Booked...

So its nearing half way through 2011 and at the beginning of the year I posted a to read list... heres how im going...


Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy - This was really a finish it off jobby... but since its 900 or something pages... im sitting at about 600... it has been collecting dust for the past 4 months though....
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens - Geniusly discovered the old audio book... am about half way through this one!

The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck - pending

On The Road, Jack Kerouac - yes yes and yes!!! this has bumped An equal music from the top of my favourite book list! I started reading it in prep for the states and then finished it in San Francisco which was just magical! One day I will do Sal's America!
Animal Farm, George Orwell - na-aahhh
Catch-22, Joseph Heller - not yet
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald - I got a copy of it for my birthday... its sitting by my bed! On page 3!
A Churchless Faith, Alan Jaimeson - yes! and it was ok> a cool mix of peoples stories
The Great Emergence, Phyllis Tickle - yes! and it was average! The first chapter was good...
Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright - ready and waiting by my bed!
Jesus Wants to Save Christians, Rob Bell - I didnt read Jesus wants to save Christians but I did read Love Wins... which i thought was really... interesting!
Confessions of St Augustine, Augustine - Who knows if I will ever read this!

 

And I have read a few other books not on my list...

 

Resident Aliens - Haurwaus and Willemon

Mere Christianity - C.S. Lewis

Seriously Funny -Adrian Plass
Beyond Personality - C.S. Lewis
Love Wins - Rob Bell
Hand Me Down World - Llyod Jones

Blessed are the Cheesemakers...

One of my favourite classics is Monty Python's - Life of Brian. This film is pure brilliance! I actually find it hard to listen to the Beatitudes read without transporting myself back to the Sermon on the Mount re-enactment...

Life of Brian

Im in the middle of reading an EPIC book... Its called Resident Aliens...* its not a Sci-Fi but a cosmically mind blowing provocative Christian assesment of culture and ministry...

Anyways here is a quote from the book...

Here [in the sermon on the Mount] is an invitation to a way that strikes hard against what the world already knows, what the world defines as good behavior, what makes sense to everybody. The Sermon, by its announcement and its demands, makes necessary the formation of a colony, not because disciples are those who have a ned to be different, but because the Sermon, if believed and lived, makes us different, shows us the world to be alien, and odd place where what makes sense to everybody else is revealed to be opposed to what God is doing among us. jesus was not crucified for saying or doing what made sense to everyone. People are crucified for following a way that runs counter to the prevailing direction of the culture…



* Please note as much as I bagged amazon.com... in previous posts... its still good for book reviews!

Music in the Clouds...

Personally I have only listened to the album in passing so am unable to comment on the creative element...
But what interested me more was the back end of the release and the 500,000 online sales Amazon generated.


One of the major successes of Gaga's album was 60% of recorded sales were digital. The record industry have been treading water for at least a decade now with the introduction of digital sales and the ever changing nature of the 21st century. After years of attempting to shy away from the 'digital world' labels and artists are beginning to understand the role that album sales play in the multifaceted business that is music. Touring, merchandise, endorsments and plenty of other clever revenue generators (and publicity) are what end up funding the product 'the music'. Seemingly backwards when you think about the systematic processes of art as we know it… (which one could beg to question is it really art when one applys a systematic process?)

Anyways in attempt to re-launch their cloud-drive amazon.com got friendly with some big people at Universal and made avaliable a digital download of 'Born This Way' for 99c… yep you heard right 99c. Cloud drive isnt exactly what I thought it was (I thought it was a digital downloads site) but instead the new branch of amazon acts as an online hard drive giving you 5GB of free space to store data. One can up the data limit but this comes at a significant cost (especially when one can create endless google accounts - messy but creative!)

So basically amazon bought the album at full price and onsold it at a rediculously cheap rate in order to drive visitation to the website. Success…? Who knows! Amazon (failing to comment) lost a predicted $3million on the campaign… At the expense of record stores who predicted their sales were down by 50%... But 500,000 people now have amazon cloud-drive accounts… who may use them again? Maybe not? Who knows.


A question I am lead to ask is… What place does the 'music' play in a world of marketing, publicity and sales… ? I don’t know the answer but I thought the below from the New York Times was interesting… "Mr. Carter, Lady Gaga’s manager, said the prerelease promotional campaign for “Born This Way” had been in full swing for six months. “If you look at ‘The Fame,’ ” Mr. Carter continued, referring to Lady Gaga’s first album, “it wasn’t marketing ploys that drove the success of that album. It was the quality of the content and Gaga’s willingness to go around the world and play for the fans, do the promotion, do the TV shows, visit the radio stations and the club D.J.’s. There’s a lot more of that than there are marketing ploys.”

 On a side note… amazon… im not much of a fan… their interface is clunky… their brand is dated… and as for innovation… see google… that’s how you create a super power!