Posts Tagged ‘City Lights’
“I _am_ big. It’s the _pictures_ that got small”*…
Apple paid $10 billion to developers in calendar 2014– thus, iOS app developers earned more than Hollywood did from box office in the U.S. Of course, Hollywood studios make money in foreign theaters, in cable, in home video, and in digital. But, as Horace Dedieu observes…
Apple’s App Store billings is not the complete App revenue picture either. The Apps economy includes Android and ads and service businesses and custom development. Including all revenues, apps are still likely to be bigger than Hollywood.
But there’s more to the story. It’s also likely that the App industry is healthier. On an individual level, some App developers earn more than Hollywood stars, and I would guess that the median income of app developers is higher than the median income of actors [a large majority of whom earn less than $1,000 a year from acting jobs]. The app economy sustains more jobs (627,000 iOS jobs in the US vs. 374,000 in Hollywood) and is easier to enter and has wider reach. As the graph [above] shows, it’s also growing far more rapidly…
Grab some popcorn and read the rest at “Bigger Than Hollywood.”
* “Norma Desmond” (Gloria Swanson) in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard
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As we disable in-app purchases, we might recall that it was on this date in 1931 that City Lights premiered. Written and directed by its star, Charlie Chaplin, the film follows Chaplin’s “Tramp” character as he falls in love with a blind woman (Virginia Cherrill). Though sound films– “talkies”– were the rage at the time, Chaplin produced City Lights as a scored silent– for which he composed the music himself. It was a huge success on its release, grossing over $5 million ($730 million in 2015 dollars). And it has grown in critical stature ever since: In 1992, the Library of Congress selected City Lights for preservation in the United States National Film Registry; then in 2007, the American Film Institute‘s 100 Years… 100 Movies ranked City Lights as the 11th greatest American film of all time. The critic James Agee referred to the final scene in the film as the “greatest single piece of acting ever committed to celluloid.”
Among the ruins…
Photographer Matthew Christopher has been intrigued by abandoned structures since he was a child. His site Abandoned America collects the fruits of that fascination.
We live in a time where every spare plot of land is being developed and redeveloped, a time when cookie-cutter, prefabricated homes and businesses are the general rule. The failures of the past are being ignored and repeated, and many valuable pieces of our common past are falling to the wrecking ball every year. This process may be considered inevitable but it speaks of a certain carelessness and wastefulness on our part not to acknowledge and explore these fragments together while we still can. There is also a responsibility we all share to confront the horrors some of these sites are witness to. While we teach and reteach certain historical atrocities like the holocaust (and rightfully so), most people are completely ignorant that asylums and institutions on our own soil came close to being as horrific and lethal to those inside. Likewise, every factory complex that is demolished erases a valuable part of the heritage of the community it helped create, and an opportunity to understand the sometimes brutal working conditions, class struggles, and the economic devastation created by its closing is gone forever. While I love archaeology, I am dismayed at the prevailing blindness in scholastic circles that prizes a handful of nails or pottery fragments from an early colonial settlement but ignores sites that are still above ground and critical to preserving the accounts of accomplishments and missteps over the last century.
Beyond that, there is an undeniably artistic element to decayed sites, and an immense number of social, theological, and philosophical questions they pose. Abandoned America’s aim encompasses not only the historical and photographic cataloging of such sites, but also on a larger scale a eulogy for the lost ways of life they represent, a statement of their emotional, spiritual, and metaphoric relevance to our everyday lives, and a sense of the visceral experience of entering a parallel universe of silence, rust, and peeling paint…
Many, many more mesmerizing memorials at Abandoned America (from whence the photos above, all rights reserved to the artist).
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As we tread carefully, we might send a lightly-but-carefully-composed birthday verse to Lawrence Ferlinghetti; he was born on this date in 1919. A translator and writer of fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, he is best known as an author for his poetry, perhaps especially for A Coney Island of the Mind (1958). He is also justly famed as a pioneering publisher: he initiated the “Pocket Poet” series, publishing his own verse, and works by Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Marie Ponsot, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, William Carlos Williams, and Gregory Corso. He published fiction by the by the William Burroughs and Charles Bukowski; non-fiction from Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn; translations of Bataille, Brecht, and Goethe… and Neal Cassidy’s “memoir,” which might arguably fit into more than one of those categories.
But Ferlinghetti is perhaps best known these days for his base of operations, San Francisco’s famed City Lights Books; established in 1953, it was the first all-paperbound bookshop in the country. Given its stock and its publishing activities, it quickly became the “clubhouse” for the Beats, and a center of challenging thought– a role it occupies to this day.
“Poetry is the shadow cast by our imaginations.” – These Are My Rivers: New & Selected Poems, 1955-1993
Ferlinghetti, reading at City Lights
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