JEANNE CLAUDE PASSED AWAY

Jeanne who? Jeanne Claude was the brains behind her husband Christo's artistic genius. Christo is well known for his "wrapping". He takes huge, well known buildings or landmarks and wraps them in a recyclable material. Christo's installation's take years to finance, obtain city permits, construct, display and then disassemble.

What's amazing about both artists is not just their art, but how they make their art. Unlike most artists, they do not accept corporate money or sponsorships to make their hugely expensive outdoor displays. Instead, once they have selected a building or object, Christo begins making color renderings of the exhibition, sells the renderings and with the profit, they actually create the artwork. Their displays never last more than 2 weeks, but they can be over 20 years in the making. HBO did a fascinating documentary on their last exhibition, The Gates in Central Park. It was the dead of winter, and to this day, I was so upset I didn't travel up to Manhattan to see it in 2005. Check out their website: http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/index.shtml

Christo's next display is Over the River at the Colorado River in 2013. I fully intend to go see this display during the 2 weeks it is up: http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/otr.shtml

Jeanne Claude & Christo were a husband and wife team whose artwork is know throughout the world. It's artwork that you only get to see once in your lifetime and the canvas is always nature. I am in awe of their genius.

2010 - THE YEAR OF THE PAY WALL

Even though it's November, I'm already willing to make a prediction for 2010. 2010 will be the year that most, if not all free content goes behind the pay wall. Yesterday, Rupert Murdoch threatened to move all of his newspaper sites, worldwide behind the pay wall. Most of Murdoch's newspaper publications are already paid, such as the Wall Street Journal. And it's no coincidence that the 3 paid newspaper sites (Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and The Economist) audiences are all what I like to call "pay insensitive" - or rich. However, search engine news aggregators frequently pick up on newspaper sites popular articles and publish them on their sites (such as Google News) for free.

The Pay Wall is fraught with complications. A newspaper sites current audience is wholly dependent on delivering a certain number of eyeballs to the site. By going behind the pay wall, and not allowing search engines not to aggregate your site, you severely reduce your online traffic, decreasing ad revenue, while creating a competitive advantage for an an audience exodus to your competitive newspaper sites. Eliminate your online traffic and you have to make a calculated (although completely unknown) gamble that the number of pay subscribers you pick up to your site is greater than or offsets the loss of your free online ad revenue. My prediction is that in 2010, newspaper sites will adopt a blended subscription model - some previews and free content, with either a pay per article fee (25 cents) or a full subscription for a monthly fee.

And newspapers aren't the only ones going behind the pay wall. The second most popular video site in the U.S. after You Tube, Hulu will also adapt a blended subscription model. Hulu will follow the newspapers lead with some free content such as select clips, trailers and other promotional content, a pay per episode fee of $1.99 (like ITunes), and/or a full subscription fee of $30 monthly for a buffet style "all you can eat - or in this case, watch." Viewers will either have to watch a full ad load to watch a free episode (12 minutes of commercials for a 1 hour show, just like on TV - this is double the current ad load for a 1 hour show, which is about 6 minutes).

And the leader of getting an audience to pay for digital content - ITunes will adopt a $30 a month subscription fee for all you can watch TV & movies on its site.

THE "FREE BLACK HOLE"

In an effort to avoid becoming the music, radio, and after witnessing the collapse this year of the newspaper business, the entertainment industry is going to stop with "Free" everything. I work in the entertainment business. I don't work for free, and neither do the actors, writers, directors, and producers who create the content. Just like getting a drink at a bar, if you want to watch the movie or TV show, you're going to have to pay for it.

Watch this blog posting for an UPDATE! in 2010 to see if I'm correct.

UPDATE: December 2009 - Variety Online has gone behind the pay wall.

UPDATE: January 2010 - The New York Times goes behind the pay wall in early 2011.

UPDATE: February 2010 - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/business/media/03brill.html?hpw

THE STATE BY STATE STRATEGY IS OVER

I was very disheartened on November 5th, 2008 when the State of California passed Proposition 8 and gay marriage was repealed in California. I found it to be especially cruel because over the summer, so many gay marriages were performed when they were legal, and now, those marriages could be annulled. It is one thing to ban gay marriage, but it is very cruel to then be told months later that your marriages no longer counts, according to your own state. And from that terrible moment forward, there has been a fierce debate inside the gay community on the way forward in the fight for gay marriage.

On one side is the state by state solution. Get as many states as possible to pass gay marriage and, like a domino effect, other states would pass gay marriage, until eventually the almost every state would allow it. On the other side was a new, younger, and rapidly growing generation of new gay activists who argued for a national strategy to take cases to the Supreme Court and get them to overturn the federal ban on gay marriage. After all, the Supreme Court struck down the ban on interracial marriage on June 12, 1967.

After personally contributed money to fight Prop. 8 (even though I was living in Florida at the time), I decided that I would no longer put my financial backing behind a losing strategy. But which strategy was the losing strategy? I don't back losers with my money.

In Washington D.C., there are 2 national groups that raise money to lobby Congress for gay rights. There is the Human Rights Campaign, and the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force. Both organizations mean well, but neither would commit to either a national or state by state strategy. Also, every state has an Equality coalition that lobbies on the state level while getting financial support from both the HRC and the Task Force. It was with a heavy heart that I decided that I could not send any organization 1 more penny until a winning strategy was decided upon and implemented.

