In case you live under a rock, or have focused all of your waking minutes to “Sheen-Watch 2011,” here was the best moment of Sunday’s Oscar ceremony: The Gregory Brothers (of Bed Intruder fame), making it to the big time with “Auto-Tune the Oscars.”
Two years ago they were three brothers and a wife who enjoyed making music. Today, they’re well-known artists making a parody video for the Oscars.
The moral of the story is that you can either enjoy something (nothing wrong with hobbies!) or actually DO something and leverage social media to propel yourself forward. Nothing is stopping you. Nothing is stopping your company. Except the ringing voice in your head that tells you to stop.
Fight that voice. Make something original and interesting.
In our second podcast, we do our small part to celebrate Black History Month, by connecting our forthcoming 2012 Historical Tweets calendar, the KKK, civil war reenactments, and Beard’s local public library.
All that in less than 3 minutes.
Short and sweet, it’s the McBeard Podcast: “Black History Month 2.0″ (2:56).
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Rostand’s classic play Cyrano de Bergerac (as with many movies that have been based on it) often gets boiled down to the wrong simple synopsis: Ugly guy who is good with words helps good-looking-but-tongue-tied guy get the girl.
Yes, this occurs in the story—but that recap misses the essence of Cyrano. His enduring quality was not his fluency or vocabulary. Words alone do not melt hearts, expressions that capture and provoke emotion do. Even when given words to say, the handsome suitor Christian cannot figure out how to express them properly to Roxane.
The New York Times released a pair of articles today that paint both a very bleak and very rosy picture of broadcast TV.
TV networks are using social tools (mostly Twitter and Facebook) to measure realtime buzz and stoke the fires of conversation around their top shows, especially events like The Oscars.
But this focused fan interaction is mismatched against today’s 10PM-time-slotted broadcast network shows: what were once risky, artful shows are now a dredge of police procedurals that are too similar to watch and too spendy to maintain. Experimental and daring shows are moving to networks, where smaller (but more rabid) fanbases can justify smaller production budgets.
