable bill every month. You have no way to avoid paying for MTV– except for cancelling the service altogether.

Monopolies are generally not permitted to “bundle” services together. And local cable companies are usually monopolies, or, at best, have but one competitor– and as all of them have instituted this bundling practice and will not stop the practice no matter how much the public clamors for it, the monopolies (or duopolies) at least appear to be in collusion on this point.

And finally, while Robert Redford’s boyish shock of tousled hair and studio system hauteur hides a multitude of sins, his own primitivist mindset is lurking just under the surface, easily found:

Robert Redford today accused the US of losing its way in the years since the second world war. Speaking at the press conference for his new film All Is Lost at the Cannes film festival.

“Certain things have got lost,” said Redford. “Our belief system had holes punched in it by scandals that occurred, whether it was Watergate, the quiz show scandal, or Iran-Contra; it’s still going on…Beneath all the propaganda is a big grey area, another America that doesn’t get any attention; I decided to make that the subject of my films.”

Redford, now 76, also had critical words for the US’s never-ending drive for economic and technological development, which he considers has been a damaging force.

“We are in a dire situation; the planet is speaking with a very loud voice. In the US we call it Manifest Destiny, where we keep pushing and developing, never mind what you destroy in your wake, whether its Native American culture or the natural environment.

“I’ve also seen the relentless pace of technological increase. It’s getting faster and faster; and it fascinates me to ask: how long will it go on before it burns out.”

Gee Bob, who gets to decide that technological progress will now officially be concluded? As Virginia Postrel told C-Span’s Brian Lamb in 1999 when promoting The Future and its Enemies:

The Khmer Rouge sought to start over at year zero, and to sort of create the kind of society that very civilized, humane greens write about as though it were an ideal. I mean, people who would never consider genocide*. But I argue that if you want to know what that would take, look at Cambodia: to empty the cities and turn everyone into peasants again. Even in a less developed country, let alone in someplace like the United States, that these sort of static utopian fantasies are just that.

Incidentally, that fawning profile of Redford appeared (but of course!) in the UK Guardian under the headline, “Robert Redford on America: ‘Certain things have got lost.’” Well, that can happen when elderly Hollywood multimillionaires make films condoning terrorism, which are in turn approved by a former presidential aide, on the morning show that’s aired nationwide on a TV network owned by the Disney Corporation.

In his 2oo6 book Our Culture, What’s Left Of It, Theodore Dalrymple wrote:

Having spent a considerable proportion of my professional career in Third World countries in which the implementation of abstract ideas and ideals has made bad situations incomparably worse, and the rest of my career among the very extensive British underclass, whose disastrous notions about how to live derive ultimately from the unrealistic, self-indulgent, and often fatuous ideas of social critics, I have come to regard intellectual and artistic life as being of incalculable practical importance and effect. John Maynard Keynes wrote, in a famous passage in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, that practical men might not have much time for theoretical considerations, but in fact the world is governed by little else than the outdated or defunct ideas of economists and social philosophers. I agree: except that I would now add novelists, playwrights, film directors, journalists, artists, and even pop singers. They are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, and we ought to pay close attention to what they say and how they say it.

Especially when the first thought is turn away from the daily horrors our pop culture seems to bring forth in ever-greater numbers.
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Cross-posted from Ed Driscoll’s Blog

For a film with a daring director, a talented cast, a captivating plot or, ideally, all three, there could be no better advocate than Roger Ebert, who passionately celebrated and promoted excellence in film while deflating the awful, the derivative, or the merely mediocre with an observant eye, a sharp wit and a depth of knowledge that delighted his millions of readers and viewers.

“No good film is too long,” he once wrote, a sentiment he felt strongly enough about to have engraved on pens. “No bad movie is short enough.”

Ebert, 70, who reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, and who was without question the nation’s most prominent and influential film critic, died Thursday in Chicago. He had been in poor health over the past decade, battling cancers of the thyroid and salivary gland.

He lost part of his lower jaw in 2006, and with it the ability to speak or eat, a calamity that would have driven other men from the public eye. But Ebert refused to hide, instead forging what became a new chapter in his career, an extraordinary chronicle of his devastating illness that won him a new generation of admirers. “No point in denying it,” he wrote, analyzing his medical struggles with characteristic courage, candor and wit, a view that was never tinged with bitterness or self-pity.

