tripu

I will never stop being surprised by this digital world. How can you be exploring it many hours every week for years, and still find so much unexpected beauty, creativity, misery, shit, information and disinformation, all in new formats, all tangled and evolving, threatening and blossoming in real time?

Some parts of what follows may be wrong, I really don’t know. (And that’s the spirit of the web, too).

Today by sheer chance I found Mia Rose, a teenager from Wimbledon who posted on YouTube some videos of herself singing covers, and also a few songs by her own. She is very talented (far more than those dummies from X Factor and alike) and gained an impressive base of fans in a short time.

It happened that some executives of some big record label in the USA noticed that, too. And they wanted to talk to her, who is just a girl from London with an account in YouTube. So by the time you read these lines she may be signing her first contract with a major label, which is wonderful and disappointing at the same time.

I mean, being under 20 she has already arrived in weeks to where many other good musicians will never arrive, and that is thanks to that over-hyped, web -2.0, massive store of frames with null usability called YouTube. And that’s great.

But, on the other hand, she had already become known and recognised without the need for any of those greedy companies. Is she going to betray the spirit of the web? (Mia, this is mere rambling — go ahead and become rich. I really mean it).

People with true talent, people born with that “touch” within, they just need some good advice, a modest investment and a little bit of experience to achieve big things. That is Imogen Heap. Or Kevin Smith. Both are talented, very young professionals who (I believe) really enjoy doing what they do. Both sold or re-mortgaged their goods to fund their first works. None of them will enter Forbes’ elite, but that’s a false “elite” anyway. And they are honest. Yeah, honesty doesn’t quote on the stock exchange, but that’s beside the point.

The web simply leverages that old formula. Advice comes easy from the internet when you are giving something away and know how to ask for it. Initial investments become even lower for all those artists with the need for physical tools (sequencers, video editors, press) which may be replaced by computers. Experience… well, that you still need. That’s why it’s called “experience”. (Otherwise it would be called “Windows Vista” and nobody would need it).

This story goes on with some youtubers claiming that Mia Rose is a fake (sic) and some odd controversy about whether her visits and comments are real, and whether she’s “cheating”. Maybe people envious of her success. Maybe they are right. In any case I don’t understand why the discussion is about her position on YouTube’s ranking instead of her merit.

Now, the last piece of this story is the best one. Via Mike Abundo I learn that some visitor who Mia doesn’t even know decided to add drums to one of her songs. Then someone else took that mix and added a bass line. The result is a moving example of spontaneous, simple, altruistic, agile collaboration to create something beautiful… on the web.

¡Ajá! Si tú también has expandido esta cabecera en tu agregador de RSS movido por la calentura disléxica del título es muy probable que esta entrada se convierta en la más leída de mi bitácora. Todo gracias al mismo truco sucio y barato —pero efectivo, pardiez— que usan constantemente ciertos periódicos.

La portada de hoy de The London Paper (¿por qué después de 20″ con ese sitio web abierto mi Firefox acapara el 80% de UCP? :¬P ):

«Job blows for sex in City banking»

Ahí queda eso.

¿No es ruín? Evidentemente tú, que llevas en el cuerpo ocho horas seguidas pensando en lítel endian, tienes ya todas las convoluciones del cerebro con forma de rama de Subversion. Pero hey, aún eres un ser humano. Así que toda esa masa encefálica obligada contra natura a producir ActionScript en lugar de parafilias se rebela de pronto y consigue hacerse fuerte en algún lóbulo esquinado. Algo en ese titular parpadea en fosforescente, así que intentas descifrarlo leyendo con el rabillo del ojo de forma exquisitamente descarada en el periódico de otro currito, a la manera canónica del metro.

Evidentemente, la noticia no es tan interesante como parecía. Lo cual me recuerda una noticia de hoy en /. que muchos también leímos mal (“immoral”? who said “immoral”?).

Precisamente hace pocos días comentaba con un amigo lo frecuentes que son aquí los juegos de palabras, a veces bien ingeniosos, en los periódicos sensacionalistas, y también en los diarios gratuitos que reparten en todos los nodos del transporte urbano. Pablo me explicó que en UK es mucho más fácil hacer estos juegos, principalmente porque el inglés tiene más palabras homófonas (ya sabes, esas palabras que odian a los maricones) que el español. La verdad es que los periodistas también lo consiguen a base de rebajar su listón de la seriedad, de forzar referencias y de echar mano del S · E · X · O, que siempre es un recurso facilón.     S · E · X · O     S · E · X · O     S · E · X · O

Unos cuantos ejemplos.

¿Os acordáis del tipo que se propuso adelgazar jugando con la Wii? El pie de foto del «Metro» fue:

«Fat boy slims»

Que es muy rebuscado, pero tiene su gracia.

Otro. Con el cambio de año, la Corporation of London, que a su vez controla Transport for London, incrementó alevosamente las tarifas de los ferrocarriles. Por obra de Ken «Livingstone, I presume» (el superalcalde de Londres). El titular:

«Train fares are not fair»

(Léelo en voz alta si no lo notas).

Y el último, que también lo he visto hoy. Hablando de Petr Čech, el portero checo del Chelsea:

«Czech in for Petr»

I missed “21 Grams” but loved “Amores Perros”. From the rather poor current catalogue of films I had to pick the new film by Alejandro González Iñárritu. (Which one if not that one? “Night at the Museum”? You must be joking).

Now, people like me, who can’t help diving too deeply into films and end up loving almost every piece of cinema as long as it’s able to alter our state of mind, people like me should never write about a film in the heat of the moment. Because when the main characters utter the last mighty sentence of their epilogue and that powerful close-up slowly becomes a long traveling, when the image fades to emptiness again and the whole meaning of the story dawns on your mind, when the last chord of strings gently vanishes inevitably taking you down to the ground of a random cinema in a random city, when the end titles start pulsing on the screen… then it always takes quite a long while for people like me to recover and come back to Earth. We would happily ban any talking or gesture inside the auditorium. No communication until everyone is outside of the cinema again and become fully aware that it was fiction, realize that they need to wait for the bloody bus in the cold and remember that such suggestive soundtrack never pops up in their lives automatically as it does on the screen (shame!). Switching back from art to life needs some graduality and care, as scuba divers need slow decompression before putting their feet on dry land again.

Having said that, I hereby resign myself to never being a good film critic.

And having said that as a disclaimer, I must say that I pretty liked “Babel”.

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Cómo odio cuando metes ropa y sábanas a la lavadora y al sacarlo todo descubres que la sábana ha fagocitado toda la ropa… ¿Es concebible algo peor?