Weekend Reads (July 6): Fireworks, Jim Lee, Redbox’s Decline, X/Twitter Alternatives
Recommended weekend reading for July 6, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
I don’t know about where you live, but here in Nebraska, we love our Fourth of July fireworks. Entire neighborhoods transform into war zones as people light off hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars worth of fireworks. But this year’s display seemed a little underwhelming, and Jay Zagorsky has a theory as to why.
Imports of fireworks reached a peak in 2022 of almost US$600 million, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission. But today, just two years later, my estimate is that fireworks imports will only reach about $350 million in 2024. What happened to one of U.S.’s favorite Fourth of July activities?
The answer, I believe, lies in the COVID-19 pandemic, which transformed the economy as billions of people around the world were stuck at home. E-commerce boomed, as did sales of alcohol, indoor exercise equipment and cleaning products. However, this boom was followed by a bust for many products, as people switched back to pre-pandemic buying habits.
Jim Lee, one of the most popular comic book artists of all time, caused some controversy when his agent announced that he’d be charging up to $35,000 for commissioned artwork — but that ultimately says more about comic book fans than Jim Lee.
One of the things that I like the best about this Jim Lee scenario is that it has led to some artists realizing that they were totally underselling themselves at their current rates. No, you’re not going to suddenly start seeing a bunch of artists charging $10,000 for an 11x17, but it has reminded some of these folks that clearly their work does have great value to a lot of people, just not the people who like to complain about how much other people are willing to pay for comic book art.
$35,000 for commissioned artwork is pretty steep, but — and I can’t believe this needs to be said — if people are willing to pay that much, then more power to the artist in question, be they Jim Lee or anyone else. Also, any time I see people complaining about how much artists charge, or having to pay for art in general, that’s usually a sign that they don’t really care about the people making the art that they claim to enjoy and appreciate.
Jamie Ludwig talks to The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Jim Reid about the infamous alternative rock band’s 40-year history and ongoing relevance.
The Mary Chain’s appeal remains strong. In fact, their music (specifically “Head On,” from 1989’s Automatic) was playing over the soundsystem of the self-consciously hip corporate cafe chain where I grabbed an iced coffee shortly before writing this sentence. Much less anecdotally, they’ve cast such an influence on generations of shoegazers, indie rockers, psychedelic punks, and other musical oddballs that four decades into their career, they’re hailed as elder rock statesmen rather than relics.
The Jesus and Mary Chain’s first studio album in seven years, Glasgow Eyes, was released this past March.
The good people at ScreenAnarchy have released their list of the year’s best films so far, and as you’d expect from them, it’s a diverse mix of Hollywood blockbusters, foreign films, and cult titles.
Rolling Stone’s Alan Sepinwall has released his list of 2024’s best TV series so far, including Baby Reindeer, The Bear, Doctor Who, and Shōgun.
James Clavell’s epic doorstop novel about feudal Japan was already made for television back in 1980, in a take that was concerned almost exclusively with the white English sailor who got caught up in a Japanese civil war. This new version still has plenty of this foreign interloper (Cosmo Jarvis), but its heart is clearly with the local players, spectacularly portrayed by Hiroyuki Sanada, Anna Sawai, and Tadanobu Asano. Showrunners Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks combined grand sweep (that earthquake!) with intimate character moments and fascinating strategy in a way that evoked the good old days of Game of Thrones.
As you might recall, I loved Shōgun. As I wrote in my review, “It’s a rare privilege to watch a TV series that’s made with so much confidence, style, and gravitas that you trust it implicitly.”
Once upon a time, Redbox’s DVD rental kiosks could be found everywhere: grocery stores, drugstores, gas stations, etc. But the company’s owner — Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment (yes, the people behind those books) — has recently filed for bankruptcy and is nearly $1 billion in debt.
The Verge has all of the details of Redbox’s remarkable decline, which was precipitated by the pandemic’s effect on Hollywood’s release schedule. “The results on Redbox’s bottom line were disastrous: the company’s revenue declined from $829 million in 2019 to $546 million in 2020, and then to $289 million in 2021. ‘It happened really fast,’ said the former Redbox executive.”
An AI company has inked a deal with the estates of Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds, and Laurence Olivier to use AI-generated versions of their voices to read audiobooks, PDFs, and other documents.
ElevenLabs envisions users tapping Garland’s legendary pipes to read the original L. Frank Baum novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” or Laurence Olivier to deliver a Sherlock Holmes story, in addition to a range of other works. ElevenLabs emphasizes that it has struck license agreements for authorized use of the legendary voices as part of the “Iconic Voices” feature of its app.
On the one hand, the fact that ElevenLabs asked for permission and will (presumably) be compensating the actors’ estates is encouraging. On the other hand, it’s still just gross and ghastly.
Last week, I wrote about how Paramount had shuttered the MTV News website, deleting decades’ worth of music and cultural coverage from the web. But now, those archives are back courtesy of the Internet Archive.
Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive tells Rolling Stone via email, “The Internet Archive has been archiving Mtv.com/news for decades and what we have is on the Wayback Machine. We built a full text search engine for MTV News to help find pages. We apologize that it may not be complete. When publishers announce they are going offline we have a better chance of getting a complete snapshot. As a library, preserving cultural heritage is what we do. We hope this is useful.”
Browse the revived MTV News archives, which contain more than 460,000 webpage snapshots.
If you’re ready to leave X/Twitter, but are unsure of the differences between the alternatives — Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads — then the EFF has you covered with this very in-depth (and slightly tech-y) guide to the alternatives, the technologies that power them, and their different approaches to user experience.
The ongoing Twitter exodus sparked life into a new way of doing social media. Instead of a handful of platforms trying to control your life online, people are reclaiming control by building more open and empowering approaches to social media. Some of these you may have heard of: Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads. Each is distinct, but their differences can be hard to understand as they’re rooted in their different technical approaches.
[…]
Two major ecosystems have emerged in the wake, both encouraging the variety and experimentation of the earlier web. The first, built on ActivityPub protocol, is called the Fediverse. While it includes many different kinds of websites, Mastodon and Threads have taken off as alternatives for Twitter that use this protocol. The other is the AT Protocol, powering the Twitter alternative Bluesky.
Related: Threads recently celebrated its first birthday and now has over 175 million monthly active users according to Mark Zuckerberg. By contrast, X/Twitter has over 600 million users while Bluesky (as of February 2024) has just over four million users.
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