Always technically savvy — he was an early investor in Google — Ebert let the Internet be his voice. His rogerebert.com had millions of fans, and he received a special achievement award as the 2010 “Person of the Year” from the Webby Awards, which noted that “his online journal has raised the bar for the level of poignancy, thoughtfulness and critique one can achieve on the Web.” His Twitter feeds had 827,000 followers.

Unfortunately, Twitter revealed the intense far left biases and raging misanthropy inside Ebert, which did much to tarnish the family-friendly middlebrow tone of his previous movie criticism. Ebert’s embrace of the unfiltered medium erased much of the good will he developed through his years of co-hosting his weekly TV series At the Movies with Gene Siskel, his fellow Chicago-based critic, who himself had passed away in 1999.

Ironically, both men warned of the dangers of political correctness in the early 1990s:

GENE SISKEL: You have to summon up the courage to say what you honestly feel. And it’s not easy. There’s a whole new world called political correctness that’s going on, and that is death to a critic to participate in that.

EBERT: Political correctness is the fascism of the ‘90s. It’s kind of this rigid feeling that you have to keep your ideas and your ways of looking at things within very narrow boundaries, or you’ll offend someone. Certainly one of the purposes of journalism is to challenge just that kind of thinking. And certainly one of the purposes of criticism is to break boundaries; it’s also one of the purposes of art. So that if a young journalist, 18, 19, 20, 21, an undergraduate tries to write politically correctly, what they’re really doing is ventriloquism.

I suspect that will be the Ebert that will be remembered by posterity, ironically, before he allowed his opinions to be consumed by what he correctly dubbed “the fascism of the 1990s” — and beyond.

(Clicking on the Drudge Report, where I first saw news of Ebert’s death, I also hope the horrific photo of Ebert after his cancer, with much of his jaw removed will somehow be removed from circulation. But alas, our less-than-middlebrow culture won’t allow that to happen unfortunately.)

Update: At the Breitbart.com Conversation, John Sexton quotes this beautiful passage from Ebert, recorded for the commentary on the DVD of Dark City (the thinking man’s Matrix) before PC consumed Ebert’s journalism:

More: Before Ebert’s middlebrow movie critic phase, and final days as an archliberal polemicist, he was a screenwriter for Russ Meyers’ late ’60s and early ’70s sexploitation movies, including Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Ebert wrote the camp classic line, “This is my happening and it freaks me out!”, which would be spoofed by Mike Myers in the first Austin Powers movie — which Ebert himself mentioned in his review.

Kathy Shaidle has that phase of Ebert’s career covered, in a post with quotes and videos. Plus a great catch, finding a remarkably unthoughtful gaffe by the Chicago Sun-Times in Ebert’s obit.

I was a slow convert to the idea of ebooks. My wife bought one of the first Kindles, and I couldn’t get past the off-putting appearance of the text on the screen in the Kindle’s first iteration. But then I tried the Kindle app for Windows. And the Kindle app for my Android Tablet. And slowly began to fall in love. I could read anywhere. I could free up space on my overflowing and limited physical bookshelves. I could easily quote what I had just read in a blog post. The idea of being able to carry my entire library with me and having it accessible in locations as diverse as the treadmill at the gym or a seat on an airplane became increasingly irresistible.

But not my entire library, alas. There are numerous examples of books that I’d repurchase in a second to read on my Kindle that simply aren’t there yet. Nor are they available on Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader; I’ve searched.

Off the top of my head, in an ideal world here’s what I’d like to see in the Kindle format. Amazon links are included, if you’d like to get started reading any of these titles now in good ol’ dead tree format — which might be a good idea, as I suspect the wait for some of these might be glacial.

