Showing posts with label Belgium. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Belgium. Show all posts

Friday, August 19, 2011

Music festivals, we may have a problem


Again.

Another outdoor concert, another thunderstorm, another stage collapse, another five people dead. The deaths at the Pukkelpop festival in Belgium late Thursday come as the death toll in Saturday's stage collapse at the Indiana State Fair rose to six.

The latest bad news comes from
MSNBC:

The death toll from a fierce thunderstorm that mangled tents and downed trees and scaffolding at an open-air music festival in Belgium has risen to five, officials said Friday.

Hasselt Mayor Hilde Claes said that two more people died overnight. About 40 were injured, 11 of them seriously, she said.

Chicago-based band Smith Westerns was on stage when the structure collapsed around them, NBC station WMAQ reported. None of the band members were injured but their equipment was destroyed.

Organizers canceled the annual Pukkelpop festival near Hasselt, 50 miles east of Brussels. Buses and trains were pressed into service to transfer the 60,000 festivalgoers home.

The brief but violent thunderstorm on Thursday evening tore down concert tents, several trees and main stage scaffolding. Panicked concertgoers ran through fields of mud looking for shelter.
DO YOU think there might be a pattern here?

Do you think that the typical design of the typical outdoor stage might be inherently unstable and prone to collapse during weather not atypical for spring and summer -- outdoor-concert season?

Let's review. And note that I've probably missed some incidents from the past couple of years.



August 13, 2011. Indianapolis, Ind.



August 7, 2011. Tulsa, Okla.



July 17, 2011. Ottawa, Ontario.



July 6, 2010. Concho, Okla.



Aug. 1, 2009. Camrose, Alberta.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

The LipDub Revolution


The "University LipDub" phenomenon, it occurs to me, may be the perfect example of the one big thing the Internet has done -- and which traditional media do not "get."

In 1964, Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan famously said "the medium is the message," meaning that the medium by which any message is conveyed changes how the message is perceived or experienced -- that the qualities of the particular medium (whether it be print, film, radio or television) embed themselves into the message itself. Now, what we have discovered -- and what traditional media has not yet -- is that the audience is the media.

Trusts have been busted, monopolies atomized and gatekeepers cast aside. The audience is the media. The Internet is the medium. The message has gotten "off message."

AND A CHILD -- or at least bunches of enthusiastic college students -- shall lead the revolution. The University LipDub project, which started in Germany (see the above video) and is spreading around the teen- and twentysomething globe, is the concept's embodiment.

Want to see a music video? Make one. What University LipDub adds to the mix is the power of academia and a critical mass of fertile young minds.

The product, as seen above and in an earlier post, is as professional as anything done at corporate behest and on a corporate (read: $$$$$$$) scale. And it's a lot more "real."

And . . . it's a lot more infectiously joyous and entertaining, too.

LIPDUB REPRESENTS the existential dilemma for radio, television and newspapers. The conversation is two-way now, and everybody owns a press, a radio transmitter and a TV station.

Traditional media, faced with this new reality, either can join the conversation and add meaningful things to it in a compelling manner . . . or it can go away.

These are not suggestions. It's an either-or choice, and reality will enforce it strictly.

Now, let's enjoy some more LipDub, shall we?

LIKE THIS ONE, for example, from l'Institut des Hautes Etudes des Communications Sociales in Brussels, Belgium: