The Composer Who Sees David Bowie As A Muse

“Mr. Branca first crossed paths with Bowie in 1981, when they were working on projects at the same Manhattan studio, the Power Station, and would pass each other in the hallway. Bowie was aware of Mr. Branca’s work. On the title song of the album ‘Tin Machine,’ Bowie refers to the composer: ‘Fractured words and Branca-sonic/Anger trapped behind locked doors/And right between the eyes.'”

Artists And Anonymity. There Are Problems

“It is interesting that writers cannot “reasonably expect” to keep their names unpublished, given how many have down the years. Daniel Defoe published as Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift as Lemuel Gulliver (with phoney portrait). Aphra Behn published pseudonymously. So did Henry Fielding. Samuel Richardson was anonymous and Jane Austen was just “a Lady”. Horace Walpole, all three Brontës and George Eliot all had noms de plume, and Eliot’s stuck. Even today, the famously anonymous are everywhere you look.”

Verbal Complexity Was Considered Elitist. So How Did TV Become The Place Where It Flourishes?

“We live in an epoch in which the battle for the complex and the resistant seems (“seems” is the operative word, as it often is) to have been lost. One of its early casualties was prose style. Style is not just a writer’s personal signature; and yet “classic style” is an oxymoron, because style is essentially idiosyncratic.”

On-Demand Culture Means You Don’t Own That Book, Movie Or Song You Think You Just Bought

“With the move to cloud computing and streaming content, the concept of “copy ownership” is now disappearing from entertainment as well. Software, motion pictures, and even music are increasingly a service provided to you. Streaming services and cloud content have their own worries. For example, what happens when you’re traveling somewhere with no reliable internet access? What happens when the service provider’s servers go down for days and you are paying for a service you are not getting? But the problems run deeper. The loss of ownership sends copyright law out to sea.”