■ Alvin Toffler’s Back Catalog: Toffler’s Future Shock was a huge bestseller when it was first published in 1970. A decade later, The Third Wave, the sequel to Future Shock, would be  name-checked by Newt Gingrich during the heady days of the “Republican Revolution” in 1995, shortly after he became speaker of the House, which gives a sense of how the book’s predictions held up in the interim 15 years. Toffler’s War and Anti-War applied the principles of the Third Wave to warfare; Powershift applied them to business. Given that The Third Wave was a pretty accurate prediction of how the Internet reshaped society in the 1990s, if any book deserves to be available in electronic format, it’s this one. Where is it? (For my interviews with Toffler, click here and here.)

■ Profiles of the Future, by Arthur C. Clarke: A quarter century before Star Trek: The Next Generation displayed its first replicator onscreen, Clarke was writing about them in Profiles, along with plenty of other futuristic technology; some we now take for granted (such as the Internet and the Kindle) and others that are still on the drawing board. Again, why isn’t such a forward-thinking book not an ebook as well?

■ Filmguide to 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Carolyn Geduld. Speaking of when Stanley Kubrick’s enigmatic 2001: A Space Odyssey left so many audiences baffled in the late 1960s, co-screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke was fond of saying, “Read the book, see the movie, repeat the dosage.” Right idea, and while Clarke’s novelization of 2001 is available on Kindle, it’s not necessarily the best book for cracking the film’s mysteries. If I had to hand one baffled 2001 viewer the Cliff’s Notes to the movie, it would be Geduld’s book from 1973, which thoroughly charts out the film’s plot and leitmotifs.

The flat-panel news and information devices the astronauts read while eating dinner in 2001 directly inspired the iPad and Kindle. Now that technology has finally caught up Kubrick’s 1968 vision, shouldn’t the book that places them into context be accessible on those devices as well?

■ The Death of the Grown-Up, by Diana West. The subhead of West’s book is “How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.” As Michelle Malkin noted in 2007 when she interviewed West on her book, others have written about the increasing child-like naiveté of society, but West was perhaps the first to explain how it has hamstrung our fight in what was once called the Global War on Terror. That we had (have?) a war named after tactics rather than the enemy we’re fighting is due to the GWOT receiving its name largely through a process of elimination, as West noted in her book and the articles that preceded it, as political correctness allows few other choices.

For years, Walter Carter was the in-house historian at Gibson Guitars, before serving a similar function for well-known vintage guitar dealer George Gruhn. He has a new book out this month published by Backbeat Books, called The Epiphone Guitar Book: A Complete History of Epiphone Guitars. Its slick, glossy, 160-pages are heavily illustrated, with many photos in color.

With a legacy dating back to the 1870s and Greek luthier Anastasios Stathopoulos, the Epiphone brand name takes its name from two components — the nickname of Anastasios’ son, Epaminondas, and the word “phone,” which, in the 1920s when the brand Epiphone was launched, competed with the word “radio” to symbolize high-tech and modernity. (See also: Gramophone, the Radio Flyer, etc.)

Epiphone has had several twists and turns in its history. Until the mid-1950s, it competed neck and neck (pardon the pun) with Gibson for sales of arch-top jazz guitars. Ted McCarty, who built up Gibson as a music instrument powerhouse in the mid-2oth century, said that “when I came to Gibson, the biggest competition we had was Epiphone.” But the death of Epi in 1943, followed by squabbles among the surviving Stathopoulos family during the following decade, caused the value of their business to plummet. McCarty acquired Epiphone for Gibson’s parent company at a bargain rate, and production of Epiphone guitars switched in-house to Gibson’s Kalamazoo, MI plant, during the 1960s. The new brand name gave Gibson certain advantages: they could protect the exclusive arrangements their dealers had with Gibson, but sell Epiphone to nearby music dealers, positioning it as a slightly lower brand — the Buick or Oldsmobile to Gibson’s Cadillac.

In the mid-1960s, Epiphone models were played by a little-known cult act called the Beatles — “Everybody but Ringo,” as Carter told me. McCartney played an Epiphone Texan acoustic on “Yesterday,” George Harrison played his Epiphone Casino on Sgt. Pepper, and John Lennon played his own Casino on the rooftop of Apple Records during their legendary last concert at the conclusion of Let It Be.

In the early 1970s, Gibson sent production of Epiphone guitars overseas. Today, it exists, in part, as an entry-level brand for new guitarists (and as such, there are likely more Epiphones in circulation than Gibsons) and there’s some controversy between those who own traditional made-in-America Gibson guitars such as the Les Paul, and those who own Les Pauls and other models also sold under the Epiphone name.