Well, after this week's crushing defeat of gay marriage in Maine, it is clear that all the liberal states that have passed gay marriage have passed it. As a community, we've reached the end of the line with the state by state method and now it's time to admit that we lost, get up, brush ourselves off, and put all of our time, money, and political resources towards the federal Supreme Court fight.

If you believe in equal rights, then I encourage our political lobbiest to fully get behind the federal Supreme Court case and to put all of our political and financial resources toward overturning the federal ban on gay marriage. Find out more at: http://www.equalrightsfoundation.org/index.html

And until the HRC and Task Force fully back this initiative, I will continue to not support either group financially until they fully endorse the new national strategy.

UPDATE: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/nyregion/03marriage.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=gay%20marriage&st=cse

New York State rejects Gay Marriage Bill

U2 LIVE FROM THE CLOUD

On Sunday, October 25th, U2 played a sold out concert at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena California. The Black Eyed Peas were opening to an audience of 96,000 people. It promised to be quite an amazing evening of great live music.

But let's look at both the time and the cost of getting there. I definitely wouldn't want to miss BEP as the opening act. They would be on around 7:30PM. To get there I would have to take the 10 to downtown to get to Pasadena in the Valley. And with 96,00 people, you have to figure not everyone's going together in the same car, so that's 120,000 all converging on the freeways of Los Angeles. I would probably need to leave my apartment by The Grove at 5PM. The concert would go on until 11-11:30PM, so I would get home at 1AM and off to bed immediately since Sunday was a school night. Total time 5PM-1AM - 8 hours round trip, door to door.

What about the financial costs? My ticket price alone is $250 and that's for the nosebleed seats. Gas would be about $10 round trip. Parking would be at least $20 and God only knows how long it would take to get in and out of stacked parking at the Rose Bowl. Then I have to buy at least 2 beers at the show. That's probably $27 with tip. Total financial expenditure - $307.00.

People, we are still in a recession. I do not have 8 hours and $307 to spend to see any band from nosebleed seats. Hell, on Broadway, $150 buys me great orchestra seats. How am I supposed to see 4 short Irishmen from 3/4 of a mile away? But I do really want to see U2. My solution turned out to be YouTube.

U2 was broadcasting the concert live on You Tube. So rather then spend 8 hours and $307, I got to see the show for free, while pausing it, sitting in my own home for 2 1/2 hours with the lights off watching the U2 concert. Of course there were some drawbacks. The stream wasn't digital in either sound quality or picture. But it was good enough for me. And the fact of the matter is, I would have paid $10 for a digital music and digital picture stream (and then have found a way to connect it to my 41" TV and watch it live on my digital TV). It's a new revenue stream for both U2 and Google and great publicity for the site. According to U2, over 10 million streams were served of the concert. Can you imagine how much server space and computer power and technology it must have taken to produce 10 million simultaneous streams of the U2 concert? Simply incredible.

I love concerts, but I don't go to nearly as many as I used to. And now when I go, I have to get seats. I can't handle standing for 2 hours in some general admission SRO section. My perfect concert solution is MTV's HD concert channel (in LA) and HD Net (in Miami). I just record the concerts on the DVR and then play them back whenever I want to in my apartment with digital sound and a digital picture, all for free, with better seats than I could get by actually attending the concert.

But I digress, back to U2. I love how Bono is financially raping rich white men to feed the children of Africa. And for a save the earth icon like Bono, the carbon footprint on this tour is massive. They need 3 days in between shows just to set it up, at 100 tractor trailer trucks to haul the massive and unique genius of concert engineering city to city (I cannot imagine the cost to fly it continent to continent). The gas prices alone must be staggering. But at $250 a ticket X 96,000, that's $24 million in 1 night. U2 is not impoverished, and you know they fly a private jet show to show too.

Getting back to the concert. It was definitely the best U2 show I've ever seen. The set list was perfect, the band sounded great, the stage was a spectacle unto itself, and I literally had the best seat - in my house.

THE RETAIL MODEL IS BROKEN

Frankly, I don't understand the retail model. This occurred to me as I was in line at the grocery store the other day. I was standing in a long line with about $200 worth of groceries in my cart, meanwhile, someone else with only ice cream and kitty litter was quickly breezing through the 10 items or less register. WTF?

Those 2 items, ice cream and kitty litter, could not have cost more that $25 total. Here I am with more groceries and more money spent in store, and I'm being penalized by having to spend more time by spending MORE money? What kind of f-ed up business treats their lower paying customers better than their higher paying customers?

Here's how the grocery/WalMart/Home Depot/Target stores of the future should work: All stores need to have RFID tags (radio tags) embedded in all their items. I place all my groceries/items inside my cart. Like the Whole Foods in Manhattan, there are 2 lines, the 10 items or less line, where there is only 1 line for ALL the 10 items or less customers and a second faster moving line with triple the number of registers for more customers with more than 10 items. The larger number of items line, further breaks up into 3 lines where they are separated out, the cart moves into a standing line, and very quickly, the RFID tagged items are checked out instantly by a cart scanner, a credit card pays for it, and then there is a separate bagging area if necessary. Here the faster moving line is the lines for customers with more items/groceries.

From an incentive point of view, I would be encouraged at any store to spend more money, if I thought I would be spending less of my time in a line. As a high paying customer, I want to be rewarded for more spending, not penalized for it.