Thursday, December 23, 2010

The Lights off (South) Broadway

I will make my 2nd annual Holiday appeal to all my friends, clients and co-conspirators in the Arts to avail themselves of a driving tour of East-Central Lemay near the Mississippi River before it’s too late.

There is no display anywhere that comes close. If you are looking for a Wildwood McMansion festooned with lights designed by Himmler’s descendants, purchased in 2010 (and soon to be trash canned), this isn’t your place. But if you want completely idiosyncratic designs with often-ancient lighting sets carefully maintained by people too poor to buy new ones against a background of housing where no two homes are alike, plus narrow streets and close set-backs so that you can almost reach out and touch the displays … go thither. I will stack the denizens of Lemay up against the trendies in the Central West End, Benton Park, or Soulard for refined artistic sensibilities and pure right-brainism.

Although I have taken some iphone shots that I may post later, they do not really do it justice. However, I jotted down a few addresses of note:

318 Lenhardt
137 W. Cartwright
118 W. Cartwright

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Howard Stern Wimps Out

“One of the keys to the deal was Sirius would be distributed on other platforms, such as the iPhone, which hadn't been in place before.“.

You don’t need Sirius to “distribute” you to iPhone.

So even Howard doesn’t have the guts to dump Sirius. Had he gone straight to iPhone with his own app … that would have been the cutting edge move we expect from Howard. Instead, he played it safe. Took the guaranteed money. Booo! Now he has to worry about every mobile device app – available now and invented in the next five years - ripping Sirius off, and Sirius getting aggressive and suing Stern fans just like the record industry sued the fans of their artists in the 2000s.

If you are Howard Stern, you *want* entrepreneurs inventing apps out there for you. Or you want to develop an app yourself that better integrates the suggestion with the purchase. Right now on Sirius, it’s the same premise of radio that it was with Fibber McGee and Molly: “I might remember to go out and purchase Life Lock or I might not.” But what if a free trial of Life Lock was waiting for you on your Stern app, linked with your credit card, password-protected and encrypted in Safari?

Plus ... what about the show as a Podcast so that people could listen on demand? Wouldn't listenership increase? How important is that "live" feel? Most syndicated shows are delayed an hour or two anyway.

Howard Stern to stay with Sirius Satellite Radio; signs new five-year contract.