Carter discusses all that and much more in our 21-minute interview. Click here to listen:

(21:23 minutes long; 19.5 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 6MB lo-fi edition.)

If the above Flash audio player is not compatible with your browser, click below on the YouTube player below, or click here to be taken directly to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip. Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.

Amazon’s cloud music service is now available on Roku and Samsung Smart TVs, offering the ability to stream your own digital music tracks without needing to keep a separate computer running. For Roku, it’s a solid response to Apple’s iTunes Match service, which offers cloud storage and streaming for $25 per year.

While Amazon Cloud Player started off as a largely free service, it now requires a similar fee as iTunes Match: $25 per year for up to 250,000 uploaded songs. That’s a ton of digital music, although the competing Google Play Music allows you to store up to 20,000 tracks for free and is available on Google TV devices.

The release comes on the same day Amazon added an Amazon Instant Video app to the iPhone and iPod Touch as well.

For our original review of the Roku box from January, click here.

Television’s Mad Men would have you believe that America was a monolithic bastion of Puritanism, untrammeled by European or socialist influences (despite the rise of Woodrow Wilson and FDR!) until the Beatles touched down at JFK Airport in 1964. The reality though, as Allen Bloom memorably wrote in The Closing of the American Mind, was that almost immediately upon the US winning World War II, America began to slowly — often unwittingly — become an unofficial enclave of Germany’s Weimar Republic.

Take architecture. As Tom Wolfe noted in From Bauhaus to Our House, his classic debunking of modernism’s excesses, because America’s intellectuals tend to think of themselves as an artistic colony in thrall to Europe, when the leaders of the Weimar-era German Bauhaus of the 1920s were evicted by the Nazis, they were welcomed by Depression-era American universities as “The White Gods! Come from the skies at last!”

[Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bahaus] was made head of the school of architecture at Harvard, and Breuer joined him there. Moholy-Nagy opened the New Bauhaus, which evolved into the Chicago Institute of Design. Albers opened a rural Bauhaus in the hills of North Carolina, at Black Mountain College. [Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, its last director, when the Nazis shuttered its doors in 1933] was installed as dean of architecture at the Armour Institute in Chicago. And not just dean; master builder also. He was given a campus to create, twenty-one buildings in all, as the Armour Institute merged with the Lewis Institute to form the Illinois Institute of Technology. Twenty-one large buildings, in the middle of the Depression, at a time when building had come almost to a halt in the United States— for an architect who had completed only seventeen buildings in his career—

O white gods.

Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) is the titular subject of the newly published biography by architectural historian Franz Schulze and architect Edward Windhorst (who studied his craft under a protégé of Mies). They’ve collaborated on an extensively — very extensively — revised version of the biography of Mies that Schulze first published in 1986, the centennial of Mies’s birth.

Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 Barcelona Pavilion, May 2000. Photo © Ed Driscoll.

While he was America’s most influential postwar modern architect and teacher, Mies never quite become a household name on the same order as Frank Lloyd Wright. (Despite a prominent Life magazine feature in 1957.) But he’s been the subject of numerous biographies and book-length profiles, beginning with his prominent role in The International Style, the pioneering Museum of Modern Art exhibition by Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock, which first put modern architecture on the map in America, back in 1932.

Even as Mies was associated with several prominent buildings deserving of respect after World War II, perhaps his greatest accomplishment was to singlehandedly invent the language of postwar American architecture. We take tall steel and glass office buildings and apartments for granted, but it was Mies who created their look, beginning with 1951′s Farnsworth House (which would also provide the inspiration for Philip Johnson’s own Glass House) and from that same year, the 860-880 Lake Shore Drive apartment complex.

Larry Hagman, who played the conniving and mischievous J.R. Ewing on the TV show Dallas, died Friday at Medical City in Dallas, of complications from his recent battle with cancer, his family said.

He was 81.

