40. (with egg)

On August 3, 2008, I drove from Spokane, WA to Lewiston, ID, and chronicled the transformation of the Inland Northwest skyline by the harbingers of modern communication: the cell phone tower. These sentinels have joined grain elevators and power line towers in watching over, or rather listening over, this farmland.

Check out the full "Sentinels of the Palouse" Flickr set.

Welcome the new age of intellectual property delivery. Radiohead is releasing a new album, named In Rainbows, and as widely publicized the price of the downloadable album ("A 48.4MB ZIP FILE CONTAINING 10 X 160KBPS DRM FREE MP3s") is up to you. Literally. Don't want pay? Put in £0.00. How about $10? That'll be £4.91 please.

How are they going to make money? Physical copy value adds! Radiohead is also selling a Discbox containing all kinds of cool stuff:

THIS CONSISTS OF THE NEW ALBUM, IN RAINBOWS, ON CD AND ON 2 X 12 INCH HEAVYWEIGHT VINYL RECORDS. A SECOND, ENHANCED CD CONTAINS MORE NEW SONGS, ALONG WITH DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHS AND ARTWORK. THE DISCBOX ALSO INCLUDES ARTWORK AND LYRIC BOOKLETS. ALL ARE ENCASED IN A HARDBACK BOOK AND SLIPCASE.

The hardcore will eat all of that value-add content at a cool £40 Sterling ($81.32). This is brilliant, daring, marking an epoch. Digital content is unrestrainable, ether-suspended -- one cannot contain it. The old business model of guarding the IP within a phisical form in order to extract money from it is dying and has been since Napster. But Radiohead is taking a cue from other innovators, such as Sean Combs, Dre, Snoop... don't sell music, sell shit. It doesn't really matter what it is: shirts, shoes, hoodies, 2 x 12 inch heaveyweight vinyl records, artwork and lyric booklets incased in a hardback book and slipcase. The margin is huge. Oh yeah, and tour like crazy.

I bought the digital. I figured $10 was fair, so I rounded up a bit to £5.00; after a transaction fee, I'm happily shelling out $11.08. Here's the email I received:

Discbox customers.

You goods will be shipped on or before 3rd December 2007 by post. Information regarding the download (included with the Discbox) as per below.

Download customers.

YOUR UNIQUE ACTIVATION CODE(S) WILL BE SENT OUT LATER THIS MORNING 10th OCT(UK TIME).
THIS CODE/LINK WILL TAKE YOU STRAIGHT TO THE DOWNLOAD AREA.

HERE IS SOME INFORMATION ABOUT THE DOWNLOAD:

THE ALBUM WILL COME AS A 48.4MB ZIP FILE CONTAINING 10 X 160KBPS DRM FREE MP3s.

MOST COMPUTERS NOW HAVE ZIP SOFTWARE AS PART OF THE OPERATING SYSTEM; IF YOUR COMPUTER DOES NOT, YOU NEED TO GET WINZIP OR ZIPIT >INSTALLED PRIOR.

YOU CAN DOWNLOAD THEM HERE:
PC: http://www.winzip.com/
MAC: http://www.maczipit.com/

IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS OR PROBLEMS DOWNLOADING YOUR FILE, PLEASE CONTACT OUR DOWNLOAD CUSTOMER SERVICE TEAM AT downloadinrainbows@waste.uk.com

We value your custom.

I am so completely frustrated right now. For the last few hours I've been working on a digital art project in The Gimp (a free Photoshop alternative) and failing to produce what I want. It's infuriating.... I can close my eyes and picture exactly what I want to create, every detail, but I just can't bend this illustration software to my will and draw the damn thing.

I suppose this happens all the time. Having never take an art course past Art 101, I'm sure the inspiration vs. execution argument comes up: are you really an artist if you can't actually create your art? Are you an artist if you can't paint the picture in your head? Are you a musician if you can't compose the melody you hear in your mind's ear? And what of the inverse of this problem, the Bizarro-inspired -- producers without originality? Is the "value" of an artist's work lower if they can only perfectly copy another artist?

Maybe I should outsource my illustration, go with the "With my mind and your hands" approach. I'm too impatient to learn Photoshop well enough to produce my idea, and my inspirations are fleeting. There are plenty of skilled designers out there who could turn my simple idea into a .psd file in about 30 minutes. But this idea makes me feel like a failure. Why? Should it? People do it all the time. My profession is to write software for inspired people who have an idea but lack the skills (or raw manpower) to execute: they can't write the code. I doubt that architects feel guilty for not pounding every nail, welding every joint, or installing every insanely-curved piece of titanium in the buildings they design. Songwriters often don't sing their own tunes. But there's something about drawing for me that I just can't get over: I have hands, dexterous ones. Regardless of how good or bad my ideas are, I want to create them myself, and if I fail I usually let the idea fall away. And drawing on a computer? What do my hands have to do with that? My fingers, dexterity, or control... what are their factors now, with this damn illustration software?

Do you think my being faster, stronger has anything to do with my muscles in this place? Do you believe that's air you are breathing now?