Perfect for the kid in me: beautiful paintings of (mostly) military aircraft from all eras. They look like they’re rendered with graphics software, but they nevertheless retain real warmth, almost as if they were hand-painted.

Browse the extensive galleries here.

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An idea to help increase theater attendance: customers pay a subscription fee for movie passes at theaters of their own choosing, creating a relationship between the moviegoer and the theater. I’m not sure anyone will ever do this, but it’s intriguing, and as a fan of the in-theater movie experience, I hope something like this can reverse the downward trend in attendance.

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New York’s legendary Village Voice has their comics issue out this week. I used to read The Voice every week but this is the first time I’ve picked it up in years, I think. Sad. Anyway, the cover for this issue was illustrated by Ward Sutton and it’s terrific: a mash-up of several different comics artists’ styles and comics characters. See how many you can pick out.

You can read stories from the issue here, or see the art slightly bigger here.

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Though News Corp does not release subscription numbers for its iPad newspaper The Daily, the folks at The Nieman Journalism Lab, with help from PostRank, have come up with a clever proxy metric that might suggest the publication’s overall trends. By studying the number of Twitter posts that originate from the app (The Daily includes a tweet function on every article), they show that, at the very least, outbound social media activity has declined significantly, suggesting that app usage is down precipitously. There are all kinds of caveats to this method, to be sure, but it yields some interesting data, to say the least. Read the full report here.

On a side note: I’ve been mentally drafting a post about my thoughts on The Daily ever since it debuted, but I can’t seem to get around to hammering it out in full, so I may as well offer a sketch of my thoughts here, otherwise they may never see the light of day.

It’s true that The Daily qualifies as a form of experimentation, yes, but it doesn’t strike me as a very imaginative or a particularly adventurous form of experimentation. In fact, it’s about as uninspired an experiment as a publisher could undertake. To me, The Daily is a near perfect realization of exactly the idea that occurs to print editors every single time they get their hands on digital media for the first time, regardless of what the underlying technology might be: “Let’s make it just like what we know so well in print.” As a result I found it sadly lifeless and lacking in urgency. What a waste of US$30 million.

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Last Thursday night I went to this dance and music performance by Steven Reker and People Get Ready at the arts space The Kitchen here in New York. I’ve been to several modern dance performances before but this one caught me by surprise: Reker is not just a dancer but a musician as well, and this performance was an unlikely but riveting hybrid of indie rock and modern dance — the musicians danced and the dancers played music. More than that, the pieces they performed (there were about a dozen of them, organized like two sides of a mixtape) established a clean and vibrant linkage between the act of dancing and the act of making music. It wasn’t just music and dance together, it was music and dance as one act. I haven’t seen anything quite like it before and I thought it was great. You can listen to some of People Get Ready’s music here, and read The New York Times review here.

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Well-regarded futurist Paul Saffo has been talking about a new economic age that he believes is now upon us. First came the producer economy in the early 20th Century, which “harnessed manufacturing in the service of satisfying the material desires of a newly prosperous working class and emergent middle class.” Then came the consumer economy in the middle of the century, in which “companies realized that they had a demand problem rather than a production problem and shifted their resources to finding new ways to sell their existing products.” Now comes the creator economy:

“Now we are entering a third age in which the central economic actor is someone who both produces and consumes in the same act. I like the term ‘creator,’ as this new kind of actor is doing something more fundamental than the mere sum of their simultaneous production and consumption. Creators are ordinary people whose everyday actions create value.”

So well put, and a really fascinating and useful framework for understanding why the things that worked so well in the last century are breaking down in this new century. Read Saffo’s full argument here.

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