“Larry was back in his beloved Dallas re-enacting the iconic role he loved most,” his family said in a written statement. “Larry’s family and close friends had joined him in Dallas for the Thanksgiving holiday. When he passed, he was surrounded by loved ones. It was a peaceful passing, just as he had wished for. The family requests privacy at this time.”

The role of J.R. transformed Mr. Hagman’s life. He rocketed from being a merely well-known TV actor on I Dream of Jeannie and the son of Broadway legend Mary Martin, to the kind of international fame known only by the likes the Beatles and Muhammad Ali.

Mr. Hagman made his home in California with his wife of 59 years, the former Maj Axelsson. Despite obvious physical frailty, he gamely returned to Dallas to film season one and part of season two of TNT’s Dallas reboot.

Reuters’ obit adds that Hagman “had suffered from cancer and cirrhosis of the liver in the 1990s after decades of drinking.” According to Wikipedia, “In August 1995, Hagman underwent a life-saving liver transplant after admitting he had been a heavy drinker. Numerous reports state he was drinking four bottles of champagne a day while on the set of Dallas. He was also a heavy smoker as a young man, but the cancer scare was the catalyst for him to quit.”

RIP.

For those who enjoy recording their own music or podcasts at home, mastering is one of the more little known aspects of the process. Most people are aware of overdubbing, editing and mixing, but comparatively few understand how critical mastering can be to add the final sparkle to a mix, how it can transform a pretty good mix into something amazing, or (sometimes, with a little luck) a poor mix into something tolerable.

In the professional world, mastering is usually done using lots of very expensive outboard gear, as the final step before a master copy of a CD is sent to be duplicated into millions of consumer discs, or an album of MP3s is uploaded to iTunes and Amazon.

In the not necessarily professional world of home recording, mastering can be done with a plug-in effect.

For over ten years, Boston-area iZotope Inc., located near Boston has been producing a high-end plug-in for recording programs called Ozone. Now in its fifth iteration, iZotope produces versions of it for most PC and Mac-based recording programs, as well for Pro Tools, the most popular professional recording system.

When I interviewed him for a Blogcritics article on an earlier iteration of Ozone back in 2004, Jeremy Todd, the company’s chief technology officer (and a musician himself — he was trained as a classical pianist) told me:

Mastering in general is tough to put your finger on; I guess it depends on who you’re talking to. But for the purposes of Ozone, we talk about everything that you do once you’ve got a stereo mixdown, to when you when you actually have a master and you say, “OK, this is the audio, this is it, we’re not touching it anymore.”

With Ozone, we try to include everything that someone would need, so that, while it’s not always the case, but in theory they could not use another plug-in; they could do it all in one.

How was mastering done before the days of computers and hard disk recording? Todd says:

There were trends established way back when, that are still present today. We’re still seeing examples of these standalone hardware devices. Things were much more isolated, you wouldn’t see as much all-in-one gear, and you’d have these big, honking pieces of equipment that were just an equalizer — and a two or three band equalizer at that, usually just a finalizer, a loudness maximizer.

Obviously, if you go back far enough, mastering was dominated by analog equipment. So with Ozone, we’re trying to capture some of the flavor that people liked, which was a big challenge when it came to designing the DSP. It’s very difficult for people to explain why they like their two-band analog equipment. So it boiled down to a lot of listening tests, and asking people a lot of questions.

We tried to keep a little of the analog flavor in the sound, in our previous versions of Ozone. [Beginning] in Ozone 3, the analog modeling was firmly established, but people have been saying that in some cases, they want something cleaner; they don’t want any flavor, they want to be more surgical with the tool. So we added a digital component to the equalizer and the multi-band crossover.

With Home Recording, Mastering More Important Than Ever

Let’s take a moment to discuss how the mixing and mastering process has changed over the past 30 years for the average home recordist.

Back in the 1980s, when I first began to record demos of songs for my local rock group on a four track, mixing was relatively easy…because there were only four tracks (that’s actually a bit of a simplification — I used a fair amount of virtual tracks and outboard gear). But I did all the mixes in real time and hoped for the best. For their time, they weren’t terrible demos — but certainly nobody would confuse them for properly mixed and mastered track on a CD.

By the late 1990s, it was possible to replicate the process on a personal computer — and with infinitely more control over the individual tracks and the overall sound.