senior music major from northeast ohio. likes making food, reading, sewing, dinosaurs, fluting, parks and rec, standard poodles, and jeff.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Kickstarter: Recording of Four Symphonic Works by Jerome N. Margolis
Jerry was the orchestra director at my high school in California and one of the coolest teachers I’ve ever had. Now that he is retired and happily free of the mania we upstart musicians brought upon him all those years he’s gearing up to professionally record several of his symphonic works.
One of the pieces slated for taping, American Journey, was among the first things I ever conducted and offered me a formative experience in preparing a contemporary score alongside its composer. As a result I have insider knowledge of just how much this project could use your support – that early performance commenced with the orchestra falling apart and most definitely did not leave Jerry with much of a reference recording!
[Ancillary lessons: Successful conducting careers can emerge from inauspicious beginnings, and composers – especially if they are your mentors – may still be willing to talk to you after you butcher their work onstage.]
(Source: pushthemovement)
why didn’t i see this coming
man look at those skanks up top
they dont even look fertile.
(Source: chocolatebowtie)
Ooh, girl! Is that sweater eatin you alive or barfin you up? Either way I am HUNGRY.
Nick Offerman from the film Smashed at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.
‘City Rains’, Dmitry Kustanovich
(by Alícia)
Henri-Edmond Cross | Afternoon at Pardigon, 1907
oil on canvas; Musée d’Orsay, Paris
When the web started, I used to get really grumpy with people because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this belief, which was completely erroneous, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn’t tell them to take it down, you would lose your copyright, which actually, is simply not true.
And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was… places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia, it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was fascinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took “American Gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it and you could download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent
I started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “Well, what about the sales that I’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.”
What you’re actually doing is advertising. You’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing.
